Music of the Swamp (6 page)

I kept on digging. All the holes I dug were in some way unsatisfactory.

Beneath the walnut tree the earth was rock-hard and root-congested, and I was afraid of breaking the shovel handle.

The last of several holes I dug on the lake bank, which was softer ground, finally yielded a few bones, but they were in a plastic garbage bag and, though it took me a while, I finally understood that they were the skeleton of a big tom cat that belonged to a neighbor-woman, Mavis Mitchum. The cat had been hit by a car last winter.

Along the ditch at the back of the house I dug up a nest of ground-hornets and was stung seven times. I dug each day and
found a good deal of unpleasantness but little death in the Delta.

I have to ask the question again: What was I digging for?—skeletons?—Indians? Not really, not at first, though I thought of those things in a general way. I think I was only playing, only digging for fun. I was a child, and I enjoyed the child's play, as I had enjoyed the games behind my closet, in the crawlspace.

And yet the more I dug—the greater number of holes I emptied and refilled, the more often I heard the shovel blade cut the soil and breathed the mold-and-mulch-rich fragrance of overturned earth and felt its heft in my hands, and watched the retreat of the earthworms and the vivid attack of the hornets and the other evidences of life beneath the surface of the earth—mole tunnels and rabbit holes—the more I feared and was driven to discover evidence of death.

And so by some process I became not the soldier or prisoner I had pretended to be in the crawlspace, not a child with a game, but a person driven by some need born of my father's pain, my mother's despair.

My occupation became not only more necessary but more real, more dark in character. I was no longer pretending to be a soldier or prisoner, but now, without the protection of fantasy at all, I was a real-life gravedigger, possessed and compulsive—and not merely a gravedigger but a hopeful graverobber, a sad
innocent little ghoul spading my way through the Delta, looking for God knows what, some signal or symbol, I don't know, whatever a child in need and fear is capable of looking for after talking to his drunken father about a shovel.

I don't blame my father. What would be the point? There is a sense in which I blame the geography itself, though that, of course, is useless as well.

The more I dug in the Delta earth, the more it seemed to call me to dig, the more certain I became that it would finally yield up some evil treasure.

I turned over spadeful after spadeful. I dug all over our small property—back yard and front yard and chicken yard. I dug out by Roebuck Lake, and even in Mavis Mitchum's yard, the neighbor-woman. Some of the holes were deep, some were long shallow trenches. I looked in each spadeful of earth for some sign—a toe, a tooth, some small thing, a knuckle. There was nothing.

I moved underneath the house—Delta houses have no basements—and here beneath the floorboards and waterpipes, in the slick, sun-untouched hard-packed earth, my digging took new meaning. No longer frantic, no longer directionless, my entire body slowed down, the way a body is slowed down by age. I was a strong child—thin but sturdy—and I had the will to dig, the iron will of a child's burden of his parents' unhappiness. I would dig to China if necessary. I was digging a hole
beneath my house, and I knew I would find whatever I had been looking for.

T
HE UNDERSIDE
of the house was a different world to me. Suddenly plumbing made sense—pipes going in and coming out. The light was filtered and cool. The dirt was slick and ungrassed for half a century. The outside world, glimpses of it, was allowed into my vision only through chinks in the brick foundation. Above me were the boards of the floor where my parents walked. Refuse had been thrown under here, a slick tire, a bald baby-doll, a wooden case of Coke bottles, an ice pick my daddy had once stabbed himself in the chest with. The house was an old structure, sixty or seventy years old, and other families had lived here before my own. Even in the refuse—the broken glass, a dog-food can, two cane poles—there was a sense that lives had been lived here, that death had defeated them.

I kept on digging. I could not stand up to dig—the floor was directly above me—so I lay on my side. I stabbed the blade into the earth and, with the strength of my arms, lifted out the dirt. The work was slow and laborious. Spadeful after spadeful, I dragged dirt out of the hole and piled it away from me in a mound.

Each day I was tired and filthy, the muscles of my arms were hot with strain. I worried that my mother would stop me from what I was doing.

She did not. She only knew that I was playing under the house. She warned me about broken bottles, she grouched at me about the dirt in my jeans. But our lives went on. I continued to dig.

There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey. The hole beneath the house grew deeper and wider, and the mound beside the hole grew taller. My father continued to pour glasses of water down the sink, my mother begged him not to. “I wish you wouldn't do that, Gilbert.” I had a sense of doing something worthwhile, or at least necessary in the face of the many things I could not otherwise control.

I kept on, possessed I would say, and sometimes fear of what I was looking for would overtake me. I would sit beside the hole and cry—
weep
is a better word, since there was as much drama in this as there was sadness—and often I would wish that I had never heard of this hole, that I had never bought this shovel, that I had bought the wicked canteen instead.

I was afraid that whatever I found—joint, knuckle, or tooth—would be too personal to endure. Suddenly, or rather gradually, this became no abstraction I was searching for, not merely
death
. I believed now that whatever bone I found—and I had no doubt I would find something, however small—was not without a human history, that a single bone was a person, someone whose life was as filled with madness and loss as the lives of my father and mother.

I believed I could not endure knowing more about such sadness than I already suspected. My throat ached. I imagined that whatever relic I found would contain within it the power to reconstruct an entire self, a finger joint becoming a hand, the hand recreating an arm, the arm a torso, with chest hair and a head and knees. Dry bones becoming meat and, immediately, the meat reclaiming the right and capacity to rot and fall away, and bones to be scattered and lost.

So I continued to dig underneath the house. I dug long past the time when I enjoyed it. It was a job to me, this digging, it was medicine necessary in some way to my continued life, neither joyful nor joyless, a thing to be done, a hole to be dug.

The underside of my house became as familiar to me as the crawlspace behind my closet. I stopped digging sometimes and lay on my back beneath the house, beside the hole, which now was deep—two feet deep and two feet wide, and then wider and deeper. I dug down to three feet, and the hole was squared off, like the grave of a child. I kept on digging. I lay in exhaustion, down in the hole, and looked up at the floorboards of the house. I heard my mother's footsteps above me in the kitchen. I heard the boards make their small complaint. Water ran through the pipes around me—surging up through pipes into the house and into the sink, or going the other way, out of the house through the larger pipes, down into the earth and away.

I lay in the dirt and looked at the floorboards, as sweat
drained out of me, my back and arms, and soaked down into the same earth. I imagined that my sweat flowed under the earth like a salty river, that it entered the water table and into a seepage of sand grains and clay and, from there, into Roebuck Lake, its dark still waters. Around me sunlight broke through the cracks in the foundation in points as brilliant as diamonds, and underneath my house was always twilight, never day and never dark.

O
NE DAY
in my digging—who can remember which day, a Thursday, a Saturday?—all the summer days were the same—my shovel struck something and my heart stopped, seemed to stop, tried to stop. I had found whatever I had been destined to find. Directed to find: by the man at the junk store, by the canteen, which had whispered
take the shovel not me
, by my father at the sink. My shovel struck something—hard, solid, long, like a sheet of heavy glass, a table top—and my heart, stopped dead by fear and awe, cried out for this to be some innocent thing, a pirate's chest, a sewer line.

I took only one look, and never looked again, and so what I tell you is only what I saw, not what I know to have been there. I was lying in the hole I had dug, this grave, its dark dirt walls on four sides of me. I was comfortable with my entrenching tool. I touched the earth again with the shovel, and again heard the noise of its blade against a sheet of heavy glass.

I thought, in that moment before I brushed away the dirt
and took one brief look through a glass window into the past, or into my own troubled heart, whichever it really was, of a nursery rhyme my mother had said to me many times at night, beneath the fake stars.

It was the tale of a woman who goes to the fair and falls asleep beneath a tree and, while she sleeps, has the hem of her petticoat cut off and stolen by a thief. Without her petticoat she doesn't recognize herself when she wakes up, and she wonders who this strange woman with no petticoat can be. Even when she gets home and looks in the mirror, she is unfamiliar to herself. She says, “Dearie dearie me, is it really I?”

I could not believe that I was the person with this shovel, on this brink.

I brushed the dirt off the sheet of glass and allowed my eyes their one second of looking. Beneath the glass was a dead woman, beautiful, with auburn hair and fair skin. Her head was resting on a blanket of striped ticking.

One second, less than a second, and I never looked again. I averted my eyes and put down the shovel and crawled up out of the hole. Without looking down into the hole again, I filled the hole with the dirt I had taken out. I pushed it with my hands until it spilled over the sides of the grave and covered the shovel and whatever else was there or not there.

The dress she was wearing was red velvet, down to her ankles. Her shoes were tiny, with pointed toes. The slipper was
leather and the boot was of some fabric, silk I thought. On one finger was a gold ring in the shape of a bent spoon.

It is impossible that I saw all this in one glance—her whole length, her tiny feet and fingers. It is impossible that I brushed away a bit of dirt and saw her entirely, her fingers, her hair, an exposed calf that showed the fabric of her boot.

And yet I know that I did see this, and that one second later I covered it up and did not look again.

I sat there in the dirt, beneath the floorboards of my parents' home, and I saw another thing, a gaggle of white geese being chased by a fox, but I knew even then that these were not real geese but only the erratic beating of my heart made visible. The woman in the glass coffin?—still I am not sure what was real and what my mind invented.

The sound of my parents' footsteps was above me, where I sat in the twilight of this cloistered world. In the dead woman's face I had seen my mother's beauty, the warm blood of her passion, as my father had once known her and had forgotten. I heard water running in the sink above me and imagined, whether it was true or not, that it was my father filling and emptying tumblers of water, and all around me I heard this poured-out water gurgling down through pipes, headed for sewers, the water table, the gills of gars in Roebuck Lake. Through the floorboards I could hear voices, the sound not the words, and I believed it was my mother's voice begging my
father not to pour his life down this sad drain, glass after glass, day after day, until she too was empty of life and hope.

I kept sitting there, thinking of the dead woman, and I imagined her in a church pew with a songbook on her lap. I imagined her on a riverboat (if she was real she might have died a hundred years before and been buried here, pickled, perfectly preserved in alcohol or some other fluid, mightn't she?—could she not have died on one of the riverboats that once floated from the Yazoo into the Roebuck harbor?), on the deck of a boat and holding a yellow parasol. I imagined her in a green back yard, hanging out sheets on a line. I saw her eat cantaloupe and spit out the seeds, secret and pretty, into a bed of bright flowers. I saw her leading a horse by a blue bridle from an unpainted barn.

I named her pretty names. Kate and Molly and Celia, even Leda, and I called her none of these names for fear of changing something too fragile ever to be named, the same reason I did not look at her longer, for fear she could not exist in the strength of more than a second's looking. In my mind, as I named her, my father's name kept ringing, over and over, with a sound like wooden ducks in a carnival shooting gallery when they are knocked over, the ding and ding and ding, and the slap of their collapse.

I left the underside of the house and never went back.

I went inside and surprised my mother by bathing and
washing my hair with Fitch's shampoo in the middle of the afternoon, and without being told. I put my dirty clothes into the washer and set the dial, and while the machine made them clean, I dressed in fresh blue jeans and a button-up shirt and dug the dirt out from under my fingernails and cleaned the mud off my shoes.

In my mind I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in.

I combed my hair with Wildroot Cream Oil and ate an entire package of my father's peppermint candy and puked in the toilet.