Swan, page 14
They referred to “before the accident,” when Wills beelined to the sunroom after work, letting down the matchstick blinds and opening the liquor cupboard. From the door, J. J. had seen him drink straight out of the bottle before he even put down his bag. Tessie was left to feed them. Kindly she said, “Just don’t pay him no mind,” the only point of view that made sense. When Wills dropped them at Sunday School, afterward they waited on the sidewalk until he came for them. Sometimes he forgot. The Bible lessons were about a woman who looked back and turned to salt, about a father who would sacrifice his son, a brother who killed his only brother. They were sent in summer to a long session of camp in North Carolina, then for a visit to Mema, their Phillips grandmother in Vidalia. She was blind and a hypochondriac, who raved alternately about how spoiled Catherine was by her father and about how Catherine would never have done this if she hadn’t married into the shameless Mason clan. She’d railed against Wills’s breakdown, calling him selfish. J. J. and Ginger had fled and played all day in the limestone caves behind her house. They were old for it by then, but they fashioned horses from the red clay floor and baked them in the sun. The last of the dream switched into the creek behind Mema’s and they went searching again for treasure until J. J. scooped his hands into a pool and brought up a cache of perfect quartz crystals, clear as the water dripping through his cupped hands. The dream made another shift, and he was still as a trout in clear water. Still.
HE APPEARED TO BE SLEEPING. Ginger came in quietly with a pitcher of water and a glass. “Are you okay? I brought a wet washcloth.” As she had in high school, she wrapped the cloth around ice cubes and placed it across his forehead. She rinsed out the pan in the bathroom. Gently, she pulled off his shoes.
“God, I’m on the slope of it now. Cut the light . . .” His fingers gestured toward the hall.
“Call me if you need anything. I’ll leave the doors open.” Ginger turned off all the lights and felt her way to her room. Big Jim’s clock struck eleven. Westminster bells, Lily once had explained, and Ginger as a child always thought of foggy London, with concentric circles of chimes spreading over the rooftops. She knew the striking chimes hit J. J. like stones. You had to count with them every hour of the day—the little dings at the quarter and half hour, marking how hours grow and accumulate and then diminish and start over again. The big hours sounded so solemn, counting off in the dark. The sad one, the clipped two, the tic-tac-toe of three, the neat and hopeful four, the swelling insistence of five, the alarming now-now-now of six, the heavy import of seven, the rising hour for school, worker-bee eight, nine, somehow magic, ten like jackstones thrown, eleven, a growing confusion, too many, then twelve hard gongs, transformation time, the glass slipper turns to wood. In the dark, Ginger felt the wide board floors, spread her hand for the spool bed just as she reached it, and flung off the bedspread.
Number games, number dreams, how many nights had she used them—they must have come from her first years at the House, falling asleep to Big Ben chimes, waking in the night with the fear that she was the last person left alive on the planet. Relentlessly, she used to multiply—any number, the cost of a candy bar or a sweater or a friend’s father’s car, she’d multiply by 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, on and on, then start back with 1, 3, 5. Eleanor Whitehead, her math teacher, had been startled by her ability to calculate almost automatically. Everybody knew Big Jim could add a column of three-digit numbers in his head; the skill must have cropped up in the granddaughter. Ginger learned to fall asleep with numbers filling her mind. They spilled into dreams, burgeoning and speeding beyond her ability to fix them. What was 582993 x 93886? Crazily, she would start to count on her fingers, but the numbers receded in space, and she woke up anguishing after them. She hated the number nightmares, and it was then that she trained herself in other ways, the happy memories recalled, the animals she’d loved, the most beautiful places, and, most recently, the favorite Etruscan paintings and votives.
She wanted to think of her project and of Marco, to somehow find him in all this. The scents of orange, grass, and iris would not be summoned. Lately, she’d felt more peaceful and often had not depended on her rituals to sleep. Her mind felt bright and fixed on her work. She’d not had to fight the irrational sense of hopelessness that dogged her, or the moments of shyness, almost shame, that few would suspect she felt. Marco. She tried to bring his face into her vision but kept seeing the joyous flute player painted in the dim Etruscan tomb at Tarquinia, his happy step and curly hair. She let herself imagine the song he played. Reedy, shrill, otherworldly. How very strange, just as she was beginning—at last—to taste the freedom of being adult, her mother violently rising from the ground. Ginger knew that her elaborate games began when she could not, could not think of her mother, when her anger and helplessness had nowhere to go. She knew she had to get through, she knew that at twelve years old, even then on the road, thrashing and crying after finding her mother, her face untouched, blood Ginger skidded into, blood, the scream Ginger still heard in her entire body, bits of her mother’s burned raw flesh on her dress, the sharp slam of the door, running, heat pouring over her, flailing, dust, then Mrs. Rowen saying, “Honey, honey, what’s wrong?” and holding her, Ginger crazy, fighting, finally saying someone had shot her mother and she was dead. She knew in many small moments since, such as in a restaurant bathroom, when she felt a surge of panic that she’d been left on the roadside, her friends driving off, and when her brain sometimes just locked and she couldn’t think at all—she knew she must get through.
She started to relive it. Her usual gymnastic maneuvers could not keep it away. The same strobe-beating colors, the scream in her head, was this J. J.’s migraine in another form?
She tried to see the box of Etruscan stones, what about the golden stones, some with spiral designs broken in fragments? Twenty-five centuries under the ground and now brought into the light by her own hands. The excitement of brushing away the dirt. Marco beside her in a stringed-off area, the other interns, Cynthia and Jessica, in their lanes, all coming up with these fragments. But her mind veered to cleaning her mother’s name on the dirty stone that morning. She had to force herself to search her memory, which required thinking of her mother. Her entire training was against that. The question she cycled around was why, why hadn’t they known? To kill yourself must take planning, perhaps months of options considered and discarded. That her mother could pick up any gun was unimaginable.
As though it were recorded, she replayed, in the weeks after her mother’s death, over and over to the last conversation they’d had. School had just started.
She was in the seventh grade. Her mother had made waffles for breakfast and Ginger didn’t want any. She wanted cinnamon toast and orange juice. Tessie always made toast the way she liked it, but Tessie had the day off. Ginger had sat on the kitchen counter beating her heels into the cabinet door.
“Don’t do that. You’ll chip the paint. Get down and have some breakfast so you won’t be late. Daddy has to go.” Her mother was slicing the skin off cucumbers at the sink. She wrapped them with carrots and celery in waxed paper and put them in Ginger’s lunch sack with her sandwich. Her daddy came in and poured himself coffee. He glanced at the front page of the newspaper, which was already unfolded on the table, and sat down beside J. J.
“Hey, buddyboy, got your report?” He’d helped J. J. with research on the Seminoles for Georgia history class.
J. J. nodded. “Can I have your waffle, Gin?” J. J. asked. His hair was wet. He looked like a little otter. He was wearing a new plaid shirt and had made neat covers from brown bags for his schoolbooks. He was in the ninth grade. Already, girls were looking at him, even sophomore girls.
“Y’all be good! We’re going to the cabin tonight.” Her mother handed her two pieces of cinnamon toast to eat on the way to school. Her daddy held the door and the three of them walked out. It still felt like summer. A white clematis vine threaded around the columns at the end of the porch. From the driveway, Ginger looked back. Her mother in a yellow dress with dots of blue and green leaned in the doorway as they got in the car and drove away. Her hand on the screen door handle. They drove away. They drove away and left her. Her hand on the door handle. Ginger could recall the exact feel of that door, its black iron latch. Then she lifted her hand in an ordinary wave good-bye. The door swung shut; her mother a shape, disappearing. They drove away and left her and she shot herself. No, she went back inside the cool kitchen for several hours and then she shot. What did she do for those hours, what did she think? Did she think of the days when J. J. and Ginger were born, the heads with soft fuzz cradled in her arms? Eyelids like moonflowers. Or of her own father, lifting her on his shoulders. Ginger had the old photo, Catherine with scrolling curls pulled up in a ribbon, holding her little spotted dog named Pansy, its wet button nose against her cheek. Did she think of the lace bow around the dog’s neck?
Ginger leapt out of bed. She wanted to enter that kitchen with a different role, one that stopped the action, made it run another way. The utter ordinariness and banality of the scene made no sense. Why would you peel cucumbers and read the paper if you planned to kill yourself? Her mother was bright and funny. After so much time, Ginger barely could remember her being funny, just remembered that she was. She remembered more clearly the peeling paint on the kitchen door, the rotation of the latch, the two-note screech as she pulled it open, all those more clearly than she remembered her mother’s wit. How barbarian memory is.
J. J. FLICKED ON THE BATHROOM LIGHT and reached in to close the door on Ginger’s side. “Are you back among the living?” Ginger asked. He emerged in a few minutes.
“It’s an empty freight train now, just the cars jangling.” He’d brushed his teeth and washed his face and neck, run the wet washcloth all over him.
“I was just thinking about the morning Mother died.”
“Well, let me not interrupt a stroll down memory lane.”
“If we could understand it . . .”
“We had a pair of doozies for parents, that’s all.” J. J. took his usual post in the window seat.
“You don’t think that.”
“I don’t? Suicide for a mother? Drooler for a father? Poor Lily as force-fed model adult in the tender years?”
“It’s the happiness when we were little that seems so brutal. If we’d always been miserable, it would have been easier. At least we’d have known what to expect.”
“Good solid misery. It came soon enough.”
“You’ve never told me. How did you feel when you found out? Somebody came to football practice and told you, and then I didn’t see you for a long time. Why didn’t you take me to the hideout? I was left with the Rowens. Mrs. Rowen kept trying to give me oatmeal.” How to say, she wondered, that it was as if life broke off that day and I balanced, moving fast, on the smallest piece?
“No guilt, now, please. But oddly enough, guilt was what I felt then. We hadn’t made her happy. We were trouble. Afterward, when Tessie would take us out to the cabin for the day before I could drive, I’d go to the rack and see what it was like to touch the triggers on all the guns. When I was about fifteen, I used to sleep with that little Beretta pistol of Big Jim’s under my pillow. It wasn’t loaded but I liked to run my hand under the pillow and find that cold trigger. Mama hated the sound of a gun going off. You couldn’t drag her on a duck hunt.”
Ginger was quiet, hoping he’d continue talking, but he didn’t say anything more. She couldn’t remember when she’d last talked to J. J. without his sarcastic or ironic remarks keeping her away from him. And she hated when he assumed his redneck pose. “I think we’ve never trusted a human since then. Well, Lily, as far as that goes, and friends”—she thought of Marco—“but that down-deep, intimate, everything kind of trust is hard for me to come by.”
No response. Then J. J. said, “Mitchell, for prime example. I thought with Mitchell you’d stumble into happiness. A good man.”
“I developed an allergy toward him. I couldn’t help it. He was like feverweed to me. I think I always felt close to you because you were the only one who could know. I just can’t help but wonder how it would have been different, a plain old normal life. I’m off digging up sherds thousands of miles away and you’re out there in the woods—you’re almost a hermit—reading about reptiles and Indians. If you think about it, we’re just magnified children.” I was like that, she told herself. I’m not as stunted as he is. Now I’m starting to live like anyone else.
“Yeah, well, this reappearance doesn’t do much for my interrupted joie de vivre.” There he goes again.
“I always thought you’d be a writer. Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, James Agee, like them.”
“I write all the time. Just not books. No ‘Song of the South’ ambitions. No ‘I-don’t-hate-it-I-don’t’ monologue in a Yankee dormitory. No one’s ever explained the South—you know that? But too many have died trying.”
“The South is like the ancient Greek plays. Things happen in Idaho and Michigan but they don’t happen the way they do here. It’s different.”
“Ah, yes. All that old murky stuff, the archetypal swamp mud abides, abides. Something affects little-bitty babies when they are born—the shadow of the hanging tree, Robert E. Lee on Traveler, riding off into the gauzy air. And all of us narcotized by the scent of magnolia.”
“Don’t mock, it’s true. What about Mother? Do we remotely think this is just a gruesome mess without a trail of tears?” She couldn’t explain how when she left Swan each time it was more than leaving.
J. J. didn’t answer, so she continued. “Even the Jews who escaped from Hitler and, God knows how, came here—before long they’re adding columns to the front porch and standing up for ‘Dixie’ at the football games. The place moves inside you. Even that New Jersey science teacher who came here was yes-ma’aming and talking at half-speed after a year. Really, J. J., admit!”
“Okay. This is the truth. See, I don’t really think the first cause of that is the War Between the States or slavery or the lure of the old plantation. The first cause lies closer to that narcotizing scent of magnolia. In a way it’s stronger than anything, stronger than evolution. Foreskins persist in covering the penis despite generations of circumcision. Nature’s not swayed a bit. But the Feldenkreisses naming their daughter Lee Ann, calling her ‘Missy,’ and pouring juleps, that’s just what they do with the spell they fell into. What we think of as South is only what is culturally available. But the land itself holds us in a thrall—the forests, the heat, the waters. I’m waiting to catch one of those eyeless fish we know are down there. If I were to write, a big if, I’d like to write something plain and real about the land. But you have to have a story, too. All the ones I know, I don’t want.”
Ginger wanted to throw her arms around him or a big Mary-blue cloak to shelter him. She waited to see if he would continue. “Unfortunately, all I know about, other than nature, is freaks and fundamentalists and a family that can’t win for losing, and signs for Judgement Day. I wouldn’t touch it.”
“But I would like to read what you could write. No one has seen anything from your notebooks. Forget the old writers, our family, nooses swinging from the hanging tree, or fanatics wrapping barbed wire around themselves. Thoreau is beautiful—you’ve lived in the woods a lot longer than he did.” They loved Walden in high school, used to sprawl in front of the fireplace at the cabin in winter, Ginger under a blanket on the sofa, him with his legs slung over the armchair, each with a copy, reading aloud and eating pickles. “You could go travelling in the Amazon and find unknown medicinal plants, or orchids they think are extinct. Maybe you’re the Bartram or Darwin of our time.”
“Maybe not.” He couldn’t explain why he didn’t write. It was not just his instinct that living in south Georgia trumped fiction any day—more doodley-squat events, violence, and craziness than any square mile in the world. There was more—the feeling of immense silence that words pulled out of, and the lack, the big white space around words once they were written down. He loved Ginger; she was the person he would face all his life. He decided to try to explain himself to her. “You know how a fish sounds when it leaps out of water? If I could write that in a word, I’d know how to be a writer. Or like the bee, that sizzling sound when it goes back to the swarm. Words are all you have to write with and most things don’t go into words.”
