The voice was like a warm, comforting hand, but Julian couldn’t help shouting, “Where the hell’s the water valve to the house? I’m flooded out, here.”
“If you got water on the floors, don’t go after that pump switch in the panel box. It’ll knock you into the next world. Look under the sink and turn that third valve to the right.”
He sloshed to the kitchen and did as he was told. With a house-shaking crash, the dining-room plaster fell all at once. Shivering, he ran back to the phone, wet up to the knees, and climbed onto the chair. “What do I do now, Obie? All the plaster in the place is coming down.”
The voice drifted in from Georgia, sleepy and soft. “You can’t afford no plaster crew, that’s for sure.” After a pause, he said, “Might be time to sell out.”
“Never,” he yelled into the receiver. “I’ll never leave here in a million years.”
“One time, I said I’d never give up my tattoos.”
“Thanks, but I don’t need your moralizing lesson. I need you to come back and fix things.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, but it sounds like things is past fixin’.”
Something dropped onto the kitchen floor like a truckload of gravel. “What can I do about the plaster?”
“That plaster’s the least of your problems.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you don’t know I can’t tell you.”
The light fixture above Julian’s head filled with water and popped off in a shower of blue sparks, and he dropped the phone. He was blind and trembling in the watery dark, and he began to struggle down the hall toward his outbuilding, desperate for the warmth of the red-hot stove. When he opened the back door, he saw that the old kitchen house had turned into a windblown orange fireball, streamers of flame running toward him through the grass. He stumbled outside and began stamping at the brush until he understood that with its brick porch and pillars the big house would probably not catch fire. Through a sidelight at the rear door he watched the flames race in the wind, flowing under his car and fanning out to light the corncrib, the smokehouse, and the big sagging barn, which went up in a howl of crackling lumber and dried-out hay. At one point, he tried to call the Poxley volunteer fire department, but the creosote pole that supported the telephone wire had already gone up like a torch, taking his service away. In ten minutes, the fire circled the house, and he climbed up to the belvedere to track its progress as it burned to the ditches surrounding his tract, taking out the pump house and a tractor shed, and incinerating his Dodge, which burned hot and high, killing most of the foliage of the live oak shading it.
At dawn, he could see that but for the roadside oaks everything was gone, burned off the face of the earth as if by a powerful beam of light, the house standing naked and singed in a field of white ash. He stayed up in the belvedere, hoping the new sun would warm him, but daylight brought a shrill wind crying like the voices of all the families, wealthy and destitute, who had lived in his house, who, each in turn, had given it up through death or duress and left it to falter. He stood unshaved and burning with fever, dressed in sopping house slippers and several layers of old robes and cotton jackets, waiting—for what, he wasn’t sure. But in a few minutes he heard a car on the gravel road, looked down through the bubbled glass, and saw them. Even from a distance, he could tell that Mr. Poxley’s mouth had fallen open at the sight of the guttering outbuildings. He and a big deputy stepped out of the police car and walked to the roadside fence. Each man held down his hat with one hand and bore a folded piece of paper in the other, liens and tax bills that would take the place away, and Julian felt house and history shrink to nothing beneath him—a void replaced by a vision of himself, dressed in borrowed clothes and defeat, spirited away that very evening on a lurching bus bound for Memphis and sitting next to some untaught, impoverished person, perhaps even another long-suffering and moralizing carpenter.
Tim Gautreaux’s fifth book, The Missing, is a tale of child abduction and human loss set on the Mississippi River in the 1920s. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and university textbooks. He is currently working on a new collection of short stories. He taught creative writing for over thirty years and retired from Southeastern Louisiana University.
One time I got a letter from a grammar school student who’d read my short story “Welding with Children” and wanted to know what happened to the characters after the tale ended. I was happy that the student thought the short story seemed real enough to trick her into believing it was true. To be honest, I’ve thought this way myself, wondering about the lives of fictional characters beyond the last pages of their capturing works. Then a friend called and asked me to write a story that showed Flannery O’Connor’s influence, and I decided to find out if one of her famous characters could be “continued,” so to speak, carried beyond his set narrative. In early draft I saw this was not enough, was too simplistic, so I borrowed an opposing O’Connor character as well and had the two interact, contrast, and arrive at different destinies. Well, that’s the story.
Laura Lee Smith
THIS TREMBLING EARTH
(from Natural Bridge)
The baby was a little different to begin with. Hard to love. He had a strange, high-pitched cry and dark circles under eyes that were neither blue nor brown, but rather an indiscriminate muddy gray. Long limbs, a brittle appearance. His name was Ethan.
I was there for the delivery. Kristen, my daughter, thrashed in the hospital bed and cried for the epidural long before it was time. She was eighteen. In the delivery room, she held my hand and begged me to make the pain stop, but I only said, “I can’t make it stop, baby. The only way out of it is through it.”
Outside, the air was thick and salty with smoke. “Look at that,” I said, pointing to the window, where billows of smoke trailed through the hospital’s parking lot. “I swear, I think all of Georgia’s burning,” though it was only a wildfire in the Okefenokee, some ten miles away.
Kristen wept. She vomited in a little plastic tray, and then the doctor came in and gave her the epidural. An hour later, Ethan was born. “It’s a boy,” the doctor said, and I couldn’t help it, I thought of Ty, my boy, my almost-man. Once, he was a baby, too. Now he was twenty, which made me forty, which was something I had yet to get my head around.
When Kristen’s baby cried out, his small voice was abrasive, and the rest of the room fell silent. Even when the nurse brought him to Kristen and she put him awkwardly to her breast, no one spoke.
I took a week’s vacation to help with the baby. I’m a bailiff for the Charlton County courts, which means that, among other things, I’m the one to hold the Bible up in front of the defendants and witnesses when they take the stand, ask them if they’re ready to tell the whole truth, so help them God. Almost always they look at me, scared, and they sort of mumble when they say “I will,” and you know they will, damn straight, because that’s a pretty powerful thing, a woman standing with a Bible in her hands calling on the power of God. But sometimes they’re calm, and don’t seem afraid, and they stand a little to the side and don’t look straight at me when they answer, and those are the ones I know are fixing to lie. There’s nothing I can do about that. I’m an honest woman myself, but there’s nothing I can do about a person who’s destined to be a liar.
There was no father, in case you are wondering. The man who impregnated my daughter, the married, middle-aged discount grocer in Folkston who saw an easy mark and went for it, denied the baby was his. He actually sat in my living room and denied it, with Kristen sitting on the couch across from him weeping and shaking her head. “You got the wrong man, sister,” he said. “You are sadly mistaken.” He drove a Dodge Magnum past our house every day on his way to work. Of course there are DNA tests now, but Kristen said to leave him alone, so we did. I thought very seriously about killing him, but I did not know how to go about it, and I was very busy, because I had other people to look after.
We had to leave the
hospital the day after Ethan was born. Kristen cried again and said she wasn’t ready. “Tell it to the government, honey,” the nurse said. “That’s Medicaid for you.” She patted both of us on the arms. “You’ll be OK, darlin’. Y’all got each other.” She leaned close to me and whispered loudly. “Sometimes they ain’t got nobody. No husband, no mama, nobody to help. At least she’s got you.”
I helped Kristen into the front seat of the car. She was slow and sluggish and walked gingerly. She was still wearing maternity jeans and a pilled cotton top with yellowish stains under the arms. Even before the pregnancy, she’d been stout, mulish. Now she was bloated and doughy, her face resembling a quilted, overstuffed pillow. She had a raised, brown mole at the corner of her mouth. On some girls, it might have been considered attractive.
I buckled the baby seat into the back of the car. Ethan started screaming as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot, but Kristen sat silently, slumped against the passenger door, biting her nails.
We drove into the smoke. In Folkston, we stopped at the Krystal. I leaned over the seat and bobbled a pacifier against Ethan’s lips, but he would not take it, so I carried him into the restaurant, wrapped tight in a blue-and-pink hospital receiving blanket and still crying. I bought a sack of burgers and three orders of fries. I was thinking of Ty at home, how he would be hungry.
“That’s a little one,” said a fat man with no teeth. “Look at that bitty one.” He reached out a dirty finger to touch Ethan’s face. “Whatchoo cryin’ about, little one?” he said. I jerked the baby back before the man could touch him. “He’s sick,” I said, which was not true, of course, but I wanted the man to leave us alone. “You could catch it.” The man backed away. Then we drove on, the afternoon sky darkening through the haze. When we pulled up in front of the house—a bruised thing, damp cedar shingles and a spindly wooden deck all around—I saw a quick movement at the window, Ty, as though he’d been watching for us.
My house is on the eastern lip of the Okefenokee Swamp, the place the Seminoles called “trembling earth” for the way the dry land, what little there is, will yield to the pressure of natural gasses, shift and dislodge into thick islands, which float like massive lily pads through the tannin water. The swamp is a national preserve, but that doesn’t mean much to those of us who have always lived here, like Ty, who can wander in and out of the preserve’s boundaries without a thought, the way you wander from one room of your house to another when you’re feeling restless. Ty grew up in the swamp. He knows its secrets. I always thought he should have been a park ranger. They make money. Ty could have been anything. He just chose not to. Or maybe he didn’t. I don’t know.
Ty’s seen foxfire in the swamp, probably a dozen times or more. He used to tell me about it—the way the light glows through the palmetto scrub, faint at first so you think you’re seeing just a reflection of the moon, then stronger, so you think you’ve lost your bearings and you’re coming out on a road and catching sight of some car’s headlights, then so bright and blinding and beautiful that you know it’s foxfire—swamp gas, some call it. Ty said it was like a gift, to be allowed to see it. I’d never seen it, not in all my years near the swamp. But I looked for it—I looked for it all the time.
I brought the car seat into the kitchen and set it on the table, then went back to help Kristen into the house. When we returned, Ty was there, staring at the baby, who had suddenly, finally, fallen silent.
“So here he is, huh? He made it, huh?” Ty said. He lit a cigarette.
“You idiot. Don’t smoke near him,” said Kristen.
He snorted. “Like it makes a difference. Whole world filled with smoke.”
“Mom,” said Kristen.
“Mom,” he mimicked.
I lifted the baby from his carrier. “Go on and lay down for a bit, Kristen,” I said. “Food there,” I said to Ty, nodding at the bag on the table. I carried Ethan into the living room. Ty followed.
“Hey, Mom. You got a few bucks I can borrow?” he said.
“Jesus, Ty. I just got home. We got a baby here, can you see that?”
“Yeah, I see it. It’s just that I need a few bucks.” His eyes moved quickly around the room. He scratched his head, squeezed his hands together, swung his arms. He paced. He had a habit of running his fingers through his long hair and flipping it out of his eyes. His skin was pale, and his eyes were a deep green, the color of moss. He was tall and thin, unlike Kristen. She took after her father; he took after his.
“You want to hold him?” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll just look.”
“I think he looks like you, Ty,” I said. That was a lie. “He reminds me of you when you were a baby.” I stared at the baby’s face and thought of the first time I saw Ty. I’d been so young myself, like Kristen, lying in a hospital bed, but with no one there to hold my hand. That was before Ray, Kristen’s father, who’d married me even though I had a toddler, but who didn’t stick around long enough to see his own daughter learn to walk. When Ty was born I’d struggled up on my elbows to look at him the minute he was out, with the doctor still wiping all the muck away from his face. He was hot and wriggling, and had, even then, an air of discomfort about him, of restlessness. He was like something wild. But he was mine. And he was beautiful. I was unprepared for how beautiful he was. I’d felt a tingling in my breasts, something faint, like a memory.
Ethan started to cry again, his thin voice bleating and raw. Ty’s eyes grew wide as he shook his head, did a little backward dance across the room.
“Holy Jesus, that’s scary. Can’t you make him stop that?”
I tried to slip the pacifier in the baby’s mouth, but he refused it. I stood up, paced around. Kristen did not come.
“Go get your sister,” I said, but Ty walked back through the kitchen and made no move toward Kristen’s room.
I held Ethan up to my shoulder, patted him softly on the back, trying to quiet his screams. When he paused to draw a breath, I heard a series of noises in the kitchen and knew Ty was reaching into my purse. Then a rustling of the bag as he took the Krystal burgers. The back door slammed and Ty’s truck started, and then he was gone.
“Shhhh,” I said to Ethan. “It’s all right. It’s all right.” Kristen’s door remained closed.
The baby would not nurse. He shook his head from side to side in impatience at Kristen’s breast, sucked viciously for a few seconds at the tip of the nipple but would not latch on. Kristen was despondent, her breasts growing flaccid with each passing day. “Come on, baby, come on,” I said, tickling his lips with my finger and urging Kristen to try again, try again, but Kristen only sulked and said it hurt. Eighteen, maybe you couldn’t expect much more. The baby cried incessantly. Ty slammed out of the house each night, looking for quiet, he said. He returned in the mornings and left his boots, caked thick with mud, on the bathroom floor.
Ty was a rattlesnake hunter. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t honest. He’d sleep during the day and then head out at dusk to haunt the swamp, dragging a burlap sack and a heavy plastic can filled with gasoline. He’d pour the gasoline down into the burrows made by gopher tortoises; the gas would flush out any snakes sharing the burrow. When he’d return the next morning, the sack was filled with live diamondbacks, and the can was empty. The tortoises would die, but Ty, he didn’t care about that.
It was competitive, he told me. The snakers fought for territory. They sat out in the swamp drinking all night, waiting for dawn, when the snakes were more active. They sold the snakes to the rattlesnake roundup over in Whigham. I don’t know what Ty did with the money he made. But I didn’t like it. It wasn’t honest. I may not be much, but I’ve always been an honest person.
On the third morning after we came home from the hospital, I got scared about the baby not nursing, so I drove to Winn-Dixie to buy formula. I wouldn’t go to that damn discount grocer’s if it killed me, even though he was closer by two miles. Ethan took the bottle immed
iately, sucking in the warm liquid like he’d been suffocating and it was air, exhaling though his tiny nose after each swallow. Kristen threw away her nursing bra. “Thank you, Jesus,” she said, and then she flopped on the couch next to me and stared at Ethan.
“Here, you take him. You feed him,” I said.
“You’re doing fine.” Her face was slack, her eyes blank.
“Kristen.”
“Mom.”
But she took the baby, holding him awkwardly on her knees with the bottle straight out in front of his face.
“Like this,” I said. I repositioned Ethan into the crook of Kristen’s arm. “There you go.” The baby’s hands clenched, unclenched, clenched again. Her face was flat and empty as she regarded him.
I left them and went to the kitchen window. Outside, in the fading light, the smoke from the wildfire in the swamp cast a strange haze behind the trees. Ty’s truck was gone. A raccoon walked across the yard. He saw me in the window and stopped for a second, but then he continued, brash, making his way up the steps to the bowl of cat food on the porch. His hands were black and leathery, like little gloves. I could have chased him away, but I didn’t. He’d only be back. Wild things; they don’t change for anybody.
After a week, I had to go back to work. I’d used up all my vacation. I called home two, three, four times a day to check on Kristen and the baby. Once, I had to leave the courthouse to run home and deliver more diapers. I’d found Ethan screaming in his crib, Kristen asleep on the couch.
Ty emerged from his bedroom while I was changing Ethan’s diaper. The baby had begun to quiet, his small face flushed and mottled, his lips trembling. Ty was shirtless and barefoot, a pair of ripped jeans clinging to his hips. His face was chiseled stone.
“Can’t sleep with that damn kid screaming,” he said. “She won’t shut it up.”
A pair of small wings beat in my stomach. I held them down. I fastened the diaper tapes, picked up the baby, went to get a bottle. Ty followed. “I mean, Mom. She won’t do anything. I swear to God.”