How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  Mother Maude interrupted him. “Get the afflicted off somewhere, like a camp or something. Be firm and strict and ruthless.” Her husband and my father moved back into the living room and sat on the edge of the couch. Both of them were eyeing me at the table with great interest. I knew that they were waiting for Mother Maude to ask the question. She had been leading up to it the whole evening: Will you come?

  “That sounds,” I said, before she had a chance to say any more, “just wonderful.” I would be the first confirmed camper. After me, they would begin the search for others. Everyone smiled at my reaction, even Father Drake, and I wondered if they had expected me to be so agreeable. A tingling had spread throughout my body—fear, excitement, I couldn’t tell which. There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have gone right then had the camp been ready. When Mother Maude and Father Drake left us that night, my father told me that sometimes the Lord put the perfect message in an imperfect vessel. I thought he was talking about Mother Maude, with her gaudiness, and the aggressive Father Drake—they were not my father’s kind of evangelicals. Only later, when in bed, did it occur to me that he probably meant me. I was the imperfect vessel.

  —

  Lake John smelled like putrid flowers. Yards away, we stood in a circle of citronella tiki torches with Rick and Larry, and waited on Mother Maude to finish praying. She was kneeling in the dirt at the water’s edge, her wig mobbed by mosquitos. The sky had drained of color, and darkness was settling over the trees. Mother Maude rose to rejoin the circle of light. Larry handed her the mirror and she held it lengthwise. The two-foot rectangle of glass scooped up the flickering flames and held them, glimmering, within its baby-blue frame. “Periodically,” she explained to us, “you will come to the lake and commune with the Spirit.” Her voice, like always, captivated. She said, “You are more than flesh. More than muscle and bone—you are souls trapped in a body that has betrayed you.” She tilted the mirror to catch our reflections. “Each of you are products of sin multiplied by sin. Each of you can be broken to his will if only the soul is willing.” Rick and Larry left the circle and stood beyond the rim of visibility. Mother Maude clutched the mirror close to her chest, and said in a quiet voice, “Which one of my lambs is ready?”

  Dale moved backward, tipping into one of the torches, almost knocking it over.

  “We’ve got all night,” Mother Maude said.

  Christopher was first. He stepped toward Mother Maude and the mirror. She held the glass up and instructed him to get closer and closer until he was nose to nose with his own reflection. “You want to be healed, yes?” she asked, and Christopher nodded. “More than anything,” he said. She drew the mirror away from him and put her face inches from his. “But you can’t,” she told him. “You, my lamb, can do nothing. Not a thing.” Her mouth stretched into a wide smile and she let her words sink in, then continued. “Your body will always be what’s before me now: unmanly, soft.” She shifted the mirror in front of her, giving Christopher a picture of what she meant. “Yes, you are not what’s important. Because it is not about you. No, sir.” She pointed heavenward. “It’s about him. He who made the waters and the sky. Only he can illumine his might through your inadequacy. Only he can separate you from yourself, as he did the light from the dark on that first day of creation.” She asked Christopher if he understood.

  “I think I do.”

  “You think?”

  “I mean—”

  “You mean nothing, baby.” She shook the mirror in his searching face. “What do you see here? Tell me fast.”

  “Um, me?”

  “Exactly! And I want you to see the self behind the self. The other Christopher. The boy filled to the brim with the Son of Man!”

  I heard it then, echoing across the lake. We all did. Clear and sharp: the sound of someone screaming. A deep yawl from the guts of Father Drake somewhere in the darkness beyond our circle of tiki lights. As his scream faded, Mother Maude went on as if she’d heard nothing, telling Christopher to repeat after her. “I am no one,” she said. “I am nothing. Lord, rend my flesh. Burn me anew.”

  Dale began rocking back and forth, and mumbled, “Shouldn’t be, shouldn’t be, shouldn’t be here.”

  Christopher turned. “Dale,” he said. “You, Dale—hush.” Amazingly enough, Dale did, putting his hand over his mouth and turning away from what happened next. Christopher looked at himself in the mirror and repeated the words, slowly at first, as if contemplating each syllable: “I am no one. I am nothing. Lord, rend my flesh. Burn me anew.” Mother Maude told him to say it again, and Christopher obeyed. “Again,” she said, when he finished a second time, and he shouted the words, screamed them at the image of himself. After he finished, his face was red, and sweat poured from his hairline, his bangs stringy and pushed back. Satisfied with his performance, Mother Maude brought two fingers to her lips and then placed those same fingers on his cheek. “Get undressed,” she said. He recoiled. “Do what?” he said, and she told him that he must disrobe, go to Lake John, and bathe. “You must cleanse yourself from the outside in.” She gestured toward the row of us standing behind him. “You all do. The flesh is weak and must be made compliant.”

  Christopher looked confused. “Here? Now?”

  The humidity had taken its toll on Mother Maude’s makeup. Dark rivers of mascara traced down her cheeks. “There’s no shame in the here and now.”

  Dale made a noise between a cry and a gurgle. Rumil and Sparse locked eyes, then glanced at me, their faces saying: This will be over soon, won’t it? The torches only seemed to make it hotter, the heat like a warm blanket being wound tighter and tighter around my chest. Mosquitos ventured across the flames, drawn to our stink. Christopher removed his sweat-soaked shirt first, his pale love handles as luminous as slices of moon. Then he kicked off his shoes, unpeeled his socks. Mosquitos the size of quarters swarmed him, but he seemed oblivious and let them feed on him in peace. At last he undid the button of his shorts and shimmied free of them. He stood now in front of the mirror, in front of us, in nothing but a pair of white cotton briefs wedged into the crack of his saggy, misshapen ass. He went to push them down, but Mother Maude’s hand shot to his shoulder. “Leave those,” she said, then: “I’m so proud of you. So very proud.” In the song of her voice, I heard how truly pleased she was, and in me there arose this impulse to please her like this, a desperate need for her approval, to have her say to me what she had said to Christopher. From the lake came another voice: Larry’s. “This way, Chris!” he yelled. “We’re here! Come on!” Before he could go to them, Mother Maude held on to him a moment longer. “Keep your eyes shut in the water,” she said. “Nice and tight.”

  He nodded from the circle. Moments later, we heard a splash. A flailing of arms, some coughing. “I can’t swim, y’all!” he was screaming. “Oh, God!” Mother Maude yelled back for him to stand up. It got quiet then. The torches created a pool of light for us to stand in, but beyond them a curtain of darkness hung between us and the lake. When Christopher traipsed back into the circle, he was different. His feet and legs and arms were coated in mud. His hair was slicked back from the swim. “I feel tingly,” he said to no one, to himself, as he touched his neck and face with a kind of wonder. He also wore a yellow T-shirt and khaki shorts, the word CAMPER etched across his back.

  Rumil went next, and the sight of his nakedness snared my full attention. His body, buttery in the torchlight, looked liquid and smooth. A mole sat at the center of his back, and I imagined reaching out, stroking it. I stopped myself. No—the words. Listen to the words. The words seeped into me, pushing away all the clutter in my skull until they were flashing across my brain, bright as neon: I am nothing I am no one God rend my flesh burn me anew. When Rumil finished and left the circle, Sparse volunteered before I could.

  Dale had gone silent and was still facing the direction we had come from. I wanted to tell him to turn back around. Didn’t he understan
d? He was missing an important part of the evening—maybe the most important part. My father’s dismay at me welled up in my chest and I focused it on Dale. I grabbed his arm—rock hard and immovable—but released him soon thereafter. Sparse was finished, had already taken off his clothes, and now, at last, it was my turn.

  —

  I heard Mother Maude sing live only once, and it was at First Baptist. My father and I had gone to Brother Mims’s church the Sunday after our first dinner with my aunt and uncle. They were going to be asking for donations from the congregation and my father wanted us to show our support. Brother Mims greeted us at the front door with shyness, hugging my father when he got within arm’s reach. Mother Maude and Father Drake had been there all morning talking with church members during Sunday school, answering questions about their summer camp, making sure not to mention their connection to us lest anyone refused to donate due to hard feelings toward my father.

  For church, Mother Maude had chosen a different wig, one that fanned out over her shoulders like a cape caught in the wind. She wore a loose-fitting jumpsuit, green and spangled about the shoulders in glittery explosions. Even from the back row, I could see the heavy makeup. She looked like an oversize girl who had been meddling in her mother’s vanity. When Brother Mims introduced her, he said how proud he was to have her and her husband visiting them and reiterated the importance of their ministry. He told everyone how lucky they were, because he had convinced her to sing that song from a few years back that had made her famous. After Brother Mims sat down, she clasped her hands together, closed her eyes, tilted back her head, and let her voice do the rest. “I’m kind of homesick,” she told us, “for a country.” Nothing about her appearance mattered now. The filigree of her look was in direct contrast to the pureness of the sound warbling out of her mouth. This, I thought. This is the sound of God.

  —

  What does my lamb see?” Mother Maude held up the mirror.

  A pale blond boy gazed back at me, hair a mess of curls, the bones of his face sharp and feminine. “Nothing,” I said to her. “I see no one.” Then I repeated the words as if I were casting a spell. As the others did, I spoke them several times until she lifted a hand to hush me. I was already tearing off my clothes before she asked. I added them to the pile forming in the middle of the circle and stepped between a gap of torches into the surrounding dark. The ground writhed under my feet with what I imagined were unseen pests: ticks, fire ants, wolf spiders. I made my way to the water in near blindness, slamming into Rumil and Sparse as they were coming back. We tumbled. My knee thwacked against the exposed root of a pine. Someone’s foot slapped my chest. There was a confusion of bodies as we grabbed at one another, pulling and pushing, eventually making it to our feet again. Both Sparse and Rumil wore the new T-shirts and shorts, the skin on their arms and legs dripping with muck. “For fuck’s sake,” Sparse said to me. “I thought you was the boogeyman.” Rumil’s arm touched my head and removed something from my hair. “I was right,” he said. “Well, sort of. All they want is for you to go completely under then they’ll let you get out.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  They lumbered on back to the circle. I took another step then stopped and waited for my eyesight to adjust. I had lost my bearings. The lake hadn’t seemed this far away in daylight. A few yards at most. Darkness had stretched the distance. A person could wander from tree to tree in this blackness, never finding his way out. I thought of my mother’s bootleggers and her gang of women. All her stories were marauding through this dense clot of woods, and now I was a part of them, another character staking his claim in the Neck, wanting more from this land than it was prepared to give.

  Slowly, the world took on more definition; the dark between the trees mellowed into deep blue. Not long after, Larry called out my name from somewhere to my left. I moved toward the sound of his voice. My vision was clearing. I saw the ground, my bare feet slushing through pinecones and leaves and sticks. Close to the lake, the earth turned muddy and soft, pockmarked by the others’ footprints. Lake John was about the size of a football field. Rick and Larry stood about three feet out, coffee-colored water lapping against their knees. They waved me onward. “Come on,” Larry said. “Hurry.”

  I eased in. A sludge of algae and particulates swam around me in a kind of stew that stunk of raw sewage. When I waded past Rick and Larry, Rick was the one to speak. “Go until you can’t,” he said, and so I kept going until the water came to my neck. The lake bottom felt waxy and sharp; I dug in my toes and let the current drift over my body, tugging me toward the center. The stars spun like fireflies fleeing capture. On the opposite side of the lake, headlights flickered on. Mother Maude and Father Drake had parked the RV on that side while Rick and Larry remained in a tent near the Sleeping Cabin to watch over us. In the middle distance, between the headlights and me, a figure stood in the water. Father Drake lifted an arm, and I did the same. As his arm remained in the air, I gathered he wasn’t waving but likely praying. Embarrassed, I covered my eyes and nose and dove under. Beneath the lake’s surface, I flapped my arms like wings to push myself deeper into the murk. The water obliged. My body became suspended down there, the lake a kind of womb holding me in place.

  —

  Mother Maude and Father Drake remained in Hawshaw for four months, leaving for the Neck at the beginning of April. During their stay, they lived in their RV, keeping the vehicle parked at the Piggly Wiggly across town in two spaces they rented from the store manager. For the most part, they kept to themselves. I presumed they were busy preparing for the camp. I imagined this entailed making phone calls and traveling through the Delta, as my father once had, ginning up interest in their unconventional ministry and, of course, collecting donations. They joined us for dinner on most nights when my father was home. Mother Maude could not cook like her older sister did, so we oftentimes ate from McDonald’s or Ward’s. But when my father wasn’t around, only Mother Maude came over, claiming Father Drake was “too busy,” but I understood that I made him uncomfortable. When my aunt and I were alone in the apartment, I learned she was like my mother in one crucial way: They were both great talkers. Especially when the men weren’t around.

  “Now listen,” she told me on more than one occasion. “Here’s how you became the sinner you are.” She believed my “inversion,” as she called it, had nothing to do with hormones, or having an emasculated father, or even some rogue gene in my DNA. “No, sir,” she said. “Don’t believe that nonsense for a second. Your sin’s the culmination of sins committed before you were born. A whole history of wrongdoing for which you are the natural unnatural outcome.” According to her, the trouble took root in the Neck after World War Two when my grandfather, Horace Dodd, bought up fifty acres of squalor from Attala and Holmes counties. “Lord knows how he got the money,” she said. “Daddy never owned two pennies to rub together when I was growing up.” She characterized the Neck as a place people went to kill or be killed. “That part your mama got right in her stories!” And she claimed to have been informed by reliable sources, though she never told me who, that he was able to purchase the land cheaply because he had worked out a deal with the county officials. As the moonshiner had in my mother’s story, Horace Dodd gave them the impression he was the man to clean up the Neck, make it respectable. He wasn’t from around there, and nobody knew much about him, but he looked like the sort of man for the job. “He was always wearing dark-rimmed hoot-owl glasses and white-collared shirts. He kept his hair greased back—oh, I’d love nothing better than to show you a picture of your grandparents, but my Johnny stole the one of them I used to keep in my purse.” Any time she brought up her brother, she would become distracted and need a minute or two to find her way back to the original point. “My Johnny thought I was abandoning him by taking a husband. He never said as much, but I knew his heart as well as I knew my own, and he felt like I was leaving him to fend for himself just like our paren
ts and your mama did when we were kids. Right before he left me, he got ahold of my purse and took the picture with him.” Eventually, she recovered the original thread: “You’ll just have to take my word for it—Daddy didn’t have the appearance of a rascal. No, sir. He looked more like the kind of man who’d figure up your taxes, not open the doors to a juke joint and run a cathouse on the side.” She paused at this part to take a sip of her large plastic cup of Diet Coke. “Which was exactly what Daddy did soon after the purchase of the property was finalized.”

  Mother Maude said the juke joint was easy to find. “A squat little building perched on the side of a gravel road right after you turned off the blacktop highway.” My grandfather made sure to set it on the Holmes County side of the Neck because Attala was dry. In the beginning, the establishment was little more than a roof and four walls where men gathered to wet their whistles. “Didn’t have electricity, so I doubt there was even a jukebox, but people called it a juke joint all the same. Don’t ask me why.” And if Mother Maude ever got to talking about the juke joint, then sooner or later she would get around to talking about the cathouse, too. It was unavoidable. “Now that was the stuff of legend and myth. I don’t rightly know what to believe about it.” From what she’d learned over the years, the cathouse was tucked so deep in the Neck you wouldn’t be able to find it unless the whores wanted you to find it. Mother Maude admitted she’d never set eyes on her father’s “little palace of iniquity” herself. “No, sir. He was done with all that by the time we kids came along.” She’d heard a rumor, nothing she could say for sure, that once her father quit the whoring business, he burned the cathouse down. “Makes sense to me,” she said, “considering what happened later.”

  Mother Maude would claim my grandfather, though wicked, did give order to the Neck. For this, the law from either county often let him alone to do his evil as he pleased. “And drunkards, poachers, gamblers, thieves—they all respected him enough to get his permission first before they started any trouble in his woods.” Everybody called him the Boogeyman for how he slunk about his land, appearing and disappearing like a ghost. “Daddy was said to have known the Neck so well he could hide bodies no bloodhound could ever sniff out. Gives me chills just to ponder the man he was.” Back when he kept a roster of women on the payroll, one in particular, a woman named Cheryl, was his personal favorite whenever he, as Mother Maude put it, “dallied in matters of the flesh.” “I know Mama and Daddy were bad people, but it’s hard for me to see them as that even now. Daddy never seemed like a boogeyman to me. Far from it. Imagine this homely little man who stood guard behind a cash register all day.” She’d claim the only time he ever lost his cool was at the end when he fought with her mother about her peculiar ways. “And Mama—for all I know she may well have been another Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke, but to me she was just Mama. Lord, I wish I still had that picture of them to show you what I mean.” Once she got going, Mother Maude could dally on the theft of the picture. After Johnny died, she told me, she and Father Drake had riffled through his apartment in New York looking for the picture but never finding it. “Knowing him,” she said, “he probably threw it away when he got tired of looking at it. Like your mama, he never dwelled much on where we had come from.” She described the picture as a small black-and-white snapshot taken by the justice of the peace soon after he had pronounced her parents husband and wife. “In it, Mama’s leaning against a door, her head cocked back, grinning. Daddy’s right there beside her, looking all pleased with himself, his arm sort of shoved around her shoulder.” From the look of her mother in the picture, Mother Maude suspected the menfolk came to Cheryl for more than her beauty. “Oh, she was pretty,” Mother Maude said. “Imagine your mama without all the heft. And Lord, them eyes, narrow and green. They seemed to say in that picture, I know what you’ve done, and I don’t care because, baby, I’ve done worse.”