Music of the Swamp (18 page)

I said, “I told my mother. That same night, after my father and I got home and my mother came upstairs to tuck me in.”

The woman said, “Tell me again about your room, then, with the fake stars on the ceiling.”

I told her what she already knew. I said, “It was an attic room, with a slanted ceiling. A desk, and even my clothes drawers were built into the wall to save space. There was a crawlspace in the back of my closet, where I sat sometimes, in the rafters. On the ceiling above my bed were pasted luminous decals of stars and the planets and the moon. Saturn had rings. A comet had a funny tail.

She said, “Tell me again about the real moon.”

I said, “The moon outside my window.”

She said, “How large was it?”

I said what I had told her many times. I said, “It was a peach-basket-size moon.”

She said, “And you were lying in your bed, with the fake stars shining down on you and the peach-basket moon outside your window, and then . . .”

I said, “I heard my mother coming up the stairs to tuck me in.”

She said, “Your mother had been worried about you, out in the car with your father when he had been drinking.”

I said, “Yes, she had been worried. She would never say this.”

She said, “What did she say?”

I said, “She said, ‘Did you have a nice time with Daddy tonight?'”

She said, “What did you say?”

I said, “I told her the story about seeing the sign. About stopping and listening to the owls in the air.”

She said, “What did your mother say then?”

I said, “She said, ‘That's about like your daddy.'”

She said, “Your mother didn't believe you?”

I said, “She was right. There was no
OWLS
sign. It's ridiculous. There is no way to hear owls in the air. And, anyway, think about the coincidence of a drunk man and his oversensitive kid stopping at just the moment the owls happen to be flying above a sign.”

She said, “Hm.”

I said, “And you know that thing my father said. That thing about ‘Your mother is a terrible housekeeper'?”

She said, “Mm-hm.”

I said, “That's a part of an old joke we used to hear in the South when I was a boy. The punchline is, ‘My wife is a terrible
housekeeper, every time I go to piss in the sink it's full of dirty dishes.'” I said, “I think I made the whole thing up.”

She said, “Where did the owls come from?”

I said, “I'm not sure. Do you remember in Winnie-the-Pooh, the character named Owl?”

She said, “Yes.”

I said, “Remember, somewhere, in one of those books, we learn that Owl's name is misspelled on a sign as
WOL
. Maybe that's where I got the idea. I just happened to think of that book. Jeeziz. It's possible I made this whole thing up.”

She said, “Are rabbits' eyes really red?”

I said, “I don't know. I saw a blind dog in my headlights one time, and its eyes looked red. Christ.”

The way the sunlight fell across the bed was . . . Well, I was so much in love.

She said, “Was your father magic?”

I said, “I wanted him to be.”

She said, “He might have been.”

Now she looked at me, and it was the night of the owls all over again. The car's heater, the vibration of the engine, the red eyes of the rabbit, the stubble fields, the music of the odd birds in flight, the
OWLS
sign before me. And also the feeling that there was someone beside me to whom I could tell my most terrible secret and that the secret would be heard and received as a gift. I believed my clumsy drunken inexpert father,
or my invention of him, had prepared me for this magic. The woman beside me said, “I love you.”

In that moment every good thing that I had expected, longed to feel with my father, I felt with her. And I also felt it with my father, and I heard his voice speak those words of love, though he was already a long time dead. He was with me in a way he could not be in life.

For one second the woman and I seemed to become twins, or closer than twins, the same person together. Maybe we said nothing. Maybe we only lay in the band of sunlight that fell across our bed. Or maybe together we said, “There is great pain in all love, but we don't care, it's worth it.”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to
The Southern Review
, the PEN Fiction Awards, National Public Radio,
Story, The Chattahoochee Review
, and
The Southern Humanities Review
, where some of these stories first appeared. And thanks also to the Pennsylvania Council for Arts for two summer grants.

Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 1991 by Lewis Nordan

“Muddy Water,” words by Jo Trent, music by Peter De Rose & Harry Richman, copyright © 1926 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation & Fred Fisher Music. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Honeycomb,” written by Bob Merrill, copyright © 1953, 1982 by Golden Bell Songs. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-783-8