In the Loyal Mountains (3 page)

“I'm happy,” Elizabeth says, squeezing my arm from behind on the horse. She taps the horse's ribs with her heels. The smell of woodsmoke, and overhead the nasal, far-off cries of geese going south. The horse plods along in the dust.

Daisy will be starting her church services again, and once more we'll be going. I'm glad Elizabeth's happy living in such a little one-horse shell of an ex-town. We'll hold hands, carry our Bible, and walk slowly down the road to Daisy's church. There will be a few lazy fireflies at dusk. We'll go in and sit on the bench and listen to Daisy rant and howl.

Then the moaning songs will start, the ones about being slaves. I'll shut my eyes and sway, and try not to think of other places and moving on.

And then this is what Elizabeth might say: “You'd better love me”—an order, an ultimatum. But she'll be teasing, playful, as she knows that's near all we can do here.

The air will be stuffy and warm in the little church, and for a moment we might feel dizzy, lightheaded, but the songs are what's important, what matters. The songs about being slaves.

There aren't any words. You just close your eyes and sway.

Maybe Preacher isn't coming, and maybe the river isn't coming back either. But I do not say these things to Daisy when she sits on the porch and waits for him. She remembers being our age and in love with him. She remembers all the things they did, so much time they had, all that time.

She throws bread crumbs in the middle of the road and stakes the white chickens inside the yard for him. We try to learn from her every day. We still have some time left.

The days go by. I think that we will have just exactly enough time to build what Elizabeth and I want to build—to make a thing that will last, and will not leave.

T
HERE WAS A KID
we used to beat up in elementary school. We called him Swamp Boy. I say we, though I never threw any punches myself. And I never kicked him either, or broke his glasses, but stood around and watched, so it amounted to the same thing. A brown-haired fat boy who wore bright striped shirts. He had no friends.

I was lucky enough to have friends. I was unexceptional. I did not stand out.

We'd spy on Swamp Boy. We'd trail him home from school. Those times we jumped him—or rather, when those other boys jumped him—the first thing they struck was always his horn-rim glasses. I don't know why the thick, foggy-lensed glasses infuriated them so much. Maybe they believed he could see things with them, invisible things that they could not. This possibility, along with some odd chemistry, seemed to drive the boys into a frenzy. We would go after him into the old woods along the bayou that he loved. He went there every day.

We followed him out of school and down the winding clay road. The road led past big pines and oaks, past puddles of red water and Christ-crown brambles of dewberries, their white blossoms floating above thorns. He'd look back, sensing us I think, but we stayed hidden amid the bushes and trees. His eyesight was poor.

Now and then he stopped to search out blackberries and the red berries that had not yet ripened. His face scrunched up like an owl's when he tasted their tart juices. Like a little bear, he moved on then, singing to himself, taking all the time in the world, plucking the berries gingerly to avoid scratching his plump hands and wrists in the awful tangle of daggers and claws in which the berries rested. Sometimes his hand and arm got caught on the curved hooks of the thorns, and he'd be stuck as though in a trap. He'd wince as he pulled his hand free of the daggers, and as he pulled, other thorns would catch him more firmly; he'd pull harder. Once free, he sucked the blood from his pinprick wounds.

And when he'd had his fill of berries and was nearing the end of the road, he began to pick blossoms, stuffing them like coins into the pockets of his shirt and the baggy shorts he always wore—camper-style shorts with zip-up compartments and all sorts of rings and hooks for hanging compasses and flashlights.

Then he walked down to the big pond we called Hidden Lake, deep in the woods, and sprinkled the white blossoms onto the surface of the muddy water. Frogs would cry out in alarm, leaping from shore's edge with frightened chirps. A breeze would catch the floating petals and carry them across the lake like tiny boats. Swamp Boy would walk up and down the shore, trying to catch those leaping frogs.

Leopard frogs:
Rana utricularia.

We followed him like jackals, like soul scavengers. We made the charge about once a week: we'd shout and whoop and chase him down like lions on a gazelle, pull that sweet boy down and truss him up with rope and hoist him into a tree. I never touched him. I always held back, only pretending to be in on it. I thought that if I touched him, he would burn my fingers. We knew he was alien, and it terrified us.

With our hearts full of hate, a terrible, frantic, weak, rotting-through-the-planks hate, we—they, the other boys—would leave him hanging there, red-faced and congested, thick-tongued with his upside-down blood, until the sheer wet weight of the sack of blood that was his body allowed him to slip free of the ropes and fall to the ground like a dead animal, like something dripped from a wet limb. But before his weight let him fall free, the remaining flowers he'd gathered fluttered from his pockets like snow.

Some of the boys would pick up a rock or a branch and throw it at him as we retreated, and I was sickened by both the sound of the thuds as the rocks struck his thick body and by the hoots of pleasure, the howls of the boys whenever one of their throws found its target. Once they split his skull open, which instantly drenched his hair, and we ran like fiends, believing we had killed him. But he lived, fumbling free of the ropes to make his way home, bloody-faced and red-crusted. Two days after he got stitched up at the hospital, he was back in the woods again, picking berries and blossoms, and even the dumbest of us could see that something within him was getting strong, and that something in us was being torn down.

Berry blossoms lined the road along which we walked each afternoon—clumps and piles of flowers, each mound of them indicating where we'd strung him up earlier. I started to feel bad about what I was doing, even though I was never an attacker. I merely ran with the other boys for the spectacle, to observe the dreamy phenomenon of Swamp Boy.

 

One night in bed I woke up with a pain in my ribs, as if the rocks had been striking me rather than him, and my mouth tasted of berries, and I was frightened. There was a salty, stinging feeling of thorn scratches across the backs of my hands and forearms. I have neglected to say that we all wore masks as we stalked and chased him, so he was probably never quite sure who we were—he with those thick glasses.

I lay in the darkness and imagined that in my fright my heart would begin beating faster, wildly, but instead it slowed down. I waited what seemed like a full minute for the next beat. It was stronger than my heart had ever beaten before. Not faster, just stronger. It kicked once, as if turning over on itself. The one beat—I could feel this distinctly—sent the pulse of blood all through my body, to the ends of my hands and feet. Then, after what seemed again like a full minute, another beat, one more round of blood, just as strong or stronger. It was as if I had stopped living and breathing, and it was the beat of the earths heart in my hurt chest. I lay very still, as if pinned to the bed by a magnet.

The next day we only spied on him, and I was glad for that. But even so, I awakened during the night with that pain in my chest again. This time, though, I was able to roll free of the bed. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, which burned all the way down as I drank it.

I got dressed and went out into the night. Stars shone through the trees as I walked toward the woods that lay between our subdivision and the school, the woods through which Swamp Boy passed each day. Rabbits sat hunched on peoples front lawns like concrete ornaments, motionless in the starlight, their eyes glistening. The rabbits seemed convinced that I presented no danger to them, that I was neither owl nor cat. The lawns were wet with dew. Crickets called with a kind of madness, or a kind of peace.

I headed for the woods where we had been so cruel, along the lazy curves of the bayou. The names of the streets in our subdivision were Pine Forest, Cedar Creek, Bayou Glen, and Shady River, and for once, with regard to that kind of thing, the names were accurate. I work in advertising now, at the top of a steel-and-glass skyscraper from which I stare out at the flat gulf coast, listening to the rain, when it comes, slash and beat against the office windows. When the rain gives way to sun, I'm so high up that I can see to the curve of the earth and beyond. When the sun burns the steam off the skin of the earth, it looks as if the whole city is smoldering.

Those woods are long gone now, buried by so many tons of houses and roads and other sheer masses of concrete that what happened there when I was a child might as well have occurred four or five centuries ago, might just as well have been played out by Vikings in horn helmets or red natives in loincloths.

There was a broad band of tallgrass prairie—waist high, bending gently—that I would have to cross to get to the woods. I had seen deer leap from their beds there and sprint away. I could smell the faraway, slightly sweet odor of a skunk that had perhaps been caught by an owl at the edge of the meadow, for there were so many skunks in the meadow, and so many owls back in the woods. I moved across the silver field of grass in starlight and moonlight, like a ship moving across the sea, a small ship with no others out, only night.

Between prairie and woods was a circle of giant ancient oaks. You could feel magic in this spot, could feel it rise from centuries below and brush against your face like the cool air from the bottom of a deep well. This “buffalo ring” was the only evidence that a herd of buffalo had once been held at bay by wolves, as the wolves tried, with snarling feints and lunges, to cut one of the members out of the herd. The buffalo had gathered in a tight circle to make their stand, heads all facing outward; the weaker ones had taken refuge in the center. Over and over, the sun set and the moon rose and set, again and again, as the wolves kept them in this standoff. Heads bowed, horns gleaming, the buffalo trampled the prairie with their hooves, troughed it up with nose-stinging nitrogen piss and shit in their anger and agitation.

Whether the wolves gave up and left, or whether they darted in, grabbed a leg, and pulled out one of the buffalo—no matter, for all that was important to the prairie, there at the edge of the woods along the slow bayou, was what had been left behind. Over the years, squirrels and other animals had carried acorns to this place, burying them in the rich circular heap of shit-compost. The trees, before they were cut down, told this story.

Swamp Boy could feel these things as he moved across the prairie and through the woods, there at the edge of that throbbing, expanding city, Houston. And I could too, as I held my ribs with both arms because of the strange soreness. I began going into the woods every night, as if summoned.

I would walk the road he walked. I would pass beneath the same trees from which we had hung him, the limbs thick and branching over the road: the hanging trees. I would walk past those piles of flower petals and berry blossoms, and shuffle my feet through the dry brown oak leaves. Copperheads slept beneath the leaves, cold and sluggish in the night, and five-lined skinks rattled through brush piles, a sound like pattering rain. Raccoons loped down the road ahead of me, looking back over their shoulders, their black masks smudged across their delicate faces.

I would walk past his lake. The shouting frogs fled at my approach. The water swirled and wriggled with hundreds of thousands of tadpoles—half-formed things that were neither fish nor frog, not yet of this world. As they swirled and wriggled in the moonlight, it looked as if the water were boiling.

I would go past the lake, would follow the thin clay road through the starlit forest to its end, to a bluff high above the bayou, the round side of one of the meandering S-cuts that the bayou had carved. I know some things about the woods, even though I live in the city, have never left this city. I know some things that I learned as a child just by watching and listening—and I could use those things in my advertising, but I don't. They are my secrets. I don't give them away.

I would stand and watch and listen to the bayou as it rolled past, its gentle, lazy current always murmuring, always twenty years behind. Stories from twenty years ago, stories that had happened upstream, were only just now reaching this spot.

Sometimes I feel as if I've become so entombed that I have
become
the giant building in which I work—that it is my shell, my exoskeleton, like the seashell in which a fiddler crab lives, hauling the stiff burden of it around for the rest of his days. The chitin of things not said, things not done.

I would stand there and hold my hurt ribs, feel the breezes, and look down at the chocolate waters, the star glitter reflecting on the bayous ripples, and I would feel myself fill slowly and surely with a strength, a giddiness that urged me to
jump, jump, jump.
But I would hold back, and instead would watch the bayou go drifting past, carrying its story twenty more years down the line, and then thirty, heading for the gulf, for the shining waters.

Then I'd walk back home, undress, and crawl back into bed and sleep hard until the thunder rattle of the alarm clock woke me and my parents and my brothers began to move about the house. I'd get up and begin my new day, the real day, and my ribs would be fine.

I had a secret. My heart was wild and did not belong among people.

I did what I could to accommodate this discrepancy.

 

We continued to follow him, through the woods and beyond. Sometimes we would spy on him at his house early in the evenings. We watched him and his family at the dinner table, watched them say grace, say amen, then eat and talk. It wasn't as if we were homeless or anything—this was back when we all still had both our parents, when almost everyone did—but still, his house was different. The whole house itself seemed to come alive when the family was inside it, seemed to throb with a kind of strength. Were they taking it from us as we watched them? Where did it come from? You could feel it, like the sun's force.