He recognized, as before, the voice that was his wife’s—except that Frances was dead, drowned in the black water of the Perdido.
Billy stepped out into the hallway. The carpet was damp beneath his feet. He could smell the water, and knew that it was from the river. It felt gritty on the soles of his feet, and he knew that to be Perdido mud. He walked across to the door of Elinor’s sitting room. He quietly turned the knob and inched the door open.
He wasn’t so startled by the sudden clarity of Elinor’s voice as he was by the light from her bedroom that fell suddenly aslant the leg of his pajamas. He stood still and listened.
“.. .too late,” Elinor said.
“No, it’s not,” came the other voice, Frances’s, except that Frances was drowned. “No, it’s not, Mama. But it’s going to be if you stay here. You’re old, you’re so old. And it hurts me when I see you getting older every day. I come to see you whenever I can, whenever I can make the change—but that’s not all the time. And Nerita never makes it—I don’t think she can. What happens if I can’t do it anymore? You should come stay with us, Mama. If you came back with us, you wouldn’t get old, you might even get young again. Mama, Nerita and I would take good care of you!”
“I don’t want to leave, darling.”
“Why not? What’s keeping you here? Daddy’s dead. James is dead. Queenie is dead.”
“Billy—” said Elinor.
“Billy stays here because of you. He doesn’t want to leave you alone, that’s all. If you went away, Billy would go off somewhere and have him a good time, I know he would, and it’d be good for him, too. Poor old Billy! You know, the other night I opened the door of my old room, and there was Billy—”
“You shouldn’t have! What if you had waked him up?”
“Mama,” laughed the someone who couldn’t have been Frances, though she had Frances’s voice and called Elinor Mama, “don’t you think Billy knows something’s going on?”
“He’s never said anything.”
“Neither has Zaddie. Don’t you think Zaddie knows?”
“Zaddie certainly knows,” agreed Elinor.
“And Billy does, too. Anyway, he didn’t wake up. And I wanted to show Nerita what her daddy looked like.”
“What did Nerita think?” Elinor asked curiously.
“She thought he looked old. And he does. Poor old Billy.”
Billy pushed open the sitting room door all the way and then stepped into the light. Elinor sat in one of the plush new armchairs she had bought after Oscar’s death, and on the edge of the bed sat Frances, his wife. Yet it wasn’t Frances. It couldn’t have been, for Frances had been born in 1922, and would have been nearly fifty now, had she not drowned in the Perdido. This Frances was no more than thirty-two or thirty-three, and she looked like the Frances that Billy last remembered.
“Frances?” said Billy.
Frances laughed, drawing her cotton robe across her breast. “Hey, Billy,” she said shyly. “Why haven’t you gotten married in all these years?”
“Billy,” said Elinor, not sternly but sadly, “go back to bed.”
Billy stepped further into the room. He stood behind Elinor’s chair, and looked at his wife.
“Are you alive?” he asked.
“No,” said Elinor.
Frances shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m not.”
“Who is Nerita?” Billy asked.
“Nerita is your other little girl,” said Frances. “Nerita didn’t come tonight.”
“But some nights she does come,” said Billy. “And she sings?”
“You’ve heard her?” asked Elinor, looking up at Billy over her shoulder.
“Yes,” said Billy, “I’ve heard her. And when you opened my door the other night, I was awake, but I didn’t open my eyes.”
“Go back to bed,” said Elinor.
“You’re not sad about me, are you?” Frances asked curiously.
Billy shook his head. “I never was,” he admitted.
“Good,” said Frances. “Then go back to bed, Billy, and whenever you hear Nerita and me coming upstairs to visit Mama, don’t come out, understand?”
“You’re dead,” he said quietly. “You don’t look dead. You live at the bottom of the junction, don’t you? I remember, on the day we decided to get married, you took me on top of the levee and we went down and looked at the junction, and you told me that you had been down there. And that’s where you are now, isn’t it—at the bottom of the junction.”
“Billy—” Elinor began.
“Are you going back with Frances?” Billy asked his mother-in-law.
“Yes, she is,” answered Frances quickly.
“No, I’m not,” said Elinor. “I’m going to stay here with you, Billy.”
“Mama—”
“Shhh!” said Elinor. “I made my choice a long time ago, Frances. I made my choice on Easter Sunday of 1919, when I sat on the edge of that bed in the corner room of the Osceola. I’m not going back on that choice now.”
“You could come back, Mama!”
Elinor shook her head. She seemed to have forgotten that Billy was there, or perhaps she wanted him to hear.
“I can’t go back,” she said. “You make the choice once, and that’s all. You were born here, in this room, darling, and you made the choice to go back to the river. I was born—well, I wasn’t born in any feather bed—and one day when this whole town was under water, I saw a white man and a colored man rowing along in a little green boat and I made my decision. So I’ll finish out my time here.”
“Mama, it’s such a waste!” cried Frances.
“It’s not a waste. I haven’t regretted it for one single minute. Not even when Oscar died and I knew that it was Mary-Love and John Robert DeBorde-nave who killed him—that he died because of me and what I had done to them. I didn’t even regret that, darling.”
Frances slipped down off the edge of the bed onto the floor at her mother’s feet.
“Mama, what will Nerita and I do without you? How am I supposed to let you grow old and die? You’re already so old now!”
“There’s nothing you can do, darling. Not a thing. I have Billy here”—she hadn’t forgotten him, and reached up and grasped his hand—”and Billy will take care of me. Billy, that’s why I’ve kept you on.”
“Why?” he asked.
“To take care of me when I die.”
“Elinor—” he began to protest.
“You and Zaddie are going to have to protect me,” she said in a quiet voice.
“Protect you from what?” Frances cried, looking up into her mother’s face.
“When the time comes, they’ll know.”
“Nerita and I will protect you! We’ll protect you from whatever it is.”
“You won’t be able to,” said Elinor, “but Billy and Zaddie will be here.”
“Mama, do you know when it’s going to be?”
Elinor only smiled. “I promise you, darling, that before it happens, I will come out into the river once more—just once more—and say goodbye to you and Nerita.”
The day after the melancholy party, Lilah went back to New York and Mr. Woskoboinikow. Tommy Lee, distressed and forlorn, threw himself into the Caskey oil business with redoubled ardor. He was down at the wells every morning in time to speak to the third-shift workers before they drove back to their trailer homes in Cantonement and Jay. He talked to Miriam and to Billy on the telephone two or three times each day, and more than once he went with Miriam on business trips and was introduced about by her. Elinor helped him in the selection of several new suits for these trips, and on the whole Tommy Lee made a good impression—if nothing else, he looked substantial. Besides, he came with Miriam’s recommendation, and that counted for a lot in New York, Houston, and New Orleans.
It gradually became known in Babylon and Perdido that Tommy Lee had been disappointed in love. He had hoped, and all his family had hoped, that he would marry Lilah Bronze; but Lilah, herself tr
ained by Miriam, had done a sort of Miriam-like thing and married herself to a man with a name that was two inches long and who declared on a stack of Bibles that he would never set foot in Alabama again. The civil rights business in Selma hadn’t been all that long ago, and people hadn’t quite forgiven the Northerners, the new Carpetbaggers, who had come down and interfered so mischievously. And Lilah Bronze had gone off and married one of those unprincipled men. However, through all this Tommy Lee had gained some depth in the eyes of the community because of his broken heart; people understood that he threw himself into his work in order to forget. Mamas kept their daughters away, “until the boy finds himself again.” Tommy Lee, by this crook of history, became an adult without the burden of actually having to get married, the usual rite of passage in a man’s development in Alabama.
Lucille and Grace were proud of Tommy Lee. They never forgot to thank God in their prayers each night, as they knelt beside each other at the edge of the bed, that Tommy Lee hadn’t rebelled and run off to Chicago to fight the police, that he hadn’t grown his hair long or swallowed LSD. They gave thanks that he was there with them most days at lunchtime, and every evening at suppertime; and that his laughter, raucous and echoing, could be heard all over the house at night as he watched television with his friends from the oil rigs.
Late one morning in the spring of 1970, Tommy Lee was paddling his boat through the swamp in a course that was as directly northward as the waterways and hummocks would allow. He didn’t like to use the motor because of the noise it made and the smell of gasoline that poured up out of it, and besides, the exercise always served to increase his appetite, and considering the tortuousness of the swamp, paddling wasn’t that much slower. He had spent the morning with the oilmen at rigs number 5 and 8, and was now heading back to the farm for lunch. He had grown used to the swamp, and knew his way about well enough to find his way in and out, which was all that really mattered. He kept a small boat tethered at the southern extremity of the farm proper, just where the swamp began. In the bottom of the boat and under a tight tarpaulin, he had stored a case of beer, the rifle that Elinor had given him for Christmas a few years back, and the latest men’s magazines in a plastic bag. The men’s magazines were for himself—he was fearful of Grace or Lucille coming across them in the house; the beer was for the oil rig workers; and the rifle was for the alligators who occasionally swam lazily after his small boat, as if in hope that so large a morsel as Tommy Lee Burgess would faint from the heat and tumble over the edge of the boat into the oily water.
This morning, with his stomach growling, Tommy Lee paddled alone through the swamp, thinking of nothing but the lunch he knew that Luvadia was preparing for him. He had reached a point about a mile from the northernmost oil rig, but still half a mile from where he kept the boat tied up. By the sun’s position he knew he was heading in the right direction, so he didn’t pay much attention to the particular scenery through which he was passing. It all looked very much alike in one place as another anyway.
Tommy Lee decided that Luvadia was cooking either fried corn or okra for him. The more he thought about it he hoped that it wasn’t going to be just okra, and no fried corn at all. Tommy Lee didn’t understand how anyone could like okra unless it was deep-fried with lots of batter, and then you had to pretend it was soggy shrimp inside. His boat must have passed over a shallow spot, for his paddle suddenly caught in the mud. The boat jerked, and Tommy Lee fell forward, knocking his knees painfully against the case of beer.
He had let go of the paddle, and it remained sticking upward in that mud. The boat wavered and swayed as Tommy Lee righted himself and reached for the paddle.
The paddle suddenly lifted itself and flew high into the air.
Tommy Lee, astounded, watched its ascent, and his mouth fell open as it hung in the air for a moment before falling back into the water, twenty yards or so from the boat.
Tommy Lee looked over the side, and saw that something looked back at him through the oily black water—a round flat face, either green or black, he couldn’t tell for certain, with perfectly circular bulging eyes, a wide lipless mouth, and two dilated holes for nostrils.
It was not his reflection, for it distinctly lay beneath the surface of the water. It was not at all like an alligator, or any kind offish ever caught in these— or any other—waters. It was not a drowned animal snared in the submerged roots of one of the cypresses. It was not anything at all within Tommy Lee’s experience. And Tommy Lee didn’t have a paddle anymore.
He turned right around in the boat, and pulled the cord on the motor, praying that it would start. Last week, he thought, that’s when I used it last. No, not last week, last month.
The motor didn’t start.
Tommy Lee pulled the cord again. The motor gurgled, then died.
Suddenly the boat was jerked backward. Tommy Lee lost his balance for a moment and slipped awkwardly off the seat onto the bottom of the boat. As he struggled to get back up, at the same time reaching for the motor, the boat was tipped precariously to the right. Tommy Lee reached out to grab the sides of the boat in an attempt to right it by casting his weight to the left, but his right hand touched not the edge of the boat, but something else—something quite wet and slippery.
He jerked his hand away and looked. There was an arm, definitely greenish-gray and not black at all, ending in a wide, splayed, webbed hand, thrust over the edge of the boat. The hand was pressed flat against the seat.
Tommy Lee grabbed the plastic package of men’s magazines and hit the hand with it. The hand didn’t even flinch. Tommy Lee flung the magazines aside, picked up the rifle and banged the hand with the butt. The hand seemed to curl slightly and give a little quiver, but it remained pressed against the seat. Tommy Lee realized then that the boat was moving slowly away to the right. The thing wasn’t trying to climb up into the boat, it was only swimming away with it.
Tommy Lee didn’t dare look over the side.
He turned the rifle around and took aim at the hand. Yet he did not shoot, suddenly realizing that the bullet might pierce not only the hand, but the seat and the bottom of the boat as well. He did not relish foundering in the swamp with that.
He tried, without making too much disturbance, to get the motor going but it would not start. The boat was moving inexorably toward one of the larger hummocks in that part of the swamp, one that Tommy Lee recognized; one to which he had even given a name. He called it the Nest, because of all the alligators’ nests that fringed it.
Not knowing what else to do, he sat next to the motor and repeatedly pulled the cord, keeping an eye on the hand as he did so and trying to keep the rifle from slipping off his lap.
The motor started at last. He turned the rudder, and gave it all the gas.
The boat still moved inexorably toward the Nest. The power of the motor could not affect the direction of the boat by even a single degree.
With his leg pressed against the rudder to keep it in position, Tommy Lee raised the rifle and stared through the sights at the elbow of the creature where it appeared atop the edge of the boat. When it stood out of the water—if it could stand—Tommy Lee would shoot it.
He now began to think that the boat was moving too slowly. Faster, faster, he thought. Every few seconds, he had to wipe away the sweat on his hands and brow.
As the boat neared the Nest, for once he saw no alligators. All the nests appeared to have been abandoned. He heard no birds, but he did hear something else. A singing—there was no other word for it— high-pitched, droning, like nothing he had ever heard. He peered into the high grass and the trunks of the cypress on the Nest but could see nothing. Then, at the same moment that he noticed two mounds of dried grass that looked almost like huts large enough for a large man to crawl into half-hidden among the dense scrub, he heard a second voice in unison with the first. After a few moments, however, it branched off into a melody of its own, with a slightly different quality. The boat was being drawn ever nearer the large hummock of dr
y grass, massive cypress, and tangled underbrush.
Then, quite without warning, the boat swung around and floated alongside the hummock, past half a dozen large empty alligator nests. In some of them Tommy Lee could count the eggs, and when did alligators ever abandon their eggs? He could hear the two voices quite clearly now. Through the sight of the rifle he picked out their locations on the hummock. He was quite certain of their positions in that high grass; he wondered if he ought to shoot. Without even having consciously made that decision, he cocked the rifle and was about to pull the trigger when he was startled by the sound of something pulling up out of the water, and the addition of a third voice to that singing, a third voice that at first was gurgly, but soon became as clear and pristine as the two others. Over the edge of the boat, Tommy Lee saw a large flat perfectly smooth head. Its features were turned away from him.
Tommy Lee moved the gun forward until the barrel was no more than a foot from the back of that glistening head.
“Nerita!” The word came sharply across the water from the high grass.
The head disappeared beneath the water.
Tommy Lee automatically swung the rifle and took aim for the place from where he had heard the voice. He pulled the trigger and the rifle fired, knocking him painfully against the motor with its recoil. The boat had evidently been released by the creature that had had control of it, for now the motor shot the boat away from the large hummock.