“You won’t make it,” they told her. “You won’t last the wet season. You’ll howl at all the mosquitoes, the snakes, the scalybacks that dig their holes beneath your floorboards.”
But Midnight Drouet didn’t howl and she didn’t go mad — the way my dad told the story, her composure was like a gun she kept cocked and pointed at her door. Five years later the gator skinners were infuriated to discover that she had, in fact, made it and lasted. Midnight built her own buttonwood shack and never asked for anybody’s help. She refused to let her neighbors hunt on her property. One day she mentioned to the bird warden that she’d shot a ten-foot alligator with her.22—he had been going for her dog, she said, a huge smoky mongrel named Luke. No: she had not bothered to skin the alligator for the tanneries. No: she hadn’t tried to sell or cure its meat. Word of this failure to profit from slaughter got around and the glade crackers were appalled — the Depression was on and here she’d killed an alligator with a huge dollar value and refused to skin the damn thing? Unforgivable. Selfish. Evil. Any one of them would have been glad to turn the carcass into coins for their own families. Apparently the bull gator’s head had languished in the water behind her house until the scales slipped, its hide moon-permeated and worthless.
And then it’s said that a man out there, or several men, rowed over to her island at night. “He” or “they” killed Miss Drouet, in cold blood. The decision was cold cognition, explained my brother, who liked to add a pinch of forensics to our gory swamp legends. Most people believe it was the work of several men, owing to the kind of damage that they reputedly did to her. For no other reason than that she’d killed that alligator and let it rot! A cardinal sin in those days, according to the Chief, back when people were killing the last snowy egrets for a buck five …
This part always made me dart under the covers, because I couldn’t stop seeing poor Miss Drouet in my mind’s eye, gagged and dragged down to the water by her murderers, dead already and now drowning, too, her cloth dress opening like a flower on the swamp water in a mixed-up and evil chronology. Her dead body floating. Her dead face, the mask of it, rising and falling on the sea’s uneasy breath.
Panthers found and finished her in the cattails. Wind unstitched her skeleton. Weeds sprayed outward from the heart-shaped wreck of her pelvis; a sinkhole opened beneath her and gave way with the suddenness of caved ice, swallowing her bones. Children who had never heard about Luke or Midnight Drouet began to report seeing a shadowy figure along rivers, beneath the dry fingers of palms. “Mama Weeds!” a little glade cracker boy called her: the woman he saw was standing in the Caloosahatchee with a quiet dog by her side, covered in pigweed. The first child who saw her hadn’t been frightened: she was doing laundry, he said, beating clothes against rocks, beating the dyes and patterns right out of them until colored oils ran downstream in twining browns and indigos and reds. The name stuck. If ever you saw a woman alone at the edge of the swamp at dusk, that lady was her, that was Mama.
I touched my throat. Personally, I had always considered the story of Mama Weeds a little silly. I had rambled all over the islands and I never once saw a ghost dog or a weedy lady in a lake. Kiwi was always telling me that Chief Bigtree’s swamp lore was uniquely stupid and that I didn’t have to believe it — if the swamp boomers had killed Midnight, he said, assuming a woman named Midnight Drouet had indeed existed, then she was dead and that was that.
But what if I was looking at an aerial cemetery? What if these clothes were Mama Weeds’s collection? In the vacant spots where no clothes were hanging, the line seemed to disappear against the blue sky. Your eyes could pick it up again further down the trees as tines of light. Far down in the west I could see five or six buzzards, spaced out on the clothesline like mainland pigeons on a telephone wire. Below them, some family’s checkered tablecloth made half a bubble on the wind.
I nearly jumped out of my skin; I saw a jacket that I recognized. It was one of the articles closest to me, pinned a few feet from where I was standing. A jacket that was so old and sun-faded that it had gone cuticle white — a WPA jacket, Bigtree museum quality, the Chief would have gone berserk for it. The shirt beside it had checks running in a canary net over the fabric; the last time I saw this garment, Osceola had been wearing it in our kitchen. Initials were sewn in cursive on the pocket — L.T. — in fat raspberry thread. Then a brighter purple caught my eye, an amethyst, the same shade as the ribbon around my wrist, and I saw that Ossie’s favorite skirt was hanging one line over. It was the clothing she’d been wearing when she left to marry Louis T.
I was pulling Ossie’s skirt from the line when a woman appeared around the side of the house. The occupant! I started to open my mouth to call for help, stopped.
She was huge — not fat so much as absolutely solid. She might have seemed ugly in a run-of-the-mill way to me if she’d been a tourist on our boardwalk. I had seen plenty of out-of-the-way women who looked like her before; she wasn’t covered in pigweed, there was no panting hound named Luke beside her. She had big dimpled arms, a dizzying profusion of gray-and-black hair. She was wearing a dress that looked ready to burst off her. It was too delicate for her, with its short puffed sleeves and its color, a faded yellow with tiny heart-shaped white flowers. My mother used to wear a dress like that, with a very similar look. No, I thought with a slow and brain-penetrating chill, she used to wear this dress. I was certain now that I was staring at Mama Weeds.
“What are you doing here, girl?”
She looked like a woman but I wouldn’t be fooled. I saw my mother’s dress hanging off her and I knew this creature was a thief, a monster.
“How did you get these things?” I yelled. “What did you do with my sister?”
“Your sister!”
And then her big hand was on my shoulder and I ducked away from her. Her breath felt moist on my cheeks. She grabbed at me and I raked my nails down her arm; she screamed and I twisted away.
“What on God’s earth are you talking about? Where’s your mother, girl? Are you out here alone? You got a sister with you?”
At the mention of my mother I shuddered out of her grasp. This creature was teasing me. “You can’t have her!” I screamed. I tried to wrench the dress off her.
Our eyes met. I looked up, still swaying from my fistfuls of the stolen dress. What I saw inside them was all landscape: no pupil or colored hoop of iris but the great swamp — the islands, the saw-grass prairies. Long grasses seemed to push onward for miles inside the depths of her eyes. Inside each oval I saw a world of saw grass and no people. Believe me — I know how that must sound. But I stood there and I watched as feathery clouds blew from her left eye behind the bridge of her nose and appeared again in her right socket. I saw a nothing that rolled forward forcefully forever. There was nobody in the ether of either white sky.
I heard the wind on the pond all around us, a deep clay smell rising from her skin. When she blinked again, her eyes looked black and oily, ordinary. For years I’ve wondered if this person I met was only a woman.
“You’re a monster,” I said quietly. “I wish you’d give me back my mother.”
“Girl, you are not making a lick of sense now …”