The Ice at the Bottom of the World (3 page)

In the winter, I used to have to take a butane torch out back to the well house to defreeze the water pump, being careful not to heat up the rocks in the floor to wake the snakes hibernating underneath, this even after, in the sleet and fog somewhere between the cabin and the well house, stumbling through a flock of snow geese on their way south resting in my leeward lawn, their necks as big as your arm, wing muscles strong and hard from their Canada-to-Cuba flight, so big and strong to knock you down if you were to stumble through them, flushing them up unawares which I usually was, so early in the morning fog going out to defreeze the pump.

In that winter Margaret stayed over, she showed how if you patched a light bulb to the electric pump to burn, it would keep the air from freezing while leaving the snakes alone, and then she took Christmas gift pictures of the snow geese eating the corn she had laid out for them, and in the morning with coffee she’d cook up
fried eggs and ham from Rusty Shackleford’s five-sided store instead of just the candy bar or peanut-butter sandwich I was used to, and this after taking a hot shower together with plenty of hot water pumping up from the well house, me soaping Margaret’s back, wondering why hadn’t I thought of the light bulb trick before.

That coming spring, a mama raccoon had babies in the woodpile, so getting a fire meant dealing with her trying to tear you up, not even being afraid of the big-headed dog Margaret had fed to full grown by then. Getting a piece or two of wood to burn in the alpine hearth was like playing a big set of pick-up sticks, not wanting to move or bother the whole pile lest the mama coon’d come tearing out hissing and chasing me and the big-headed dog back inside the house. This was something Margaret liked to watch, sometimes taking pictures and sometimes pretending to lock us out with the pissed-off mama coon coming at us on our heels. I stopped getting anything altogether off the pile, settling on burning driftwood, which was a ache and a pain to gather. But the sand in it burned the flames in the fire green and were pretty for us to look at, stretched out naked on the quilt late at night. It came spring soon anyway and we didn’t need the fires, and mama coon and what we called the coonettes started coming up on the steps to look in the house and the way Margaret had with people pretty soon the coonettes were all over
the place eating out of the dog’s bowl and then chasing his tail around the picnic table I still had in the living room for furniture. I only put my foot down the time they all ate the lime rinds we’d had left over from a batch of gin and tonics, and raving and hissing drunk they ripped open my favorite big covered chair and tore out all the stuffing. I think chasing them all out of the house with a broom and a stick hurt Margaret’s feelings, and looking back on it now, I feel sorry for doing it.

That is the spring I’m come to tell about, the spring of remembering the mama coon and her babies, what I last remember. And this, the night we were hearing one of those quick-boiling thunderstorms step and kick around the place where lightning takes tall walks, us in the bed in the back bedroom with the big-headed dog sitting on the straight-backed chair to watch like he liked to do, us saying the little secret things to each other that people doing what we were doing say, then me feeling the hair on my arm bend the wrong way like in a chill breeze draft, Margaret’s hair floating from her head like a Christmas tree angel’s wings, still doing it but bracing and waiting, and then a stray step of the walking lightning came down through the top of the tree right by my back cabin door. It all happened so fast with the dog scrambling up on the bed and Margaret naked sliding off and the ceiling breaking open for a tree trunk like a telephone pole to come pile-driving all the way through and still on its way down into the floor.
And then it being quiet after the explosion, the tree trunk finally stopping, it smoking and smelling that blue electric smell with the burnt-up sap, me and the big-headed dog tangled on the broken bed, with Margaret having hit hard on her back near the hole in the floor stuffed with tree trunk, her long legs kicking in the air with a sexy view, an even more sexy view when I peeked over the mattress at her fully near the trunk of the tree, a sexy view that even further excited me about now being able to use a chain saw indoors.

But all wasn’t just all right. When Margaret sat up she said Oh, like she had just thought of something she had forgotten, she pressed her fingers below her belly and then the lights flickered off and in the dark she said we needed to go into town for Della, Rusty’s wife Della, Della who is what we have for a midwife and a cat-gut stitcher of slashed skin hereabouts. Della had delivered most nearby babies that could be gotten to, her delivering about two of her own with just Rusty’s help.

All was not all right because to my eye Margaret wasn’t showing that she’d had something of ours to carry, and the little quick-boil thunderhead seemed to be more of a front coming through with much of it still downriver letting lightning tall walk through trees. Even dressing in the dark, getting ready, not finding a flashlight that worked, I could tell there was lots of blood by the smell and by the way the dog was nervous. Even getting down to the canoe Margaret was feeling weak,
making it worse for her that the tide was out and I had to make two trips down to where the water was deep enough, one trip to drag down the metal flake canoe and the one trip carry her away.

Big rain like grapes hit us even before I pushed off in the dark, and the big-headed dog yelped and yowled at us from shore. The front moving in was coming at us right up the river bringing with it the turning tide and dirty chop. I couldn’t see, not even Wolftrap Light, not even the number-four channel marker I used to reckon with. As I broke around and free of Stingray Point the breeze freshened harder so I figured best to hug inshore and make my crossing farther down hoping the wind would slack but it getting stronger and me figuring what was the right thing to do when I couldn’t even see the bow of the canoe nor even Margaret wrapped in our fireside quilt laying quiet on pound netting in its bottom.

The rain broke harder, the canoe taking on some, waves licking the gunwales, my knees wetting, and a slosh around my ankles, me hoping the net would at least keep Margaret up a little out of it. Lightning was hitting something right regular over to south shore, and that was my only hope to see, when it lit the sky bone-white bright. I was pushing us as hard as I could with my best J-stroke but I could tell that not even did I pull my paddle out to dig for another stroke but what the
wind pushed us back. I turned even closer to shore hoping for a break but not feeling it come.

Margaret shifted a couple of times pressing what we had for her to where the bleeding wouldn’t stop, and even in all of it with her getting worse she shifted herself so not to disturb any headway I was making with the canoe, her maybe not really knowing I really wasn’t making any. In a bright burn of lightning I slumped for a second seeing we still hadn’t completely passed Stingray Point, and Margaret, lifting her head seeing it too, asked me to go ahead and talk to her, to tell her the story about Captain John Smith, and even though I had told her it a hundred times, not in that night could I remember a word of it, any more than I could turn us through the wind, so she told it, she told it like I had never heard it before, telling each part like it was a question, like how you tell a story to a child, asking with the sound of your voice, Are you straight on that part of the story yet? And then when she finished telling it she started telling it again until I started to remember it, and then remembered it well enough to tell her, telling her it, and also remembering too what that story is all about.

I paddled all night pushing back and across, making headway until just before light I was able to make the crossing where the river is a mile wide just up from town, where Rusty Shackleford has his half-fell-down dock. The light coming up was the kind that after a
front moves through gives everything a different color in the early morning break. The water sloshing in the bottom of my metal flake canoe had several different colors of blood in it, colors that were all over me and my legs from kneeling, colors running around my wrists like vines from where the skin had wrung off my hands paddling all night, colors black, dark red, and brown everywhere except in the quilt-tucked face of my Margaret, laying still on the net in the bottom of my metal flake canoe.

I don’t remember much after, except seeing Danny Daniels Shackleford covering Margaret’s eyes while pushing his fingers against his own, Scoop kneeling with us in the mud beside the canoe to straighten out the colored mess in his simple way but not being able to and going to fetch Della. I think I was there when the state people came and the sheriff came but I get hazy, maybe remembering fighting with someone over the fireside quilt they had unfolded Margaret from, maybe fighting with Rusty taking off my clothes with all the state people around, I think I did, and then I started walking the forty lengths of bad shoreline quilt-dragging naked to Where Lightning Takes Tall Walks, to where I’ve stayed just about all until today.

That must have been so many seasons I can’t count ago. What they’ve caught a few sights of me since is mud covered in summer and quilt ragged in winter, being the haint the kids come to try to spook out at
night with their lights, me running clapping and splattering through the mud when the quick-boil storms come marching across the bay, me making to where the tallest shortleaf pines grow, to stand as straight as I can arms spread and face turned up, please begging for just one long-legged kick of bone-white light right between the eyes.

What I’ve come to see, though, is me laying lately in deep holes dug in the woods, just outside of Rusty Shackleford’s town, and I’ve seen me slipping around at night to where Rusty has my metal flake canoe strapped to the rafters in the concrete-crate shed for me to get when I want, and I’ve seen me creeping under the back door of Rusty’s five-sided store hungry to hear a human voice or two.

And lately, I see me losing a taste for raw fish and the young robbed from men’s nets and animals’ nests, and I see me lonesome for that big-headed dog I see sometimes sniffing at the tracks I’ve made at low tide, tail wagging but too wall-eyed to think to follow the scent, and me, I get to thinking about Stingray Point and the story where they dug the grave but never the man let them fill it, and I see today from my fresh hole dug in the woods near Rusty Shackleford’s town that it must be Friday night with all the turnaround truck drivers drinking with Danny Daniels and Scoop, seeing how young they aren’t anymore, and seeing how many turnaround truck drivers are up against them, I figure just
as soon as that second bottle goes down and the fists come up, I figure I’ll come down out of these woods swinging, putting in together with my friends, getting a fair knock of human life, taking a tall walk back into this town.

ON THE ROPE
 

I
HAVE TO TELL MY UNCLE
it is just a bread wrapper, a nothing piece of paper thrown up on the fence by the wind. I run out to show to him that that is all it is, but the spell is already on my uncle, and when I come back in from showing, it is just as well I should have stayed outside.

My gramere says the barge they brought down the bayou coming to get my uncle and his boat slid up on the edge of our backyard. She said the barge came gliding up soundless in the darkness with the floodwaters boiling under its squared bow, and she said God was giving her an eye of warning, showing her, See how that barge boils, like it is a man’s head atop a pot the man
is boiling in alive. She said she could hear the water bubbling like it was hot and she said the way the flood churned beneath the bow it looked like the barge was coming even closer, but that it was only her will keeping it back, pushing it away from coming into our backyard and taking away my uncle and his boat.

Some men in green uniforms used a crane to hoist my uncle’s boat up onto the barge. My uncle was afraid they would scratch the polished finish. Gramere said when my uncle came back from where the floodwaters had boiled away everything from the land my uncle did not care what the boat looked like. She said the boat looked like it had been whipped with wires, like it had gone on the barge and been whipped with wires, and my uncle looked like the men in the green uniforms had made him do it. She said the way my uncle was, was like when a man is drunk and whips a dog for no good reason and then when the man is sober he cannot look at it, even though he is a man and it is just a dog, that is how Gramere said my uncle could not look at his boat.

My uncle said at first when the barge stopped and the men in the green uniforms let his boat into the water he thought they had gone too far south, like the floodwaters had carried them all the way out into the Gulf. He said in the night all you could see was the amber light on the bow of the barge and all you could hear was the sound of the floodwaters boiling all around, boiling away everything from the face of the earth.

My uncle said all that night he drove his boat over the boiling waters wondering why the men in the green uniforms had put him so far out into the Gulf, until in the shine of his flashlight he saw an island of sparkling diamonds. When my uncle drove his boat over to the island he saw it was the crown of a tree boiling in the currents of the floodwaters and the diamonds were the eyes of all the snakes spun up through the branches. My uncle said the snakes dropped into the water so they could swim into his boat, but instead they were swept away into the darkness by the waters. He said after that he was careful of the islands and was not fooled again by their diamond-shining lights.