Music of the Swamp (15 page)

My father sat down slowly on the edge of the cot beside Mr. Shanker. The electric light bulb overhead still cast its odd harsh light over everything, the filthy cot, the army blanket, the table, the drugs and crumpled clothing on the floor.

My father said, “I'll have to call Big Boy.” He meant Mr. Chisholm, the town marshall.

I said, “Are we in trouble?”

He said, “No, Sugar. We're not in any trouble. Shank wouldn't want me to say I killed him.”

I said, “We just found Mr. Shanker here like this?”

He said, “I'll work this all out with Big Boy. Don't you worry, Sugar-man.”

My father kept on sitting there. He patted Mr. Shanker once on the knee, and then sat a little longer.

At first I didn't move, and then I started to pick up the bits and pieces of my gun-cleaning kit and put them away, the tip section of the ramrod, with Mr. Shanker's spit and tooth enamel still on it, the solvent my father had used to sterilize Mr. Shanker's arm, the used swabs, the cotton rope. All of it I fitted carefully back into the velvet-lined box, and then I snapped shut the latches.

For a little while neither of us spoke.

My father said, “I look like a fucking fool in these shoes.”

It is hard to say why, but I am certain that this was the closest moment my father and I had ever shared. I was very much in love with my father, though I might have known even in this moment that something inside me had frozen solid and would be a long time in thawing.

I said, “Is the hunting trip, you know, is it off again?”

My father rubbed his unshaven face with both his hands.

He said, “Do you still want to go hunting?”

I said, “Well, I wouldn't mind. Sure. Okay.”

He said, “You're not just saying this? You really want to?”

I said, “Well, you know—if you want to.”

He shook his head. He said, “Tell you the truth, if I was a fine boy like you I wouldn't much want to go hunting with a man like me.”

He put his hands in his lap and studied the backs of them.

I said, “You mean a murderer?”

He looked up. He said, “Oh, well yeah, that too. I was more thinking about, you know, these damn shoes. Going hunting with somebody wearing yellow plastic shoes.”

I sat down on the cot beside my father and the late Mr. Shanker. I could feel the warmth of my father's arm against my arm, and the warmth of Mr. Shanker's dead body against my butt and lower back. I leaned comfortably into the corpse.

My father said, “Do you really think I'm a murderer?”

I said, “I don't know.” I said, “But you could throw the shoes away. That's something you could do.”

My father said, “You're right there. I could do that. I could get rid of these damn shoes.”

My father slipped off one shoe, very slow, and held it a moment and then dropped it into Mr. Shanker's paraphernalia-cluttered wastebasket. Then with the other shoe he did the same. He crossed his legs and rubbed his foot with his hands.

He said, “They wont even comfortable.”

Mr. Shanker was very warm. I wondered how long it took for a body to grow cold.

I said, “You could cry like a baby.”

My father said, “I couldn't do that, Sugar-man. Oh-no, I don't think I could do that.”

I said, “I guess not.”

I thought of my father's father, the bitter old man back at
the house. What did he have to do with this strange moment in my family's history? I could smell cigars and oranges.

I said, “I've never fired a gun.”

My father said, “Well, you're right. You're right about that. And that's another thing we can do something about.”

He stood up and took the gun and the gun-cleaning kit out of my hands.

He said, “Here you go, let me carry these for a while.”

I handed everything over to him.

He said, “I think we'd better find me some decent shoes and call Big Boy Chisholm and figure out some way for me and you to burn some gunpowder before this day turns out to be a total loss.”

N
AUGHTY DEMONS
accompanied my father wherever he went. All misery did not seem to be of his own making. In his home, the telephone often rang with no one on the line. Hoses broke on the Maytag. Pipes froze in the spring. Pets came down with diseases they had been inoculated against. Wrestling and “The Love Boat” appeared on television at unscheduled times. Lightning struck our house and sent a fireball across the floor. He was the only man in Mississippi to buy a bottle of Tylenol that actually had a cyanide capsule in it. He went to only two high school baseball games in his life and was beaned by a foul ball at each of them. A homeless person died on his back stoop. When he walked down the street bluejays chased after him and pecked at his face. He was allergic to the dye in his underwear. He mistakenly accepted a collect obscene phone call.

This sounds like a joke or an exaggeration, but I swear it is not. There was something magical about the amount of benign bad luck that, on a daily basis, swept through my father's life like weather and judgment.

After the separation my mother was suspicious of the outcome of any reunion with my father. He had quit drinking, it was true. And I was home on furlough from the army to lend
her moral support, that was true as well. But even if she could have forgiven the incident with the knife, there was some chance, at least, that a reconciliation could lead to busted plumbing or bad wiring.

I should say more about the incident with the knife.

A year earlier, just before I went into the army, my parents had one of their usual fights.

My mother: “You, you, you!”

My father: “But, but, but . . .”

My mother: “You never, you always!”

My father: “But, but, but . . .”

My father was drunk, of course. I went upstairs to hide, as I always did.

I turned on my father's small black-and-white television and watched part of a “National Geographic Special” about whales. Japanese whalers shot harpoons into whales and the whales dragged boatloads of people in raingear through bloody water. A cartoon special was scheduled, but the whales came on instead. My father's portable television set.

Later wrestling came on, though “The Cowboy Bob Steele Film Festival” was scheduled.

The fight was over, so that was good.

I got out of bed and started downstairs to take a leak.

I walked past the kitchen just in time to see my father take a butcher knife from the sink and stab himself in the stomach.
He was wearing only a light cotton robe, which was open in front. My mother had already gone to bed.

Then he stabbed himself again, and this time the knife sank two or three inches into his stomach.

For a second I was stone, and then I said, “Daddy!” and rushed to hold him in case he should fall. I said, “Oh my God! Oh Jesus, Daddy!” I had my hands on his shoulders, and I tried to lead him to the sofa.

He drew the knife out of his stomach and dropped it on the kitchen table. Blood spilled down out of him, down his belly, down into the hair between his legs, down his thighs, onto the floor.

All I could say was, “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”

My father said, “Hand me one of those cup towels from the rack. Watch that rack don't fall off the wall.”

He took a clean dish towel and held it against the wound.

I said, “I'll wake Mama.”

He said, “Don't do that, Sugar. She's had a rough night. Let the pore woman get some sleep.”

I said, “I'll drive you, then.” To the hospital, I meant.

He said, “Well, but somebody's going to have to clean up this mess.”

So that was that. I stayed behind to wipe up the blood with a sponge and wash it down the kitchen sink.

I heard the car start up in the driveway—it was a Pinto he
had bought from Runt Conroy, my friend Roy Dale Conroy's daddy, the car that later would actually explode, but tonight it started on the first try and there was no fire. I saw the lights come on, and then I watched out the window as my father backed the car out and drove up the street towards the highway and on to the hospital in Leflore, ten miles across the Delta.

After this incident my mother had had enough. She told him he would have to leave.

He said, “I'm going to make this up to you. I'm going to become a new man, you wait and see. I'm going to change my luck.”

It was when I was on leave from the army, sometime in the spring of the following year, that my father came back to our house to beg to be taken back. That's what I thought he had come to do, anyway.

It was hard to deny that he was different. He had stopped drinking, for one thing. He went to meetings that he called his Don't Drink meetings, and to tell the truth, I had never seen him more in the flush of good health. It had been almost a whole year since he had a drink.

I had a brand new stripe on my dress greens and a spit shine on my shoes, and my mother seemed more at ease with herself than I had ever known her to be. Now here was my father going to his meetings and saying he might have his teeth fixed.

So when my father told me in confidence that he was planning to ask my mother's forgiveness for all his years of drunkenness,
well, it didn't seem impossible to me that something very good might come of it.

My mother was not completely unaware of what might be in the offing. My father had called her and had asked, in his gentlest way, to be allowed to speak with her about matters of a personal nature. He said he was working a “step” of some kind for his D.D. meetings and would appreciate my mother's cooperation. This was the way he phrased his request, and so in my mother's mind it could mean nothing else except that he wanted to be taken back.

I need not go into the details of why she might oppose a complete reunion. Her life was moving along well enough, she had adapted to the small town gossip about the separation and the suicide attempt and my father's embarrassing Don't Drink meetings. She must still have harbored some grudge about the final scene at the house, the stabbing.

But in fact there was an irresistible quality about my father's particular doom. It did not seem entirely related to alcoholism. It seemed more cosmic, as if there were demons other than rum that did not care for my father at all.

The appointed day and hour arrived. I was home on leave, as I said. “You'll want to talk privately,” I said to my mother, in an effort to get away from the house.

My mother insisted that I stay. “I need you here,” she said. “If he asks to come back I'll need you here beside me.”

I said, “What will you say?”

She said, “I'll say no. If he says, ‘I'm sorry,' I'll say, ‘I forgive you.' If he says, ‘Take me back,' I'll say, ‘No, I can't, it's too dangerous.' But you have to be here. If you are not here I might say yes.”

So we waited for him.

My mother said, “I'll straighten up the kitchen.”

She straightened it up, she more than straightened it up. She mopped the floor, she unloaded the dishwasher, she put new dishtowels on the rack, she scrubbed the sink, she put Drano in the pipes, she scoured the range and sprayed the oven with Oven Off, she cleaned the Venetian blinds and swept a cloth-covered broom over the cobwebs in the ceiling corners.

She said, “Do you know how to put up wallpaper?”

I said, “Mama, he'll be here soon.”

She said, “I didn't mean I'd hang the paper right this minute!”

I said, “Why on earth would you say yes?” I wanted her to say yes.

She took off her rubber gloves and sat in a kitchen chair. She mopped sweat off her forehead with the back of her forearm.

She said, “He's just so helpless, Sugar. When all those bad things happen to him, I just can't keep from wanting to help him.”

I said, “But do you love him?”

She said, “I don't even ask myself that question any more. It doesn't even matter any more.”

At last my father's car appeared in front of the house. It was the Pinto. The car was just out of the shop for electrical and fuel pump problems, as usual. My father did not seem to mind paying large sums to have the car repaired. He expected mechanical failure.

Here is what I know now. When he came to the house on this day, my father had no intention of talking my mother into taking him back. His only purpose in coming was to say to my mother, “I have treated you badly. I am so very sorry.”

My mother and I watched him out the front window. He sat for a few moments in his car. I thought his doors might have become accidentally locked, but I looked more closely and saw that his eyes were closed and his lips were moving. I think my father might have been saying a prayer. I think he might have been praying, “Keep the demons away from me while I do this thing.” Who knows what he might have been doing. The key was probably stuck in the ignition, or the seat belt would not come unbuckled.