My Drowning Read online

  THE DEAD BABY slept under the Christmas tree. His bed of swaddling clothes lay hidden behind the thick branches at the back, but if you looked close you could see it. Through the shadowy cedar branches the pale baby hand sometimes appeared. He lived in this house now, he would never leave. Maybe Mama whispered this to me, or maybe I dreamed it. The baby boy had come to stay.

  Mama still saw him, but after a while she stopped talking about it, except to Joe Robbie and me. She no longer woke in the night to see the baby floating above the bed. She no longer heard his crying in her dreams. Now she saw him in more ordinary ways. Sometimes he lay on the couch in a rectangle of sun, stretching like a cat. Sometimes he looked down at her from the high kitchen shelves where she hoarded Daddy’s coffee and sugar. Sometimes he hid under the bed or in the back of the closet behind Daddy’s boots. But over the days near Christmas, he made a bed of his burial clothing in back of the Christmas tree, and I was so convinced her story was true I could see him there myself.

  What did the dead baby dream of? Did he get cold? At night, after we were asleep, did he warm himself by the shadow of the fire? Did he ever appear outside? Would he ever speak?

  Was he my brother still? Was he here and under the ground at the same time?

  If Daddy threw the tree in the yard, the dead baby would have to move again. I was afraid he would start sleeping in my room.

  When school stopped for the holiday break, Nora and Otis stayed home all the time. During the cold days before Christmas we sat by the stove in the kitchen, all of us, hungry, while the wind rattled the windows.

  Nora took me with her when she searched for wood. The memory of one such day returns in a vivid way. All the coats, even the hand-me-downs, hung on me like sacks, but I wore both my pairs of overalls and my dress, and two sweaters, one of them with the sleeves rolled up. Socks covered my hands. I had Otis’s old hat on my head.

  The wind struck like a knife across the yard, and I was afraid it would blow me off the porch. Nora gave me her hand. We kept our mouths closed. Her coat was too tight to button so she held it closed with her other arm. We walked close together in the wind. The steady thwack of Otis’s ax resounded behind us as he, in another part of the yard, split more wood for the fireplace and the stove.

  The world spread out flat and wide, colored ash and clay. The sky, a pale blue, almost no color at all, swelled endless and empty over us. Fields yielded to a bare rim of trees. Wind spoke with a voice, pressed like a hand. We offered no sound to compete with it.

  In the yard Nora let go of my hand and adjusted the scarf against her ears. We searched methodically in the woods nearest the house, Nora avoiding the places she had already scoured. I held the smaller stuff. Some good branches had fallen in the wind; we needed to search only a little way into the woods. Nora dragged the biggest pieces she could. We delivered the wood to Otis under the woodshed and crossed the fields for another load.

  By then we were nearly frozen ourselves, and we returned to the house.

  Beans boiled in the pot on the stove. The smell made me weak to eat. Nora tasted the beans for seasoning and threw in salt. We shivered in front of the stove.

  Gathering wood kept us busy till dark. The weatherman on Carl Jr.’s battery radio predicted a cold, cold night; we needed enough wood to keep the fire roaring. The sky layered with clouds and then the bottom of the clouds flattened.

  Carl Jr. came home with a bag of groceries.

  I was standing with Nora in the yard when he headed toward us, near sunset. The grocery sack nested in the crook of his arm. Nora took the groceries inside, and Carl Jr. stayed to help Otis with the wood.

  For supper, because of Carl Jr., we had hambone in the beans, and chunks of lean and fat to savor, and fried fatback. We crowded around the table. Nora made the biscuits, smooth and brown, fluffy inside.

  That night we set the lanterns around the Christmas tree and sat in front of the fireplace. We had never done this before, and I expect, therefore, that this memory comes from Christmas Eve. We never burned so many lanterns. The tree cast eerie shadows in the dark.

  I watched the corner for the baby boy to emerge. I dreaded that only Mama and I would be able to see him. Mama sat in her chair with Joe Robbie in her lap, his soft legs dangling. She smoothed his hair.

  I am remembering, I am looking back. I am trying to see clearly, but I do not even know that what I am seeing is true. How can the memory of so small a gesture be genuine? The movement of my mother’s thick, blunt hand through Joe Robbie’s hair repeats itself. Why have I remembered that?

  Maybe because of jealousy, because I wanted to sit in her lap myself.

  The radio played Christmas music, news from other places, a radio drama about Christmas. I remember nothing specific about these, except the fact of the radio in the dimlit room. Carl Jr. kept it by his knee, and adjusted the antenna when the station faded.

  Daddy came in the back door and let in the cold and slung a dead fox across the kitchen table. Daddy’s sharp eyes raked mine. For a moment I was very cold. I stood near the table at eye level with the dead fox. A pink tongue trailed out of its mouth. The gray-brown fur hung flat against narrow ribs. Through the hole in its skull, a dark jelly oozed.

  “You can’t leave it there,” Mama said.

  “I’m going to put it in the back room, it’s cold back there.” Daddy blinked at her.

  “You been out there all day and that’s what you killed.”

  “It wasn’t anything else to shoot.”

  Mama stirred the fox leg. “You been drinking. I know it.”

  “I ain’t.”

  “I can smell it.”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn what you can smell.”

  They fell silent. They were both watching the fox.

  “What you planning to do with it?”

  “I might get it stuffed.”

  Mama touched her index finger to the fox’s paw. She stood like that in the glimmering lantern light. Her mouth worked on words. “Well, get it off the table then, and let me get you some supper. Carl Jr. bought some groceries.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes, he did. We had us a right good supper, didn’t we, younguns?”

  The sound of general assent followed. Carl Jr., sullen and silent, remained behind at the fireplace. He adjusted the tuning knob on the radio, turned the volume louder.

  “You ought to look at this fox I shot.” Daddy raised his voice a little, clearly to reach Carl Jr.

  “Right now I don’t want to look at no dead animal I can’t eat.”

  “You little son of a bitch. Come in here and get this fox and take it to the back room. And open that window back there so it can stay cold.”

  Carl Jr. after a while rose, stretched his legs, rounded the corner, grabbed the fox by the hind legs and looked across the table at Daddy. “I sure wished it was a rabbit.” He sauntered to the back of the house, the dead fox swaying from side to side.

  Daddy ate his supper methodically, chewing the pork lean with relish, spooning beans onto his plate, sopping the bean broth with biscuit. He drank a glass of clear whiskey, smacking his lips and shaking his head. Mama boiled coffee for him, and he spooned the sugar in heaps.

  “Santy Claus comes tonight,” he sang. He pulled the lantern toward him and lifted his Prince Edward tin from his pocket.

  I remembered that I was supposed to want a doll.

  “Hush and don’t get these younguns’ hopes up.”

  “If Santy Claus don’t come, it means they ain’t been good.”

  “Nora, get in here and boil water for these dishes.” Mama stamped off in a rage. Joe Robbie, sitting on a pillow near the fireplace, asked, “Will Santa Claus bring me a toy?”

  “Santy Claus ain’t bringing nobody around here nothing,” Daddy said. “He don’t know how to find this house.”

  Mama slammed the door behind her. The tree shivered. I slid next to Joe Robbie, leaned on his skinny shoulder. For once, he neither hit me nor pinche
d me. We soaked in the heat of the fire, without having to fight the larger ones for a place. The crackle and hiss of burning wood offered comfort.

  Out in the world a dog howled, an owl crooned. We pulled the curtains closed as we always did at night. We feared strangers peeping in, tramps walking on the road. We feared the monster who lived in the woods around Moss Pond, who walked among the houses at night, according to stories we had heard. The curtains left a gap in the middle, enough for the width of an eye.

  “These is good beans. Did you cook them?”

  Nora had pumped more water and lugged the bucket through the kitchen door. “Yes, sir.”

  “Your mama can’t cook.”

  “Otis, you better pump another bucket of water and bring it in the house. That well is going to freeze tonight.”

  “I don’t want to go out there.”

  “You get your ass out there and pump water like your sister told you.”

  “Do I have to go right now?”

  “Yes, you got to go right now. Now get out there.” The rising sharpness of his tone lifted Otis from his torpor. He shoved his arms into the sleeves of his coat.

  “Fill it twice,” Nora said. “We might not can get no water tomorrow.”

  “I ain’t going out there twice.”

  “Yes, you are, Otis. I can’t do it all by myself.”

  “I chopped that goddamn wood all day till I got blisters. I don’t see why I have to do everything.”

  But Daddy said, “Get your ass out there like I told you.” Otis stomped out the door, the screen slamming with a ringing echo.

  “I need to beat that youngun’s ass,” Daddy said thoughtfully, sopping the last of his coffee onto a biscuit. “Give me some more coffee.”

  Nora poured. On the radio played a song I knew, I could hear myself singing it under my breath. Daddy rolled his cigarette and smoked it. He tapped the ash on the biscuit plate. The coffee steamed as he lifted the cup.

  MAMA WENT TO bed. Nobody asked where she was. Everybody knew.

  Sometimes, most of the time, Daddy would linger by the fire, and he and Carl Jr. sipped whiskey or moonshine, and smoked cigarettes, and listened to the radio. Sometimes, Daddy went in to Mama.

  Tonight he stood by the fire awhile. Nora tended the flames to keep them burning, adding logs judiciously, mindful of our stock. Carl Jr. passed through with a last bucket of water. “Well’s about to freeze, like Nora said it would.”

  Nora set the water tub near the stove to keep it from freezing. She would stoke the fire before we slept and let the warmth drain out of it through the night. She and I would sleep out here tonight, in Uncle Cope’s bed, since he had gone to his daddy’s house for Christmas. I liked the thought of sleeping in that bed. We would have extra blankets and the warmth of the dying fire, and clean sheets that Nora ironed.

  I went to bed in my cotton nightgown. Nora slept beside me, close. I could see through the grates of the stove into the embers of the fire. The silver dishpan and pitcher caught the orange reflection. Either I slept or I became hypnotized. All night I dreamed of doors opening and closing.

  THE BABY BOY drifts through the house on a current of air. I am riding behind him. The lifted edges of the baby’s shroud lap my face. I have become able to fly through the agency of the dead baby boy, and we are one cloud together. I have the feeling I may be as cold as the baby. We float down the hall, over Daddy’s work shoes, into the bedroom, where Daddy is lying on top of Mama in a strange huddle, and Mama sees us over his back, rises up, and screams.

  ON CHRISTMAS MORNING under the tree, between the empty lanterns, appeared a toy pistol for Joe Robbie and a small doll for me. A bushel of apples stood among the lower branches. Otis got a toy, too, I forget what.

  I held the doll in my hand loosely. Joe Robbie pointed the gun at my head.

  He took the doll, and I sat beside him while he stroked the skirt.

  I turned the pistol over and over in my lap. I liked the shape. Carl Jr. showed me how to hold it.

  The fox had frozen on the shelf in the back room. I wandered in there when no one noticed. The rigid carcass lay on the flat surface, legs jutting straight in the air. A moulded pink tongue sprawled over yellow teeth. Frost had formed on the snout. Clearly dead, but for the eyes, which had a glint of fire.

  We ate leftover beans with ham. We used syrup and sopped it up with biscuit. We ate twice, plus biscuits in the morning. Daddy drank coffee with sugar the whole day and never stirred from the fire. He sipped whiskey through the long afternoon, listening to the radio till the batteries were weak.

  By the end of the day Joe Robbie screamed if I touched the doll. I sat dumbfounded beside him. The gun meant nothing to me, but, truth be told, neither did the doll.

  The apples were the best gift. I ate until I was sick from them. I ate as many apples as I could stuff into my belly. Never before had there been so much of a food that I could eat all I wanted. I ate the apples until I could hardly move. I lay flat on my back through the cold afternoon, in an ecstasy of digestion.

  Nora fought with Mama about my doll. Nora wanted Mama to take the doll from Joe Robbie so I could play with it. But any time anybody touched the doll, Joe Robbie screamed, and Mama couldn’t stand to hear him scream. Mama decided Joe Robbie might as well keep the doll since he was puny and it made him happy. Nora huffed off and made Mama mad, and Mama reared back to slap her, but she remembered it was Christmas and contented herself to yank Nora’s ears good and hard.

  Not once did I ask Joe Robbie for the doll. When he kept the pistol too, I didn’t mind.

  I had been flying with the baby boy. I replayed the dream in my head, and the memory kept me buoyant. The bushel basket still held more than half its apples. Tonight Nora and I would sleep in the kitchen again, with the ghost fire glimmering in the stove. All these were good things. But above all, I had eaten as much as I could hold. I had learned of the possibility of abundance.

  WHEN THE WEATHER warmed, Mama carried the carcass of the fox outside, wrapped in burlap. She flung the softening corpse into the ditch. Daddy never asked what happened to it.

  At night, across the room, Joe Robbie slept with the doll wrapped in his arms. I remained oblivious to the loss, but Nora carried the anger like a hot coal. She would get me another doll, she said, when she worked in tobacco this summer. This promise consoled her in some way. I did not care, myself. I would never want a doll.

  NOT LONG AGO I drove to the Low Grounds, down that road where we used to live. I had begun to remember the Christmas of the dead fox, and I realized I was headed toward the place where that house had stood as soon as I slipped behind the steering wheel. I made the drive early one morning, after my slice of toast. The distance isn’t much, only an hour or so from the place I live now, near Pinetops.

  The road had been paved, Lord knows how long ago. Electric wires lined the pavement and now there was light in the Low Grounds, and more houses, most of them brick, with plain bare yards and pitiful scrawny azalea bushes. The house where my family lived collapsed long ago, and nothing remains except the chimney, lying on its side in the white dirt. I stood at the sidewise mouth of the fireplace. I closed my eyes and pictured the gray fox, the white biscuits, the specter of the dead baby boy. I remembered gathering wood across the bare field where now a brick house squatted. The countryside suddenly smelled of winter. I could not quite remember what year it was.

  MOSS POND

  WE MOVED FROM the Low Grounds to a house near Moss Pond. The house was small, four rooms, with a wood heater, a woodstove, and a hand pump for water in the backyard. An empty chicken house leaned precariously under a sycamore. The outhouse stood there too, in thick shade, with its narrow door hanging from the hinges and its plank seat with two holes cut in the surface for doing your business. We resorted to a slop pot only in the coldest part of winter. Otherwise everyone took the long trek down the path, except for Joe Robbie, who was allowed a pan and a jar.

  Sitting suspended over the cavern o
f shit and piss, in summer with the buzzing of green flies, in the winter with cold fingers creeping from the wood along my nervous bottom, I felt a pure and memorable terror. I was small enough to drop straight down the hole, and I clung to the edges with my hands in fear of snakes and other creatures that lived in the woods thereabouts; I pictured them crawling along the planks toward my bare behind. The echoing of the hollow place beneath me sent a shiver of fear through me and I finished my business as fast as I could. I cleaned myself with soft leaves in summer and newspaper or comic books in winter, learning to rub the newsprint together until it softened and to grip the seat with one hand while cleaning with the other. I was fanatical in cleaning myself, frightened as I was of sitting there; Nora made fun of me for my fastidiousness.

  If you walked far enough through the woods that surrounded the house, you came to Moss Pond, where the woods were full of bobcats, snakes, and even bears. Nora and I made the trip together. I savored the black surface of the pond, the reflection of pine and sky. Nora in general disliked my company but preferred it to that of our brothers. Carl Jr. and Otis never invited us when they went fishing, but whatever they caught, we cleaned. I learned first to scrape the scales from the sides of the fish and later to cut the fins neatly at the base. Spines in the fins were sharp as needles at the ends and drew blood from careless fingertips. I worked as hard as I could but nothing I did ever pleased Nora, who herself moved with neatness and efficiency that I admired. Nora sawed off the fishheads and gutted the silvered bodies, scooping out mysterious soft masses that clung to her fingers. Cats yowled and marked the door, trying to climb inside, whenever we cleaned fish.

  Mama’s belly had swollen with a peculiar roundness, hard and smooth like a ripe squash. Nobody told me why. Because it was summer, we worked on Albert Taylor’s farm in his cotton field, or weeding in Ruby Jarman’s garden, or topping and suckering tobacco for Mr. James Allison, whom everybody respected because he was rich. I worked along with the rest, weeding and plucking on my hands and knees. Because I was so small, I could not hold a hoe to chop the cotton, but I pulled up handfuls of weeds that the hoe couldn’t reach. At night we were all exhausted, but especially Mama, and Nora boiled hot water for her to soak her feet. Nora made supper, dry beans most of the time, maybe with fried fish, and we ate near dark or after dark, in the first cool of the day.