I leaned over the stall and looked down on Pinky, who was currently digging a hole to China in the corner. She looked at me, grunted through her snout, and flopped her ears forward.
I looked across the overgrown yard to the house and heard Maggie throwing things in the kitchen. I heard a glass break, a pause, then several more crashes for what I assumed was good measure. A door slammed. Blue looked at me, I shrugged, and his face told me what I already knew. We were nearing the end.
Something had been severed. It wasn't Maggie's voice that told me this. It was her eyes. When she looked at me, she was looking at the world beyond me where her dreams once lived. The brilliant light that had once been there was dim and flickering.
"What can heal the human soul?" I whispered.
Blue leaned against me and raised his cold nose to my hand. I stepped into my clothes and admitted that I had grown angry at something I could not see or touch. The irony of my life smacked me in the face: while I could protect Pastor John from a raging fire, I could not protect my wife from that which threatened to kill her.
I walked out the back of the barn along the edge of the corn and tried counting the stars. I felt little and insignificant-one amid the many.
My sense of helplessness pressed down on my shoulders, grew tighter across my chest, and squeezed out the air. I could not escape the sense of blame. Like a wave of vomit I could not control, the ache cut my knees out from under me, sent me to the dirt, and then exited my heart like a cannon shot. I knelt, clutching the earth, gasping for air, and trying not to let the split in my heart split me.
MIDNIGHT CAME, AND I CRAWLED OUT OF THE FIELD. THE large green leaves of the corn slapped at my arms, and the tasseled tops towered now some two feet above me. I crept toward the barn, slipped through the garden behind the azaleas, and stood next to the barn door staring at the staircase.
Blue looked up at me and even shook his head, but I scratched him between the ears and told him, "I'm just checking on her." I climbed up the stairs into the loft. The room was cold and dark, and I could hear Maggie sleeping in the silence. She lay in the bed, mounded beneath the covers, breathing heavily under the oral sedation she'd grown accustomed to.
I tiptoed to the bedside table, picked up her bottle of sleeping pills, and clicked off the lid. One left. There were five this time last night.
I knelt next to the bed and slid my hand beneath hers. It was limp, frail, and did not respond to mine. I slid my hands beneath the sheets and found her cold feet. I pulled some socks from my drawer, slipped them over her heels, and covered her up. The fan was spinning like a tornado, and the AC was set on "snow." I knew our power bill would shoot through the roof, but I didn't adjust a thing. If that's what she needed, then that's what she needed.
I climbed down, walked across the yard, and found the answering machine light blinking quietly in the dark. The red light reminded me of the hospital and the machines that had monitored Maggie. Maybe we'd escaped the confining walls, but the monitoring continued. I pushed the button and heard Dr. Frank's voice.
"Dylan, it's Frank Palmer. Just checking on Maggie. I'm working the graveyard shift, so call me anytime tonight."
I dialed the number of the delivery ward and asked for Dr. Frank, and the receptionist paged him. A few minutes later he picked up the phone.
"Hey, Dylan, how're things?"
"I'm not too sure."
"Any sign of her cycle starting?"
"I don't think so."
Dr. Frank took a deep breath. "I don't want to give you any false hope. If you don't see something tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, I think, well ..."
"I understand."
"How are her emotions? Is she on an even keel?"
I scratched my head. "No, not really."
"On a scale of one to ten, ten being really out of whack, where is she?"
"Reaching ten."
He paused as though he was checking his watch. "Today's Wednesday. Why don't you call the office Monday, and I'll tell the nurses to work her in. We probably ought to start her on a hormone replacement therapy. Like we discussed, it's routine for menopausal or sterile women."
The word sterile echoed through my head. "I'll call Monday."
He hung up, and I returned the phone to the receiver. When I turned around, Maggie was standing in the doorway, wrapped in a sheet. Her face was as white as a ghost, and she was barefooted. We stood looking at each other.
Finally she spoke. "What'd he say?"
Her eyes were dark and hollow. "Dr. Frank."
"He said he hoped we'd have a good weekend."
Maggie blinked and waited.
I shrugged. "He wants me to bring you in Monday."
"Why?"
"'Cause by the end of the weekend, we ought to know one way or the other."
Maggie's finger slid along the lines of the wall calendar. She reached what would be the end of the weekend, pulled the calendar off the wall, and pitched it into the trash. Then she turned and walked back to the barn.
I walked to the front porch and leaned against the screen door. The streetlight lit the mailbox and reminded me that I had not checked the mail in two days. I walked down the drive and filled my arms with junk mail, then walked back to the house. Sitting at the kitchen table, eyeing the barn door, I filtered through the pile.
The letter from the adoption agency was stuffed somewhere in the middle. I froze, eyed the hallway again, and then slit the top of the envelope.
"Dr and Mrs. Styles, We regret to inform you . . . "
It was signed "Sincerely," which I doubted, and then included a postscript, "You may appeal this decision in writing," and gave detailed instructions on how to do that. The following page was a check in the amount of my deposit.
Over the last few weeks, the facts of my life had festered like a splinter and were now tender to the slightest touch. The letter was like somebody rubbing the tip of the splinter with sandpaper.
I'd had just about enough of this committee. I folded the letter, stuck it in my pocket, and closed my eyes. I needed to work on my appeal, pay off my debt at the bank, and figure out what I was going to tell Maggie.
LAST JULY, AS THE HEAT OF SUMMER AND SWARMS of mosquitoes arrived in force, Maggie and I packed enough food for two or three days, whistled for Blue, and hopped on the raft. We shoved off, and I stood at the rear manning the rudder while Maggie lay across the deck tanning, talking with me, and dipping her feet in the river as Blue paced back and forth across the front spotting fish.
The first night we pulled into a small cove, anchored, lit the butane stove, fried fish, scrambled some eggs, and then sipped coffee while Maggie laid her head on my chest and the stars shot by overhead. Two magical days passed before we even blinked. And by the time we thought about returning, we'd been on the raft almost four days. It's a good thing the fish were biting.
Reluctantly we turned around, cranked the Evinrude, and began puttering home. On our trip north, Maggie began spotting flowers that had bloomed, blown off the stem, and landed in the water and now floated carelessly along. They were white and blue, and Maggie said they looked like some sort of iris. She began scooping them off the water, and in an hour or so she had twenty or thirty blooms.
She noticed that the blooms were spilling from the fingers of the Salkehatchie, and her curiosity grew. At the mouth of one narrow stream leading into the river, we saw half a dozen blooms floating single file behind one larger bloom, like ducklings following a drake. We pulled the raft up alongside a tree, marked the tree with a piece of rope, and puttered home.
The next day we borrowed Amos's fishing canoe, an Old Town, and returned to our rope-marked tree. Maggie wanted to find the source of those blooms, but the raft was too big and bulky, and walking was not an option. No one walked in the swamp. Well, not unless you were Jesus. You could be ankledeep one minute, and in the next you'd be looking up from the bottom of a twenty-foot hole. The Salkehatchie has a way and a mind all its own, and you don't
go in there unless you've got a strategy for getting out. Amos and I grew up listening to stories of lost Confederate gold, escaping slaves chained at the ankles, lost Germans manning a submarine, and Indians who lived in the trees.
Rain had overflowed the swamp and, like tidal waters along the shore, spilled over the edges into the larger body, the Salkehatchie River, that ran alongside it. The flooding happened to coincide with the blooming of what Maggie later learned was a rare iris that grew almost exclusively in a unique combination of two types of water that collided in the swamp. The compost created by the tannic acid in the water, the decomposition in the swamp, the water temperature, and the gentle flow of the water from an underground spring combined to make the perfect petri dish for what we soon dubbed Maggie's Iris. I'm pretty sure some botanist had already labeled it, but he wasn't around to correct us, so the name stuck.
The myths surrounding the swamp were many, but what we knew for certain was that the timber had never been cut, ever. Meaning that some trees in the middle were three or four hundred years old, and the canopy in some spots could be a hundred feet high and make the day seem like night. It was the quietest and most peaceful, untouched, virgin, ancient, and prehistoric land I'd ever seen. Few people had ventured far enough in to really get a look, because the first mile or so could be rather creepy. But when you're married to someone like Maggie, who's passionate about plants and where they come from, creepy just adds to the ambience.
We paddled in past our rope, up and into the swamp where the finger lost its boundary and bled into the landscape. Within a few hundred yards we were surrounded by nothing but trees and water. The trees, wide at the bottom and skinny at the top, grew up out of the black water like natural skyscrapers. Once in, everything looked the same, so I took a compass reading and poled slowly past the trees, the smallest of which were bigger at the base than the hood of Pastor John's Cadillac. While the silence engulfed us, Maggie pointed and I poled.
Behind us in the water, the pollen, which had fallen en masse and coated the water in a yellowish haze, was now marked by the wake of the canoe. If we wanted out, the only markers we had were my compass and that oozing trail back through the pollen, which, given a few hours, would bubble, roll, and flow its way along, covering up any track we'd made. Meaning our trail in the pollen was about as effective as bread crumbs. Couldn't trust it for very long.
Occasionally we'd look into the water and see where an alligator or snake had rolled along the top of the water and made a similar cut in the pollen. The more I looked, the more I noticed that the surface of the swamp was marred with thousands of such scratches and cuts. Dotted amid all of this traffic atop the yellow brick road were the blooms that Maggie was chasing.
And me? I was chasing Maggie, and Oz lay somewhere in the distance.
I poled for hours, dipping under limbs, into the hearts of great canopies, around the bases of trees wrapped with vines and snakes, and over alligator holes and turtle perches. The coolness of the swamp did little to deter the mosquitoes, which had descended straight out of the Jurassic period. The farther in we went and the closer we seemed to get to the source of the blooms, the more Maggie beamed. After four or five miles, she was standing in the front of the canoe, leaning over the bow, pointing me onward like Lewis or Clark.
At dusk, I grew a bit antsy. I did not want to spend the night in the bottom of this canoe floating in this swamp, but I knew absent a miracle that was about to happen. We were almost out of insect spray, and when darkness came I had a feeling that the really big bugs would come out to play. And despite Maggie's Lewis and Clark mentality at the moment, the first really big bug that dropped on her during the night would end her tour of fun and send her across the top of the water like Peter on the Sea of Galilee.
Luckily, we never got that far. Thirty minutes before it grew too dark to see my hand in front of my face, Maggie pointed and started jumping up and down like a puppy in the window at a pet store. I poled another hundred yards and turned into a clearing where the moon, out early, was shining down like a God-sized spotlight. Maggie sat down, dropped her shoulders, and gasped.
A natural spring, flowing up out of nowhere, rose up like a small bubbling fountain and filtered through hundreds of wild irises that were hooked together via their roots and floating free above the spring. They were connected to nothing other than one another and evidently feeding off whatever was shooting up out of the earth. And given their defined perimeter, it was pretty obvious that they would grow only where the black swamp water met the clear springwater. As soon as the water diluted into the swamp, the flowers quit growing.
Maggie sat back on the bow of the canoe, sweeping her fingers through the tips of the irises in the emerald-green water and inhaling the pungency of the swamp through her lungs and into her limbs. She was surrounded by a sea of white and blue that looked almost fluorescent in the growing moonlight. It lit on her hair, which she had pulled back and up, and then cascaded down her shoulders and spilled into the water below. "Promise me that one day we can come back here."
The gates of the Emerald City opened, and I nodded.
I SIGNED MY APPEAL LETTER, DATED IT, AND STUCK ON THE stamp. It was noon, the sun was high, and Maggie had yet to emerge from our room in the hayloft, so I cranked the tractor, ambled across the road to the ruins of Amos's house, and pulled around back, where his shed stood lonely and isolated. I wedged open the door, picked my way through the banana spiders and cobwebs, and unearthed the canoe. I strapped it across the sides of the wheel wells and drove down to the river.
An hour later, draped in sweat and muscle ache, I reached the marked tree and noticed the first of the blooms floating atop the water. I turned into the swamp, took a compass reading, and began making my Osceola-like journey through the limbs and cypress stumps.
Two hours and five miles later, I had paddled my way into what some might have called the heart of darkness. Truth was, I was a long way from nowhere, but if this place had a heart, it was anything but dark. The farther in you paddled, the closer to the light you came-that's the secret of the swamp.
The blooms dotted the surface of the swamp like bread crumbs, just as they had the year before. I followed the trail and finally pulled up beneath the tree limbs, breaking into the cathedral canopy.
The sunlight lit the tops of the irises in a checkerboard of white and blue dotted with golden-yellow tips. The roots waved in the emerald-green water like mermaid fins. Somewhere high above me an owl hooted, and all around me the pungent ripeness of the decomposing yet perpetually reborn swamp filled my nose like menthol.
I worked quickly. The stalks were stiff, some three feet long, and I laid them in the bow of the canoe, blooms up. Within ten minutes I had about two armfuls. I turned the canoe, pulled hard on the paddle, and, thanks to the opposition of the current, landed the canoe on the riverbank below the house about two and a half hours later.
The sun was down, crickets had come up, and a light breeze lifted along the river. It would be a nice night. I grabbed the flowers, hopped on the tractor, and let third gear roll me home. I stopped at the barn, hopped off, and bounded up the steps, hoping I'd find Maggie awake.
She was sitting at the table, dressed in baggy sweats and hovering over a cup of tea, her fingers nervously tapping the sides of the mug. Her face was thin and pale-like her eyes. She opened her mouth when I walked in, but closed it when she saw the flowers.
I was dripping with both sweat and river water. I didn't know what to say, so I walked to the sink, laid down the entire bundle of stalks, and start filling the basin with water. Her eyes watered, and she shook her head, then walked to the sink, gently feeling the blooms. She shook her head again and loosed a tear that fell like a BASE jumper down toward her once-painted toenails that were now chipped and peeling.
Her voice was hoarse as if she hadn't used it much. "Same place?" she whispered.
I nodded and watched her filter her fingers through the blooms as she would through the hai
r of a child.
"You follow the trail on the water?"
I nodded again.
She sat down, folded her arms, and looked at the floor as I leaned against the opposite countertop. There were six feet and a thousand miles between us.
When she crossed her legs, her bent knee raised her sweatpants just above the ankle, revealing a leg that hadn't been shaved in more than a week. Maybe two. I wanted to say something, anything to keep the conversation going. I pointed at the irises. "I wanted you to ... well." Then I pointed at her stomach. "How's your tummy?" The words slipped out before I had time to take them back.
She reached up, grabbed a single bloom between her index finger and thumb, shook her head slightly, and then snapped off the bloom like a dead twig. She dropped the bloom in the sink, folded her arms again as if a subzero wind had just blown in through the cracks of the floor, and walked out on the porch, where the curtain seemed to be closing on the stage of our lives.
I looked through the kitchen window at the corn standing tall, still, and silent. The cotton was no different. I had only been to one Broadway show, Riverdance, with Maggie in New York, and when they finished that magnificent, glorious show, we jumped from our seats-our faces beaming and hearts racing-and clapped for fifteen minutes while the dancers bowed and smiled. Looking through the window, I heard no encore.
I SHOWERED, SHAVED HALF MY FACE IN FRONT OF the cracked glass, turned and shaved the other half, and was sitting on the porch when Maggie walked out the door. She hadn't changed, still wore no shoes, and her hair hadn't been brushed out of her face. The only change showed in her eyes-they were red and puffier.
I stood up. I'd have taken her anywhere.
Blue circled behind her and licked her toes, and she pointed toward the river-her eyes lost beyond the horizon. "I'm going for a walk."
I set down my glass. "I'll go with?"
She held up a hand and shook her head. Without looking at me, she said, "I'll go."