by Brad Watson
They came to the low and shaded clearing at the base of the ravine. The little leafy tunnel of the trail opened up into what could only be called a woodland cathedral, its ceiling the boughs and leaves of tall oaks, sycamores, sweet gums, beech trees, and pines. The floor carpeted with pine needles and brown leaves, and furnished with small shrubby trees and the remains of a half a dozen small plank cabins on brick and pine-stump posts. These all stood on one side of a tiny creek that wound down toward a dense-looking swampy area, and on the other side of which stood bamboo thickets and lower-limbed, moss-draped live oaks. All appeared to be abandoned, at first look. Then he saw something on the little porch of the far one, and a movement, and went that way.
She sat in an old paintless rocker, though not rocking, and her eyes though cataracted looked unmistakably at him. She was as knotted up as if she were actually a strip of cured leather someone had twisted into shapes resembling a head, shoulders, crooked arms and hands, and a pair of feet on shanks so thin they couldn’t possibly hold her up. She was barefoot, though her feet were a blackened color such that he’d had to look twice to determine they weren’t in some worn-thin pair of old leather soleless shoes. Her face like an old burnt knot of lighter pine from within which the two milky pools of hardened sap regarded him calmly.
-Afternoon, Finus said, standing there.
Her eyes cut momentarily to old Mike standing droop-headed at his side.
-Are you Miss Vish? Finus said.
She nodded again, continued to look his way without speaking.
-I’m Finus Bates, run a little newspaper in town. This is my old dog, Mike.
-I don’t much like dogs, she said, her voice phlegmatic but strong for that. Then she said, nodding toward Mike, -You seems pretty healthy, yourself, for an old gentleman, but your old dog is ailing.
-Yes, I expect he won’t be around much longer.
-I don’t know much about treating dogs, she said. -Sometimes I treated a cat or a horse or a cow, but never could do much to help a dog.
-That’s all right, I’ll just let him go when he’s ready.
She looked at him a moment, nodded.
-Yes, sir, what can I do for you?
Finus said Dr. Orin Heath had told him about her. She said nothing, working her mouth a little bit, then nodded.
-How he doing, then?
-All right, all things considered.
-Still drinking that whiskey?
-Yes.
-Well, she said after a moment, it ain’t killed him yet. Maybe it keeping him alive.
-May be, Finus said.
-Them cigarettes gon kill him, though.
-I expect they will, soon enough.
-Yes, sir, soon enough. Is there something I can do for Dr. Heath, then? Ain’t nothing I can give him make him stop that whiskey or smoking.
-No, I just wanted to ask you about a couple of things.
She nodded. -You knew Mr. Case, now, ain’t that so.
-Yes, I did know him. I always heard he left this land open for the folks that lived here in the ravine.
She nodded. -He left it so can’t nobody clear or build down here, so his children can’t let nobody do it, for some time.
-How long he make that for?
-He ask me how long did I think before everybody live down here be moved out into town. I said could be just ten year, could be twenty, thirty, or longer. Just depend on how much the younger folks likes it, or if they gets restless or not. He say, You think could be forty year, Vish? I said, May be, but I doubt it. Well, he say, just in case, and make it forty year. That was near about forty year ago, and now I’m the only one left down here. I figure any day the Case children gon get a judge to let them change the papers, tear it all down, if they remember to. She laughed. -With me goes the ravine, I speck. I speck they gon put another shopping center right here someday.
Finus looked at this old woman looking at him like she’d watch a snake.
-You ever help out Mrs. Birdie Urquhart, lives out on the Macon highway?
She considered that.
-No, sir, don’t believe I ever helped her out none.
-Did you ever know the woman worked for her, Creasie Anderson?
She didn’t answer for a minute, then, -Yes, sir, she from down here in the ravine. I raised her. But she ain’t lived here in a long time.
-How long she been gone?
-Moved out from here to the Urquharts’ when she was just a girl, many year ago.
-Did she keep a place back here?
-Yes, sir, had a place. Ain’t been back to it in a long time, though.
-When would you say was the last time she used her place here, then?
-Couldn’t say, I reckon. Ain’t seen her here in a long time.
Finus looked around at the other cabins.
-Which one was hers, then, you don’t mind my asking?
The old woman cut her eyes without moving her head to look at the other cabins.
-That old green one over there was hers.
Finus looked. One of the cabins was a flaked and faded dark green color.
-You reckon it’d be all right if I took a look around it?
After a moment the old woman nodded.
-I don’t reckon it make a whole lot of difference, she said. -She don’t never come back here no more.
-I appreciate your time, Finus said. -You take care, now.
-Yes, sir. Tell Dr. Heath I said good day.
-I will.
Mike following stiffly, Finus walked over to the green cabin and mounted its rickety porch. He pushed on the old plank door and it gave way to a cobwebbed and ratty single room that gave way itself to what looked like a tiny kitchen in the rear, where he could see the edge of an old wood stove there. In the main room there was just an old stuffed chair, torn about the arms and cushion and backrest and stained with water and whatever. A little table stood near it, bare. The walls were covered with what appeared to be faded Sunday comics pages, torn and stained and splotched with age and water damage. In the kitchen the stove was bare except for a rusted cast-iron pan sitting on one of the heating plates. There was an old metal sink with no faucets but with a drain that appeared to run out through the wall. Above the sink there was a single shelf on which sat a salt box folded in upon itself, shredded paper in a mound of something could have been once flour or cornmeal. A lard tin. A mason jar stood next to it, shrouded in cobwebs and dust. He leaned in close to it, something inside. A black and gnarled little knot of something, like a charred fist of an old monkey or something. Finus heard a huffing sound, Mike settling down on the floor beside him, old baleful eyes looking at nothing.
-Poor old Mike, Finus said, bending stiffly over himself to scratch the dog’s head. Mike’s eyes moved to him but otherwise he didn’t respond. Finus straightened up and looked at the jar again, took it off the shelf and wiped the cobwebs and dust away and peered closely at whatever it was inside there. Shriveled tendonish piece at either end, looked to have been severed away. He gently coaxed Mike up off the floor and led him outside. The old woman was still on her porch in her rocker. Seemed to be looking at nothing, just out through the woods. Finus stepped carefully down the steps of the porch and, Mike slowly and stiffly making his way beside him, walked back over and stood at the base of the porch steps.
-Sorry to trouble you again, Miss Vish, he said. -I just wanted to ask one more thing.
She nodded. Eyes cut just for a second to the jar he held in his hand.
-Yes, sir.
-I was asking Dr. Heath about poisons, ways folks might poison someone if they had a mind to do it.
She looked at him, even cocked her head just a fraction of an inch.
-Poisons? she said. Then an odd little movement ticked at the thin licorice twist of her mouth. The old lips opened a hair and something between an enervated laugh and a wheeze came out. -Naw, sir, she said then, don’t truck in no poisons.
-Say you don’t.
-No, sir, and her eyes went back to whe
re they rested on something over his head across the tiny creek in the swampy woods. -No sir, she said again, managing an emphatic little movement of her head, the white straw and scarce hair there looking as if permanently blown and dried hard away from her face like a frost-driven shrub. -Poisons invented by the white folks. Black folks don’t need no poisons.
-Why’s that?
-Well, sir, she said, we got the white folks, poison enough. Then she bared her gums, gave that little wheezy laugh. -I reckon I can say that nowadays, cain’t I.
-I reckon you can say whatever you want to.
She nodded.
-Ain’t always been the case, she said.
Finus held the jar up a tad so the light caught it, seemed to be soaked up by the black gnarl inside it, a tiny black hole into which the fading afternoon light was sucked.
-You got any idea what this thing she was keeping on her shelf might be?
Old woman rocked once, using an old toe as black as the thing in the jar, about as gnarled, and seemed to regard the jar with her opaque eyes.
-I can’t see too good, she said.
-It’s just a mason jar. Got something in it I can’t tell what it is. It was on Creasie’s shelf, in the kitchen.
-Naw, sir, she finally said, drawing out the words. -Look to be some kind of old preserves, to me. Might be some old figs drawed up. Long past eating.
-I’ll bet you’re right on that.
-Might have something to eat inside, you hungry.
-Well, Finus said after a moment, I appreciate that. But I believe I’ll pass. He nodded by way of saying good day, made his way with hobbling old Mike back up the trail toward his truck.
A Lost Paradise
SHE HAD NEVER been naked in public in her life. She had been naked outdoors but not within sight of others aside from her friend Avis. Now it felt naked but not quite the same, though who’s to say since she never went outside naked, not out in the open air with no cover. This was not naked the same way, but she was getting used to it. And she wasn’t anymore like walking, but more like what you call flying in a dream, just sort of moving just ahead of some awareness of the body or of moving itself, an effortless here and there. She had no voice but a sound like a gentle wind rattling dry fall leaves. Once in a moment she was frightened by the shadowy presence of tangled live oak limbs all around her. Then she was near and among the presence of the little town of Silverhill down near the Alabama coast, and the pecan groves in between there and Fairhope, and then there was the bay and the sifting of breeze through the wings of a flock of gulls who seemed to see her and roll their beady eyes in her direction and nearly crash into one another in distraction. She held her long dark hair out of her eyes and gazed upon herself at that height and thought, Oh, I was beautiful, I look like, I don’t know. It was like the brief moment in her life between a child’s comfort in her own skin, and the burning new awareness of what she was to a man.
Here, the streets of Fairhope were like none of the streets when she was a child and they would visit—all these homes had sprung up since then, none of the old waterfront homes survived, long gone, she had long ago mourned them and now their own ghosts lay over the newer homes like veils, or mosquito netting. She skimmed through the old live oak tops on down to the Grand Hotel, the ghost of the original Point Clear Hotel itself now barely visible to her among the broad oak boughs and the steam coming from the ventilation pipes in the roof of its successor. None of the long galleries and the swings, though the promenade was the same. On the bay, on the water’s surface and out between two sunglint sailboats, a man leaning himself back out over the chop said hah! when his boat gave a tilt in her direction as she rose up to avoid a little wave. The man nearly fell out of his boat.
She spread her arms and legs and let the foamy tips of the chop skim into her navel, then deep into the water without the resistance to which she was accustomed, past the hulls of sunken fishing boats, the cracked beams of sailing vessels and the long bent and wrenched-off arms of hapless shrimp boats, the skeletal hulls of great tarpon resting in their long-quiet disgust, and automobiles, some she seemed to recognize from her youth, and she remembered the sinking of an early ferry taking travelers across to Mobile. She passed in through the rusted torpedo shaft of a submarine of which no one knew save those poor souls still locked inside, and drifted slowly past the stricken eyes of the crew boys who rode it to its death, and one said, Bless you, Miss Birdie, and she kissed his concave, whiskered cheek—he was all tears, in the briny deep. She left through the molecular lacunae of its old prop shaft and spinning blades. Seeing spindly legs ahead of her went to look, and circled with the speckled trout and a few lost snapper the beams of a natural gas derrick, and then swam away and left the water. Ahead of her lay the old fort. Through the decrepit buildings that were the captain’s quarters and the officers’ and enlisted men’s barracks, she came through cracked panes which gave her some dread, and along the floors where boards had pulled apart from one another in age and ill health, these buildings propped up with the crude buttresses of those who would preserve them, their galleries gone as if from faces had fallen their features, poor noses and teeth and jaw, exposing the yaw of the corpse. She was caressed by the cool, clipped grass of the lawn inside the fortress itself, seeming ancient but no older than her father were he still alive. She drifted through the dark archways and chambers and then back into the yard, paused at the bloodstain on the steps where she’d had her picture taken as a girl with her sisters, where some confederate had died and left his ineradicable mark in the mortar. She slipped over the lip of the gun bay for the old disappearing cannon, no longer there, but its ghost too still lingering, even steel leaving its shape somehow in the air, a lingering particulate shade, collecting itself in her honor, to swing up and out over the water, and she entered its bore and followed its sighting above the Gulf itself and kept going, the earth receding, and she thought she must keep going into the lighter air and nothingness, but was drawn back in a dreamlike shift from there to here, the old lighthouse, in the balmy air currents moving east along the peninsula. Over the old site of Palmetto Cove. She heard cries and went down. There were the general calls of the animals once native to the shore, the wild hogs descended from the pigs the soldiers let go when the fort was first shut down, and the older, indigenous bears and panthers and even the shy, retiring ivorybill. The glow from the treasure laid in by pirates and sought by everyone and never found now called to her from beneath cypress but she paid it no mind. There were pirates hanging a man from the hanging tree, and whipping others back into the water. But those cries she heard first now became apparent to her in the spirits of two young girls who drowned in the storm of ’06, huddled in the corner of a room in the house built by their father, who had earlier washed into the bay, their poor mother tumbled into a drowned thicket of scrub oaks whose dense branches held her by her clothing until the water rose and drowned her too. Soldiers would find their ravaged bodies in the trees in Bon Secour and would be ashamed at their own interest in the girls’ bawdy contortions, long dresses lifted and twisted about their heads like murderous turbans, their drawers torn and muddy. A soldier unable to contain himself would begin to cry, as the others stared and drifted in the tide, and then discovered another girl alive and hanging from the high branches by her long blond hair.
This was a paradise, once, Pappy said. There, he was with her again.
It’s all gone now. We had all our homes in here, you probably can’t see it.
Though she did, now, free as she was to see all that had been in her mind’s eye throughout her life, the little pine board homes with sheet tin roofs, and the smallish porches and wash sheds out back, the raked sand yards and the dogs roaming free and chasing off into the thickets after wild boar and deer. She remembered her grandmother once stepped out onto the front porch and shot a boar attacking their dogs, with a rifle she held seemed longer than she was. And all the homes separated by the dunes and the scrub oak thickets and some up
on little hard dunes and the others nestled down into the flats between the shifting oblong mounds over which the children ran. And there were paths from there across the old fort road to the Gulf beach, and the children roamed them with the wildlife and stayed out of one another’s way, human and animal, with a kind of natural grace.
You have no memory of your own, of the storm, I expect.
I remember the sound of the wind, and of being cold and in the water, in the dark, and being cold on the little hill by the oak trees.
She felt a cool breeze and they were a memory of hands clapping, a singing around the fireplace in his old home down on the coast, here on the peninsula, before the storm that blew it away, when she and her mother and father still lived with him and her grandmother there, before Pud and Lucy were born, and she smelled the heavy salt air, felt the cool freshness of the white sand outside the open windows, and heard the breeze in the tops of the longleaf pines, and the old heartpine house timbers groaned.
See here it is again, Pappy said. The sand white as sugar, the dunes high as the tops of the pines, and the little live oaks and the sea oats on them rustling and swaying, the tops of the little oaks swept back like wild women standing facing the wind so that their hair is blown back and their faces beautifully ravaged by it, and the white sand blowing in the little drifts and ribbing the upside of the dunes and in gentle swells down the sides toward the bay, stitched with the milkwort, the backdune drifts filled with the yellow flowering partridge pea and cropped up you see these wax myrtles and cacti and the yaupon holly, this wild rosemary, and you see these little holes for the ghost crabs and the beach mice, and their tracks leading to and fro. There was life everywhere, it was full and teeming with life, and with joy. There was no locks on any of our doors, which people say but it was true, here, there was simply no one and nothing to fear here, we knew everyone else and we knew the whole world here. We ate and lived on what was here, we needed nothing much from the outside. The fish from the sea. We kept pigs and cattle, a kind of longhorn which would feed on the palmettos and ranged the woods. And there were deer, chickens. Some things would not grow well and we traded for those from inland, but most what we needed we kept or raised.