I
By noon the high azure sky had been scorched to a hard sapphire. Bands of heat rippled upon tin roofs throughout Coffee County. Roddy's mom pranced naked on the front lawn, kicking up divots of Saint Augustine sod, and crooning a Doris Day song to a peacock. Off-key, crazily: "How MUCH as that doggy in the WINdow?"
The ancient bird sulked in a magnolia. Mom liked to insult it by calling it a cuckold. Roddy didn't know the word.
Confusion reigned in his eleven-year-old mind as he ogled his mother's spanish dugs, brown nippled, with aureole as big and wide as peso coins.
Full of dry-roasted wind, the great tree seemed to shiver and sneeze as if ailing with summer distemper. Its huge blossoms fretted like castaway paper lanterns. Roddy's morbid imagination transformed the blossoms into wax monkey skulls and the peacock into a raptorlike eater of simian brains.
*
He loved her body and the way it jiggled as she ran from the men in white suits. They chased her whooping and hollering. It wasn't every day that they got to round up a naked lady as fetching as Esmeralda Garza- Coldwell and strap her into the loony wagon.
She shrieked: "Run, Roddy! RUN!" (Frizzy mouse-brown hair billowing up like a cyclonic duststorm against the blue Cinerama sky--)
He had no need to run. Nobody was after him. He wasn't the person prancing naked outdoors.
It was like watching wierd Sunday television, something on Omnibus. Dreamy, not quite right. Not involving him.
He sat with his bony Coldwell rump against the stoop of the service entrance. Sipping Ovaltine from his Captain Midnight mug. Wondering what he would tell Dad.
Could he describe the faces of the shadow-eyed men and how the red clay from the service road had gotten smeared along the cuffs of their trousers? Or the sour stench of their early morning whiskey breaths?
*
She came home a year later looking like Elsa Lanchester in "The Bride of Frankenstein." Acting just as strange too. Dazed, randomly alert. Mostly lost in thought, serene, tranquil. With sudden spasms of lizard-quick diamond-hard focus. Her eyes burned like black glacial suns. Someone had told him she had undergone electro-shock therapy after Dad refused something called lobotomy. Roddy imagined Mom bolted to a slab with just a smock covering her nakedness. Fuzzy coils of spark whizzed like pinwheel rockets and bands of crackling light climbed a Jacob's Ladder into an infinite ceiling of blue vapor. She writhed and twitched, her eyeballs glittering with wild radiant current.
*
Then one morning she woke up knowing she had sinned in some ghastly way.. She began going once again to Mass, Holy Communion and Confession. Sunday became a day of untold suffering for Roddy.
The altar crucifix loomed above everyone kneeling in church. People drank wine, passing the gold cup, sharing germs. Someone told him it was really blood. Blood from Jesus. The crucifix viscerally spooked him, with its wretched open-jawed man-thing God. It scared the piss out of him to think about Jesus at night. He missed the church Dad went to, the cool affable place with just a plain wooden cross. The Bible stories had been way different. Perhaps a bit goody-two-shoes. But at least, Jesus was alive and well.
*
Mom disapproved of all things sexual. She fussed at him about a seventh-grade girl he walked with to Black's Pharmacy. They sipped cherry-smash sodas and talked about TV shows and Hollywood movie stars. Sally Ann McConnell had budding breasts and wore a padded bra. Mom despied her, called her a tramp, and forbade Roddy to associate with her.
Mom didn't need to be in his room, his nifty private abode with its cowboy bunk bed and airplane models dangling from the ceiling. She stood there, watching him in spirit. Having crowded out his Guardian Angel.
By this time, Dad had finally moved out for good.
*
Time was Einstein's millipede crawling into infinite summer. Humid wee hours, ripening by the dark of the moon, were moments when Roddy truly enjoyed being alone with himself. A street lamp down on East Oglethorpe hurled its flat illumination smack against the Gold Medal house owned by the Coldwells. Built during the Roaring Twenties in a classic Queen Anne style, the house went through several restorations until Roddy's mom prided it as the crown jewel of the neo-historic neighborhood. Roddy didn't understand what Dad meant by "Babbit House." (It had been financed by Abner Coldwell after his mad faith-based speculation paid off grandly on Wall Street. What very few people knew was that Abner's faith had been based upon pronouncements of a Cassadega psychic known as the Profit Prophet.) Venetian blinds projected slats of shadow into Roddy's room, and he could imagine himself inside a strange room far away from Coldwell House and Mom. He would be playing a part in one of those crime movies shown after the eleven o'clock news. He loved the men with fedoras and gats and the women with orchids and long cigarettes who talked roughly of rare coins or valuable documents while all around them people were being murdered. Roddy felt grown up now. He lay there listening to the Philco radio.
During this sea change Peggy Lee sang in a husky sultry languid way. FEVER (boom)...You give me fever (boom)...FEVER...all through the night.
Something happened.
He issued a sticky substance that filled the palm of his hand.
Good grief. This was all new to him. He crashed to turn on the desk lamp. To see what this mystery fluid looked like.
"Roddy?" came Mom's voice from her room.
*
The gardenia girl in his dream licked her ruby lips. Her pink tongue darted out like a lizard's and lapped up his drying jizz (splattered upon black velvet in white drops like Elmer's Glue)...
Once he had seen a swarm of termites break loose from a section of shed in the backyard where Uncle Jim stored his 1937 Indian motorcycle under a tarp. Crates of empty bottles of Orange Crush were stacked inside the shed. One of his chores was to rinse the bottles and return them to the Jitney Jungle (everything from Babbo Cleanser to Briggs & Stratten lawn-mower sparkplugs). He allowed the bottles to accumulate. Rinsing them was an icky enterprise. They would fill with dead roaches and an obscene bio-mass. Thus he procrastinated until he could no longer abide the ensuing guilt.
Saturday afternoon, late August. He hosed them and loaded them in the saddlebags of his Schwinn. The bottles were of glass as darkly brown as the tannic water in the nearby slough (rife with ghosts, hawks, cypress and sable palm, water oak and palmetto, wrought together by devine magnetism). During the monsoon the slough encroached upon a small historic Negro cemetary where massive kudzu blanketed the red clay and its stones and bones.
Roddy watched the termites settle upon a mouldy plank where two bluetailed skinks were sunning.
*
The screendoor to the Jitney Jungle had a rusted advertisement for Sunbeam Bread next to the latch. Inside it was always cool and dusky, with braided aromas of coffee, tobacco, armpits and farts. Wall shelving displayed kerosine lanterns, crosscut saws, muleshoes, hoes and spades. Out back were stacked bags of concrete mix, sand-and-gravel mix, and sheep manure. Rolls of chickenwire and tarpaper. The cabstand was an annex with a canvas roof and a cold drink box.
Immediately Roddy homed in on the spinrack that displayed EC Comics, Bluebook For Men and Manhunt magazines along with paperback novels by Mickey Spillane and Erskine Caldwell. Lurid literature impossible to find elsewhere in Douglas, Georgia. Atop the locked glass-windowed cabinet showing Case knives and Colt revolvers was a widemouth jar full of miniature candy bars, gumballs and jawbreakers.
Someone spoke to him. "Hey, Bo, buy me a beer."
He turned to meet an eagle-beaked young woman with copper skin and raven hair. Prominent cheekbones and glassbead eyes. Creek and Dahomey heritage.
"Hell, no!" He sneered, showing as much disrespect as he could, thinking: The NERVE of her speaking to me! "I won't buy you ANYTHING. Get away from me!"
She stood defiantly and gauged him. This truly infuriated him. He sniggered, "G'won, now!"
She wore one of those white painter's caps that you got for free when you buy paint. Sherwin-Williams. Its logo showed paint flooding over a globe.
So heated he was, he barely noticed the lincoln green cotton twill workshirt, unbuttoned to show half of her bosom. A rill of sweat ran between her breasts.
What he profoundly noticed was the fishy stench of her rawboned body. He'd never smelled such an odor from a human being before!
"Ahm so hot I could just swoon," she sighed. Emoting with a twinkle.
"You people don't swoon."
"That's the truth." She made as if to leave. Then she paused and winked. "I was only kidding about the beer."
"I've seen you around."
"Folks call me Mud Dauber, but my Christian name is Rebecca Mallowtree."
"Mud Dauber?"
"That's what I do. I sweep the eaves of houses. To get rid of wasps and mud daubers."
Roddy's face roiled with horror. "Don't you get stung?"
"Sometimes."
"Good grief!"
"Well, I hafta get along, seeing as you're not going ta buy me a beer."
"Wait."
She waited.
"You can do my house. Let me ask my mom. I'm sure it will be OK."
"Sounds swell. I'll drop by Tuesday afternoon. How's that?"
"You know where I live?"
"You're the boy with the crazy naked mommy."
Roberta touched his arm lightly with a finger. "It must be rough. She doing all right?"
Roddy brightened. "Oh, yeah. You'll see."
"Remember now, Pabst Blue Ribbon."
She strode from the store like a lioness prowling the canebrake. His view of her was framed by the dark portal of the screendoor.
*
"What'll it be, Sonny?" The sandy-haired redfaced Cracker asked. Straw garden hat with a green celluloid sunvisor. Blue eyes. Two gold teeth. "Take your time," he added, "If yuh need me, I'll be in the krapper with my funny papers."
Roddy had visited the "krapper" and had seen Deep's funny papers. Nudist camp magazines.
"Can I ask you something?" Voiced hushed, clandestine, conspiratoral.
"Sure, Sonnyboy."
"What was she in here to buy?"
"Hell, didn't your nose tell you anything? Tampons. She was fresh out."
Roddy knew what a nudist camp was, but he had never heard of a Tampon.
II
The sun whirled within violent vermillion, crimson and scarlet. The sky shimmered with submerged orange and tangerine. Roddy was reminded of the opaque fire in the 19th Century luminist painting that hung in the hallway. Gazing at the setting sun in its full exultant glory, he wondered if miracles were still possible. Like Rebecca showing up! He didn't believe in Our Lady of Fatima as Mom did, but the story of the sun's spiral fall during Her visitation resounded in his mind.
Rebecca's voice sang in the purple air like a mockingbird: "Thought I wasn't coming, didn't you ?"
She strode up to him from across the lawn and sat beside him in the fallen-down gazebo. She smelled of lilac water.
His voice hitched. "I'd just about given you up."
She chuckled demurely. He noticed she was wearing a single-stitch white cotton dress and freshly bleached white canvas shoes. He could see where she had patted talc upon her uppermost bosom. And where else? He vividly remembered the rill of sweat that had trickled down between her breasts. Although she smelled nice, he was disappointed. Achingly he wished to detect that coppery fish scent that had excited him so.
"Do I look all right?"
"Yes. Yes, you do."
"I was thinking of your mother. I want to look as fine as I can for our contract meeting."
"She'll be driving up any minute. She had a doctor's appointment."
"I'm sorry. Is she still ill?"
"Sort of."
Rebecca nodded that she understood such things. It was a common opinion that the state of orderliness of one's home reflects the state of orderliness of one's mind. The Coldwell
estate had declined since Mister Coldwell departed, leaving his estranged wife with plenty of money each month. Rebecca could see that most of this allowance had gone unspent. The gazebo, for instance, once a place of delight, was now overgrown with wisteria.
She patted Roddy's bluejeaned knee and said deeply: "Sometimes getting well is a long process."
Roddy almost blurted out, You speak almighty correct for a colored person! But he gushed, "I'm much obliged to you for being so kind."
They heard the crackling of tires on the gravel driveway and circle at the front of the house. Mom's huge blue 1948 Chrysler Windsor had brought her home.
"It's Mom."
Sundown was a time for half drained glasses of warm lemonade with gnats floating upon a pale surface. It was a melancholy time. The world was not yet dark enough for the summer air to conjure fireflies.
Roddy heard the car door slam. Heavy. THUNK.
He waited. The pit of his stomach congealed into a wad of nerves. Whenever Mom had been gone for more than a few hours he never knew what to expect.
Then he sighted her gliding toward the gazebo. Ivory legs sheathed in the finest hose, flashing with each step.
Mom was a slim trim woman clothed in rich black flannel. Her suit had natural shoulders and was cut tightly in the waist. A fresh gardenia pinned to her lapel accented her ruby lips.
(tongue darting out like a lizard's)
The slant of her widebrim black bonnet blocked view of her face.
She asked, "Who is it there visiting you, Roddy?"
"My name is Rebecca Mallowtree, ma'am."
"You came to rid my house of wasps."
"That is correct."
Teeth as small and perfect as pearls showed briefly in the mouth with ruby lips. A hint of smile.
Then she was floating away toward the house, into the blue indigo of twilight.
Roddy asked Rebecca, "What do you think?"
"I'd say she hired me."
"When will I see you?"
"'Morrow morning."
*
Dinner was chicken and dumplings. The dumplings had been flattened with a rolling pin, the way they were at Davis Cafeteria. Which he liked. For desert, Eagle Brand icecream. Mom did not eat with him. Robby attended to his repast by silently listening to her radio console. The Artie Shaw Orchestra playing "Begin The Beguine."
Roddy thought the music was pretty square, but he admired it all the same, because it lifted his mother's spirits.
As time passed it seemed that her fragile mind drifted a million miles through ether and ozone to other worlds beyond heaven's gate.
Her dreamy smile was akin to that of an opium-eater. Denial. Detachment. Bliss.
The scent of night-blooming jasmine wafted its summer sachet into the great house where all the tall windows were free-flowing. Perchance rain? Go be damned!
Mom cooed to herself. Roddy carried his dishes to the sink. The orchestra pounded out "Indian Love Call." The drumming full and meaty. Men's chorus: "All echo--all echo--"
III
Roddy preferred bath to shower, and was soaping himself in the rust-stained claw-footed tub while fantisizing about Rebecca. At the Jitney Jungle she had been wearing khaki bermuda shorts to go with the lincoln green cotton twill workshirt, and he had seen welts on her flesh where she had been stung, only now realizing this. He wondered if any of the devils had gotten beneath her clothes.
Suddenly a knocking at the door nearly stilled his heart. "Roddy, I need to speak with you."
"Mom--"
"Right now," she said, opening the door. Before he could cover himself she was in the room, wearing a violet cotton summer gown fit for town.
He sloshed from the tub and yanked his white terrycloth robe from the hook on the door. He felt her heavy brown eyes feasting upon his pubic area. His erection was a small and pointy thing, a cat's dick, glistening with soap bubbles.
"WHAT IZZIT, MOM?"
"I'm going out and I don't know when I'll get back."
"But it's dark." Of course it is, you idiot!
"I feel like a drive and maybe a walk. My point is you are not to worry yourself or call the police."
Why did she say it that way? he asked himself, beginning to worry.
As suddenly as she had come, she went, pulling the door firmly shut.
He gazed stupidly at the useless privacy latch, a hook-and-eye rig. Mom had busted it. He could hear the click-clack of her spike heels on the hardwood floor of the long hall. Going, going, gone.
*
He stayed up past his bedtime and watched Marshal Matt Dillon. The ochre divan with its mauve arabesques matched the drapes like ornate scrollwork. A greenshaded desklamp illuminated the parlor. The tall window behind the desk was a black slot. He turned off the TV and immediately felt lonesome.
The night pressed in against the window screen like an enormous resperator, an engine pumping strange air into the house. He could hear the zinging of cicadas and the ramjet wind-tunnel zooming of bullbats, nighthawks diving for errant bugs. He could hear the peacock embracing a romantic bird-dream.
Heat fell upon him like tonnage. His face blushed, his heart pumped a molten river. Colors grew intense, auras mushroomed from all objects.
Then in the far, far distance there were antlike voices, people laughing, shouting, talking, a merry hullaballoo. Coming rapidly closer, quickly into full earshot, the voices grew globular and he could pick out words: Lookit them flames! Glory! Jest lak Sherman marchin t'the sea!
Suddenly the mob dashed past the house, up the paved road leading to downtown Douglas. Honking cars, stentorian commands: "Get outta the way. Move to the side! Thankyah kindly, let us through!"
Roddy gawked from the window. He could see at least fifty people in raucous parade (the number would increase with each retelling), some in nightgowns, some in boxer shorts and undershirts. Most folks had managed to dress before following the excitement. Brogan shoes, chambray workshirts and denim overalls. White-sleeve men wore straw fedoras and rode in cars. Cows clopped by, their bells reverberating dully, tonk tonk tonk. Roddy laughed in falsetto like an imbecile.
A chorus from Smokey Hollow A.M.E. Church: "OH M'LORD, THE FORD PLACE IS AFIRE!"
Indeed.
The Ford dealership (glitzy showroom and corduroy carlot) blazed to high hell. An entire downtown block had become a burnt offering to the mercantile gods of Dixie. Fire demons climbed pillars of vapor, fumes and compressed gas. Exploding propane shook the whole town. The fury of the shockwave caused everyone attending this holocaust to cower. A newspaperman muttered, "Awesome. Truly awesome."
Afraid to leave the house and go running in ecstatic pursuit because Mom might return and find him absent, Roddy watched the carnival-like procession timidly from his yard. His morbid imagination sent him an an image of a drooling mouth-breathing fieldhand geek tossing a NeHi molotov cocktail into one of the service bays, igniting the whole bejesus.
By and by, he began to wonder about Mom. Where was she? Was she all right?
*
Roddy decided that since the event did not include his imperial attendance, it wasn't much ado. So he repaired to the parlor. On the ottoman one of Mom's Collier's lat open to an article about England's Guy Fawke's Day, with illustration of an effigy burning.
The telephone startled him.
"Hello?"
"Roddy, it's me."
"Mom! Where are you?" He could hear a hurricane of noise in the background.
"I'm calling from the picture show."
Roddy knew exactly where she was. At the phonebooth on the sidewalk outside the theatre. Across the street from the Ford place.
"Are you ok," he asked.
"I'm just fine, honey. Just fine. I'll be home soon as you can say Dairy Queen butterscotch."
IV
It was a splendid dogday morning, lush and verdant. The fields resounded with the cawing of crows, squadrons of them. Ears of corn stood head-tall like triffids. Sitting on his stoop, Roddy could smell the fields and thought about sprucing up Scarecrow, freshly returned from Oz.
He gazed down the red clay lane that disappeared into a slowly dispersing mist. Rebecca emerged from it, tranping behind a pushcart. His heart swelled up like a bullfrog, catching in his throat.
"Good morning, kind lady." Immediately thinking, This is absurd!
"Good morning, kind sir."
He presented her with a sprig of wisteria.
She flashed a Colgate smile, perfect tombstone teeth. "Why, thank you."
She wore clean white painter's overalls and a blue checkered cotton shirt, a hint of Clorox. Her heavy brogans were buffed to shine with brown Kiwi polish.
Her little vehicle was loaded to the brim: including bugspray to kill wasps and ammonia for her if she got stung, an extension swab and a collapsible ladder.
"You've organized this very well," he said, pointing to her rig.
They trundled up to the house and halted beside a high azalea.
"I'll bring you some coffee."
"Fine. I'll be unloading."
He noticed that her hair had been lashed into a magnificent braid. Kind of like Princess Tiger Lily. Her copper skin smelled again like lilac water.
*
Roddy served her in a souvenir mug from Jekyll Island, his last outing with Mom and Dad together on peaceful terms. Rebecca hooked her eagle beak over the rim and sniffed.
"Chicory, I believe."
"Like it?"
"To be honest, it'll do." She smiled.
*
Then Rebecca set to work.
She climbed the ladder like a squirrel shagging up a longleaf pine. Her agility reminded Roddy of a lady acrobat he had seen at the Ringling circus. There were several inhabited wasp nests under the eaves on the north side. She attacked with the ferocity and commitment of a kamakazi. Before long, the wasps lay stunned and dying and their nests swept away and burning on the ground.
"Holy God Damn!" Rebecca shrieked.
Ho-oh-lee Gawd Dayum!
An errant wasp on the wing, returning from somewhere in the garden, nailed her in the left armpit. She tugged loose from her overalls and whipped off her shirt. She took the ammonia and splashed it on the wound.
As the pain eased she buttoned her shirt and stuffed it back down into her overalls. "Guess you got an eyefull, huh, sugar?"
"I think we're OK," Roddy replied, spoken like a conspirator. "Nobody saw us."
"Us?" She grimmaced.
He nodded.
Testily, Rebecca snapped, "Why don't you run into the house and see if your mommy needs anything? G'won now! Lemme do my work!"
Stung by her sudden change in mood, he departed.
*
Roddy's head felt like a baloon. The memory of viewing Rebecca's breasts was a gas. Wonderful copper-hued globes with blackberry nipples. Not like Mom's at all.
Inside the cool house he found everything silent as a crypt. Down the gallery her bedroom lurked, door ajar, like Satan's maw. Its sentient consciousness ever watchful, ever listening. As he approached her room the entire house seemed eerily vigilant. His ears pricked up. A floorboard creaked as he crept along, and an invisible claw plunged into his chest and clutched his throbbing heart.
He peaked into her room. The rumpled bed was empty.
Mom often wandered the house as if half vapor, half Medusa. Dust was her hobgoblin. Following one of her cleaning binges the scent of lemon oil polish pervaded this perpetural gloaming.
Roddy walked over to the parlor.
Arthur Godfrey was on TV, sound turned low.
A breakfast tray lay upon the sofa. Coffee poured, melba toast warmed.
"Mom?"
V
It took the remains of the day to find her trail. Tracking her shoeprints in the red clay lane, Rebbeca led Roddy to the community of Smokey Hollow. They found where Mom had squatted beneath a dogwood. Several people commented that they had seen her striding grandly with a familiar icey madness in her dark spanish eyes.
Roddy gazed at the ground where Mom had piddled. Then he looked around. Then he looked around. He had never been to Smokey Hollow before. It belonged to Negro people.
Hog grease steam rose from stovepipe chimneys and mixed with woodsmoke amid lofty boughs od live oak. Tarpaper roofs were plotted into the shady distance. Shafts of sunlight slanted down to the rich earth. The leafy canopy collected it all into a forest smog.
He had heard tales. The sons and daughters of freed slaves congregated here almost a century ago. It was a sylvan paradise, with a drowsy stream alive with lazy bream. Ideal for holidays and baptisms.
Tales of rip-snorting revivals, people shaking and quaking, speaking in tongues and levitating from the threshing floor were wide-spread in Smokey Hollow. The A.M.E. church was a fairly new organization. Its faithful shunned those "snake-charmers" and "fire-walkers" from the clapboard tabernackle deeper in the woods. That place of worship, it must be said, had survived arson, the scourge of nightriders, thanks be to the Lord and the fire-bucket brigade.
*
"Yeah, dat lady pass on straight through town an' head up t'ward Plantation House," grizzled old Deacon Mims offered, mopping the sweat from his brown bald head with a red kerchief.
"Thank you, kindly," Rebecca replied.
To Roddy she queried: "You willing to go all the way with me?"
The Plantation House.
Not far from the wagonwheel of pigtrails leading from the hub of Smokey Hollow stood the ruins. The Haunt, most folks called it. Roddy had been told that scoundrels torched the place and planted a burning cross. He believed it was rife with noisome spirits hooting and moaning in the rafters. His imagination was tainted by spooky campfire yarns dramatized by Uncle Fletch, that barnstorming thespian killed in a midnight pylon race. Roddy visualized souls of the restless dead tethered to a land of torment.
Enormous torment.
Why would Mom go up there?
Queasily he answered Rebecca: "I'm with you."
Rebecca marched into the dimming woods of weir. Braced by her resoluteness, Roddy followed, undaunted and eager for adventure. He grasped her hand and gently squeezed it.
The trail narrowed and crooked and before long Roddy detected the aromas of corn oil, cornmeal and frying fish. Also the faint stink of mule turds.
Rebecca shouted, "Hello to camp!"
They approached the wilderness estate of a brawny barrelchested middle-aged black man. He looked up from his deep-fryer and offered welcome, his huge basso-profundo voice rolling forth like Tribulation.
"Hey college girl. Come bide some time with me."
Rebecca explained to Roddy: "This is our blacksmith. He is also a man of a thousand recipes, all magical."
"Howdy, Mister Scofflaw," she teased.
"Scofflaw, is it? You go away to Baltimoah, learn a few smart things and now you think you is slummin', eh?"
"Baltimore," Roddy Chirped. "Mom went there for treatment."
Rebecca smiled beatifically. "Johns Hopkins."
"I believe so."
"I was attending the university. To help pay my way I worked as a nurse's assistant at the hospital."
The blacksmith beamed with pride. "Our Miss Mallowtree is very special!"
His massive beard and shoots of white nappy hair gave him a bestial appearance, Roddy thought. Like a satyr he had seen in Mom's illustrated Ovid. The man's massive arms were as sturdy and as big around as railroad ties. And scars! There had been burning timber and iron and knifefights.
Rebecca instructed: "We musn't tarry."
"Well, then, you takes a few bites of fish."
*
Dusk settled like gray ash upon the forest. Roddy heard an owl shriek in the boughs and there was an avalanche of wings. Then a rabbit screamed. Terror preceded death. The owl showed no mercy. Roddy realized that there was no mercy in Nature and, like Time, it existed only in the inflated mind of mankind. And as far as he could tell, mankind stood apart from Nature.
Scarlet threads of sky were woven into the crepuscule fabric, indigo and jet. Combers of serated cloud slipped over the horizon. By the time Rebecca and Roddy emerged from the tanglewood, the pines were singing and the land was dark. They could see the plantation clearing and its sward of thick wiregrass, sloping toward a ridge where the ruins stood sentinel in melancholy silhuette. Charred columns, studs and beams succumbing to kudzu and wisteria. A gothic tableau rear-lighted by the peaches-and-cream gibbous moon.
Whippoorwills trilled odd entreaties.
"Listen," Roddy whispered.
"I hear 'em."
"You superstitious about whippoorwills, Rebecca?"
"Am I afraid of dying? No. Not a whole lot.
*
The bewitching scent of My Sin snaked through the wiregrass and mingled with the corpulent stench of human flatulence, feces and blood.
Roddy cried, "Mom's perfume. We've found her!"
"Wait here. Something's wrong."
Roddy squirmed ahead. Rebecca grasped his shoulder. She commanded, "Wait here. I'll go see."
She stepped off, one feathery foot in front of the other, as if stalking quail in moccassins. Roddy felt his stomach being yanked through a washtub wringer. He puked yellow curds.
Why would Mom be up there in the middle of the night with shit in her pants?
*
Her angry eyes gazed upon a cold moon, shrunken now to a mere tugging-stone in the obsidian sky. Her eye make-up could have been Egyptian kohl. Age had deposited sooty bags beneath her eyes, so sightless now, so godless. Her fingers clutched the snub-nosed revolver in rigor mortis. She had pressed its muzzle beneath her tender breast and fired a bullet upwards into her heart. Her mouth of tiny white teeth had snarled at the moment of death.
Roddy was reminded of a barracuda.
Mom had unbuttoned her silk blouse and exposed her naked chest to the twilight air. The wound seemed small. Bleeding evidently was elsewhere.
"Was there pain?" His voice was hollow.
"Surely there was. Briefly."
"Her church teaches that her soul is now damned. To more torment. God damn God!"
"Come on, sugar. We must leave her here and go report to the sheriff."
"The animals might--"
"The animals might disturb the body. I don't know where she is now. Heaven, Hell or Nowhere. But trust me, she's gone from here. This dreadful place."
*
The sun above the gazebo hammered the flatiron sky so mercilessly that the sky itself held its breath. Rebbeca and Roddy sat and shooed away bluebottle flies.
"I've a feeling that Mom knew you from some place. The way she smiled when I introduced you."
"The Frontotemporal Dementia clinic."
"Dad met you there."
"Yes. When he learned I was from here, he made, I mean, we made an arrangement. Your father cares for you very much."
Roddy fanned his face with the paper from Western Union.
"Does he love me?"
"Of course. That's why he engaged me to check up on you."
Tearful now, Roddy testified: "I love you, Mud Dauber."
-30-
