by Kent Wascom
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They traveled on ridges of dry ground, out of the marsh and saltmeadow to the dunes and the shore of the sea. Oleander and sea oat in thick patches; white sprays of spurge nettle in bloom. She knew none of these things—the landscape had outpaced all her grasp, her youth of rock beaches and cliffs.
Their torn, blackened feet stirred hot clouds of sugar sand. Neda awed at the whiteness of this termination and the sudden explosion, when they climbed the last dunes, of the Gulf.
Numberless shorebirds adrift above waves and strutting stiff-legged in the break. Mullet shot like jets of mercury from the water. She wavered there, waiting for an answer. She’d come so far wanting to escape loss and pain and others, and now she knew there was nothing left to do but keep moving. So they did, down the beach and to the east, where parties of terns and black-bellied plovers and sundowners raced ahead of them.
They crossed unknowingly the tight neck of land that connected the continent to the island which had yet to receive an Anglo-Saxon name that stuck. On the beach, the wet sand breathed, sputtering with clams, and in the clear breaking waves to the left of Neda and Isaac schools of bull minnow and snapper fry were shadowed by small sharks. Families of dolphins breaching in strong, smooth arcs swam parallel to their course.
At the point where the island jutted out into the bay, the sun’s glare was so great that she could see nothing and she laid a hand to Isaac’s head, still hoping for some answer but knowing now that none would come. Only faceless voices and the sun burning them away. She thought this would be where they would die, burnt up, and they might drift as ashes out over the water. Then the voices came again.
—Miss?
—Excuse me, miss?
Neda turned, squinting for the glare, and saw them. On the other side of the point, on a broad flowered quilt, sat women in straw hats and fluttering ribbons and clothes as white as the sand. The one who spoke stood above the bursting stars of their parasols while another took a nervous bite of a white triangle she held in one gloved hand. Neda felt herself slipping as the woman approached, speaking in a crystal voice.
—Miss, are you all right?
Six
Floating in a soap bubble. That was how he would remember it. Lifted up and suspended in some soft, shining element, the air thick with ointments and colognes and the sharp tang of borax in the bedsheets when he woke. The strangeness of light filtered through perfect windowpanes and curtains thin as mist.
He lay alone in the bed in the turret of the summer people’s house and waited for Neda to come. He guessed she was being kept in some other room, but the only voices that came drifting up to him were those of the vacationers, a Pennsylvania coal heiress and her daughters. He heard footsteps on the stairs and in the evenings a piano being played. He’d never known the sound before and when the youngest daughter came to check on him she found him weeping, frozen, in the bed.
They kept him for a month and a half. Fed him on lemonade and bowls of beef broth whose surface shuddered with beads of fat. Then rice puddings, then fish. It was the era of faddish philanthropy and foundlings were in vogue, the popular literature of the day rife with charity. The heiress and her daughters sent for clothes, cut Isaac’s long hair, and with the cold discretion available to the rich, they gently fended off all his questions about the woman he called his mother as the heiress made entreaties to the few orphan asylums in the state of Florida.
Neda could see that the rich girls were suspicious, like their mother, taking account of Neda’s features and trying to make them fit those of the boy. For the four days she spent at the house, Neda turned herself to stone, taking food and water but giving nothing back. She responded to none of their questions, and when, on the fifth day, the sheriff of Washington County came to collect her, her silence was unbroken and would have remained so had the youngest daughter, a doughy girl called Amelia, not run up to her as she was being led out, saying,
—Don’t you even want to see him? Won’t you at least tell him goodbye?
Standing beside the sheriff, who smelled of lather and gun oil, Neda stared resigned at the girl whose cast-off dress she wore.
The girl summoning all her pomp:
—Well won’t you?
—And what good will that do, Neda said. Who will it help sleep?
Stunned, Amelia couldn’t summon a response, and when, later in life, this speechless moment would return to trouble her, she would remember how the dark woman shook her head and let herself be led away, uncaring, as unfortunate persons often are, always complicit in their own sorrows.
Neda was brought to the sheriff’s house rather than the jail itself. The sheriff, whose name was Rayburn, was only slightly older than his jurisdiction, having come down from Baltimore with frontier dreams and an aged aunt who acted as housekeeper though they had been lovers since his youth. Neda was given a room across from the aunt, and the two of them spent their days in silent housework, cooking the sheriff’s meals and listening to him talk through dinner.
For five years Rayburn had enjoyed a peaceable county, where whatever crimes occurred did so without his knowledge, for the most part. Until now, and there was the matter of this woman and the dead man at the bottom of the falls and the other at Bill’s Wineshop. That particular corpse had fallen, by chance, in the next county, whose cracker sheriff would no doubt find this woman and her trail of calamity of interest. But the sheriff noticed that his aunt was somewhat perked by Neda’s presence, and so he decided, confiding in no one, that he would say nothing of her or the boy at the vacationers’ house. Handing her over did not appeal to his tailored-buckskin sense of gallantry and, besides, no one knew for certain whether she had done anything at all other than be mad, which to his eyes she surely was.
The days passed and the aunt and Neda kept their silence as they scrubbed and cooked and shook flakes of alum on the floor, even as the aunt saw her stealing bits of things to hide beneath her bed—a knife, pins, washcloths, a pan—and, as autumn neared, food. And when one midnight in late September the sheriff was called away to attend the burning of a house, Neda readied to leave. She made no special effort for stealth, and hearing her the aunt sat up awake, watching the dark gap of her door, which she left ajar for her nephew. The aunt couldn’t see beyond the doorway but felt just the same that Neda was there. And, because she was a bit dreamy and melancholy by nature, the aunt spoke a line of poetry in misremembered schoolgirl Greek, about another such soul who traveled like the night.
For the first time in the aunt’s memory, she heard the woman laugh.
—That’s a very old way of saying it, Neda said.
The aunt in her rumpled nightclothes felt the sum of her life, whose consolations were few beyond the touches of the boy she’d ruined into an early maturity, settle grimly on her bent back. When she spoke again her voice was hoarse.
—It’s all old, the aunt said. Everything. There’s nothing between the then and the now.
The aunt stared at the gap in the door, not expecting an answer nor even fully understanding what she’d meant, and all that came to her were the footsteps going out and soon even these were gone.
There are those who condescend to tell you about love and loss, and have known neither at its full pitch, which is nearest to madness and sends us out to wander unknown, night-black countries, seeking what we cannot have, the land growing less and less familiar with each step.
Neda, twenty-three years old and heading down the road, in possession of little more than her life. But this would be enough.
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When the suit between the families of the northern convalescents and the contractor was settled in a Florida court, whose deliberations were belabored by the appearance of a sordid woman in a feathered hat who claimed to be (and was) the wife of Newell James Brose Jr., also known as “the Teacher,” three years had passed since anyone had set foot on the grounds of Rising Souls. And because the first workmen had for the most part drifted elsewhere,
and what few remained either refused to return or had so poisoned other teamsters with what they’d seen, the men who were engaged to do the digging had to be got from as far as Georgia and Alabama. They came in wagons loaded with coffins and tools, in the fall of 1895, and found the outbuildings overgrown by creeper vines and the spring choked with a kind of waterlily none of them recognized. Only the cottage was untouched. Flaking paint and a few shingles missing; on its porch a wicker chair blown down by the wind.
These men were not so different from the ones who’d gone before. You’d be hard-pressed to distinguish between them in, say, a photograph of a crowd jostling beneath the burnt, twisted body of a black man, which for most would be the only time their pictures were ever taken. But they were single-minded and hungry, and before sundown they would dig up twenty-three bodies, pry them from their rotted coffins and shovel them into the new ones bound for little towns on the Eastern Seaboard. When it happened that one man’s shovel turned up the skeleton of an infant wrapped in a kitchen rag, none paused. The man tilted the contents of his shovel onto the dirt piled beside the grave, and when they exhumed its nominal occupant, a young consumptive from Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and placed him in his new home, the man scooped the infant up and poured it in. The small bones and hollow skull lay across the chest of the dead young man, whose folded arms and gaping mouth seemed to refuse its company. Then the coffin was nailed shut, marked with the name from the headstone, and like the others hauled out to the depot, where the stationmaster stamped them as freight.
In a well-kept plot hard by a home for the insane, child and man would wait out eternity, presided over by mourners who aged and died and were themselves buried and mourned by another generation ignorant of the small interloper in their family ground. And like them, we might think our lives to be distinct, though the distinction exists only in so far as we are there to perceive it. Lives, like the bones which briefly hold them, are all related and who can say where one ends and another begins.
PART 2
The Light that Came from Beside the Sea
1896 – 1909
One
We come from this: the Gulf, the sea of storms. A place of generation and memory, for here all forms may be found antecedent to one another: the current is remembered in the sands it shapes, and hurricanes in their vast movements over the face of the waters whirl as do bodies of stars in the infinite dark. All our endings and beginnings, here, in the forms of life igniting and extinguishing.
Sixty-six million years ago, in the night, at the southwestern edge of the Gulf, a sky-long bow of fire ending in a second sun arced over the earth, and struck. Onshore stones were blasted into sand and the sand boiled into liquid for an instant and then turned to glass as over the water rose a dome of viscous light around which billowed the vaporized sea, taller than the peaks of distant mountains, hurtling past the clouds. For months thereafter frantic lifeforms scrambled beneath a sky ribboned with new and terrible colors. Then came hissing, burning rains and the fall of ash and darkness. The shadow in which hitherto insignificant, furred creatures with warm bodies and quick hearts would become, among other things, human.
Much later, to the north and east, the mountains lost their ice. A ten-thousand-year spell coming to an end. Rivers of melt veined with sediment, numberless grains of limestone, granite, quartz traveled south to the end of the continent and fanned out from the mouths of rivers and accrued in the shallows of the sea. Meeting currents and the fragments of shell and bone they brought, the sediments formed the barrier islands that stretched from the great curve of what we know as Florida to the seat of life, the Yucatán. There the descendants of the beings whose cradle had been ash and shadow built vast coastal temples overlooking the sea where, long ago, the stone had struck. The descendants prospered there, and when it came time to give a name to creation they called it the light that came from beside the sea.
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Cold bleeding out as possibility gathers in smoke and mist. The declines of glaciers and civilizations are not so different from the course of a single life.
When Mrs. Patterson collected him from the Baptist Boys’ Home, Isaac carried all he owned in a paper-wrapped bundle tied with string. He was six years old. Boarding the westbound train for Mississippi, a porter tried to help him with the bundle, but Isaac yanked back and stared at the man, furious. Mrs. Patterson, apologizing, put a hand to the child’s shoulder and eased him from the platform up the foliated iron steps, hoping this was not a terrible mistake.
She was forty-six years old and of a liberal bent. Her husband had retired early from business, bringing her and their two sons from New Orleans to the coast of Mississippi and a town called Maurepas on the eastern shore of Biloxi Bay, and their relationship was uncommonly warm. From the early days of their marriage, they would rendezvous during his workday for covert bouts of lovemaking. As a younger woman she’d gotten him fired from one job for the frequency of these noonday departures and had horrified his parents when a note from her was found that, as Mr. Patterson’s father had said, would have stunned a whore. Now on occasion she still found herself, at midday, burning up, and she was proud that her body and her drives had yet to fail her, though the possibility of bearing children had passed. When on vacation in St. Augustine Mrs. Patterson had decided that she wanted to take on another child, there was no argument.
Stepping onto their car, she found their seats and gently persuaded Isaac to part with his things. A flash then of normalcy, the boy nodding meekly and taking his seat while she stowed the bundle away. Her only regret in that moment was that her husband would not be there to meet them at the station in Biloxi. It was November and the ducks were thick over the marshes to the west, where he kept a small hunting camp in the Rigolets in Louisiana. He was far from unfeeling but was often in his own world, one governed by migrations and spawns, and they’d arranged for their sons, Ben, the youngest, and David, seventeen, to have some time with him before she and Isaac arrived. By now he’d be crouching in the blind with Ben and David and the birddog Lu, holding the oil-cloth-wrapped Italian birding gun, a gift from Sicilian friends. Her husband had made his money in real estate, buying lots and decaying houses in the French Quarter from retreating Creoles and selling them to the most recent wave of immigrants, from Italy. And because he did so fairly and treated people well, there were many who considered themselves in his debt. Thus the shotgun fit for a duke and the crates of oranges and shoeboxes of cuccidati on their doorsteps each Christmas. They called him Mister Pat and when, in 1890, eleven Italian men had been lynched, he was one of the few who’d spoken against it. She considered this as the train shook and vented steam, the gifts, their lives and the beauty with which they shielded themselves from the world.
The boy, Isaac, fidgeting and silent, had no doubt seen and been touched by the ugliness of this world. Of course, the heavy women and soft-voiced men of the Boys’ Home had assured her that Isaac was young enough and gentle and would do God and family proud. (Most of the other boys would be adopted by childless farm couples in need of backs, or not at all. These were the days of surplus children, orphan trains chugging down from the cities of the East, seeding the inland states with parentless youth.) Mrs. Patterson bore little love for God, and having given him one child of hers already (a girl, two, fever) considered that grim transaction the end of their relationship. Still, she could be swayed by the spiritual as much as the rational, and read the Kabbalists and the agnostic Ingersoll with equal interest. She was an early proponent of sunbathing, and thus the cause of several minor scandals in her small town on the Mississippi coast. Her true love, though, was for filling life as fully as she could with beauty, for herself, her husband, her children, and now, she hoped, this young boy whose small shoulders jerked at the shriek of the brakes.
Now on the train with him seated opposite, Mrs. Patterson saw that he was not the feral thing of her deepest fears. Almost as soon as the train bucked into motion, she saw the change in him that
wasn’t a change at all, but the slow unveiling of who he was. Beneath the sweep of brown hair his eyes grew bright and he spoke, chattered as though he’d been waiting for a listener, and before they were out of Jackson County she was thoroughly charmed. He asked her where they were going and she talked about the house on the sound and the islands and the sea beyond that. She told him how certain fish swam in hoards to the beach and how on summer nights ghost crabs swarmed and at spring moons others shaped like bowls with swords for tails beached themselves to mate.
—And when their eggs hatch, she said, what’s left behind is a coin-purse for mermaids.
He nodded gravely at this, then asked what a mermaid was. Mrs. Patterson explained as best she could, and again he was nodding.
—Like angels in the sea?
—Something like that. They used to do mischief to sailors, but not anymore.
The train car rocked, hurtling through pine forest.
—But are they real like angels?
—Well, she began, but decided on another tack.
In her handbag she’d brought along a framed photograph of them all, taken last May. She took the picture out and, handing it to Isaac, told him who each person was. The light that came streaming in as the train entered open ground and hugged the sea caught the gilt frame so that it glowed in his hands. For a long time Isaac studied the picture, and she listened, learning his voice—the light twang of the accent he would lose in the coming years as he adopted her own—watching happiness wash over him as he gave the names out like a prayer.
—Mother. Father. David. Ben.
She touched his hand, just barely.
—And now you, she said.