Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan Page A

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 myfather 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 andwashing 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.
    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