Music of the Swamp (2 page)

Sweet Austin said, “I was running trotlines and found it. You've got to come with me.”

S
WEET
A
USTIN
had come here in a boat. That was how he had appeared so unexpectedly behind Sugar Mecklin on the pier. When they had walked down the lake bank for a few yards, Sugar saw the boat pulled up in the weeds in a clear spot between the cypress knees. They crawled into the boat, first Sugar Mecklin, up front, and then Sweet Austin in back. Sugar looked out across the lake at the shanties and pulpwood
along the ridge on Runnymeade plantation, where the Negroes lived.

Sweet Austin stuck a Feather paddle into the gummy leaf-moldy bottom of the lake and used the paddle like a raft pole to shove the boat away from the bank and to ease them out into the deeper water.

Sweet Austin said to Sugar Mecklin, “I don't know what to do, tell me what to do, Sugar. If I had a daddy I would know what to do.”

For one second, when Sugar Mecklin spotted the bare feet and legs sticking up out of the water, he managed to believe that Sweet Austin had brought him here to see the mermaid. He knew better, of course. He knew this was a dead person.

They were far down the lake now. White cranes stood in small gossipy groups along the shallow water near the Runnymeade side of the shore. Turkey vultures sailed like hopeful prayers above them in the wide blue sky and then settled into the empty branches of white-trunked leafless trees. Deep in the water there were fish everywhere, invisible to Sugar Mecklin, no one could know how many of them, bream and perch and bass, silver and gold and blue, and for the first time in his life the thought of hidden fish and all their familiar coloration and feathery gills and lidless eyes terrified Sugar, he could not say why.

It was a body, of course, snagged upside down in a drift of brush.

Now here is the oddest thing. When Sugar Mecklin saw the naked legs poking up out of the water, he thought first of his daddy in speckled overalls back at the house, standing on the fourth rung of a stepladder and holding a bucket and brush and smearing paint over the bathroom ceiling.

Sugar Mecklin said, “Turn the boat around, Sweet Austin. We got to tell somebody. We got to call Big Boy Chisholm.”

The body was an old man, it turned out, who may have had a seizure of some kind before he went into the water. Later on, his boat was found with a fishing rod and baited hooks in the floorboards. There were two catfish still alive on a stringer hooked to the side of the boat. The old man had been missing for a couple of days—he lived on Runnymeade with his daughter. The daughter, the
Greenwood Commonwealth
reported, had told her father not to go out on the lake by himself, because he had “spells.”

Sweet Austin and Sugar Mecklin did not know all this yet. They only knew that there were legs and feet sticking up out of the drift, and so they did the only thing they could do. Sweet Austin dragged the paddle behind the boat in a sculling motion and turned them in the direction of a camp-landing a little farther on, near the town dump where the rats were as big as yellow dogs and howled all night at the moon. Sweet Austin dipped the paddle deep into Roebuck and caused the boat beneath them to move steadily across the lake to Raney's
fish camp, where somebody would let them use the telephone to call Big Boy Chisholm, the lawman.

When they docked at the fish camp, Mr. Raney made the call for them, though it took him a while to find his glasses and even after he did find them he dialed the wrong number four times. Each time he said, “I. Godfrey,” and then dialed again. He said, “Y'all just get yourself a Co-Cola out of the icebox.” He said, “Are y'all boys all right now?”

Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin said that they thought so, they thought they were all right. They looked at one another to decide whether this was true.

Mr. Raney said, “Y'all boys look enough alike to be sisters.” This was Mr. Raney's kind way of making a dead man in the swamp a little less horrible idea than it actually was.

Mr. Raney was the last man in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, who could spit into a brass spittoon from a long distance. He did this now. Ptooey! Pting! He did this as a way of thinking things out. Or maybe only to make a joke, nobody knew which. Ptooey! Pting!

A young man named Hydro—it was Mr. Raney's own son, his only child—who had a big head on his shoulders and a peach pie in his lap, sat down in Mr. Raney's high-backed rocker and rocked so far backwards he turned the pie upside down and nearly turned himself over in the chair, and said, “Shit far and save matches!” Hydro often chased cars and
howled when the firetruck turned on the siren and had to be given ice cream so that he would stop.

Then several more times, Mr. Raney spat in rapid succession, ptooey pting! ptooey pting! ptooey pting! while Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin shifted from one foot to the other and listened to somebody pull the crank rope on an old Evinrude and start up the rattly little engine down by the dock, where it idled for now, smelling of gasoline and warm oil, and waiting for Big Boy Chisholm to show up so somebody could help steady him while he got into the boat and then lead him down Roebuck Lake to the brush pile where he would collect the corpse.

Mr. Raney said, “Hydro, get your lazy no-count ass out of my rocking chair, or I'll pistol-whip you within an inch of your worthless life.”

Hydro was eating his mama's peach pie with a big steel spoon—he had gotten the deep dish turned upright again and had not lost much of the pie—and he did not hear his daddy just then, so Mr. Raney just blew his nose hard into a red bandana and said, “I. Godfrey,” and let the matter drop, what good did it do to argue, what difference did it make anyway.

To Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin, Mr. Raney said, “We're all going to be a little edgy for a while, it don't mean nothing. It's normal after you find a floater.”

Sweet Austin did not go to his own home that night. He couldn't do that. Sweet Austin's mama would be working late
behind the bar at the American Legion Hut. She would turn on the switch that caused the Miller High Life sign to revolve. She would scatter sawdust on the little hardwood dance floor for whoever might want to take a turn to the music. She would reach into the cooler for long-necked beers in dark bottles, maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon, or Falstaff, or Jax, or even Pearl, and crack them open with a church key and say to men wearing bunion pads on their feet and Vitalis in their hair, “You don't want no glass with that, do you, loverboy?”

She might take a shot of Early Times herself and chase it down with a swig from one of those men's long-neck bottles, and then peel the label for him. She might belch real loud and make all the men in the Legion Hut laugh and make all the women think she was common. She might sing a song, too, if anybody asked her. She might sing “Honeycomb” if she felt like it, she might sing
honeycomb won't you be my baby oh honeycomb be my own just a hank of hair and a piece of bone my honeycomb
Her arms would be tired and cold and maybe numb from the ice chest and from weariness and loneliness because her man was dead, or she hoped he was anyway, and her apron would smell like the stale beer and cigarettes and her fingers would be crinkly from being wet all night, when she got home and finally found the light switch in the hall and scared the cockroaches off the counters and back up into the kitchen cabinets where they belonged, and staggered a little in the hallway, where she finally propped herself up and took off her shoes.

She might go into the room where her son slept on an army cot and wake up Sweet Austin and tell him what a no-count scoundrel his daddy was, and always had been, and she might tell Sweet Austin he was just like his daddy, just ee-zackly like him, and then she might crawl in right alongside Sweet Austin on the army cot and fall asleep and wake up full of regrets and no energy to apologize to her boy or to anybody else.

Or she might not come home at all that night, that was surely a possibility, a distinct possibility she herself might say, not if Al the Boogie Woogie Piano Player, who had two gold teeth in the front of his mouth and silver taps on his shoes, asked her to go somewhere with him after they turned off the lights of the Legion Hut and unplugged the slot machines and washed the last beer glasses and re-bagged the last of the pretzels and beernuts, especially if he asked her to go riding with him in his Oldsmobile, with the rag top down on this warm summer night and maybe kiss a few hard, whiskey-breathed kisses beneath the Confederate memorial.

She might sleep that night in Al the Boogie Woogie Piano Player's bed where he lived for now in a damp room of the Arrow Hotel, and she might feel just so damn awful after she got there and got her stockings off at long last, that she couldn't sleep and so she might ask Al to sing her a baby lullaby to help her drift off, she might ask him to sing a song she remembered from her own girlhood, on a record that she sneaked around to play on a wind-up Victrola, a song called
“Let These Red Lips Kiss Your Blues Away,” and Al might actually know the song, since he knew every song in this bad world, but he would be too tired to sing it, and so Sweet Austin's mama might have to go to sleep without it, it didn't matter, she had gone to sleep sick and lonely plenty of times before, what difference would one more time make, none, it wouldn't make any difference at all to anybody, why should it.

And so Big Boy Chisholm dropped the two boys off at Sugar Mecklin's house. Big Boy didn't turn on the siren today—the whistle, he always called it—or the revolving light on top of the car, though normally he did when he gave a child a ride home. Today he only drove them from the fish camp and stopped the car out by the iron fence in front of Sugar's house and said, “I'm sorry y'all boys had to bear witness to that floater, I truly am sorry.” He waited until the two boys had left the car and slammed their doors good and were clear of the road and out of harm's way and up under the catalpa trees, which were covered in locust husks, and past the iron hitching posts in the shape of black horses, and then Big Boy Chisholm drove away in his car, real slow, down Lake Front Road.

It was late in the afternoon now. Bessie Smith was on the phonograph, so that meant that Sugar Mecklin's daddy was already drunk. Sugar Mecklin's daddy called his Bessie Smith records his wrist-cutting music. It was Bessie Smith singing a long time ago when Gilbert Mecklin stuck the ice pick in his chest,
my mama says I'm reckless
Bessie Smith had sung that day,
and he knew just what she meant too, he was reckless too.
my daddy says I'm wild
Bessie Smith sang. Nobody knew better than Gilbert Mecklin what it meant to be reckless and wild. Nobody in this world.
I ain't good looking
she sang
but I'm somebody's angel child
Bessie Smith had been singing that day before Sugar Mecklin was even born. In a way that was the good old days, Gilbert Mecklin remembered them fondly, that day long time ago when he had let the record play to its end and then jammed an ice pick straight into his breastbone.

Sugar Mecklin had heard all about it, and he couldn't help wishing that Bessie Smith was not on the phonograph on this particular day. He wished instead that his daddy had waited until after Sugar had had time to come home and say, “Me and Sweet found a dead man. Can Sweet sleep over tonight?” before he started playing wrist-cutting music.

And, if the truth be knew—this was a phrase that Gilbert Mecklin used and drove Sugar's mama straight out of her last and only mind, “if the truth be knew”—Gilbert Mecklin was just this minute saying to himself, he his ownself would have preferred not to be drunk this afternoon. If the truth be knew, Gilbert Mecklin was sitting there in his chair thinking, Now I wonder how this happened again, just when I didn't want it to happen, how did it come to pass that I am sitting here unintentionally drunk on my ass with wrist-cutting music playing on the record player when I have great need to comfort two children who have lost so much and seen too much death in
their little lives? The alcohol made Gilbert Mecklin groggy. He felt a little like he had been hit over the head and covered with a heavy blanket.

On the phonograph now there was a trombone. It started way down low, and it could have been the voice of a Texas longhorn cow at first, or an alligator in a swamp quartet singing bass, it was so low. Gilbert Mecklin listened to it. He had to. Nobody else knew how to listen to it. His wife sure hell didn't know how to listen to music. She didn't appreciate music. The trombone note was rising now, rising up and up. Listen to that clear note rise up from the muddy waters of the Delta!

Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin were standing in the doorway of Gilbert's bedroom, trying to tell him about the body.

Gilbert already knew about the body. Big Boy Chisholm had called him from the fish camp, had told him Sweet Austin was coming to spend the night. He didn't need to hear about the body.

Sugar said, “Hey, Daddy.”

Well, the thing was, after the trombone note got up in the air high enough, it started to blend in with another horn, a trumpet maybe, that took up the note and brought it up even higher, headed up to the moon, until another note got inside these two, a clarinet, so high it was a squeak, like the sound at the tail end of a long crying spell, and then, well, Gilbert Mecklin couldn't very well say hey to Sugar right this very
minute, because now Bessie Smith was right there in the room with him, talking to him about his whole life.

Dixie moonlight, Shawnee shore
Bessie Smith said to Gilbert Mecklin. She seemed to be sitting right there on the bed beside his two boys. She had only one leg, she lost the other leg in Clarksdale, the night she was killed. Oh those sad brass horns, like a crying child. Bessie Smith said she was
headed homebound just once more
she said she was going to her Missy-Sippy Delta home. The trumpet was still there, but now it had a mute on it, and it was weeping real tears. Oh yes, it was a good thing Sugar Mecklin's mama had thrown that ice pick up under the house all those years ago, this was a song that took a man back to better days.