Death by Water Read online

  I know she didn’t go far.

  Now, out of eight, counting my daddy, there’s just my Uncle Bert, Jeffy, and me. Our three older brothers signed up for the service together laughing and joking. At least we’re in different branches, makes us safer, better odds they told Mama, like betting on different numbers. Uncle Bert says they haven’t written, he means sent money, for months.

  I think Mama gets the letters instead.

  Uncle Bert’s no farmer. All the animals had long been auctioned off, even Annie, though I’d considered her my dog. Uncle Bert said no sixteen-year-old girl wants a dog nowadays anyway. Shows what he knows.

  “Will you be late tonight, Uncle Bert?”

  He jumped, “What the hell, where’d you come from? Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  “Are you going to be late getting home?”

  “Why?” He narrowed his eyes and I noticed how puffy his face had become. “Kids at school talking about the phenomena? The lights. Are you scared?”

  “No. I’m not scared. They’re nothing new. I’m thinking about dinner. Should we eat whatever we can find, or what?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll probably have to work. You kids go ahead, eat what you want.” He looked around the kitchen, “There’s food, right?”

  “Yeah, Uncle Bert, there’s still bread.”

  “I’ll bring something. Yeah, I’ll swing by the store on my way home. And, here, just in case, I don’t know.” He pulled a few dollars from his pocket and tossed them on the table. “Just so you have some money, you know.”

  I didn’t know. We don’t live anywhere near a store.

  “Yeah, good. Thanks, Uncle Bert.”

  He grabbed me and squeezed me too hard, too long. He petted my head so fierce it felt as if he were trying to pull me into his heart. We probably could have gone and lived in better circumstances with my favorite teacher, Miss Palmer. She’d helped me out in the past, and she told me, anytime, she would always be there for me, but times like this I felt he needed us. And this was our home, the last place I’d seen Mama.

  I was afraid he was going to start crying again. He pushed me away, nodded, and slipped the thermos under one arm. He patted his pocket for his keys and stumbled out the door. He’d already had one cup of coffee.

  The truck engine ground and stopped. Ground and stopped. Oh, please, please, start. It caught. The sound of the gears being tortured followed.

  The noise of the engine faded as I tiptoed up the stairs. But Jeffy was already awake. He trailed me and the axe to the ridge where three of the five trees stood; the three planted when our older brothers were born were much larger than the two holly trees by the door that were planted for Jeffy and me.

  “What are you doing, Amy?” Jeffy was still in his T-shirt and gray-white boxers with the mud stains from yesterday.

  I used my math, planned and calculated, “You need to stand right there,” I marked a spot in the dirt with my toe. “Don’t move and I mean, don’t move or I’ll kill you. Really. Understand?”

  He nodded hard.

  The first tree was John’s. My oldest brother. The first time the axe struck the wood I felt as if it sunk into my own heart. But I wouldn’t stop. I wouldn’t think about what the trees symbolized. I pushed up my sleeves.

  I went at the trees like a machine, calculating, planning, positioning my little brother in safe spots, watching the trees crash so the sun could shine unimpeded over the ridge onto the house where I believe my mama has gone to live. It’s a beautiful house with an ornate fountain; only the lake and the green field with gray stone markers lay between us.

  Some say it was a mistake to place a graveyard so close to the lake. I’ve watched it all my life and I’m sure they’re right. The lake has become a roiling boiling cauldron of the dead. How could the gases not build; the lights not be seen for miles. How could it not call out, to demons, perhaps, or simply the dead from other planes, alien spaces, to dance among us as Daddy danced on the end of his rope?

  Perhaps it was nothing alien at all, but a quite natural visitation of swamp gas from the rotting bodies in their graves that then spread out like fog over the lake, picking up any bit of light. It was just that lately the lights had become more prevalent, more solid, and began to disturb me more deeply as my emotions rose to the surface with my years. I couldn’t keep an eye on the globules for the trees. The trees that weren’t really my brothers.

  Now the town folks have seen the lights and I want to keep a better watch. I feel a duty, living here, so close. Perhaps my daddy had felt it, too; maybe that’s why he fed the lake so well.

  My second brother was Phillip, the first born of the twins. The thought of Mama and Daddy when they were young, together, buying the two trees for the twins puts a sad lump in my throat. I don’t know how old the trees were when they bought them, but this scot pine had been in the ground for nineteen years. A guilty chill passed over my skin.

  For the first time, I felt eyes on me; I looked around, expecting to see someone standing behind me. Of course, there was no one there. I looked to the barn, to the open mouth of the haymow. The pulley at the gable end hung empty. I hardly ever saw Daddy swaying there and then it was mostly at night. I laughed.

  “What, Amy? What’s funny?” Jeffy didn’t look up from his game in the dirt.

  “Nothing, I thought I heard Daddy’s old truck. That maybe Daddy was here again somehow. Daddy.” There, I said Daddy three times, as I did when I was a kid and I was scared. I’m not scared now, they’re just trees, and they’re dead. I’m just cutting down dead trees.

  Phillip’s tree was very tall. A man’s hand could cover the stump, once I cut the pine down, so the job wasn’t going to take me long. I struck my axe into the tree. The pitch wept. I had to pause; pitch doesn’t run in dead trees.

  I heard a sound on the other side of the ridge, down in the tall grass around the lake. Not Jeffy, he was right here, irritatingly close. He was making spaceship sounds, swooping his hands around my legs.

  I tried to tell myself there was nothing down there, that it must be John’s tree, still settling. But I should have checked over the ridge before I felled the first tree. I hadn’t thought to check.

  I peered over the edge of the ridge, listening now, too. Relieved that I saw nothing squirming to get free from under the tree. There was no movement in the grass. Except…off to the left, down the path Daddy’s boots had beaten on his way to the drownings, a twisted figure was crawling up the bank. I blinked.

  It was gone. I think.

  I was overheated, sweat running into my eyes. I was feverish now to finish this task. I wielded the axe again and the tree swayed precariously for a moment then plunged to the ground. The branches cracked and the trunk bounced as it slid down the bank. I squinted and I could make out the tips of the branches just skimming the surface, like a Jesus bug, walking on the humid surface of the lake.

  Jeffy was at my side, “Let me count, let me count.” His fingers crawled across the pitchy stump.

  “There’s nineteen.” I knocked him away. “You’re getting pitch all over your hands. You go in the house and wash with the borax.” I pulled him down to the ground and rubbed his sticky fingers in the dirt. “Better yet, don’t come back out here until you can’t see a speck of dirt on your hands.” I gave him a shove. He stumbled toward the house.

  I drove the axe into the tree.

  I heard Jeffy sob. I turned around. His shoulders shook. Damn.

  I left the axe in the tree.

  I put my arm around him and dried his tears with the bottom of his T-shirt, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything.” Sniffling, he went into the house; I turned back to the ridge.

  A wreck of a woman stood between Andy’s tree and me. Her eyes were empty, her blue face a mosaic of mossy puzzle lines, some of the pieces missing, a few just now falling off. I wouldn’t have known her at all but she was wearing Mama’s good church dress. She held her stomach in with a half-fingered hand. She was wheezing
and gasping as if the air I was breathing could no longer satisfy her needs.

  “No harm in cutting down John and Phillip’s trees, those boys is with me now, but it’s not Andy’s time.” Gently, she removed the axe from the wound in Andy’s tree.

  “Mama.” I moved forward, to put my hands on her, to kiss her cheek.

  She jerked away, but not quick enough, my lips had barely grazed her. The chill settled in my teeth. My cheekbones ached. I saw the graveyard with roots that fed into the water.

  I looked down and saw my brothers dancing on the lake. I longed to join them.

  I heard a voice behind me. Uncle Bert gripped my shoulder and leaned on me, “Andy’s injured; he’s coming home. Money’s tight; all the same, I’m anxious to see him.”

  I stared at the wound I had made in Andy’s tree.

  “Me, too, Uncle Bert.”

  Mama was gone; she must have gone over the ridge while the demons’ songs distracted me.

  Andy’d changed. The wheelchair tracks didn’t take long to roll straight over the ridge and down into the murky water. It looked like Uncle Bert had tried to save him. They sank and died together, Uncle’s sleeve bound up in Andy’s wheel. I hadn’t heard a sound that night, but I woke up soaked and screaming from my dreams.

  I went to live in the town across the lake with Miss Palmer, my favorite teacher, the one I’d gone to when my daddy hung himself. Jeffy went somewhere else.

  Miss Palmer dressed me up like a city girl and took me to church on Sunday. I didn’t fit in and I’m not sure I belonged in a religious setting. I’ll always believe it was my sinful thoughts that brought the demons down on us that Sunday.

  Sister Moore led the girls up to the choir loft for Sunday school. She stood in front of the short wall that separated the loft from the main church below. As she recited the lesson, she rocked in hypnotic circles, it would be so easy for her to lean back too far, tip over the little partition, and hurtle to the floor below. Thick support hose that didn’t begin to hide the wormy purple veins strangled her stout legs. She balanced precariously on coal black heels that choked her swollen feet. The lenses in her glasses were bifocaled and thick as a serving dish.

  She stumbled on the edge of the carpet. She slipped on the painted wood floor.

  Mrs. Moore’s lips barely moved when she talked. I could only count the hairs in her mustache for so long before boredom settled in and a little voice began to frolic in my mind. One push. Just one shove, push the old biddy over the edge. Do it. Now. One push. I could feel the act gathering as my muscle juices built up, my body was getting ready to rise, and then I felt the tingly needle of anticipation, that preceded the heady rush as if I were pushing her, as if it were actually happening. Like pushing Daddy out of the haymow.

  I let the feeling tantalize me, ride me. I could feel my palms sticking on her shiny purple Sunday dress. She would topple so easily.

  I could picture the panic and the horror on all their little faces. They didn’t grow up on a farm as I did. I’d seen so many dead things. Maybe she wouldn’t die. Not right away. What would happen if I pushed her? I folded my hands and crushed them between my knees. I was saved from damnation when the organist struck the first chords announcing the end of Sunday school. We lined up, marched single file, and joined the main congregation downstairs for the morning service.

  I slid into the pew beside Miss Palmer, shut my eyes, and began to swing my legs.

  The Devil and his demons placed the spires on your churches; baptized children in His name. I kicked the bottom of the hymnal lodged in the holder on the back of the pew in front of me in rhythm to the words beating through my head. The Devil and his demons placed the spires on your churches; baptized children in His name…baptized in His name…children in His name…Devil (kick) demons (kick) baptized (kick) children. Your Daddy…Uncle Bert…they had to be stopped…

  I opened my eyes and quit kicking the back of the pew in front of me. Where the heck were these thoughts coming from? I knew they weren’t my own thoughts. I looked around the church, the whisper still damp in my ear.

  The congregation was in silent prayer. Every cell phone was respectfully turned off. Brother Johnston’s bald head glowed at me tenderly; it wasn’t he, he hadn’t spoken. Miss Palmer stood beside me with her eyes only half-closed, always slyly checking to see who might be watching her.

  I smoothed down my skirt and was rethinking my irreverent slouch when the double doors at the back of the chapel opened and the air became warm and so humid it was like being in a pan of water.

  I can’t say why I didn’t scream and run or at least duck under the pew. Maybe television has inured me to the fantastic, the strange, and the peculiar. Even the monstrous. Perhaps I thought it was a joke at first or that we were being filmed. Or perhaps I’d finally gone mad. I certainly had the right.

  In any case I just sat there, a TV-trained immobile spectator while a swarm of the aliens, demons, or followers of the revivalists, more likely that’s what they were, preceded by the two more recognizably human of the bunch, the ones I came to know as the leader and his pale wife, passed down the aisle and up over the altar, leaving the carpet rumpled and soaked in their wake.

  They surrounded and incorporated Brother Johnston. He didn’t scream. He actually chuckled; which probably led me further into believing there was nothing wrong, a few of the parishioners even laughed with him. But when the damp and misshapen monsters backed away, Brother Johnston was gone, just gone. I figured later that must have been when he became part of them, because from that time on they knew my name, my sorrows, and my weaknesses. But they weren’t there to give me comfort as he’d been.

  Thus, they came into what had been Miss Palmer’s church, and relativity changed; it was her church no longer, this new leader became the host.

  It all seemed normal at the time. Even the fact I never heard him speak; his words rang only in my mind. In retrospect, there were so many oddities, which should have sent me as far from him as I could find a means to travel.

  I was unable to discuss his physical appearance with anyone; my tongue tied as soon as I tried to describe what I saw when I looked at him. If I tried to write or type a description of him, my fingers stumbled. Any attempt to take a photo of him came out blank. I attempted signing and my arms went wild. I had to assume everyone else’s experience of him was as intoxicating as mine.

  Miss Palmer began to keep strange hours. I followed her to the church one night and watched her with the leader; both of them were flirting and laughing. The light from the full moon hit the stained glass and glorified them both. My heart broke outside another, plainer, window; his wife fumed in the choir loft.

  Miss Palmer came home in the morning, glowing. “You’re going to be baptized. The leader and I are preparing the program together, choosing the songs, and some bits of poetry.”

  “Not Bible verses?” I said.

  She stared at me for a moment, a line between her eyebrows. Then she smiled, “No, just some bits of poetry.”

  Her period of delight went on for a week then one morning she came home subdued.

  “What’s wrong?” I touched her hand. She was cold and damp. The early morning light showed the tiny green lines that crisscrossed the whites of her eyes.

  She put her hand on my forehead. “You’re skin’s burning. You’re sick. Let’s get you in a cold bath.”

  I raved in the bath; I tried to warn her about demons and drowning.

  She put me to bed in a thin gown beneath a cool cotton sheet. After she left I tried the door. She’d locked it.

  “Miss Palmer, let me out. Talk to me.”

  I heard her crying on the other side of my door.

  That night she came to me, her skin pearlescent, she was leaving again.

  “Miss Palmer?”

  She pushed me to my pillow; a damp handprint shimmered on my shoulder.

  On her return, she locked herself in her room. This time her sobs were so plaintive I pulled a c
hair up to her door and waited for the night to pass. Her cries ceased, light came in the windows, but the door never opened.

  Finally, I broke it down. All manner of damp footprints covered the floor. It was obvious she’d been drawn out the window. A streak of brackish water marked a wicked path down the side of her bed, across the floor, and over the windowsill.

  I ran to the church.

  They enfolded me. You’re our child now. We’re baptizing our children today.

  They pressed a goblet of green honey wine to my lips and held back my head.

  The dangling horizon, quicker to the sight than Earth’s sky should ever dare to droop suspended at the twelve tiny figures in a shadow box. Gray cotton on the cardboard above, a tiny mirror denoting the black lake before me, icy, hungry. My bare feet tentative in the frozen blades of silver.

  We stood in the cemetery.

  The lake was different now for they were in power.

  The breeze mocked the thin white gowns of the initiates calling the rose to our cheeks. We blinked into the wind, licked the dryness from our lips, and struggled to hide our shame with slender arms as the rough muslin inflamed our virgin skin.

  Then he was ready, arms everywhere, bare below his several knees, ghost of a tremble in his hand, One rule that must be obeyed. Do not open your eyes in our water. You will not know what you will see.

  The ceremony had come to an ellipsis…

  Holding for the first sight of my teacher, this had started out as Miss Palmer’s affair after all, she’d spent too many darknesses with him sweating, apparently over which melodies would be sung and when. Laughing together, they’d chosen the poetry that would roll across his golden tongue.

  Someone knew where she was…someone surely knew.

  Hanging his head, the leader rubbed his neck and closed his eye, as was his wont.

  A dust devil blew by us playing with a bit of burlap.

  The cold families huddled, whispered, and glared at me; the orphan farm girl, conversant with swamp gas and death.