Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan Page B

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, eightnotes—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