Swamplandia! (16 page)

At seventeen, Louis was the youngest member of the crew. It was the height of the Depression, and sometimes the men turned to the past for distraction—talking about the girlfriends they’d left mooning after them in red diner booths in Decatur, or their high school teachers, somebody’s family store in Rascal Mountain, Georgia, or their army stints, the dogs and the children that they’d left on terra firma, the debts they’d gleefully abandoned. Inside the suck of these other guys’ nostalgia, Louis became almost unbearably nervous.

“What about you, Lou?” somebody eventually asked. “How did you get washed down here?”

“Oh, not much to tell …” he mumbled. Very little of his childhood before the dredge felt real anymore. In fact, the vast and empty floodplain that spread for miles in every direction around the dredge’s gunwales seemed to mock the notion that a childhood had ever happened. Two skies floated past them—one above and one below on the water, whole clouds perfectly preserved. “One thing about me, though,” Louis said, coughing, trying like the other guys to make his past into good theater. “One sort of interesting thing, I guess, is that I was born dead.”

“Well, goddamnit, Louis, you don’t need to brag about it.” Gideon Thomas, the engine man, laughed. “Born dead—shit, son, everybody is!”

Of all the men on the dredge, Gid was probably Louis’s best friend, although it wasn’t exactly a symmetrical relationship, since Gid teased Louis without mercy and “borrowed” things from the kid that he couldn’t really return, like food.

“I’m not bragging,” Louis said, and he wasn’t bullshitting the crew, either. He was just repeating a fact that he’d heard from his adopted father—“born dead” was an epithet that he had used to needle Louis whenever he moved too quickly for the old man’s fists. And although the old man had boiled the boy’s birthday story down to two cruel words, they both happened to be true—Louis Thanksgiving had very nearly been a nobody.

At birth, his skull had looked like a little violin, cinched and silent. The doctor who had uncorked the baby from his dead mother in the chilly belly of the New York Foundling Hospital had begun shaking it to a despondent meter, thinking,
Ah, what a truly rude awakening!
Because this tiny baby—holding its breath, refusing to wiggle—was failing at the planet’s etiquette. He did not blink. He was resolute and blue in the doc’s blood-soaked arms.

“A stillborn,” the doc told a nurse. “And the woman’s dead, uterine rupture, terrible …” So this kid had missed it totally, then, his windy little interval between birth and death. His life. And the unwed mother, lying naked on a table in the Foundling Hospital, was now no one’s mother or daughter.

The doctor lit a Turkish cigarette and let out a little cry, a sadness that registered in decibels somewhere between a gambler’s sigh and the poor woman’s grief-mad wailing at the end of her labor—and then another cry joined the doctor’s. The stillborn’s blue face opened like a flower and he started crying even harder, unequivocally alive now, unabashedly breathing, making good progress toward becoming Louis. The baby’s face kept reddening by the second, and the doctor plucked the cigarette from his lips like a tar carnation. He would have liked to keep on smoking, and drinking, too, but babies—you could not just stand there and toast their voyage back to nothingness! Although. If the room had been emptied of witnesses, no nurses, no mother, just this baby’s squalling eyes, and your own …? Could you maybe then …?
No
, the better doctor inside the doctor insisted.
We can’t do that
. So the doc put on his self-prescribed green eyeglasses and massaged air into the baby’s chest with the flats of his hands; and when blood and air started to work in tandem and the midnight pigments in Louis’s bunched-sock face brightened to a yellowish pink, the doc stared down at the baby and said, “Well, pal, I think you made the right choice.” The mother’s cracked heels were by this time cooling to putty on the table.

Exhausted, the doctor left the birth certificate blank. L-O-U-I-S read the alphabeads that two nuns strung on a little black bracelet for the baby, because the doctor remembered or imagined he remembered that the dead mother had at one point whispered this American name to him. Louis’s mother was an immigrant from a country that Louis could not have pronounced or found on a map—and if Louis ever did hear its
name when he was growing up, well, it could have been Oz or the moon to him, an imaginary place.

One of the Children’s Aid nuns at the New York Foundling Society came in to retrieve the newborn orphan. Louis lost his true past in a few squeaks of her nun shoes on the linoleum. Carrying him away, leaving that widening blank of a woman behind him, this wimpled stranger wound the clock of Louis’s life. The nun (who sometimes dreamed she was a man in advertising, writing copy for Hollywood movies) tucked a paper with a short description of his delivery into his blanket, thinking that this might help him to be adopted by a Christian family at the train station:
MISLABELED STILLBORN MIRACLE BABY ALIVE PRAISE GOD FOR LOUIS, THANKSGIVING!

Somewhere down the line the nun’s purple comma got smudged and then Louis had a surname.

When he was three days old, Louis Thanksgiving was added to a group of eleven orphans, accompanied by one nun, one priest, and one mustachioed western agent who really did not care for children at all. He became one of those unfortunates who grew up in the Midwest, part of the human sediment deposited by the orphan train that ran from New York to Clarinda, Iowa; and while plenty of boys and girls found their way to loving adoptive families, such was not the case for Louis. The New York Foundling Society had placed a melodramatic advertisement in the newspapers of each of the towns along the railroad route, and dozens of farm families had gathered under a striped awning at the Clarinda station to size up the scabby knees from New York City. Louis was picked up at the station by Mr. Frederick K. Auschenbliss, a German dairy farmer who treated him worse than the livestock—at least the dairy cows got to stand still and swat flies; Louis was up to milk the cows at 2:30 a.m., spreading manure on the flat fields at sunup. Mr. Frederick K. Auschenbliss was not an affectionate father. Picture instead a slave driver who grew into the hard hiss of that name—a hog-necked man with a high Sunday collar, his eyes a colorless sizzle like grease in a pan, half his face erased by the dark barn. Louis was zero when he arrived at the Auschenblisses’ farm, sixteen when he escaped it—and even Death, judging by the gaps in Osceola’s story, had not yet afforded Louis T. enough time and distance to permit him to tell the story of those lost years.

Louis T., now grown into a bruised and illiterate young man, the
brother to no one in that house of twelve, escaped the farm as soon as flight seemed possible. He rode the rails southward on a voyage that had the fitful logic of a sleep interrupted: suns set and suns rose. Forests dispersed into beaches and regrouped again in mountain passes. Lightning sent down its white spider legs outside the dining-car windows and crawled up the pine trunks, trailing fires. He hopped trains that crisscrossed the Midwest, touching golden millet fields and the black corners of the Atlantic before he finally pushed beyond the Florida Panhandle.

Florida, in those days, was a very odd place: a peninsula where the sky itself rode overland like a blue locomotive, clouds chuffing across marshes; where orange trees and orderly rows of vegetables gave way to deep woods and then, further south, broke into an endless acreage of ten-foot grass. This, finally, was the vision that reached Louis T. through the train window: a prairie that looked as vast as the African savanna. A strange weed or wild corn shifted restlessly in the afternoon winds
—saw grass
, said a fellow passenger beneath the slouch of his hat. That was the name for the long stalks that swallowed the WPA men up to the waists of their coveralls. Teams of lumbermen and government surveyors were working up and down the train rides, an eerie counterpoint to the dozens of herons and deer that Louis saw standing in the marshes. Then the dizzying height of the trees in the pinewoods, the thin millions of them extending as far as the eye could see. They were called slash pines for the cat-face scars left by the gum tappers—already thousands of acres had been tapped for turpentine. The slash pines reminded Louis of a stark daguerreotype he had once seen as a child of Lee’s emaciated Confederate forces.

These woods were deep but they were neither peaceful nor quiet—they were full of men. Axes swung and fell, a blue glinting on the edges of the woods, and Louis followed the blade handles to the stout arms and the square, heat-flattened faces of the Civilian Conservation Corps lumbermen. It was the Depression, and thirteen million job seekers were surging southward, westward, eastward and massing like locust clouds in the cities. But few of these money hunters had made it to the deep glade. From Louis’s window seat in the train, he saw just a smattering of humans. When the train had some mechanical problem outside the Crooked Lake National Forest, they cut the engine and the
metal moaned to a full stop in the middle of a wrinkled wood. Out here you could hear the beginning of the wind, the hiss of the air plants and the crimson bromeliads. Oak toads chorused incessantly. If he could hear his own death in all that lively hubbub, he ignored it.
Home, home, home
, sang the rails, and the train lurched back to life.

Louis disembarked in Titusville and signed a six-month contract with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He wrote his name out
LOUIS THANKSGIVING
, dropped the Auschenbliss, and then looked up and down the dusty street as if he’d just gotten away with a crime. Why did anybody fool with guns, he wondered, when he had just dispatched Mr. Auschenbliss and the cat-eyed Mrs. Auschenbliss with one bloodless swipe?

“There’s Indians, but they got their own camp,” the recruiter told him in a patient voice, as if this were a concern he frequently allayed. “There’s coloreds here, though, we haven’t segregated your camp yet …” He glanced up from Louis’s paperwork to see if this would be a problem. Louis stared incredulously back at him. He wanted to tell the man that he had spent the last sixteen years living with animals and a pack of brothers whose great entertainment on the Iowa weekends was to devise practical jokes with bulls and farm machinery that had nearly killed Louis in the fields. Louis had no problems with any man alive, black, white, or Indian, so long as his surname was not Auschenbliss.

On his first stint he got deployed with fifteen other men, who were introduced to him by their professions (“This here is the cook, the cap, the civil engineer, the lieutenant, the scout …”). He was now part of a government team surveying the woods around Ocala. Thirty dollars a month for income and try as you might, you couldn’t spend more than five dollars of that unless you were a serious and self-hating gambler—what could you buy on the swamp besides cigarettes, penny stamps, camp equipment? Louis bought a mess kit for fifteen cents. He slept in a tent with five other men, their legs tangled together, the odor of sweat and cigarettes percolating inside the tent’s bubble. Outside their tent, rising out of the scraped stone like the earth’s own exhalation, came the odor of peat, a great seawall of it, nothing so subtle or evanescent as a fragrance—no, this was stuff with a true
stink
. In open sunlight the peat became an olfactory roar that recalled to Louis Thanksgiving the feculence that hung over Clarinda.
Cow pies
, Louis T. thought, wrinkling
his nose,
farm perfume;
but out here the air was salted, the feculence quadrupled. He complained about it good-naturedly, happy to have something to say to the other men at night.
Our legs are tangled
, he realized that first night and every night thereafter, saying nothing and moving not one inch once he found his bedroll, the tent humid with the other men’s careful closeness. Every man had to maintain his fixed position; you had to train your body until even in sleep it remained a tethered boat that wouldn’t rock. There was news that a surveyor for the train company had been beaten to death south of Tallahassee after climbing into another man’s bedroll stark naked
—a fairy, a funny one
, the men hissed.

Nights came and the moon was so bright that it penetrated the tent cloth. Louis was often awake until the filmy predawn, listening to the hum of the mosquitoes as if even this were something holy. He was in love with everybody, with the heat and the stink and the foul teakettle dredge that had cut a channel so far from his childhood. He was in love with the crushed oyster beds and the uprooted trees. He was smart enough, too, to keep these feelings to himself. Osceola described the way that Louis liked to hoard a hairy kiwi all day and then waited until the other laborers were snoring to open it. He’d pushed a thumb through the furry skin and released the kiwi’s subliminal perfume through the tent. The first time Louis had done this, he’d watched as the men smiled in their sleep; after that he did it nightly, smiling himself as he imagined pleasant dreams wafting over them. His good mood spilled over into the mornings, and a few of the more taciturn crewmen grumbled that this farm kid must have a screw loose—who woke up whistling in 102-degree heat? What sort of special asshole kept right on beaming at you when his cheeks were flecked with dead mosquitoes and his own pink blood?

“Look who’s grinning like an imbecile in the dead heat of noon,” the lieutenant said, shaking his head. “You are the most good-natured boy I have ever met, Louis—honestly, it’s a little worrisome. You just better not snap and kill us in our sleep! I could tell you stories. Strange things happen to personalities this far out, you know.”

Every so often, the captain passed around a flask of purple apple moonshine, joking that he hoped it didn’t blind the men. Louis thought the captain’s hooch tasted like a mixture of Christmas cider and gasoline—it didn’t make his personality any stranger or corrupt his
vision, but his smile shrank, and often he had to excuse himself very politely to run and puke over the stern. Louis still had a kid’s broad face, a farm face, but with a sharp nascent handsomeness lurking around his cheekbones—he had what you’ll hear described as a “lantern jawline,” with its presidential thrust, its hint of bedroom avarice. It would have been irresistible to a woman, had there been any such creature in the general environs. The last one Louis T. had seen was the cook’s wife, who had a tall and mannish figure with a dishlike face and mean little eyes, a dirty cloud of yellow hair.
That must be the cook’s older brother
, Louis T. had thought as he watched them embrace at Fort Watson.
Why is the cook’s older brother wearing a dress?