Music of the Swamp (7 page)

My mother said, “Sugar, are you all right?”

I said, “You bet,” and walked boldly into my father's room and stole two rubbers from a box of Trojans in the drawer of his bedside table, and as long as I had the drawer open, took out his pistol and spun the cylinder and aimed it at the green lawn rocker and cocked the hammer with my thumb and then eased it back down. I stole two bullets from a box of cartridges in the drawer.

Later I walked beside Roebuck Lake and threw away the rubbers and the bullets and hated my father and myself.

T
HE SUMMER
was long and its days were all the same. The poison in the ditches was sweet, the mosquitoes were as loud as violins, as large as owls. The cotton fields smelled of defoliant, and the cottonstalks were skeletons in white dresses. As summer deepened, the rain stopped, and so the irrigation pumps ran night and day in the rice paddies. My father took my mother dancing at the American Legion Hut, and I went with them and put a handful of nickels in the slot machine near the bar and won enough money to keep on playing for hours.

The black man behind the bar—his name was Al, and he drove an Oldsmobile—took me to the piano and showed me an eight-beat measure with his left hand and said it was the boogie-woogie beat and if I listened right I could hear it behind every song ever written, every song that for a lifetime would ever make my toes feel like tap-tap-tapping.

That night it was true, and I still listen for it. I could hear it, this under-music, like a heartbeat, in the tunes my parents were dancing to. I could hear it in the irrigation pumps in the rice paddies. I could hear it in the voice of the preacher at the Baptist church, and in the voice of a carny who barked at the freak show. I heard it in the stories my mother told me at night. I heard it in the tractors in the fields and in the remembered music of my shovel, my entrenching tool, its blade cutting into the earth,
and in the swarm of hornets, and in the bray of mules, and in the silence of earthworms.

I watched my father and mother dance in the dim light of the dance floor, the only two dancers that night, and I fell in love with both of them, their despair and their fear and also their strange destructive love for each other and for some music I was growing old enough to hear, that I heard every day in the memory of the woman in her private grave. My father was Fred Astaire, he was so graceful, and my mother—though before this night I had seen her only as a creature in a frayed bathrobe standing in the unholy light of my father's drinking—she was an angel on the dance floor. The simple cotton dress that she wore was flowing silk—or was it red velvet?—and her sensible shoes were pointy-toed leather slippers with a silk boot. I understood why the two of them had been attracted to each other. I understood, seeing them, why they continued in their mutual misery. Who can say it was not true love, no matter how terrible?

In this dim barnlike room—the felt-covered poker tables, the dark bright wood of the dance floor, the upright piano, a lighted Miller's sign turning slowly on the ceiling, a nickel slot by the bar—here I loved my parents and the Mississippi Delta, its poisoned air and rich fields, its sloughs and loblollies and coonhounds and soybeans. In everything, especially in the whisk-whisk-whisk of my parents' feet on the sawdusty dance floor, I heard the sound of the boogie-woogie beat, eight
notes—five up the scale and three down—I heard it in the clash and clatter of the great machines in the compress, where loose cotton, light as air, was smashed into heavy bales and wrapped in burlap and tied with steel bands. I held onto my secret, the dead woman under our house, and wished that I could have known these things about my parents and our geography and its music without first having looked into the dead woman's face and held inside me her terrible secret.

My father and mother danced and danced, they twirled, their bodies swayed to the music, their eyes for each other were bright. My father sang to my mother an old tune, sentimental and frightening, crooning his strange love to her,
oh honeycomb won't you be my baby oh honeycomb be my own
, he sang, this small man enormous in his grace,
a hank of hair and a piece of bone my honeycomb
. My mother placed her head on his shoulder as they danced, and when she lifted her face he kissed her lips and they did not stop dancing.

T
HERE IS
one more thing to tell.

Late in the summer, deep in August, when the swamps were steam baths, and beavers as big as collies could be seen swimming in Roebuck Lake from a canebrake to a willow shade, I passed my eleventh birthday.

I still had told no one about the corpse, if it was a corpse and not something equally terrifying, a vision or hallucination
born of heartbreak and loss, beneath our house. The shovel was a forgotten toy.

My mother made me a birthday cake in the shape of a rabbit—she had a cake pan molded in that shape—and she decorated it with chocolate icing and stuck on carrot slices for the eyes. It was a difficult cake to make stand up straight, but with various props it would balance on its hind legs on the plate, so that when I came into the room it looked almost real standing there, its little front feet tucked up to its chest.

At the sight of the rabbit I started to cry. My mother was startled by my tears. She had been standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. The table was set with a white tablecloth and linen napkins, three settings for my birthday dinner.

I could not stop crying, looking at that rabbit cake. I knew that my mother loved me, I knew something of her grief—something in the desperate innocence of the rabbit, its little yellow carrot eyes. I thought of the hopelessness of all love, and that is why I was crying, I think.

My mother came to me and held me to her and I felt her warmth and smelled her woman-smell. I wanted to dance with her at the Legion Hut. I wanted to give her a gift of earthworms.

I kept crying.

My mother said, “Oh, Sugar-man . . .”

I kept on crying, sobbing, trying to talk between the sobs. I said, “There's a woman under the house.”

She said, “I know, Sugar-man, I know, hush now . . .”

I said, “I don't want to listen to the boogie-woogie beat.”

She said, “I know, darling, I know . . .”

She kept on holding me, rocking me where we stood.

I said, “It's a dead woman. Under our house.”

She said, “I know, Sugar-man, I know . . .”

I said, “In a grave.”

She said, “I know, darling, you hush now . . .”

I said, “I don't want my toes to go tap-tap-tapping.”

W
HEN
I was a child of eleven, there was a snail-slow freight train of a dozen cars or less that dragged its back legs through town each morning like a sorry dog and even stopped momentarily for God knows what reason at the Arrow Catcher depot and rested itself long enough to catch its breath and then, as if hopelessly, gathered its strength once again and set out on its asthmatic straining greasy little diesel motion towards the Mississippi River, some forty miles west of where I lived.

This was the summer a man was executed in Greenville. And it was the year my grandfather lived with us—my blind, bitter grandfather, I need to say—and listened to St. Louis Cardinals baseball on a Philco radio as big as the Frigidaire.

One day that summer, after a night when the Delta had been washed by a jungle rain, I hid in the ditch down by the track where I knew the last freight car would rest when the train made its daily stop, and I waited until the chuffy little sorry excuse for a train came to a stop and I pulled myself up the ditch bank by holding clumps of grass and wiped my hands on my pants and grabbed the ladder of a boxcar and swung myself up onto its first rung and held myself there as the train creaked forward out of the station.

I only rode through town, hanging onto the ladder, past the
Old Dixie Cafe, past Mr. Wooten's Shoe Shop, which stood on a block of stores with a wooden sidewalk, past the Quong Chong Fancy Gro., and the Kingfisher Market. The train got scarcely above five miles an hour, and if I had at any point let go of the ladder and dropped to the ground, I could have easily outrun the train to the apple orchard two hundred yards down the track, where I could have jumped clear and walked back home as the slimy little worm of a diesel and its spineless freight cars continued with threats of speed down the Delta flatscape towards the river.

I did this a half dozen times that summer. And then one day, for what reason I cannot say, something changed. I hooked the train, as I had done before. The Delta was what it had always been—endless blue sky, defoliated fields, small African villages peopled with princes and savages and their barebreasted sad women, washpots and collard greens. The train was what it had always been, so slow, so comfortable that it seemed to be stasis in motion. The poison heat of the diesel exhaust which swept back into my face was no different from the normal usual poisonous air that blew across the Mowdown in the paddies or the DDT in the ditches and made up the staple air of my comfort and ease. Everything was the same. The train wagged its reluctant head and heaved itself up like an old man and set out with a wonted resignation toward the orchard where I usually jumped clear. Bark from the pulpwood
on a flatcar was blowing in my face when I realized that I was not going to jump off.

I didn't jump. The apples on the trees called me to jump, but I did not. The train kept on, down the track, slow as a cow. My body relaxed. I held on easily. I leaned out from the boxcar and looked ahead, down the track. The apple trees crept back behind me, their voices did not reach my ears, which were filled only with the bad-lung sounds of the train, which suddenly caused me to laugh like a happy person.

I rode the train out of town. Someone might as well have been ringing Christmas bells inside my body, my insides were so alive with anxiety and joy.

The train eased into a bend and along a length of Panther Burn, a snaky stream with brakes of bamboo along the banks. It did not increase in speed, it only moved along the track.

I saw a dead dog alongside the railroad track and knew that this animal had committed suicide, there was no other explanation for how it could have been struck by this train. Farther along, a flock of red-wing blackbirds stood pecking at something in the gravel one foot away from the track. I could have jumped into the middle of them, they were so unaffected by our comical huffing and commotion.

I saw roadhouses I had never seen before, Leonard's and Paradise Inn. I saw a woman beating a child. I saw an old man clogging on a bridge. I saw a horse with a blue bridle. I saw a
jeep stuck in a field. I saw a yellow cat with a sparrow in its mouth. I saw lespedeza and wisteria. I saw cowbirds on a barbed wire fence. I saw empty wine bottles in the roadbed. My eyes could now suddenly see long distances.

The train kept on down the track. It even gained a little speed. It rocked like a dangerous cradle. I climbed up the ladder to the top of the boxcar. I stood and spraddled my legs and let the train rock on. The train's motion was my own motion. I walked a few steps along the moving car. At first I was stiff-legged and cautious and then I walked with confidence. I danced a country-boy jig. I laughed my damn head off. Git on down the road!

The train slowed then, five miles outside of Arrow Catcher, and then it stopped at a little gray building, a tiny depot, with the word
QUITO
spelled out on its sign. The tired old train knelt down with its tongue hanging out and heaved deep breaths and nursed a stitch in its side. Whoo, shit! the little train seemed to say, a little too pleased with itself for its brief speed, as I scooted back down the ladder and headed out walking, back down the track five miles to my home in Arrow Catcher. Walking, walking, don't give a flip!

N
O ONE
had missed me, of course. And when they saw me no one noticed that I had been transformed by imagination and the possibility of distances.

The danger of what I had just done was small—a fall from a
height of a few feet at walking speed was less dangerous than a dozen risks I took every day of the summer. Often, with other boys my age, I jumped from the Roebuck trestle into a few feet of water to test how far I could stick myself into the mud of the lake bottom. One boy actually hit a submerged boat and broke his back, and yet we jumped. But for all its benign aspect, my illicit ride on the Southern was not a secret I was likely to share with either my father or my mother. The danger of being chopped up by the wheels was meaningless. I was afraid my parents would understand the real danger, the great magnetism, the centrifugal pull away from everything familiar and true.

I
WOULD
not tell my parents, but I considered telling my blind grandfather, who despised me. It was a Saturday afternoon and the sun shafts through the window of his room were as solid as pine planks. The Delta was a steam bath, and my grandfather's space heater was roaring like a log fire. My grandfather was dressed up, as always, in a suit and vest and silk ascot and a watch and fob chain as heavy as leg irons and sweating in the impossible heat like a man on death row. My grandfather believed he might sweat the blindness out of his system. The dark glasses that he wore to cover his affliction kept slipping down his oiled nose and he had to push them up again with his forefinger.

As I came into my grandfather's room the hypnotist was just
giving up. My grandfather paid him, and he scurried away with big wet spots underneath the arms of his shirt.

Grandfather said, “He was more useless than the faith healer.”

I said, “I rode on the freight train.”

He said, “Musial just batted. You missed it.” He was listening on the big Philco, which partly explained the hypnotist's failure.

I said, “I jumped off at Quito station.”

He said, “Tripled off the right field fence, but you missed it. You always miss it.”