Swamp Dreams, Pt. III
ISSUE #171
As we crest the ridge that runs down September’s back, it’s clear to me that special frequencies hide in autumn air, resonances that only ring out when the air falls back to cool. It gives power to a primeval force—gnarlgrass, memory dust, swirling blackwater tinctures. There’s a reason Swamptember’s been around for centuries. The story continues:
My father was silent for a long while. I watched him. He sat with palms flat on his scraped knees, his thin hair a nest of midnight twine. His birdlike nose and pointed jaw gave him a nervous, questioning look, but all the Swampers knew he was generous and kind. Up early with the birds, he would often finish three or four tasks before coming in to make my breakfast—the fixing of a neighbor’s roof, the daubing of their boat, the simple gift of last night’s bread walked over with the dawn. He knew many stories by heart, never telling any the same way twice. Except for the ones about her.
His neck was turned and he was looking back at the cross standing naked in the blackwater. A pane of glassy night spilled out through the reeds—naturalists came to call these treeless blots of swamp “prairies,” after the black dirt that held their cabins back home. Two cypress branches, bare as bone, were the markers of my mother’s grave.
The day he asked her to marry, she was climbing a magnolia eighty feet tall. Higher and higher he watched her climb, weaving her way through waxy leaves. It tested her, he always said, but never let her fall. She seemed to have some extra sense—her hand knew where to catch each branch even as she looked him in the eye.
It was her time at Vassar that she learned to climb—the campus was an arboretum, a word my father slowed down to say every time her told this part. Her favorite tree to climb was the chestnut right outside her dorm, whose branches were her umbrella while she read in the rain.
That tree got sick just before she left for Georgia with the U.S. Biological Survey. A parasitic fungus was infecting all the trees, a disease now known as chestnut blight. She spent her last few days in the North climbing as much as she could, hidden among its nurturing leaves.
He sat at the campfire, I pretended to sleep. I was maybe nine or ten that night, which I remember from the awkward curve of my spine on the bed roll—I always hunched as a little girl, hoping that folding into myself might hide my purple eye.
I closed my eyes again and started to count the cricket chirps. My father taught me to tell the temperature by how many could fit in fifteen seconds—add forty to the number you get and that’s how hot the night was. I counted thirty-five.
“Dad?” I said, breaking the silence. I opened my eyes and turned toward him, just in time to see him jump.
“Hmm?” His mouth turned upward, just a bit, and he looked back at me without turning his head.
“It’s seventy-five degrees,” I said. I pointed out across the water, a conductor to a chorus.
He sighed and cocked his head to listen. When he turned back to me with a humble smile, his dark eyes were as bright as the sun. He reached out to softly brush my hair so it no longer covered my eye.
Few creatures have as many natural enemies as crickets do. I learned that years later, in the library with M. It’s why they’ve become so useful as bait. They’re entirely without natural defenses. Every evolutionary cent was spent on their chirping, which only the males can do—they sing to attract the women, who lack the parts to make music at all. Many hunters find them by following the chirps. The song itself is their great weakness, the source of their gravest danger.
“Then why sing at all? Why not find some other way?” M. asked, months after the night at the tree.
I looked up and out the window at the moon, cratered with her blemishes. “If what they sing could be said with words, who would bother to write a song?”
Swamptember is over.