Patched together the poster would have read HILOLA BIGTREE, SWAMP CENTAUR. Kiwi had always been embarrassed by this particular epithet for her — more of the Chief’s lame publicity — but it was a name that his mother was growing into, apparently. Because here she was: a real centaur on the door. The closet wood showed through half a dozen rips in the poster and blanked out one cheek. You could touch the grain of the wood through her torn forehead. A crescent of her smile hung on a little fang of green paper. Death was speeding her evolution into this monster: half woman and half invention. Kiwi couldn’t remember the real color of his mother’s hair anymore, her nascent wrinkles like the first cracks in an eggshell, her voice, her beautiful scowl, because the poster had papered over her third dimension and now even it was ruined.
“Kiwi? Learn to take a fucking joke, bro …”
“No, it’s fine.”
He touched the paper of her face and shut the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. Mama Weeds
Ossie’s ribbon was still on my wrist. All it did was remind me that I had a sister somewhere, the way you’d strap a watch to your wrist to keep you in time. If the Bird Man had showed up and tried to take this cloth protection from me then, I really think I might have killed him.
This part of the swamp grew very noisy at night, growls and squelches and the infinitesimal roaring of each mosquito piling into waves. Sticks snapped and once I heard a large animal go crashing through the water; all I saw, though, were the tall gumbo-limbo trees that were like pepper shakers of moths. Probably the Bird Man was miles and miles away from me, I told myself. On his way home, back through the Eye and this phony underworld. In a way, he’d made good on his promise to me, our bargain, because I couldn’t imagine a hell that would be worse than this place where he’d left me. Overhead the sky was a fast and swallowing blue.
“Ossie?” I gulped. “Mom?”
I fixed my eyes on two palm trees at the edge of the saw-grass prairie; I was going to use them as goalposts. I started to walk. I could see little oases of thatch-palm and cabbage trees, carpets of gray sea oxeye, of red sea bight, and between these the stalks weaving, endlessly, acres and acres of this.
* * *
I walked steadily all morning. By noon I was getting really mixed up. I drank more of the silty groundwater and then threw it back up an hour later.
If I don’t find water, I thought, freshwater, rainwater, potable water, and soon …
Now I didn’t always recognize the cries of the animals; whatever adhesion in my brain connected sounds and light to the names of species was breaking down. The leaves that I had easily identified as bay or gumbo-limbo or pop ash gave way to a muted palette of foliage, a glowing russet and gray, much of it alien to me. Fewer and fewer of the plants that I tripped over or pushed through in curling curtains of vines uprooted a name in my mind. I was seeing new geometries of petals and trees, white saplings that pushed through the peat like fantailing spires of coral, big oaky trunks that went wide-arming into the woods (no melaleucas anywhere). A large egretlike bird with true fuchsia eyes and cirrusy plumage went screeching through the canopy. For some reason all the life gurgling in the anonymous hammock made me want to cry. Some underworld this turned out to be, Ossie.
I started to think it might not be a terrible thing if the Bird Man found me. A little later I began drafting my apologies to him for leaving. If he had water, I wanted him to find me now. I didn’t care at all what happened afterward …
Then I pushed through a stand of palms and saw the house. It was a one-room bungalow, the sort of dilapidated structure that swamp rats like Grandpa Sawtooth used for a fish camp or a hunting cabin. A tripod of sticks held a resin pot over a stack of pinewood; a stiller pump stood pondside. My heart leapt — my first thought was that we must have rowed to the Gulf coast, where you could find a few actual towns on the elevated pinelands. I got it in my head that I was walking toward a town. It didn’t matter that nothing else I had seen or smelled or heard in the last few hours bore this theory out: I was on the outskirts of some island community, I decided, a place with televisions, telephones, refrigerators filled with sodas and cold cuts and cans of whipped cream, paper towels, pet dogs, telephone wires — I was on a roll now, I was close to blinking back tears — generators! electric light! hot showers! toilet paper! I walked behind the first house.
“Hello?”
This first house appeared to be the only house. A live alligator was sunk into the mud behind the southernmost wall, watching me as I scouted the perimeter. Switchgrass sprayed like a little beard beneath the blue-black apples of its cheeks. Its grin upset me in a way our Seths’ musculature never did back home.
“It’s not funny,” I hissed. “You’re the clown, you stupid monster, you don’t know anything, you don’t love anyone, you can’t even imagine …”
I looked inside a begrimed window and I thought: abandoned. For sure nobody lived here. There was a straw pallet on the needle-covered floor and no furniture that I could see. Dishes on shelves, little cups. Outside its wooden walls had been completely overtaken by weeds and strangler fig, thick vines doing their weird tethered ballet when the wind blew. Water thinned to a brothlike cup between the mangroves. Oh, yes, I thought. I was going to drink all of it.
Thirst dragged me by my neck to the bottom creek and I was halfway to water before I noticed the clothesline. Clotheslines, I realized — there were half a dozen of them strung like a winking web in the high branches. Clothes were snapping all along both banks of the canal. The blouses nearest to me hung like cutouts against the sun, pinned and flapping. Sunshine turned them mild shades of gold or ghostly whites. The vaguest beiges made me think of photographs waiting to develop.
Some of the clothes looked antique. I found a woman’s glove with a star-shaped wine stain over the palm. Each finger was bent against the wire by a clothespin. Many of the items looked burned and stained, moth-eaten. A gingham sundress had holes that I could have put my fist through. I thought again of photographs in the developing solution of the blue-violet air. Only the sky out here seemed like a deteriorating solution — it was erasing them.
A black hat brim — just the brim — hung from two pins like a shocked O.
Oh. I took a step toward the tree line, and for a second the maze of clotheslines looked as if they went on forever and ever. A line of billowing dresses that stretched to infinity, missing their women. All the silhouettes were wrinkling. Then I blinked and the image of an eternally twining line was gone. The clothes just looked like dirty old clothes strung from one branch to another again, mosquitoes shimmering vacantly around them. But where had all this clothing come from, in the middle of the swamp? Mama. The name came to me without warning out of the aching blue sky. Mama Weeds.
There is a legend in our swamp about a lady, a laundress — or a ghost, or a female monster — named Mama Weeds. She was like an island bogeyman. Her story predated us. The Chief liked to tell it to tourists: he’d ham it up and do all the different drawling voices like a radio play.
Mama Weeds started life as a real woman, Midnight Drouet, a light-skinned black seamstress descended from freed slaves who lived in the Ten Thousand Islands. A beautiful woman, so quiet that strangers assumed she was mute, with no real interest in rearing children or marrying a man. She moved to the deep interior of the swamp and worked there as a seamstress and a laundress; the pioneers could leave their clothing with her and she’d sew up holes and sew on faux gold buttons, a bottomless bucket of which she’d brought with her from the factory that once employed her in Troy, New York. People swore that she could get any stain out in the river by her house. Her few neighbors, moonshiners and gator skinners among them, were incensed by her presence.