The Sound of Building Coffins (15 page)

Chapter twenty-two

Shoes

The consensus among the Morningstar family was that their mysterious benefactor and dead patriarch were one and the same. Typhus secretly knew otherwise, while sympathizing with his family’s need to believe what could not be so. The phantom’s mystifying persistence had certainly offered more questions than answers—and the idea of a fatherly ghost offered at least some token sense of comfort. Typhus supposed such an explanation was as likely as any other if a person didn’t care to think things through.

Nine days after their father’s death, the phantom had made its debut. In that terrible time of grieving, temperatures had plummeted in South Louisiana, stove coal becoming a scarce commodity. Then one chilly Tuesday morning, Malaria opened the front door and let out a yell, “Lord God, thankee Jesus! Amen, amen and a-
men
some more!” The rest of the Morningstars rushed to bear witness. Shivering, hungry, and with hearts nowhere near mended, they were in a vulnerable frame of mind where potential miracles were concerned. But there it was.

A bundle of purple and white boskoyo blooms tied with a note, and beside the blooms sat a huge crateful of beautiful black coal. The note was a small square of paper (folded four times smaller) and, upon the unfolding, a single word had been written in pencil:

simpithees

The phantom’s gift of coal was enough to see the Morningstars through every cold night for the rest of that year, and several of the next.

Time soon revealed the coal as mere introduction. In subsequent weeks the Morningstar family found itself in need of basic articles for living, and as need arose, answers appeared on their doorstep. If the quantity was any less than bountiful, the gift usually came with a note of apology,

sory iffit ayn anuff.

Blankets, coffee beans, grain, fruit, tools, clothes, animals for eating, and fresh water for drinking—nothing seemed beyond the generosity of the Morningstar family’s phantom benefactor. If a conversation had taken place in the house regarding a particular need, that need would soon be satisfied. It was as if someone was spying on them; listening in, watching, taking notes and making sure. And the giving never stopped. Fifteen years later and the Morningstar family’s benefactor had kept on benefacting.

Believing the phantom to be a ghostly representation of their own father had felt natural and good to the Morningstars—and the theory seemed approximately proven the first time the phantom passed over muddy ground, leaving clear, unshod footprints. Always first to rise, Malaria discovered the tracks at dawn, and she immediately retrieved a pair of her father’s shoes from the house. Her face beamed as she compared the track’s size to the length and girth of a corresponding shoe:

“
See? A perfect fit!” Malaria announced authoritatively, at a volume intended for all to hear.

The siblings were suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of guilt for burying their father without shoes on his feet. From that night on, Malaria made sure a pair of her father’s shoes stood prominently by the doorstep with a note tied on, reading, in Malaria’s perfect handwriting:

Take these, Father, and thank you.

From Your Loving Children.

The shoes sat unmolested with Malaria’s note for better than a month. Then, when a particular bad growing season presented itself and the market price of corn went beyond the Morningstars’ means, two bushels of near-ripe corn appeared, and the shoes were gone. A note had been left:

mitee nis shoos thankee
.

Father Morningstar had owned and kept three pair of shoes in his adult life, so the remaining two pairs were left as offerings on subsequent nights. It was not long before all three pairs were retrieved—replaced with badly spelled “thank you” notes and fresh parcels of needed things.

From that point on, when the ground was damp and items appeared, tracks left behind were clearly made by the shoes of Noonday Morningstar. This only helped solidify the notion of ghostly intervention—despite the obvious truth of how the phantom had acquired means of such evidence. But the fantasy was made easier to believe—and the Morningstars desperately needed a thing to believe.

The truth had dawned on Typhus the morning Malaria left that first pair of shoes on the stoop. It struck him how Malaria’s own “thank you” note had been so neat and perfect. This wasn’t only true of Malaria; the whole family possessed first-rate writing skills, and their writing excelled because their father had taught them well. To the contrary, this phantom was clearly no good at spelling, and his handwriting was equally substandard. On the basis of this evidence alone, Typhus deducted the phantom could not be Noonday Morningstar. Typhus kept this observation to himself. The rest seemed so reassured by the idea of having their father back, even in this distant way, Typhus would not rob them of such small and harmless hope.

Before tonight, Typhus’ sleeping troubles had provided him a single benefit—the right to bear exclusive ear-witness to the footfalls of the phantom. He had never considered sharing these nocturnal dramas with his siblings—to do so might encourage them to investigate or confront, which may be construed as ungrateful in the eyes of their benefactor—whoever it might be. After all, the phantom had given endlessly to the family, and all he seemed to want in return was his continued anonymity.

Tonight would mark the first and last time Typhus would violate that unspoken condition.

By the time the footfalls had returned, Dropsy was back in bed, snoring gently. Typhus found himself afflicted with a sudden and uncharacteristic curiosity. Why not put an end to a mystery so easily solvable? Impulsively, he kissed the hem of Lily’s white dress with trembling lips and told her goodbye. Grabbed his multi-purpose coffee sack, kicked off his shoes for the sake of quiet, and went out.

Typhus’ stunted size gave him the advantage of quiet steps, his bare feet hardly yielding a whisper from the moist codgrass blanketing the threshold to the brackish marsh. The sky was clear that night, moonlight barely trickling through tangled branches of towering cypress and black willow trees, not quite tickling stars. A crisp crush of blackberries beneath Typhus’ feet gave him fair warning of nearby Devil’s Walking Sticks—treacherous growths whose soft leathery leaves masked the presence of thorn-studded branches. The phantom moved ahead evenly without shadow or silhouette, his progress betrayed only by complaint of hard, spiny fruit balls crackling dully beneath his feet, freshly fallen from sweet gum trees that sprouted high above the marsh.

Swamp-muffled moonlight distracted rather than illuminated, so much so that Typhus opted to remove light from the equation altogether; eyes shut tight, he walked on. Removing the want of light allowed a deeper appreciation for information of ear and hand. Typhus moved forward, fingers stretched before him, gently brushing rubbery leaves of unknown plant life. His legs and feet brushed and bumped against hard cypress knees, the height of which indicated how high the waters were prone to rise in a given section of swamp, but also giving some indication of how far he was from home. Nearer the house, the cypress knees were no more than six inches at their tallest—here he noted several in excess of three feet. He soon became concerned as to whether he’d be able to navigate his way back in the dark. Soon the sound of footfalls stopped. Typhus stopped, too.

Quiet.

Would have been perfect quiet if not for the low warble of a hundred lonely bullfrogs, hoping for love and getting none. Typhus waited. Still: No sound beyond that of lovelorn reptiles. With private embarrassment, he realized his eyes were still closed. When he opened them, a gentle illumination in the bog brought him a soft shock. It made no sense. It struck Typhus that this was not light as he understood it.

Light—but not light. That is, it wasn’t so much light as it was a lighter shade of dark. Even this might have made sense had it been a variety of gray (as shadows tend to be)—but this shadow had color. Like fire minus the flicker and crackle; just warm, thick color, lightly painting plants, trees, and saw grass.

Orange. Everything orange.

No sign of the phantom, no sound, no telltale silhouette; nothing. The brightest area of swamp appeared twenty yards or so ahead where cypress knees stretched upwards of four feet. The center.

Center of what? Typhus considered turning back. Didn’t.

As he drew close to the light’s apparent source, the ground became muddier and the desire to inch forward amplified. Typhus’s toes wiggled in the slush, his feet sinking in, then pulling out; the quagmire lightly tugging at the soles of his feet like a living thing. He took another step. Another. And again.

Forwards.

In the swamp of Bayou St. John every inch of terrain is packed with unruly life, every grain of soil nourishing something that insists on being, and thus is, and so grows. This is the way of all wetlands. But the place where Typhus currently found himself didn’t follow these basic rules. Typhus was standing in a clearing—a tacit impossibility where life only competes to push forward, mindlessly crowding in on itself in the name of dumb survival. As his brain struggled to accept the strange reality before him, it dawned on him that the odd light tapered and faded from the spot where he now stood. He was standing at its source.

A lone mosquito-fern drifted nearby, its mossy mats and two-lobed leaves bunched up death-still at the surface of the pool.

Here there was nothing—no sound or sensation, not even of frogs. But there was a certain power in this nothing, a power with no evident bearing on human senses. There was no feeling about it, no feeling at all; just a knowing. But this “knowing” did prod a feeling from Typhus’ chest; a feeling of naked, new wonder.

threads through a rug

His feet were submerged, toes squishing in mud. He bent down to dip a finger in. Cool, orange water. Licked his finger. No odd flavor, only the rancid muddy taste of any stale bog. He bent down; inspected the water’s smooth surface carefully by eye before realizing that, although he hadn’t waded further, hadn’t moved at all—somehow the water had crept to his knees. Idle thought: “I’m sinking.”

Sinking.

sinking

No matter.

The possibility of his body and soul being consumed by this (
nothing
)
was unimportant at the moment. Typhus thought of Dropsy’s knack for instant bliss, and now here was his own. His own uncomplicated, painless acceptance. If there was danger here, then danger was welcome. This was right now. This was his special reality. This belonged to him. This thing. His thing.

bliss

In the water. The water. Water.

water

But from this purest moment, the worst possible thing happened.

(…)

Lily. Removed from his mind. From his heart and his soul.

(bliss)

If she remained somewhere in his heart, he was simply unaware. She was gone from him now, and he didn’t miss her. Her eyes forgotten, impossible white dress forgotten, Raleigh Rye forgotten, mysterious yellow stain forgotten, hand in a loose fist forgotten, promises made and rewards rendered: forgotten, forgotten, forgotten.

water

The water was a kind of false light—but not light—and, really, not even water. There was something in it. Something living in it.

the journey of

Streaks of reddish brown and tiny wisps of pink: jetted and swam, soared then dipped, shot then faltered.

threads through a rug

The pinkness was familiar to him, the familiarity a calming thing, the color of rebirth, the color of his babies. The babies he’d sent off on their way into the river, for second chances, for the tender mercy of childless mothers. Typhus didn’t know whether to feel joy or dread at the familiarity. He didn’t know whether to feel at all. There was nothing more to feel.

No matter.

As his eyes followed pink motion, a tinny music positioned itself at the back of his mind, the sound of a horn through a ghostly filter; not a physical sound. The water snuck to his waist—but he didn’t care, couldn’t pull his thoughts from the sound in his mind and the image in his eyes.

So beautiful. Haunting. Lovely. Final.

Bliss.

Troubled about my soul…

Sinking.

No matter
.

As the water (
not water
) reached his chest, Typhus realized he no longer needed to bend at the hips in order to view
(adore)
the divine movement of pink. As orange gradually (
not gradually
) rose to the level of his throat, a fear of drowning failed to present itself. The thought of being submerged forever here was not a threatening thing.

Typhus Morningstar was, like his faithful friend the mosquito-fern, now perfectly still. His trusty burlap sack slipped from his fingers.