by Jack Carneal
The lonely blinking lights out across the James. Wind through pines. Smell of salt mud and bay air, chitinous clacking of sandcrabs scuttling along the spits. Across the river moaning voices carry from an invisible ship, a lantern hung on stern, the oilflame within flickering through handblown glass. Oak branches reaching out over the river, shadowless and black. A scent reaches shore, foul, detestable, no less than the devil’s breath, splashes muted by summer air so thick it is like breathing warm smoke. She is standing in the darkened window on the top floor of a large house imagining the figures crouched amidships as the boat bobs at anchor, sails limp and sagging against their weight. Now wondering about the men and women huddled beneath those very lights on the river in the dark. Tiny bubbles floating in the glass panes, a tongue of thickened glass drooping in front of her chin, the windows handmade by slaves in the glasshouse past the barn, her breath coming more quickly now. Out in the night those lights. Crabbers dropping pots along the channel cut. Fishermen spotlighting rocks. Shadows dim from the shore, the water lapping at their boatsides like a million cold lips.
Minnie Mouse on her t-shirt. Behind her her brothers hug moldy pillows to their faces, her eldest one-eyed for three weeks now, he still walking sideways and looking at you like he trusts you less now than before he jumped off the church roof, the other sitting up now and again and crying out his brother’s name, his sister’s name, cousins’ names, just crying. The spitting voice of the one-eyed brother not angry or sad there in the darkness but effecting only the desire not simply to fall back asleep in peace but further to allow the younger brother to know that he is making a fool of himself, sputtering in the night, and that the older brother knows it and wants the little brother to see his foolishness as others do.
You wouldn’t know it, she thinks, peeling away a bit of cuticle with her eye teeth. You wouldn’t know it to look at it from the river. You wouldn’t know it from running across the lawn when the sun is falling on it through the trees, or when Ogden is chasing them in the woods or through the corn in the fields along the highway. You wouldn’t know it to see the photographs back in Richmond of mother and father’s wedding, a canvas tent and centerpole up through its middle like a teepee top, out on the piece of lawn nearest the beach out there, where in the photographs every single person in every single photograph is smiling.
Out through the swirls of glass that are pooled and uneven she watches the lights on the river. She can’t sleep. The river frightening enough during the day when she can see it bright and green before the sun, the silver tips of the small waves glinting from the pier at Dovecote, while underneath that brown-green twinkling skin all manner of creatures spin and tumble. Feeling the minnows nibbling at your arm and leg hairs when you swim, the hot layer of water on top, beneath it, down a foot, less hot but warm, and then where your feet are the cold of the grave, crabs’ spindly eyeballs whirling towards your toes, claws opening. Things clawing up against you. Invisible things, things as broad and deep as the river itself. Tomahawked skulls, river ghouls in armor, the bones of dead slaves, thousands of them dumped over the side of the boat as it approached, Jamestown not ten miles from here.
Just a week ago Cammie herself spotted a brown thing out in the river. Ogden still lying on the velvet couch in the parlor, a Redskins handtowel held against his eye with an Ace bandage, knee pointed and heel pulled up towards his crotch, the radio on. Him reaching out and fiddling with the knob. Fitzgerald on the floor, a fan ticking somewhere. Dust spinning in yellow light. Distant sound of tractor, of outboardwhine from the river. Soft sounds from the kitchen, soft shoes whispering in the hall. Out in the yard and then from the thin beach she watched it floating like an overturned bathtub, calling back at the house through cupped hands, her father emerging from the smokehouse he’d converted into a darkroom. Grandfather seated underneath a tree, his tie unloosened, a pipe in his teeth. They got in the motorboat and her Dad saw what it was before anyone else and made an odd sound, and so spun the steering wheel and pushed the throttle even as her grandfather tried to grab the steering wheel and make them go closer. It was easy to see: an enormous deer, so swollen it looked instead like a bear, its antlers the pale color of jellyfish. Its eye glinted at Cammie as they sped past, t-shirts pulled up over noses.
It was she who looked up at Louis during the funeral and saw that Louis was the only one not praying like her, the only one whose face was not pointing down at the ground, the weird wet murmur of adults crying, trees nodding and waving, and even though Louis’s face was also wet with tears he was not looking down and also smiling at her. And she smiled back. It was incredible to be so sad and yet to feel like you might laugh, that you were happy to have someone smile at you even while gathered to bury a dead grandfather! Why then did she think now that what she did was not just a little wrong but so wrong as to mean that she was no longer who she used to be before she laughed with Louis?
At night though some kind of blackness past the window, that whispering sound of the same small waves breaking on the shore at the edge of the yard, the grass itself whispering, calling to her, and the solitary lights floating out there suspended in the blank of night. Who chooses to be out on the river long past sundown? Channel markers blinking green in the night, steady and threatening, a countdown to something. Sailors in from some distant port. Late when from the dark uninhabited woods across the river, sometimes two headlights fold out from some fire road cut into the woods over there on the Southside, blinking at her, two shining eyes flashing out like those of some grand night cat. Someone else is awake. Who is in that distant car in those woods when she cannot sleep and she is looking out of her bedroom window at three or four in the morning? Pirate ghosts come to collect their filthy booty. Indians carrying a grease lantern. Pocahantas come to save John Smith. Preacher offering last rites. Gray tilt of night-sail. Bootleggers at their still. A boy and a girl necking, their parents oblivious. Boys, their car trunk full of beer. Louis’s mom, her aunt, trying to find her way back to Dovecote. Slave ships piloting among the bars, muted splashes, waiting for daylight…
Cammie leapt up and tried to grab one of the moths circling the porchlight. There were bunches tapping against the bare globe and somersaulting back. Her hand moving through them distracted them not even for a second. Leaping again she listened to the papery sound her bare feet made when they hit the porch hard again and the quick fade of the echo dying in the space below where Joe the dog slept. She stayed squatted after leaping in one smooth motion not unlike a dancer and rubbed her hand over the dimpled baby blue paint and imagined the old yellow dog snuffling down into the dirt and dust under there: imagined big Joe down there in the dark licking his wounds he’d got from fighting the raccoon and before PeePaw the Senior had to take him in to Hampton to get him killed by a skinny needle in his leg vein. Like he was going to sleep for the last time. Tufts of bloodied fur, hanks of purple skin, the rabid coon’s footprints in the oily mud along the river.
Cammie’s brothers and cousins were out there along the river in the darkness somewhere, running around through the yard and under the trees getting bit by mosquitoes. She’d had enough of that. Plus here’s where they had to come back to when they were finished doing whatever it is they were doing and it was here that she would wait for them, tired as she was of the clammy feel of the night’s first dew against her feet, the blades of grass that would gather around her ankles and the mosquitoes that would bite her there.
She turned her ear towards the dark. She could hear some hint of voice from out there in the honeysuckle-smelling and grass-sweet night, some fluty and urgent call from one invisible sprite to another, her brothers and cousins collecting magnolia branches to smoke, maybe, lighting fires out near the cow pasture, Floyd probably having stole a pack of cigarettes from PeePaw’s stash of cartons of filterless Camels in the pantry. Floyd showed them how to smoke sticks. All you had to do was hold a match to the end of the magnolia branch and suck in a sweetish minty taste of magnolia smoke, you could even blow it out like you was smoking a cigarette. Parents didn’t care. Thought it was funny. She heard a call like a night bird and knew they were all out there near the cluster of cedars where Ogden had hid a jar of peanut butter to cover up the smell of the real smoke, the cigarettes, which the parents would not think was funny. Wright did it, too and she was a girl. The voices arrived in the near field and became distinct but the bodies remained in the shadows.
A white figure rushed past, limned barely by the pale light from the porch. Nude, curls past shoulders, a boy with a girl’s light and wet body, leaping through the grass, disappearing behind pyramidal magnolias. A figure singing, calling, waving. It was Louis. She bounded down the porch steps but it was a tall porch and by the time her feet hit the bottom step she looked into the yard and it might as well have been the river. Down here out of the penumbra of weak light from the porch the grass stretching away from her was but a blank void into which her cousin had already disappeared. A sob rose in her throat. Less out of sadness and more the noise a dog would make when she saw her master leaving.
A second child ran by yelling And a hey nonny nonny. He was thin and black, Henry’s son, and wore a cape he’d made out of old gabardine and held a thin piece of metal trim out in front of him as a swordsman might. A peacock feather rose from his tight helmet of hair. Dad said Henry did not know what to do with him, Henry old and a waterman before he became a landman, a fieldman, and cowman who’d watched both mommy and daddy grow up down here and now watching Ogden, Fitzgerald and Cammie, Floyd and Wright, Henry Junior and his youngest son Jeb, Jeb who learned how to read at three, who taught himself how to play the organ at the baptiss church by six, who for no apparent reason certainly not from Henry or Lucinda could do whatever he set about to do almost without thinking, who looked upon each new thing as some puzzle whose solution was inevitable. And the way Ogden looked at the younger boy, you knew Ogden was smart and weird enough to know a kindred spirit, a brother in the bonds of some weird secret of knowing they had something others didn’t, Fitzgerald always two or three steps behind them even though older than Jeb. Cammie called out to the boy as he sped out of the thin light. Jeb! Wait! He jumped up and as his feet hit the ground again tucked into a somersault like those moths and followed Louis into the dark
Back up on the porch, waiting, the whiny dog feeling still in her chest, she jumped up again and tried to grab one of the moths still banging dumbly into the light. It fell clumsily away from her hand but she knew she would not miss again. She waited on flexed legs and felt her body relax until a voice in her head whispered Now. Legs straight, body above the porch, t-shirt now up and showing her dimpled belly, she rose through the summer’s night and watched as her fingers found the body of a moth. Her hand did not close around the moth but when she landed again on the porch inside the jail of her fingers the moth’s powder spread silvery and blue across her palm. She gasped and a horrid feeling went through her like a shock. She tried not to kill it and she hadn’t but she knew it was doomed now so she dropped it and twisted her bare heel on it, looking back out into the darkness for her brothers and cousins, especially Louis, he who knew her so very well and who was nice, a gentleman, of the same mind as her. Like her in many ways. Unlike Floyd, who’d already burned down his school. And Ogden who was one-eyed, Fitz who cried, Wright who was fast and Jeb who already wore sharktooth necklaces and crosses made out of olive wood and read books from the Charles City library about elves. Louis more girl than boy.
It wasn’t long ago out in their fort when all of them were together there under where three old cedars had all grown together and beneath which was formed a perfect teepee covered on all sides by thick green brush and from outside looked like on large impermeable bush but inside of the cedars was a room, really, a room where all of them could lie side by side. Well that’s how big it was. Three columns of blistered cedarwood rose from points six feet apart and met above head height and the only way in was to crawl from the backside of it, the one they couldn’t see from the house. Talk, talk, talk as long as they wanted. Bottles drunk and spun, shirts removed, then shorts, children’s bodies white in the night. The older kids did other things, too, like light candles, tell ghost stories and smoke cigarettes. And not too long ago Wright has lifted up her shirt without anyone even asking and showed whatever little there was to show. Ogden said something mean probably, mean but smart, something from a book that Jeb had read too, at least from the way he chuckled and kicked Ogden chummily with his toe. Her skin was pale white in the darkness and when she put her shirt back down it was like turning off a light.
Cammie held her ear up and listened. Could she hear them now way out by the barn, running in and out of the stacked bales, climbing up to peer at the bats hanging from the rafters? Or was she imagining something they used to do before the shadow came into her? So much space out there in the back yard in the woods that stretched along the river shore, where you could walk through the darkness not seeing a thing until you heard the ominous ripple of the river and came right up on it, pine and oak and locust tipped and tilted and pulling away huge chunks of muddy bank as they tumbled in. In front of you stretched the river, silver-brown, not far from where, said all the old people, the country began, the first starved and half-crazed settlers not ten miles from here. Down there on the river after storms you could find arrowheads and Indian pottery and china blue shards that the people who built the house had left. And of course all of the bones. Why did they leave their dishes out there on the riverbank? Why were they broke? What were they doing there? Why did Captain Smith try to jab the ray with his sword?
Cammie on the riverbank, Ogden and Fitz ankle deep jabbing sticks into the water and pulling up globes of jelly, tentacles dangling beneath, some tinged rose. Then as clear as anything will ever be, staring up at her are two eyes half-buried in the mud. As benign and lifeless as a shell. She reaches down and grabs the thing as if it is something that must be removed and is only then surprised to know that she is holding a human skull.
But at night when she stands at the window looking out across the lawn to the river and the woods there was a darkness that moved is all how Cammie could explain it to herself, not to anyone else because anyone else didn’t ask. A darkness void of form that moved in against itself, away from itself and turning back in on itself, just moved around. Twisting in the air. Like it was made out of black syrup squidging around in an invisible air-shaped bucket. Syrup that floated, was weightless, had no mass. Solid smoke. There was a sound when it moved, a rustling sound like feet through dry grass. Or a whispering sound like someone whispering so quiet because they don’t want you to hear. That sound when someone is so quiet that their lips are barely opened and tiny small breaths spill out so quiet but still you can tell that someone is whispering.
One day she rode on her dad’s lap while he drove the tractor out a fire road through the woods and out there in the middle of forest, vines, weeds and brush she saw through the trunks a clean brick wall about as tall as she was. The bush hog behind the tractor howling, the joint grinding malevolently. The wall enclosed a space not even big as a room and so far on the corner of the woods past where Dad had cleared brush one dry summer, way deep into the woods, she clutching his flannel shirt and smelling the vinegary smoke smell of him and the gassy smell of the tractor as he wrestled it through a fire-road that might as well have not been a road at all until they came to the brick wall, the bricks almost rounded they were so old. He told her to go look while he backed the tractor and the bush hog around. She peered over the wall and saw first the names etched in the graying stone, her own among them, the great-great-great grandmother who they first called Cammie, Cameron DeLisle, the lady looming over her with that awful blank sad look on her face, the tiny headstone beneath her no bigger than a loaf of bread.
And off in the corner where two of the brick walls met rolling its hands on themselves was the black shape, whispering.
But not now, she whispered aloud, covering her ears. Above her the moths flicked against the single bulb and looking out she couldn’t see ten feet from the porch.