It was kind of a rude church gathering. They sat, squatted, leaned on plaster walls, and one by one, with reverent awe, they stared at the jar upon its shelf.
They wouldn’t stare sudden like. That would’ve been irreverent. No, they kind of did it slow, casual, as if they were glancing around the room — letting eyes fumble over just any old object that happened into their consciousness.
And — just by accident, of course — the focus of their wandering eyes would occur always at the same place. After a while all eyes in the room would be fastened to it, like pins stuck in some incredible pin-cushion. And the only sound would be someone sucking a corn-cob. Or the children’s barefooted scurry on the porch planks outside. Maybe some woman’s voice would come, ‘You kids git away, now! Git!’ And with a giggle like soft, quick water, the bare feet would rush off to scare the bull-frogs.
Charlie would be up front, naturally, on his rocking chair, a plaid pillow under his lean rump, rocking slow, enjoying the fame and looked-up-toness that came with keeping the jar.
Thedy, she’d be seen way back of the room with the womenfolk in a bunch like grey grapes, abiding their menfolk.
Thedy looked like she was ripe for jealous screaming. But she said nothing, just watched men tromp into her living-room and sit at the feet of Charlie staring at this here Holy Grail-like thing, and her lips were set as seven-day concrete and she spoke not a civil word to nobody.
After a period of proper silence, someone, maybe old Gramps Medknowe from Crick Road, would clear the phlegm from his old throat’s cavern, lean forward, blinking, wet his lips, maybe, and there’d be a curious tremble in his calloused fingers.
This would cue everyone to get ready for the talking to come. Ears were primed. People settled much as sows in warm mud after the rain.
Gramps looked a long while, measured his lips with a lizard tongue, then settled back and said, like always, in a high thin old man’s tenor:
‘Wonder what it is? Wonder if it’s a he or a she or just a plain old it? Sometimes I wake up nights, twist on my corn-matting, think about that jar settin’ here in the long dark. Think about it hangin’ in liquid, peaceful and pale like an animal oyster. Sometimes I wake Maw and we both think of it. . .’
While talking, Gramps moved his fingers in a quavering pantomime. Everybody watched his thick thumb weave, and the other heavy-nailed fingers undulate.
‘. . . we both lay there, thinkin’. And we shivers. Maybe a hot night, trees sweatin’, mosquitoes too hot to fly, but we shivers jest the same, and turn over, tryin’ to sleep. . .’
Gramps lapsed back into silence, as if his speech was enough from him, let some other voice talk the wonder, awe and strangeness.
Juke Marmer, from Willow Sump, wiped sweat off his palms on the round of his knees and softly said:
‘I remember when I was a runnel-nosed kid. We had a cat who was all the time makin’ kittens. Lordamighty, she’d a litter ever time she turned around and skipped a fence — ‘ Juke spoke in a kind of holy softness, benevolent. ‘Well, we usually gave the kittens away, but when this one particular litter busted out, everybody within walkin’ distance had one-two our cats by gift, already.
‘ — So Ma busied on the back porch with a big two-gallon glass jar, fillin’ it to the top with water. It slopped in the sunlight. Ma said, ‘Juke, you drown them kittens!’ I ‘member I stood there, the kittens mewed, runnin’ ‘round, blind, small, helpless and snuggly. Just beginnin’ to get their eyes open. I looked at Ma, I said, ‘Not me, Ma! You do it!’ But Ma turned pale and said it had to be done and I was the only one handy. And she went off to stir gravy and fix chicken. I — I picked up one — kitten. I held it. It was warm. It made a mewin’ sound. I felt like runnin’ away, not ever comin’ back.’
Juke nodded his head now, eyes bright, young, seeing into the past making it stark, chiselling it out with hammer and knife of words, smoothing it with his tongue:
‘I dropped the kitten in the water.
‘The kitten closed his eyes, opened his mouth, tryin’ for air. I ‘member how the little white fangs showed, the pink tongue came out, and bubbles with it, in a line to the top of the water!
‘I know to this day the way that kitten floated after it was all over, driftin’ aroun’, aroun’, slow and not worryin’, lookin’ out at me, not condemnin’ me for what I done. But not likin’ me, neither. Ahhh. . .’
Hearts beat fast. Eyes shifted quickly from Juke to the shelved jar, back to him, up again; a spectators’ game, like one sees at a tennis tournament, interest changing from moment to moment, apprehensively.
A pause.
Jahdoo, the black man from Heron Swamp, tossed his ivory eyeballs like a dusky juggler in his head. His dark knuckles knotted and flexed — grasshoppers alive.
‘You know what thet is? You know, you know? I tells you. That am the centre of Life, sure ‘nuff! Lord believe me, it am so!’
Swaying in a tree-like rhythm, Jahdoo was blown by some swamp wind nobody could see, hear or feel, save himself. His eyeballs went around again, as if loosened from all mooring. His voice needled a dark thread pattern picking up each person by the lobes of their ears and sewing them into one unbreathing design:
‘From that, lyin’ back in the Middibamboo Sump, all sort o’ thing crawl. It put out hand, it put out feet, it put out tongue an’ horn an’ it grow. Little bitty amoeba, perhap. Then a frog with a bulge-throat fit ta bust! Yah!’ He cracked knuckles. ‘It slobber on up to its gummy joints and it — it AM A MAN! That am the centre of creation! That am Middibamboo Mama, from which we all come ten thousand year ago. Believe it!’
‘Ten thousand year ago!’ reiterated Granny Carnation.
‘It am old! Looky it! It donn worra no more. It know betta. It hang like pork chop in fryin’ fat. It got eye to see with, but it donn blink ‘em, they donn look fretted, does they? No, man! It know betta. It know thet we done come from it, and we is goin’ back to it!’
‘What colour eyes has it got?’
‘Grey.’
‘Naw, green!’
‘What colour hair? Brown?’
‘Black!’
‘Red!’
‘No, grey!’
Then, Charlie would give his drawling opinion. Some nights he’d say the same thing, some nights not. It didn’t matter. When you said the same thing night after night in the deep summer, it always sounded different. The crickets changed it. The frogs changed it. The thing in the jar changed it. Charlie said:
‘What if an old man went back into the swamp, or maybe a young kid, and wandered aroun’ for years and years lost in the drippin’ trails and gullies, the wet ravines in the nights, skin a turnin’ pale, and makin’ cold and shrivellin’ up. Bein’ away from the sun he’d keep witherin’ away up and up and finally sink into a muck-hole and lay in a kind of — solution — like the maggot ‘skeeters sleepin’ in liquid. Why, why — for all we know, this might be someone we know. Someone we passed words with once on a time. For all we know. . .’
A hissing from among the womenfolk back in the shadow. One woman standing, eyes shining black, fumbling for words. Her name was Mrs. Tridden. She said:
‘Lots of little kids run stark naked into the swamp ever’ year. They runs around and they never comes back. I almost got lost maself. I — I lost my little boy, Foley, that way. You — you DON’T SUPPOSE!!’
Breaths were taken in, snatched through nostrils, constricted, tightened. Mouths turned down at corners, bent by grim facial muscles. Heads turned on celery-stalk necks, and eyes read her horror and hope. It was in Mrs. Tridden’s body, wire-taut, holding on to the wall back of her with straight fingers stiff.
‘My baby,’ she whispered. She breathed it out. ‘My baby. My Foley. Foley! Foley, is that you? Foley! Foley, tell me, baby, is that YOU!’
Everybody held their breath, turning to see the jar.
The thing in the jar said nothing. It just stared blind-white out upon the multitude. And deep in raw-boned bodies a secret fear juice ran like spring thaw, and the resolute ice of calm life and belief and easy humbleness was cracked down the middle by that juice and melted away in a gigantic torrent! Someone screamed.
‘It moved!’
‘No, no, it didn’ move. Just your eyes playin’ tricks!’
‘Hones’ ta God,’ cried Juke. ‘I saw it shift slow like a dead kitten!’
‘Hush up, now! It’s been dead a long, long time. Maybe since before you was born!’
‘He made a sign!’ screamed Mrs. Tridden, the mother woman. ‘That’s my baby, my Foley! My baby you got there! Three year old he was! My baby lost and white in the swamp!’
The sobbing broke out of her.
‘Now, now, there now, Mrs. Tridden. There now. Set yourself down and stop shakin’. Ain’t no more your child’n mine. There, there.’
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