Authors: Karen Russell
The current grew stronger. It wove our skiff in an S-shaped path. In certain places now, the river was so narrow that trees on opposite banks could touch.
* * *
Some hours later I realized that we hadn’t seen a melaleuca in miles. No more threat of “monoculture,” as the scientists called it. The trees out here were a dark variety.
“You sure this is the river to hell? This place would be heaven to my father, all the hammocks out here.” I pointed at a stand of bearded trees whose flowers gave off a syrupy perfume as we paddled beneath them. “I don’t even know the names of some of these twisty ones …”
“Hey, kid, look where we’re going …”
We had to go onto our backs, flat as water moccasins, to pull our skiff through the next tunnel. My head was on the Bird Man’s lean stomach as we entered a net of branches. I could feel him breathing in a careful way under my damp scalp; each exhalation sank me a little. A black maze of branches moved over the sun. Leaves, round as pucks, waggled their tongues at us.
“What happened here?” The Bird Man touched the flaky spot on my knee where I’d scraped hard against the chickee ladder. “Poor kid. You okay?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. I don’t even remember how I got that one.”
He kneed forward in the skiff with his black feathers moving in wavelets, slid something from an interior pocket. The next thing I knew the Bird Man was uncapping a jar of green fluid. He drizzled a cool ointment over me and crisscrossed a bandage on my cut.
“There. Home remedy. ‘Home’ being a fluid terminology, in my special case.” He smiled. “There you go. Nomad medicine. Works better than anything in a first-aid kit, that’s for sure.”
Love.
“I love you,” I blurted out. The Bird Man laughed; for once I had succeeded in startling him.
“Are you feeling okay, kid? Do you need some water?”
I shook my head. “Sorry …” My eyes were burning. “I, uh, I thought …”
We ducked the subject of love by swapping water from the canteen. But now I had an embarrassed feeling and I wanted to explain myself to him; I didn’t want him thinking I was some idiot kid. So between sips of water I started telling him about my mother’s show. That show was
my model for love, the onstage and the backstage parts. In this goony kid way, I think I must have been hoping that my story might get the Bird Man to love me the way my mother was loved by the Chief.
“You know, my father trained himself to be my mother’s sun, electrically speaking.”
That was exactly how my dad described the job of love. The Chief rigged the lights for Mom’s act years and years ago, on their fourth date—he dreamed up the lights and the choreography for her show before she’d ever so much as touched an alligator. This was a popular story on our island (Bigtree Museum, Exhibit 12). After she became a wrestler and started doing evening performances, he operated the follow spot. I’d always try to find a way to be backstage for this part. Love, as practiced on our island, was tough work: the blind eye of the follow spot took all your strength to direct and turn. Every night the Chief ratcheted its yellow-white iris around my mother’s muscular back on the diving board. The follow spot we used was decades old, heavy, with poor maneuverability, and the Chief struggled to hold the beam steady. I remember his hands better than his face (I was a short kid): the square nails discolored against the metal, his big knuckles popping from the pressure of his grip like ten white valentines.
My mother did her breaststroke inside the spot’s golden circle of light, growing smaller and smaller as she headed for the deep end. “Now watch
this,
” my father would say, smiling at me as he changed the color filter and adjusted the iris diaphragm. By the end of her performance his shirt was soaked with sweat.
Now I mopped my own brow and stared at the Bird Man with my knees stowed under my chin, waiting to see if the story had worked.
“Sounds like a nice show,” he coughed.
“I saw posters of your mother all over the islands, you know,” the Bird Man offered almost an hour later, breaking a long silence. He said this like we’d been in steady conversation, like he was answering my question. “She was a beautiful woman. You look just like her, Ava.”
I burned in the bow seat. I thought this was the kindest lie anybody had ever told me.
* * *
On the skiff I made up a little credo for myself:
I believe the Bird Man knows a passage to the underworld.
I believe that I am brave enough to do this.
I have faith that we are going to rescue Ossie.
Every doubt got pushed away. Kiwi’s voice (
There are no such things as ghosts
) I ignored. Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.
When I shut my eyes I could see the underworld: a blue wave in front of us. The painting from Ossie’s book sprawled behind my eyelids—
Winter on the River Styx
—and if I really concentrated I could get this painting to
snow
. Dark flakes falling into our near future. It was hard work to keep believing that we were going to get there, but I persisted. Faith cupped and kept the future like leaves on the hidden water that (I believed) we were rowing toward. Where Ossie was waiting for me, and maybe my mom.
We kids cultivated a faith in all the Bigtree legends—I’d heard them so often from my parents that they seemed to me like memories I’d made myself. At the time, I also had faith that my pet Seth and I would be champions—how could it be otherwise? In fact I sort of thought this future must exist somewhere, the year of our triumph floating in utero in outer space, as small as the pinheads of stars.
Sometimes when I caught the sun sinking and felt a rinse of panic, I risked a look back at the Bird Man.
Imagine the thousands of birds this man can summon!
I told myself. Armies of birds, whole rookeries. Colors on their underwings that I thought were the prettiest part of our universe and here this man could paint the skies with them. Most incredibly, he had called me.
“Ava.” The Bird Man’s voice sounded preoccupied; he was trying to backferry us around some rocks. “Tell you what, kid, I’m going to sit and paddle for a while. You’re tired, why don’t you rest here? Lean back, huh? Put your head on my lap if you want. I’ll wake you if I see signs of your sister.”
I shook my head. This kindness was so sudden and extravagant that it made me, for some reason, want to cry. In a very different context, I had responded the same way when Mrs. Gianetti on Gallinule Key had offered me fancy chocolates once and I’d declined to eat even one,
intimidated by the blue satin ribbon around the box. The Bird Man’s gaze rippled over me, calm as clouds.
“Suit yourself.”
We were traveling so slowly through the mangrove keys. The bark on the trunks here wove together brilliant magentas and silvers, which reminded me for some reason of the old tourist women’s dye jobs, that funny mix of rubies and milk, age and vanity.
“Those tourists are sure going to love
you,
” I told the red Seth in her crate. It was three, I noted, the time of our Swamplandia! matinee. “When we get home …”
The red Seth squirmed unhappily in my palm, like a little dinosaur dreaming of amber.
Where was the dredge right now? I wondered. Where was the fisherman who claimed to have seen it?
Waves of feeling seemed to heave and smooth in me to the tempo of the actual waves. Big-mouthed fishes sucked whirlpools between the prop roots.
“Ossie?” I called into miles of trees. “Ossie, it’s me …”
At some point, our waterway disappeared, dried up, and we had to carry the boat overland. In
The Spiritist’s Telegraph
, Lethe was described as a deep, reliable channel. Well, that was not the situation we encountered in the Ten Thousand Islands. The sun was a white hole. I was walking with the wet prow of a boat on my head through waist-high marsh grass and the hundreds, the thousands, very possibly the
millions
of mosquitoes.
“Hey, can you use your whistle to call these bugs off?”
We were seeing a part of the swamp that I was unfamiliar with. The distant saw grass waved like wheat that silvered at its tips. I was grumpy, then scared: what wind could it
possibly
be moving in? Sweat covered my forearms; the clouds hung motionless.
It was a terrible portage—the Bird Man stood beneath the skiff’s rough yoke and my job was just to steer us, and it turned out I couldn’t even do that well, mud everywhere and flies in my eyes and my nostrils. I imagined we made a strange insect, our four feet moving beneath the boat’s flipped hull.
Very suddenly we drew up to the ruins of a bridge. Wooden trestles spanned a canal that was fifteen feet wide—it looked like part of a skeletal roller coaster. The Bird Man told me that wild-cotton crews employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture built this bridge in the 1920s. They were hired to eradicate the red cotton borer, a wild species of cotton that threatened the commercial plantations in northern Florida; they’d been working on a network of roads and bridges through the swamp to get their trucks and equipment out here before the infamous Labor Day hurricane of 1935 struck. Hundreds of World War I veterans died when the train sent to rescue them departed too late and every car—all but the locomotive—got swept into the sea. Broward, Bolles, the private contractors, they all ran out of money. Money appeared to be the one species that couldn’t take root in the swamp—and this blight was a killer of dreams, the Chief said, more potent than the red cotton borer.
I nodded hard to indicate that I knew my history well. (Please! Ladies and gentlemen of the mainland, I cleaned the history, I dusted dead mosquitoes off the history on summer mornings.)
“Sure, I know all about that. My grandfather survived the Labor Day hurricane. He took photographs of all the bodies.”
Black laborers had drowned by the thousands in the vegetable fields, and, because they were black, the laborers’ deaths never got recorded in the official tallies. Few tourists lingered over the framed pictures of their bloated bodies in Taylor Slough, 1935, that floated on our museum wall, preferring instead the photos Mom had taken of obese baby Kiwi in his water wings.
Most mainlanders hear “homeschooled” and they get the wrong impression. There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, “disappeared” boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the “official, historical” Florida records we found in books. “Prejudice,” as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic—a “damn fool math”—in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery on Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.
At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. Grandpa ate rat snakes and alligator meat even after grocery stores made frozen dinners available; he bit that one guy, Mr. Arkansas; but I don’t think these facts disqualify him from being a true historian, a true egalitarian. Tragedies, too, struck blindly and you had to count everyone. Grandpa taught us more than any LCPS Teach Your Child …! book about Florida hurricanes, Florida wars. From his stories we learned as children how to fire our astonishment at death into a bright outrage.
After the carnage in the marshlands, the federal government took over the Swamp Reclamation project: its new stated mission was “flood control.” Nobody was trying to drain the swamp anymore, although the Army Corps’ new system of hydrological controls seemed just as shortsighted and failure-prone as their original plans. We had an exhibit in the Family Museum called The Era of Swamp Reclamation, which seemed to give strangers the impression that this era was over—as if the Army Corps weren’t still turning those faucets on and off, sponging phosphorous for Big Sugar, opening the canal locks for the farmers in October and telling the water where to go.
“It’s a wonder this bridge is still standing, isn’t it, Ava?”
The Bird Man looked like he had just crawled out of a lake, he was sweating so badly. We leaned the skiff on the ant-covered bridge supports while he toweled water from his brow.
“I guess.” I was proud of myself for feeling no surprise—I’d been instructed by the Chief to think of mercy as “the wind’s oversight” and miraculous survivals as “a lucky malfunction; a fluke in the weather system.” Streamers of pale marine grass had swallowed the trestles.
“Did the cotton pickers know they were in hell?” I huffed. It was close to five o’clock now, and sweat trickled down my hairline; I could feel a splinter worming inside my palm. The sky above us was a pure and cloudless blue.
“Oh,” the Bird Man said. “I imagine so.”
Forty minutes later we were back on the water, poling around the glacial spires of a long oyster bed. At first I didn’t hear anything; the Bird Man flinched before I did. He whipped around with his burnished eyes dimming. “Go flat,” he hissed, and then he was pushing me down.
After a moment I heard the buzz of an approaching outboard. A
beige-and-black Park Services boat pulled around the grass-fringed slough, water spudding off the boat’s rigging, and then abruptly the engine cut out. When I saw who it was, I nearly shouted at the happy shock of a familiar face: Whip Jeters, a park ranger who often patrolled the waters around Swamplandia!, was standing in the stern with his hand on the sputtering Evinrude. Whip Jeters was a tall, once-fat man who wore his uniform khakis in a size that swallowed his new frame. He had a painful sunburn, and when he removed his sunglasses I saw a raccoon pallor ringing both eyes. Then I felt hands on my shoulders and my eyes were level with the tackle box, my cheekbone pushed against the wood.
The Bird Man, still seated in the stern, turned and waved. “Howdy, friend!” His voice was unrecognizable. “How’s the fishing over yonder?”