The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  In May of 1961 he went out to the east of Ochlockonee Bay to Piney Island, a green scrim four miles from shore, and fell into his accustomed pattern of work and watching. Woke on the second day and at low tide waded out past the weir of oysterbeds to a patch of grass where he thought he’d seen a bittern nest.

  The night before he’d heard the bird’s deep drip-drop call, seen her at sundown carrying reed-stems in her beak. Whether it was true or not in pure numbers, he believed he’d seen more dead birds than live that year. And now, more than anything, he needed life. He needed to draw the bittern’s eggs, the pale green shells the atmosphere of a gold small inner world.

  So, chest-deep in cool water, bare feet flushing rays and stirring grasses that sighed back to rest on the sandy bottom as he passed, he came to the patch of grass and parted it with his free hand. The bittern, flew off, and Isaac saw the nest, a spiral thatch rising from the reeds. He had his clipboard tucked under one arm, sweat staining the clasped sheets cut from the sides of grocery bags, pencil hanging from his neck as ever. Leaned closer and reached up into the mouth of the nest, willing sense into his callused fingertips and feeling for the smooth shells. What he felt instead was a dart-sharp pain and a fire in the meat of his palm. He jerked his hand back just as the cottonmouth came spilling out of the nest in one uninterrupted pour. The snake’s skin patterned like the bittern’s feathers, like grass and mud, black-streaked brown and buff. Made for here. The snake slid through the reeds and swam off in the direction of land.

  He’d never been bitten before. His whole life. This thought almost comic in his fogging mind, followed closely by the memory of Kemper talking to the fat old kingsnake that followed her while she gardened. He held his hand, throbbing, against his chest, where his heart had likewise taken up a frantic, jagged beat.

  Midnight the tenant who had recently started living on Isaac’s property, having escaped her marriage of two years to a helicopter pilot and retreated south to spend her days before bubbling tanks of ocean life, woke to a squall that shook the walls of her shack, to windows washed with rain. It had been three days since she’d last seen the old man, and she was worried. When the storm was through she went half-dressed down the sand drive, raking her path with the beam of a flashlight. She crossed the road and came to the spit where he launched. Found nothing but sand and crab scuttle. She swept the light out over the water. A mullet leapt and fell. She thumbed the switch and stood there listening in the dark.

  He’d made it to the island, dragged himself onshore, when the retching came that bent his thin body double and emptied him. In the distance his abandoned clipboard floated unnoticed, leaves reaching down into the water.

  His bitten hand, leaden and dead, fell and dragged along the ground as he crawled toward his camp. He might have lain there and let it happen, let death come, but he’d become a passenger in the flight of his own body, which wanted, as bodies do, only to survive.

  Isaac gained his feet, bile streaming from his lips.

  The wind was coming from offshore when he made it to his camp. Found his water and drank, spat, fainted briefly. Groaning, he got his fire going in the pit, crouched over the flame to shelter it from the wind, fed it with twigs and his sketches from the day before. Then he set a pan of water in the fire and took his clasp-knife from the pack and cut a cross into his dead hand. Trembling, he sucked his own blood, which ran freely thanks to the poison. The wind at his back, his heart burning, he waited for the water to boil. Waited and fell unconscious as if through a trapdoor.

  Eyes open to the glow of flame. He rose up in horror at the sight of what he’d done. The fire had been blown by the wind and spread across the island in a wave that spat smoke and small birds like burning paper. Everywhere underfoot went small, scared things. Woodrats scurrying and crabs, boar piglets burst squealing from a burning vein that had once been an oleander.

  All of this, his doing. His fault.

  He took his bedroll and for a long time shambled along the wave of fire, beating at it with the blanket, cursing, howling. His every movement urging the snakebite’s poison on. He knew this, but kept fighting, and knowing that he would die for this, for what he’d done, was a small consolation. When the wind turned and the fire chased him back to the beach, he was crazed with poison and smoke. Weeping, Isaac shoved his boat into the surf and flung himself aboard, where he fainted again and the outgoing tide, the strongest in months, carried him to sea.

  The following day the tenant reported him missing, filed a formal report with, Coast Guard and put the word out to fishermen and tourists at the dock. She stayed by the radio into the next shift as the sun bled red against the grease-flecked window overlooking the gas pump and the icemaker, watched the ships coming in the channel, expecting the next to be lashed with the old man’s empty skiff. Someone said there’d been a fire on Piney Island, just before the storm, but when they ventured out the searchers found no sign of him there or on any other of the countless smaller islands along the coast.

  In the end she went with a sheriff’s deputy who pried open the door of the old man’s house. Inside, a warren of paper and piled furniture. The tenant and the deputy had flashlights on and they were midway through the front room when she realized what the papers were. She lifted up one sheet after another to her light. A painted tern looked back at her. A pattern of gulls. The arched backs of dolphins diving through leaves of pasted butcherprint and the backs of grocery bags. They went on deeper into the house. A little space carved into the kitchen where he’d sat. The cold stove. Everywhere stacks of paint and jars of murky colors. Brushes stiff and sharp as arrows. Piled cans of housepaint. Child’s sets of colored pencils and pastels cracked with age or melted. And everywhere the work.

  Around this time the first mate of a United Fruit ship glassed a skiff bobbing a quarter mile parallel to their path, west of the Florida Strait. The skiff had no markings, no occupant that he could see, and he took it for the sort put out by poor fishermen and frequently lost. The ship, which carried agents of Central Intelligence and crates of rifles among the bananas, could not stop on its way to Ciudad Trujillo, say, or maybe Barranquilla. There was greater work in the world and it would only end, for that company, fourteen years and several mergers later, in midtown Manhattan, when its chief executive bolted the doors of his office on the forty-fourth floor of what was then the Pan Am Building, took his attaché case and smashed a shoulder-width hole in the tempered plate glass window, cleared the sharpest shards away, and leapt. Before coming to ground on the Park Avenue Viaduct, to the outcry of break and tire and horn, the executive’s body was glimpsed in its descent by a few stunned onlookers who happened to glance that way, the hurtling man a sign of things to come.

  The current carries Isaac Patterson far out into open water.

  He wakes, alive, high in a swell. Dark shapes in the waves. He sleeps and believes he will die, only to wake alive again. Life startling as the dawns that break so suddenly this far out at sea. In the belly of the boat he lays facing the sky.

  She comes as no surprise. Kemper. He’s seen her since the day they met, in one form or another. But when he dies she will not be there, he will not see her, know her, or know where he is or what is happening. Even the Gulf becomes a stranger, as in death the elements are shorn of their associations. Wind is wind. Rain is rain. Water is water. Light nothing other than itself. The living world goes on, neither cruel nor kind but written with its nature and wanting none of us. No pleasing vision, no memory will ease him to his end. On the horizon he will never again see, clouds lower and reach out dark tendrils to the steaming surface of the sea.

  They will tell you change is the nature of things. And it is the nature of certain paints to pale over time, or to darken, or to shift into another shade entirely. The fugitive quality, this is called. Much work is lost this way and that of Isaac Patterson would be no exception. Cheap watercolors and housepaints are easy prey to light and time. As it happened, the oils of his early work would last t
he longest. And while the colors of his life fled, men on platforms in the Gulf sent down drills tipped in diamond to bore in the bed of the sea, retrieving packed cylinders of earth as it was in other ages. These cores they carried to the headquarters of their company, which occupied a city block in New Orleans once home to a shipping and fruit concern owned by a footnote family whose name was not remembered, a brief and minor enterprise as these things go, and the cores were cut along their lengths into inch-thick hunks and arranged in sequences of time, stored in boxes of treated wood and kept in this corporate substrata for years, untouched in the dark, though they told in mineral lines that this had been the place from which the light had come. The light that came and meant the end of some lives and the dawn of others who would likewise live their time in the belief that all of this was theirs. Ours. The shriven marshlands, ours, and the nestlings choked in gouts of oil. The islands beaten into white shards like something hurled down and smashed, gone in the span of a human life. That meaningless scale by which we measure stories that will be told, in the end, not by lives or paint or words or the frail vessel of the human voice but in the layers of earth and the water that is coming to cover us whether or not we care to know.

  Acknowledgments

  Background:

  While the action of this novel occurs in times and places that do not always correspond to the historical record, the writing of it would not have been possible without the work of many scholars and writers. Particularly Michel Gobat, René de la Pedraja, Lester D. Langley, Peter Chapman, and Susan Cerulean.

  The character of Isaac was born from many artists, but among the chief inspirations was the work and life of Walter Inglis Anderson, whose art stands as a testament to the beauty and fragility of both the Gulf Coast and the human spirit. Please seek it out.

  This book is for:

  Two writers I have never met and who are now gone, but without whose work this book would not exist: Eduardo Galeano and Jim Harrison.

  My agent, Gail Hochman, for tireless advocacy. The amazing people at Grove Atlantic: Peter Blackstock, who saves my sentences and sanity on a regular basis, and most especially John Mark Boling, Deb Seager, Elisabeth Schmitz.

  Josh McCall, who knows my tics and tremors and whose editorial eye never fails.

  Jim Davis, who keeps the light of literature alive in my home state.

  William Bedford Clark of Texas A&M for his kindness and friendship.

  Huntley Johnson, the most hardcore reader and lover of letters in these United States, for opening his home, his treasure trove of books, and most importantly his heart to me and my wife.

  My hometown bookstores and the wonderful people who run them, Octavia Books and Garden District Book Shop. Special thanks to Brazos Bookstore of Houston and a pair of readers so glorious I’m not sure I deserve them, Mark Haber and Keaton Patterson.

  Taylor Brown, brother from another coast.

  Colleagues at Southeastern Louisiana University, all of whom are aces, in particular Chris Tusa, David Armand, Thomas Parrie, Jason Landrum, and Carin Chapman.

  Bob Shacochis, for many things, but especially for the hours on the water.

  My family, all of you, for generosity and love and unending tolerance for me dragging your surnames through the muck of history and my imagination.

  Andrew Smith, whose friendship is one of the great gifts of my life.

  My wife, Alise, who did the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, and somehow manages to be more wondrous each day.

  My daughter, who spent many a night wrapped against my chest while this book was being written, a constant reminder of what matters most, what all the people listed here have given to books, to art, to the natural world, to each other: love.