Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan

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 sweatdrained 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 dirtand 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 wasleather 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