Music of the Swamp (9 page)

T
HERE IS
one more thing to tell. Many days later, when my illness was coming to an end, and the bandages were removed from my infected hand, I was lying in bed between clean sheets and with my head on two fluffed-up pillows my mother had put there, my grandfather, who now could see, came into my room and sat in a chair beside my bed. He had never done such a thing before.

Then he moved from the chair and actually sat on the bed itself, right beside me. I have to tell you, I was frightened. He could have said anything in the world to me. He could have killed me this day with his bitterness.

He said, “Sugar, long time ago there was a man name of Harper. This is when I was a boy. Harper had a friend who was a midget. Harper and the midget were violent men, don't ask me why, I can't explain. One time the midget held a dog on a rope and Harper poured gas on it and they set the dog on fire. Dog name of Holyghost, don't ask me why, I can't explain that neither. I started to watch Harper and the midget. I watched them drink coffee in the Delta Cafe. I watched them run trotlines on Roebuck and on Quiver River. I watched them drink whiskey. I watched them cut wood with a chainsaw. One day Harper lost control of the chainsaw and accidentally cut off
his own hand. I watched him do that too. The midget drove him in the pickup to Dr. Hightower's office, and Harper lived and so did the midget, of course. But they forgot to take the hand. I got the hand. I brushed the sawdust off. I gave it a firm handshake. I waved bye-bye to Harper with it. I played peep-eye behind it. I sang ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord.' I picked my nose with it. I bit its fingernails. I scratched my ass with it. I said, ‘Gimme five.' I said, ‘Lend me a hand.' I saluted the flag. I yanked a yellow dog. I shot the bird. I thumbed my nose. I thumbed a ride. I took it to a palm reader. I said, ‘Read this, sister.'” My grandfather said, “Do you see what I mean?”

I said, “That's why you are a bad man?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “And that's why Daddy is an idiot?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “And what about me?”

He said, “I don't know.”

I thought of Holyghost burning alive. I thought of the soft fragrances of swamp water and wood rot. I thought of cypress and mimosa. I'm still thinking of those things today. I'm still asking the same question, though my father and grandfather are a long time dead: What about me?

T
HE ONLY
house in the Mississippi Delta with a full basement was a rambling many-roomed tar-paper shack owned by Roy Dale's daddy, a white-trash gentleman named Runt Conroy. Runt was weasely and drawn and he worked, when he was sober enough, as a backhoe driver, digging sewers and graves and ditches for pipelines. It was his own hands that had dug the basement of the Conroy shanty.

There was a passel of Conroy children, all red-haired and sunken-cheeked. I was never really sure how many. There were the twin girls, Cloyce and Joyce, children who spoke in unison. There was a misfit child named Jeff Davis who believed his pillow was on fire. And, of course, there was the boy near my age, Roy Dale, and a very young child, about four, named Douglas, whose only ambition when he grew up was to become an apple. There were others who were grown and had moved away.

Mrs. Conroy, the mother, was an angry woman. She seemed especially angry at Douglas, the child of low ambition. She berated him for it. She encouraged him to want to be something finer than an apple. She threatened to beat him if he did not change his mind. “You will always be white trash,” she said to this four-year-old child. “You will never amount to
anything. Do you want to be a doctor?” “Apple,” Douglas replied. “Do you want to be a policeman? A fireman? A cowboy? A secretary?” “Apple,” he replied each time. With enough effort she could wear Douglas down. With enough nagging he would change. Once he upgraded his ambition to a level that almost satisfied her. “Do you want to be a bootlegger? A pimp? A computer scientist?” “All right,” Douglas said at last. “I don't want to be an apple.” Mrs. Conroy was happy, she was a new woman, she was elated. She said, “I knew it! I was right after all, my darling boy, my own true son! You are not like the rest of the Conroys, you are not white trash. You are a wonderful child, the hope of our family.” Douglas said, “I want to grow up to be a dog.” It didn't matter. Mrs. Conroy was not dejected. Dog was not good, but it was progress. Dog was better than apple. Other days were less joyous. Other days Douglas would slip backwards. Once he wanted to be a cork. That night his mother cried herself to sleep while Runt sat lovingly beside her bed and wrung his hands and said, “He could do worse, darling, he could do a lot worse.”

Most of the Conroy children were filthy and ragged and had sores on their legs, and skin like alligator hide. One of them was different, Dora Ethel, a teenaged girl in perfect health who wore immaculate clothes and Woolworth makeup and made good grades in school, the freak of the family. She went out on dates.

My own family was poor, but this did not keep us from
looking down on the Conroys and sneering when they took canned goods from the Episcopal charity box at Christmas.

Mrs. Conroy—Fortunata was her name—was a teacher's aide in an elementary school some ten miles away. She was not an attractive woman. She had a horsey face and buck teeth and a voice like sheet metal. Most of the children she taught were poor blacks, scared little first graders with no telling what kinds of homes in the swamp. She was gentle but not warm to them. In the middle of a reading lesson, when any person on earth might least expect it, let alone a small peasant child faced with reading a language scarcely his own, Fortunata Conroy would suddenly look up at the small quivering sea of little black faces and she would say in her impossible voice, “God has denied me two gifts, beauty and a pleasing voice,” and without another word would turn back to the struggle of sounding out the meaningless words of the stories the children were pretending to read. Fortunata was jealous and believed that every other woman in town was sexually attracted to her weasely husband Runt.

I had been inside the Conroy home a few times, but only briefly and never to take a meal or to spend a night. Roy Dale never invited me to sleep over. He had a million excuses—the small space, the lack of hot water and meals, his meddlesome sisters, the single bathroom, even the possibility of rats. Neither Roy Dale nor I ever mentioned the real concern, that Roy Dale was ashamed of his family.

Finally I wore him down. When you can manipulate a person with nothing else, you give him your secrets. I told Roy Dale that my father drank and was often depressed and maybe even suicidal. Roy Dale did not believe me but he had sense enough to know that such an admission, even if it was false, required reciprocation.

“My daddy wants to die,” I said.

“Want to sleep over?” he replied.

T
HE
C
ONROY
home was a shack, but it was not small. There was one impossible room after another. The floors were covered with yellow linoleum, some of the rooms were papered with newspaper. There were dangerous-looking space heaters in many rooms. The pictures on the walls were of Blue Boy and of a wolf standing on a snowy hillside looking at a house. They had been cut out of a magazine and stuck in cheap frames. I pretended to love the wolf picture. For effect I said, “Sometimes that's the way I feel.” Roy Dale gave me a look, but he didn't accuse me of lying.

The real reason I wanted to visit here was that I was interested in the Conroys' cellar. I had never seen a cellar before. The word itself impressed me. Cellar, root cellar, storm cellar. The cellar was the one detail of the Conroys' lives that almost rescued them, in my mind at least, from the charge of white trash.

Fortunata Conroy, Roy Dale's mother, did not agree. She
hated the cellar. It reminded her of Runt. Runt had dug it. It was a sewer, it was a ditch, it was a grave. It was an underground monument to white-trashery. Nobody should have a cellar. Having a cellar was proof positive to Fortunata Conroy that their genes and chromosomes were tainted. A billion dollars, a college education, and new teeth would not save a family from white-trash chromosomes if they were the only family in the Mississippi Delta with a cellar. Cellars stunk. Cats pissed in cellars. Potatoes rotted in them. Cellars were homes for rats.

Each day when Fortunata came home from work she walked into the house in search of evidence against herself and Runt. Her nose twitched, her entire face vibrated with accusation. And each day when she arrived home she said the same thing: “This place stinks!”

It was partly true. The incredible sea-level cellar could not be expected to hold out moisture. There was mildew built into the architecture. And the Conroys also had an old cat who sometimes peed in the basement, and especially on damp days a smell of urine could be detected in the air. “This place stinks!” Fortunata would say, and the cat and Runt and the whole gaggle and pride of viral and damaged children would leap for cover. At one time the Conroys had a parrot that could speak not a word but could make a sound like a cash register. It lived in the cellar until its feathers changed color and fell out. That, however, is another story.

The effluvium of the cellar was not really related to mildew or the cat; it was an accusation of Runt for his alcoholism, his birthright, his genes, his occupation, his adulteries real or imagined, his very breath. “This place stinks!” The house rang with the bad music of that refrain. “This place stinks!” The smell, real or imagined, was Runt's fault. Runt believed this as thoroughly as Fortunata.

He sniffed the cellar daily for the place where the cat was doing her evil business.

It was a day in April that I came to spend the night with Roy Dale and his family. It was this same day that Runt put forth his best effort to correct the smell in the basement.

He filled a yellow plastic bucket with hot water from the laundry tub and poured in a dollup of Parson's pine-scented ammonia. Roy Dale and I sat on the cellar steps and watched Runt the way normal children watch television. Runt swished the foamy water around with his hand and breathed the chemical fragrance into his nostrils. He began his search for cat piss.

He sniffed the fabric of a discarded chair near the useless hot water heater. He poked through a sad heap of linoleum scraps and cardboard boxes and cheap suitcases and round hat boxes containing veiled remnants of Fortunata's millinery past—and through newspapers and cinder blocks and a cracked mirror and the rags-and-tags of children's clothing, looking for the smell. He found nothing unusual, no cat piss, but he was not discouraged.

He tilted the yellow bucket so that the chemical water flowed over the basement floor. He had a new brush with yellow plastic bristles.

When he was finished his undershirt was sweaty and his knees were wet. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his scrawny scaly forearm. He looked satisfied.

Roy Dale had said nothing at all during the whole time Runt had been working. Suddenly now he said, “It stinks!” He meant the pine-scented ammonia cleanser.

Runt looked up. He forced a pained smile. He said, “It smells kind of refreshing though, don't it? Kind of pine forest clean?”

Roy Dale said, “It stinks! Ugh! It stinks!” Then he jumped up and ran up the stairs, holding his nose in an extravagant way. I leaped up and followed him. I held my nose also and said, “Ugh! Gag! It stinks!” I understood that there is something about seeing a wounded man that makes you want to hurt him.

For that reason it is hard for me to think of Fortunata Conroy, for all her meanness, as an evil woman. In fact, I believe she loved Runt and all her strange children. I think her intentions were always better than her actions.

Now when I look back on this day I think of Fortunata getting off work that afternoon at the elementary school in Leflore. I imagine that her classroom is neat and orderly, unlike her out-of-control tar-paper house and life. I imagine that the chalkboards are washed and the erasers are clean. I imagine
that she puts an extra thumbtack in a colorful poster on the bulletin board. There are health charts and dental-hygiene reminders and smiling Dr. Seuss monsters with good advice.
Stop Look Listen, Be A Friend, Don't Talk To Strangers.
I imagine Fortunata grading the last of the first-grade writing papers. She brings the hump of an
f
up to the top of a line; she extends the tail of a
g
to the line below. She checks the pregnant hamster for babies, she grieves the dying Gila monster in the terrarium.

I imagine Fortunata driving home through the incredible flatscape of the Delta. She drives an ancient explosive Pinto beneath wide blue Mississippi skies. She smells the fragrance of cotton flowers on the breeze, she breathes the sweet swamp water of the rice paddies, she passes bean fields shrouded in dragonflies, a pasture with a white mule, the town dump where the rats are as big as collies, past a herd of deer in cornstalks, a dead armadillo on the berm, a flash and sudden clattering of swamp-elves through the brush and across a high-water bridge. The explosive Pinto is a spiritual thing. She is in love with her husband. Her children are normal children. She passes the local stick-fighting team, the high school arrow-catching team on a farther field. She watches old Mr. O'Kelly carve soap on his front porch, and she sees the ventriloquist's dummy named Joseph of Arimethea that poor Mr. O'Kelly believes is his grandson. Mavis Mitchum, a neighbor woman, sucks her skirt. Joby Conroy, Roy Dale's cousin, chases cars.
Mr. Love's goat walks across the mantelpiece in praise. Parrots ring out a wealth of good news. Fortunata is beautiful, her voice is a melody, and she is coming home to the man she loves.

And then she pulls into her driveway and remembers that Runt is probably drunk, has probably already betrayed her today with another woman, or several, that Jeff Davis is trying to extinguish his pillow, and Douglas is a child of low ambition. Before she has set the emergency brake of the car, she can already smell the cellar. The cellar stinks.