Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  I rarely thought of the father at all, he was so seldom around.

  And then one day as I was walking to the lot where I hoped to play baseball, I noticed that he was in the side yard working in the vegetable garden with a hoe. He was drunk and dirty, wearing baggy, unzipped trousers. His big belly was hanging out from under a sleeveless undershirt.

  Dixie Dawn had come outside at the moment I was passing and had brought something to her father, something cool to drink.

  Then for no apparent reason she stood there near him among the cabbages and began to sing. It was music of some operatic sort, some aria I suppose, clear and foreign and completely surprising.

  This spontaneous music infuriated Mr. McNeer. He began cursing Dixie Dawn and berating her and calling her names. I was standing across the street watching. They did not see me, though it would not have mattered, he would have kept on in any case.

  The abuse continued until Dixie Dawn was crying. Still it did not stop. Dixie Dawn was dressed in crisp seersucker, and though I hated her for her poverty and her fatness and her social ineptitude, she looked almost beautiful standing there among the cabbages and beans that her father had been hoeing.

  Mr. McNeer’s anger grew and grew, and the abuse became worse. Finally he walked towards her through the garden patch, and I was astonished to watch him strike Dixie Dawn over the head with the side of the hoe.

  She staggered but did not fall. She turned to run. He followed and struck her many more times on the head and shoulders and back. He flung the hoe behind him and ran and caught her and stopped her. He was heavy and strong. He spun her around to face him and he held her by the shoulders. Her hair was black with blood. Her crisp dress was ruined. He shook her until she was as limp as a rag doll.

  I could not hear his words, only the anger in his voice. Finally he let her go and she ran into the house, crying.

  I hurried away from the scene, embarrassed and frightened. Before I was completely out of sight of them I turned and looked back and saw Dixie Dawn’s mother coming out the door, calling angrily to her husband. I didn’t wait to see more.

  I hung around the vacant lot and waited for someone to show up to play ball. For a long time I was alone. I tossed the ball up in the air and caught it with my fielder’s mitt. There was not much else to do. I thought of Dixie Dawn getting cracked over the head with the hoe. It was summer and the sun was beating down on the Delta. Fields of cotton plants stretched like long green carpets in all directions from where I stood. I could smell the cotton flowers on the wind. On the street a mule-drawn wagon trundled past, driven by a black man. The wagon was filled with blocks of ice and covered with a tarp. The ice melted and water poured out in streams beneath the wagon wheels.

  At last another boy showed up, Roy Dale Conroy. Roy Dale was a white-trash child. He had milk-white skin and large coppery freckles. His hair was red and badly cut, probably by his older sister. He spat constantly, ptooey ptooey ptooey. It was a habit, a compulsion I would say.

  Roy Dale was worthless as a playmate. He had no ball or glove or bat. He relied on the charity of others. He didn’t really know how to play ball anyway. He would put the bat between his legs and make sexual jokes. Or he would put the ball down his pants and strut around. Nobody wanted to play with Roy Dale.

  He said, “Hey, Sugar.” Ptooey ptooey ptooey.

  I said, “Hey, Roy Dale.”

  He said, “Throw me the ball. I want to show you something.” Ptooey.

  I said, “Mr. McNeer just beat Dixie Dawn over the head with a hoe.”

  Roy Dale went ptooey ptooey ptooey.

  I said, “She was bleeding and everything.”

  He said, “Did she let you see her tits?”

  I turned and headed for home. Roy Dale ran along and caught up with me.

  He said, “Hey, man, just kidding. Take a joke.”

  I kept walking.

  He said, “No kidding, let me see the ball. Just for a second. I’ll give it right back.”

  We walked along towards my home. Roy Dale kept nagging me about the baseball.

  I said, “She wants to sing opera songs.”

  He said, “I’ll give you a quarter to let me see the ball.”

  We cut down an alley, a short way to my house. There was a weedy ditch with water running through it. Roy Dale said, “Hole up.” He climbed down in the ditch and scrambled around, this way and that, grabbing at something in the weeds and finally cornering it in the water. He stepped in the ditchwater and didn’t seem to notice that his shoes were wet. Finally he caught the thing he had been chasing, a mouse the size of a Ping-Pong ball.

  We were in sight of my house now.

  Roy Dale said, “What shall I do with it?” Talking about the mouse.

  I said, “Let it go, Roy Dale.”

  He said, “I don’t know. . . .” Teasing me.

  I said, “Here, take it, take the ball.” I held it out to him.

  He said, “Hm. I don’t really need the ball any more.”

  I said, “Don’t hurt the mouse, Roy Dale. C’mon, take the ball.”

  He held the mouse tight in one hand. Its head stuck up between his fingers. It was tiny as a button, the little head, and yet all the features were distinct, the big ears and pointy face and little whiskers and frightened eyes like bright punctuation. It had little mouse-teeth, small as sand crystals.

  Roy Dale took the baseball from me in his other hand.

  He said, “I wonder which one I could throw farther.”

  I said, “You can have the ball. I’ll give it to you. Let the mouse go. I’m telling you Dixie Dawn was bleeding all over the place. I thought he was going to kill her.”

  He said, “Do you mean it? I can have the ball?”

  I said, “Just let the mouse go.”

  He said, “You’re lying,” and made me think he was about to hurl the mouse to the ground.

  I said, “No, really. You can have it.”

  He said, “I don’t want your fucking ball.” He dropped the ball into the ditchwater and tossed the mouse underhand out in front of him in my direction. It was spinning in the air. I tried to catch the mouse but I missed it. It hit my hand and then my thigh and fell to the ground. The mouse was stunned but not badly injured. In a couple of seconds it got its bearings and scuttled off into the weeds.

  Roy Dale picked the ball up out of the water and dried it against his pants and handed it to me. “Good as new,” he said.

  I said, “Thanks.”

  He said, “You might as well not lie to me about being your friend.”

  Roy Dale went his way and I went mine.

  MY MOTHER was in the kitchen making homemade noodles and chicken broth. She hated noodles and broth, but it was the only thing my father would eat when he was drinking.

  I walked into the kitchen and said, “Roy Dale caught a mouse and let it go.”

  She said, “To my mind a body needs a balanced diet.”

  I said, “Mr. McNeer hit Dixie Dawn over the head with a hoe and made her bleed.”

  Mama said, “Oh.” She stopped what she was doing. She looked at me with sadness, her hands still covered with flour. I was glad I had told her.

  I said, “She didn’t do nothing. He just started beating her with the hoe.”

  She said, “Anything. She didn’t do anything.” And then she said, “Those poor sad people.”

  SOON AFTER the incident with the hoe Mrs. McNeer began a campaign to make her children’s lives happy. She surprised local children on the street by giving them money. She would say, “My treat!” She volunteered to “help out” in the youth groups of every church in town. She made sandwiches for Methodist kids, she hired a truck for the Presbyterian hayride, she taught in the Baptist Vacation Bible School, she folk-danced with the Episcopalians.

  Her unhappy children were always there with her. Dixie Dawn was forced to sing solos. John Wesley, who was tone deaf, stood around with his knuckles on the sidewalk.

  Nothing worked,
of course. Every child in town grew to fear and despise Dixie Dawn and John Wesley all the more.

  The saddest event in the attempt to conscript an army against the McNeer children’s misery was a birthday party for Dixie Dawn. I should say “birthday party,” in quotation marks, since it was still summer and nobody’s birthday at all. Dixie Dawn’s birthday was not until February.

  The party was elaborate. Maybe the most elaborate single event in white-trash history. Mrs. McNeer had prepared for forty or more children. She worked day and night for weeks. She strung crepe paper streamers from every available place, four separate colors of crinkly paper twisted together in a bright rope looping and swagging from house to store, from tree to bush. The yard was practically canopied in streamers.

  Mrs. McNeer had rented a tent in case of rain, and had set it up and rolled up its sides and placed long cloth-covered tables beneath it. On the tables were foods that most of the children of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, had never seen before. Cucumber sandwiches cut with a cooky cutter, pickled herring, olives, smoked oysters, raw vegetables with a mustard dip, smoked bluefish and trout and salmon, even a liver pâté. There were two large cakes. One of them said You’re a Big Girl Now. The other said Let’s Boogie Down. There was a banner that said Happy Birthday, and another that said Let’s Have a Party.

  All across the lawn there were areas arranged for various games. Card games here, board games there, blindfold games, running games, croquet, badminton, every game you can think of, all over the yard.

  There were party favors beyond imagining. Honkers and tooters and squeakers and clickers and tassled hats and sheriff’s badges and painter’s caps and small magic tricks. Handcuffs, fingercuffs, whoopee cushions, hand buzzers, squirting flowers, leaky fountain pens, play money, sneezing powder, itching powder, loaded dice, Mexican jumping beans, nose flutes, nose putty, glow-in-the-dark teeth, riding crops. There were Japanese lanterns and one million helium-filled balloons on strings.

  Most impressive of all was the ice cream. There was enough ice cream for a hundred hungry people. It was homemade and completely fresh. Fresh strawberry, fresh peach, fresh fig, I don’t know what else, but fresh, all of it fresh. Mrs. McNeer lifted the freezing-cold lid of each metal canister, and the perfect cream pulled into a long smooth curl. The clop-clop of hooves sounded in my mind as I imagined the ice wagon leaving off its entire load at the McNeer doorstep so that this perfection might be accomplished.

  The problem with all this was that nobody came to the party.

  I went to the party, no one else.

  THE AFTERNOON was hot. We sat for a long time in new lawn chairs, me, Mrs. McNeer, Dixie Dawn (swollen with tears), and John Wesley, his hairline threatening to grow down over his eyes. All of us sat in the chairs and waited and waited for someone else to appear.

  I could not even hate my parents for sending me here. I had not been sent. I came to this terrible place because I had to. I came because I had seen Mr. McNeer beat Dixie Dawn with the hoe. For that reason only. I was the only true guilty responsible witness to the sadness of their lives.

  The minutes were hours, as we waited. Mrs. McNeer said, “No one wants to be first at a party.” And she said, “Who said small-towners don’t know how to be fashionably late?” And she said, “Where could all those other scamps be?” And she said, “All the expense . . .” And, “Their parents practically promised me.”

  No one came. The afternoon lengthened. The sun moved down the sky. Mrs. McNeer made a few futile phone calls. Finally there was nothing more to say.

  One other person did come to the party. After a long while Roy Dale Conroy showed up. I am certain he had not been invited. He seemed only to happen past the house and to see us in the lawn chairs. He had been wading in a swamp and was wet to his knees and smelled like fish.

  I had brought a small gift, a jar of hard candy wrapped in tissue paper. Roy Dale had brought no regular gift, of course, but he tried to give Dixie Dawn a quarter and a dime he found in his pocket.

  Dixie Dawn refused to take the money, and then she refused to take the gift-wrapped package from me as well.

  Mrs. McNeer insisted that she take the candy and then thank me for it. She ignored Roy Dale altogether.

  Later Roy Dale offered the money to John Wesley, who took it and grinned like an ape and thanked him sincerely.

  We played as many of the games as the five of us could play. We ate as much of the food as we could eat. We filled up bags of party favors to take home. Gallons of ice cream went to waste. We sang happy birthday to Dixie Dawn and she cried like the Missouri and went inside and lay down on her bed under an oscillating fan.

  AND SO it was over. Or I thought so.

  There was one more event on Mrs. McNeer’s bizarre pathetic agenda. A campout, a sleep-over. Boys only. That was the way Mrs. McNeer put the proposition to us. Good news! What fun! It’s all decided, your parents have agreed. A pup tent! Have you ever heard of anything so wonderful, so fun! You can’t escape, don’t try. Everyone is invited.

  WHAT CAN I say about my life that explains what it meant for me to lie hostage in a tent with these two companions?—Roy Dale and John Wesley. None of it is important. Only this day. The smell of gasoline at the pump, of souring cream, of defoliant and crisp leaves, a wagon pulling ice, noodles, broth, alcohol.

  When night finally came, the party seemed to have been going on for centuries. Mrs. McNeer lighted a couple of lanterns in the backyard. She spread clean soft quilts on the bottom of the tent and laid out cheap sleeping bags on top of those. She opened up both ends of the tent so that we could catch a breeze, and dropped mosquito netting over the ends, just in case.

  I forgave her for the lies she told to get us there. I doubted whether she had even bothered to lie to Roy Dale’s parents. Probably he was there without permission, or for that matter without anyone’s knowing or caring whether he came home that night.

  We talked for a while in the tent, the three of us, John Wesley, Roy Dale, and me. Roy Dale said that he would teach us how to jack-off if we wanted him to. John Wesley said, “Oh boy! Yeah, sure, that would be great! Thanks!” But nothing ever came of the offer, and I was relieved.

  We lay quiet for a while. We removed the mosquito netting and looked at the sky.

  I said, “That’s the North Star.”

  Roy Dale said, “You’re lying.”

  He was right. I didn’t know one star from another.

  Roy Dale said, “I wish I had a cigarette.”

  It was a soft night. I was beginning to be glad I was there. I told Roy Dale and John Wesley the story of the day when I was five years old and a warning about a maddog went out through the neighborhoods. I made the memory sound dramatic. “No one was allowed on the streets,” I said. “A maddog. A rabid dog.” I told them that the air was filled with the fragrance of rotting persimmons and the sounds of wasps drunk on the ferment. This part was not true, I only told it to make the story sound better.

  I thought Roy Dale would say, “You’re lying.”

  Instead he said, “I remember that.”

  I said, “You do?”

  He said, “I remember that maddog.”

  I said, “You’re lying.”

  He said, “I saw it. It couldn’t hardly walk, it was so crippled up with the disease.”

  I said, “Tell the truth.”

  He said, “There was ropes of spit stringing out of its mouth. Its eyes looked like busted marbles.”

  I said, “Oh, man.”

  He said, “A man with a rifle killed it. It was a shepherd dog. I saw a bright red bullet gash in its side. Mock it down: I watched that dog breathe its last breath.”

  We lay in the night silence and watched the stars. I wished I knew the names of all the stars and all the constellations. Or even just one of them.

  I said, “Jeeziz.”

  Roy Dale still smelled like fish, but it was a good smell. The earth and its waters.

  John Wesley spoke then. Soft litt
le faraway ape-boy voice. He said, “The man who killed the dog was my daddy.”

  For a while there was only silence. For a while neither Roy Dale nor I even looked in his direction.

  John Wesley was not lying. His father had been the man who killed the maddog and saved lives.

  In a while Roy Dale was still, maybe he was asleep. I pretended to sleep as well, and then maybe I did fall asleep, and not long afterwards I woke up again and John Wesley was crawling out of the tent. John Wesley was barefoot, and wearing only his underwear.

  He was headed towards the house.

  I shook Roy Dale. I said, “Look.”

  John Wesley went inside the house through the back screened door, and we saw him through the window, in the kitchen with his sad mother beneath a lightbulb hanging from a cord. They sat together at the kitchen table amidst the birthday wreckage, and though we could not have heard them in any case, I think they did not speak.

  And so we lay back in the tent, on our sleeping bags, and did not speak either. We pretended to be asleep, though I was not, and I am sure Roy Dale was not. After a while John Wesley came back to the tent and crawled in between the two of us and cried quietly until he slept, and so then sleep did finally come to me, and then to Roy Dale, as well. The birthday party was over.

  I SUPPOSE there is one more thing to tell. For many years, after I was grown and no longer lived in Mississippi, I told this story to my friends. And when I told it, I always added one detail that was not true.

  I always said that after we had settled down and had drifted off to sleep beneath the canvas roof of the tent, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of Dixie Dawn’s sweet pure angelic voice in song. I said that beneath the bright stars her voice was a crisp spirit, a lyrical hopeful pause in the terrible drama of our narrow lives. I said—and even as I invented this I believed it—I said that in the foreign-language music of her song my ears and my heart opened up to a world larger and more generous than the world of my parents and our geography.

  Now as I tell this story again, I forget why I ever made up such a thing. It is not true, of course. Dixie Dawn did not wake up that night, so far as I knew. As far as I know, she lay in her bed in a hard deliberate sleep, where song had put her and from which song could never draw her out.