Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Advent of the World of Darkness

  Incredibly, Mom stayed dead but the sky changed. Rains fell. Alligators dug and tenanted new lakes. It became (how?) early April. We were doing four or five shows a week, at most, for pitiful numbers of people. Some audiences were in the single digits. I read my comics and memorized the speech bubbles of heroes. I dusted our Seth clock, a gruesome and fantastic timepiece the Chief had made: just an ordinary dishlike kitchen clock set inside a real alligator’s pale stomach. The clock hung from a hook next to the blackboard menu in our Swamp Café. TIME TO EAT! somebody—probably Grandpa—had scratched into the boards above it. Water overflowed the sloughs and combed the black mudflats. Mangroves hugged soil and vegetation into pond-lily islands; gales tore the infant matter apart along the Gulf. Our swamp got blown to green bits and reassembled, daily, hourly. The wet season was a series of land-versus-water skirmishes: marl turned to chowder and shunted the baby-green cocoplums into the sea; tides maniacally revised the coastlines. Whole islands caught fire from lightning strikes, and you could sometimes watch deer and marsh rabbits leaping into the sea of saw grass on gasps of smoke.

  Some days Gus Waddell—our fat angel at the ferry’s helm—was our only visitor. Of course, we couldn’t tally Gus as a Swamplandia! tourist because he didn’t pay money to see us. Gus Waddell was the ferryboat captain, as per his monogrammed life vest and his little captain’s hat and his squishy-foam I’M THE CAPTAIN drink cozy. Uncle Gus brought us mainland provisions: bagged butcher-shop meats and various zoo supplies and gallons of whole milk, big sandbags of rice. Several boxes of our favorite mainland cereal, Peanut Butter Boos. For the Chief, a rubber-banded roll of emerald Win This Lotto! tickets and the “Ziggurat”-size carton of Sir Puffsters cigarettes.

  Back when Mom was healthy, we’d see the flash of orange paint behind the mangroves that meant the ferry had arrived and go scrambling for our staff positions, like mainland kids who hear a school bell. And then all day my siblings and I would barely see each other—we’d be too busy busing tables in the Swamp Café or selling tickets or giving a tram tour. Sometimes the first minute that we spent together didn’t come until 3:30 p.m., when we met onstage for the Bigtree Wrestler Spectacular. But now Kiwi and Ossie and I were always lumping up in the Gator Pit, trying to figure out: what are we supposed to do? When Gus showed up with supplies and no people he gave us an uneasy gift: time. Free time. Many blank, untouristed hours of it. That’s how my sister’s metamorphosis started to happen, I think—inside that white cocoon.

  We started spending the no-tourist days on the Library Boat—even Ossie, who had never been what you would call a bookworm. We boarded an airboat and motored over to the long bottleneck cove of a nameless pine island about a quarter mile west of Swamplandia! A coppery green twenty-foot schooner was at permanent anchor there, listing in the rocks. This was the Library Boat. Like Gus’s ferry, the Library Boat was another link to the mainland, although this boat never moved. It held a cargo of books. In the thirties and forties, Harrel M. Crow, a fisherman and bibliophile, had piloted the schooner around our part of the swamp delivering books to the scattered islanders. Then Harrel M. Crow died and I guess that was it for the door-to-door service. But his Library Boat, miraculously, had survived on the rocky island, unscavenged and undestroyed by hurricanes. It was an open secret, utilized by all our neighbors. You could row over to the site of the wreck, descend into H. M. Crow’s hold, return with an armload of semidamp reading material. People contributed newer books, too—the bottom shelves had filled with trashy romance novels, mysteries, somebody’s underlined Bible, a mostly filled-in book of jumble puzzles, the plays of Shakespeare. So the collection was always evolving.

  I can’t remember when I first saw The Spiritist’s Telegraph lying around the house, but once I’d noticed the book it seemed to be everywhere—in our kitchen, facedown in the café. Ossie was never without it. I was surprised she’d found it out there. The Spiritist’s Telegraph looked old, ancient, centuries older than Harrel M. Crow. It was a spell book, Gideon-thick. We didn’t think it was from our country, even though the writing was English. Inside the print was so tiny—in places it was almost impossible to read—and Ossie said this was because each chapter had been written as a whisper to the reader.

  “Well? So what the heck kind of machine is the Spiritist Telegraph?”

  “I think,” Osceola said wonderingly, turning a page, “that it’s supposed to be your body?”

  There were dozens of drawings in the appendix. Ossie showed me an old anatomical sketch of a woman floating with her arms akimbo, her private parts inked in. Her eyes were pupilless, serene, like the Egyptian sculptures I had recently discovered in a kid’s World Wonders book of my own. THE SPIRITIST RECEIVES A MESSAGE, read an ornate scroll of Bookman type that furred her collarbone.

  “Can I read it?”

  “You’re too little.” She saw my face and relented. “You can flip through it. You can flip through it once, and fast.”

  Together we spun through a hundred chapters: foxed pages, strange drawings, an appendix of gibberish. All these witchy psalms about a place called the underworld, which was neither the heaven nor the hell that I had learned about from Little Rabbit cartoons and Bandits of the West comics and the Bible. It sounded instead like a vague blue woods:

  In the Underworld, all suns and lanterns are unwelcome. The transfer of light is an unforgivable breach from Acheron to Lethe. One matchstick, one fingersnap of light, can feast on those shadows and blaze into a conflagration. Young Spiritists: you must gag your vision.

  Do not even say the word “sun” here, Aspiring Spiritists, or the trees of the Underworld will punish you for it: to do so would be like telling kindling the epic of fire, or whispering lamp to the dark.

  —from The Spiritist’s Telegraph, pages ix–x

  “There’s no such place, honey,” said my father when I asked him about this underworld. His voice was like a shell with something oozing and alive inside it. “There’s no such thing as heaven, no hell. That’s a Christian fantasy. That’s a very old fairy tale that your sister is reading.”

  “It’s a book for witches, Dad. And the underworld isn’t heaven or hell, it’s like a whole separate country. Like a, a Germany under the world.” I frowned; this description was nothing like the painting in my mind, which was like a woods but also in some uncommunicable way not like a woods at all. I defaulted to: “Like a woods, Dad. You can visit dead people there. It’s always nighttime and the trees get angry if you bring flashlights or candles …”

  “You girls want an underworld?” The Chief’s booming laugh was directed at our sofa; there were no other adults in the house to echo it back to him. Our parents used to find each other this way, via laughs and gasps, an echolocation of incredulity and horror. “How deep do you want to go? You tell Osceola this: we are already underwater. Okay? Tell her that we live below sea level.”

  “Da-ad. That’s not what the underworld is. The book says …”

  “Ava Bigtree, why not let your sister have her hobby, huh?” His voice was wry and ordinary, but he looked at me with real pleading: “You and I, we’ve got the Seths, we’ve got the whole park to run, right?”

  One picture in The Spiritist’s Telegraph I stared at for hours, until I could see it fork behind my eyelids: a river cut a lightning shape through jagged, enormous boulders. Strange creatures lived in the margins of the mountains. The artist’s brushstrokes had added shapes into the clouds: snouts and wings and eyes, a long whiplike tail. Obsidian flakes snowed over the entire range. This painting was titled Winter on the River Styx.

  About this time, Ossie and I started playing Ouija every afternoon. We made the board ourselves. It had a blue painted alphabet and little suns and moons modeled on a picture from The Spiritist’s Telegraph.

  “ ‘The language of the living rains down on the dead,’ ” Ossie read to me from The Spiritist’s Telegraph, “ ‘and often our
communications can overwhelm them. The hailstorm of our words can be too intense for them to bear …’ ”

  SO GET AN UMBRELLA, MOM, I wrote to her a little angrily.

  Weeks passed and we didn’t hear back. Sometimes to make me feel better Ossie would pretend to be our mother—I LUV U, DOTER, she’d write, or U ARE PREITY, AVA. I MIS U.

  This is a true fact: my brother gave himself report cards. He modeled them after a Rocklands Middle School report card, which he had purchased from his obese mainland associate, Cubby Wallach. Cubby Wallach was complected like a bowl of oatmeal and yet carried himself as if he were wearing a top hat and spats. He had the bellicose dignity of a kid who refuses to excuse or even to acknowledge his own extreme ugliness. I admired this trait. It reminded me of the Seths, with their scarred, alien faces and their beautiful oblivion. Like a Seth, Cubby Wallach would let you stare at his face without apologizing for it. No red cheeks or downcast eyes, just a cool, invulnerable stare. In this way his ugliness got transmuted into a powerful hypnosis. Ossie used to have a bad crush on him, and I pretended to hate him. “What an asshole,” I’d say, but it came out as sort of a giggle.

  Whenever he came to Swamplandia!, Cubby Wallach brought a gigantic shopping bag filled with other kids’ colorful graded homework and purloined protractors and sold this haul to Kiwi at an incredible markup.

  Kiwi insisted that he was our homeschool’s valedictorian. I was the salutatorian. Ossie mostly read magazines. Years ago, Mom enrolled us in Teach Your Child … in the Wild!, a vestigial statewide initiative from the early days of white settlement—we got a whole “substitute curriculum” for free in the mail. Every month some functionary at the Loomis County Public Schools sent us stapled booklets with titles like Your Federal Government Is a Tree with Three Branches and Mighty Fungi: The Third Kingdom. Several times a year we mailed back a stack of tests and completed worksheets, I guess to prove that we were learning something.

  This stuff was too easy for my brother. He said that he was going to leapfrog over the LCPS high school requirements and go directly to college. He was studying for the Scholastic Aptitude Test—the SAT. If you put the fan on high in his bedroom these little powder blue cards with funny words on them flew everywhere: FATIDIC [adj], OPPROBRIUM [n]. My brother always had a pack of study cards with him. He would rather conjugate Latin than do any of the chores the park required of him. He was in charge of concessions. When the park was open, Kiwi would sit next to the trapped snowfall inside the popcorn machine at the top of the stadium steps, waving mechanically, his face making a funny pucker beneath the paper cone of his hat. Cubby Wallach had sold him these dark-rinse jeans, and they fit him like a puddle.

  Now Kiwi was free to spend most of every day mossed inside the Library Boat, where the portholes gave his face a Frankenstein gleam. He got this aura of expectancy about him that confused me. It wasn’t dread, not exactly, but you could not call it hope.

  “What little test are you studying for?” I asked him once, and he looked up with clouds for eyes and said, “My future.”

  I think that Kiwi resented my sister’s new scholarly ways a little, because up until this point he had always been the bookworm, the captain of the Library Boat. But Ossie applied herself to The Spiritist’s Telegraph with the same diligence with which Kiwi studied science and philosophy—she wouldn’t meet our eyes anymore, she was lost in her book.

  On April 29, we threw Osceola a sweet sixteen party. Without Mom and Grandpa the party felt dazed and sad. The guest list was us. The Chief and I thawed out an ancient cake from the Swamp Café freezer (“Let’s hope this doesn’t kill us, Chief!” I said, the absolute wrong joke to make). Our presents for her that year, not to put too fine a point on it, really sucked. The Chief walked over to the Bigtree Family Museum and returned with a pair of tawny moccasins. I had to remind him that the moccasins didn’t fit Osceola anymore; that’s why we’d moved them to the museum in the first place.

  “Well, it’s the thought that counts, Ava,” he told me in an almost-shout.

  The Bigtree Family Museum, next door to the gift shop, contained all kinds of crap from our house that the Chief had relabeled as BIGTREE ARTIFACTS. The entryway to the palmetto-thatched museum burned green in daylight: WELCOME TO THE “LOUVRE” OF THE SWAMP ISLANDS! Sometimes you’d find a disoriented tourist in there, sucking a Fine Lime through a straw and looking mournfully for a bathroom. Ladies liked to change their babies’ diapers on our glass cases. On one wall, the Chief had framed the flyers that had lured Grandpa Sawtooth away from Ohio in 1932. He named this exhibit Antique Promises. Each flyer featured an artist’s sketch of the Florida islands “post-drainage”: our swamp as farmland, complete with milk cows, orange groves, a heaven of clover “where the sea beasts once roamed.”

  Grandpa, who was born Ernest Schedrach, the white son of a white coal miner in Ohio, bought the land after losing his job at the Archer Road Pulp Mill, which was just as well because he was tired of the pitiful wages, tired of his ears ringing like Sunday church bells all shift and of his bleached vision caused by blinking into the chemicals. He changed his name to outwit his old boss. It turned out he owed a sizable amount of money to the mill foreman. He picked “Sawtooth” in homage to the sedge that surrounded his island; “Bigtree,” because he liked its root-strong sound.

  The farmland he’d bought, sight unseen, at the Bowles and Beaver Co. Land Lottery in Martins Ferry, Ohio, turned out to be covered by six feet of crystal water. Stalks of nine-foot saw grass glittered in the wind, in every direction, the drowned sentinels of an eternal slough. The only real habitable “property” in sight was the island he later named Swamplandia!: a hundred-acre waste. What the cheerful northern realtors were calling—with a greed that aspired to poetry—the American Eden.

  Grandpa Sawtooth and Grandma Risa took the train from Ohio to Florida and then traveled by glade skiff to their new home. When they first docked on the lee side of the island, my grandparents’ feet sank a few inches before touching the limestone bedrock. Sawtooth cursed the realtors for the length of an aria. A tiny crab scuttled over Risa’s high buttoned shoe—“and when she didn’t scream,” Sawtooth liked to say, “that’s when I knew we were staying.”

  According to Bigtree legend, it was that same day that Grandma Risa got her first-ever glimpse of a Florida alligator, the Seth of Seths, lolling in a gator hole near the cove where they had stowed their boat—and she later swore that as soon as they locked eyes, they recognized each other. That monster’s surge, said our grandfather, sent up a tidal wave of black water that soaked Grandma Risa’s dress. The prim china-dots on her skirt got erased in one instant, what we called in our museum Risa’s Chameleon Baptism.

  Alongside this bit of Bigtree history, the Chief kept an ever-changing carousel of objects from our lives, accompanied by little explanatory cards that he typed up and framed himself. Often the deck of our past got reshuffled overnight. He took down Grandpa’s old army medallions, which did not fit with his image of our free and ancient swamp tribe. And nowhere did his posted descriptions of Hilola Bigtree’s many accomplishments mention her maiden name—Owens—or her mainland birthplace. Certain artifacts appeared or vanished, dates changed and old events appeared in fresh blue ink on new cards beneath the dusty exhibits, and you couldn’t say one word about these changes in the morning. You had to pretend like the Bigtree story had always read that way.

  So it was with precedent that the Chief vandalized the Bigtree Family Museum, looting from my sister’s past to find her a birthday present. Kiwi and I just grabbed some stuff from the clearance bin in the Bigtree Gift Shop: a variety pack of hats and this XXL version of a puffy-logo Seth sweatshirt that she already owned and hated. This is what the sweatshirt said: STOP IN THE NAME OF SETH, BEFORE HE EATS YOUR HEART. The Chief had ordered dozens of these. So far as I knew, nobody in the history of our gift store transactions had ever exchanged legal tender for one.

  “Thanks, guys,” Osceola said drily.


  The Chief unwrapped Osceola’s old shoes for her, hog-tied together in our mom’s red ribbon.

  “Remember how much you liked these moccasins?”

  Ossie did not really remember, no.

  “Do you want to do a birthday show, honey?” The Chief was smiling and smiling at her, pop-eyed with the strain, a smile that looked almost frightening in the dim Swamp Café. “Do you want to … what do you want? More cake?”

  My sister shook her white head very slowly behind the tiny fence of birthday candles.

  Ossie was polite, licking icing off the twisty candle stripes, pretending this was exactly the sixteenth birthday party she’d wanted. But I knew better—I thought she must be pretty lonely. I’d seen her on the ferry docks, trying to talk to the small knots of mainland teenagers. The only boys her age we’d ever met were tourists. Sometimes, to impress them, Os would corner a posse of older boys and play them her favorite songs in the blue iceberg glow of our jukebox. Yet this jukebox had not been updated since Dwight D. Eisenhower ruled the land.

  “Cooool.” The boys would drone, catting their eyes at one another. “Who sings that one? The, ah, the Scroobie Brothers, huh? Never heard of them …”

  In fact, those Scroobie Brothers were playing right now, song after song off their only album, Scroobing the Tub, Ossie’s jukebox pick. I think Ossie liked them because they sang about things that were exotic to us, like corn and car accidents. Between bites of cake I caught her mouthing along the words, but even these hokey songs weren’t cheering her much. After the presents were opened nobody could think of what to say, so the Chief cut us second helpings of the rock-hard cake.

  “What, you don’t like your presents?” the Chief asked out of the blue, his voice alive and crackling. “Is that it? You don’t think that sweatshirt is going to fit you?”