Beginner's Mind

As dusk shadowed the brake and the sky glowed hot and gloomy like fired iron, as the cicadas set in and far off the frogs began a song, a spectral figure emerged hat and shoulders from the rippled surface of the backwaters. He carried a long walking stick with which he plumbed the path before him, and tied to the top of the stick hung a heavy black sack. He pushed his way through the weedy murk and emrged onto the damp ground of the brake dripping and naked save the wide black hat on his head. He leaned against the stick and felt carefully over his flesh in the last of red light, picked a few dangling leeches like mutant teats of blood from his wiry thighs and knotted buttocks, then he untied the sack which was in fact a preacher’s cassock looped over a heavy Bowie knife and rotting string of beads. He removed the hat and hung it float atop a clump of reed and he draped himself in the cassock, tied his waist with a rope and hung the beads from the front of the belt and slipped the knife into the rope to hang at his back. He donned the hat and inspecting first the sky and then the dark ground before him, he discerned some sense of direction and struck out through the unseen trails in the reeds. He meandered for some time, the night falling heavy around him till he could no longer distinguish the hem of his cassock from the black ground below it. His own hands seems to float in space like incorporeal spirits guiding him through the marsh. At last he pushed aside a stand of reeds like curtains and stepping into a small clearing of hard earth in the back of which nestled of burrow of reeds with a door. A drift of smoke rose less dark than the darkness around it in a thin cloud from a lifted hatch in the roof. He looked around the rest of the clearing but so no other markers and checked the sky for his bearings but could make out no stars for guidance. He bent low to the ground and laid his stick gently there, then slipped the knife from the rope behind him and crept up on the hovel.

Buford’s shack tilted in the reeds and listed one side half down a slope into the water. It had fallen off its thick cypress blocks. In the night it looked like some giant angular concoction of the marsh slinking back into the muck and water whence it had come. As he approached the side with his knife in his fist to peer in the one side window he still could reach he half-expected to find the blazing eyes of a rougarou leering back at him through the paneless frame, the hot wolfen breath through the dripping teeth the breath of the swamp itself. He saw nothing inside but smelled it nonetheless, though it was a form of death he’d known already these last few years and nothing supernatural about it. He slid down an embankment into water up his ankles and bent to prise open the door, had to wrench askew and climb over the corner of it just to enter. He crouched and waited for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness inside. He heard a scuttle of some creature and felt the matted grizzly fur of a muskrat scrape past his foot but he held his ground and waited still. When nothing else moved he reached into a fold and pocket he’d stitched into the cassock and popped a match with his thumbnail. The inside of the shack wavered in the yellow light like it was underwater, but nothing else moved. A wreck of moldering reeds in one corner, the scent of scat by the wall that cantered into the marsh. His lantern bent and glassless still hung on a nail by the door but it was drained and wickless, pilfered long ago. A pole warped along the far wall, some shards of crockery and some bones he’d collected in his youth and never saw fit to discard. Nothing else remained. His few utensils, his table and two chairs and his bedframe, his old cookstove, everything pillaged. The match expired on his thumbtip and he hissed. He shuffled into the corner where he’d remembered seeing the pile of reeds, popped another match and reached for the bent pole to poke among the damp wreck but nothing emerged save a few insects. He blew out the match and shook it to cool then pocketed the last of the stick, stirred the nest with the pole till he was satisfied whatever had called it home had now absconded, and then he kicked the reeds together into a loose mat and fell back on it to sleep. He lay instead for some hours just staring up into nothing.

During the Civil War, a mother and her son's wife eke a living out of the Lousiana bayou by robbing the bodies of passing soldiers. Sometimes they kill the soldiers first. Into this comes a neighbor deserted from his regiment and hiding in the reed brakes where they live; he brings news of the son's/husband's death. Now both women enter a silent, unacknowledged war of lust and jealously trying to possess the runaway hermit.

For days on end the only sound in the reed brake was the wind in the rushes. There would be other sounds for those who knew how to discern them, the soft crash of a gator slipping from the prairie grass into the muck and water, the rustle of ducks breaking for the sky or the dip of a heron beak as it fished the shallows. But all kept quiet enough that by day few sounds were louder than the sighing of the reeds, and at night the baritone croak of the frogs was cheerless and departed. The two women listened anyway, silent and languid themselves in their meager chores, and when at last they’d catch out of the hot breeze the long-off reports of canonshot or riflefire, they would set aside their baskets of wash and reel in the crawfish traps and the few lines they’d laid, and they would gather their one musket with its fixed bayonet and a long stiff cane they’d sharpened and wrapped with a grip, and they would crawl out into the marsh to lie in wait.

They took almost half an hour to drag the men to the forgotten well in the marsh by a long abandoned homestead where now remained only the well and a packed foundation they alone would recognize. They dragged their pairs of legs to the low stone wall of the well and propped the naked ankles atop the rim. With such a ramp created from the dead legs they bent and rolled the third man like a log up the bodies until his rump hung over the lip and they pushed so he bent in the middle and fell into the well. Echoing up from the maw came a wet crunch of various limbs when he landed in the deep below, the bodies down there already risen past the water line. A cloud of gnats ascended to behold them that had disturbed the deep, and with the gnats came a stench of swollen meat and festered gases like the reek of hell itself. They paid the not gnats nor the stench any heed, bent already to the second body and hauling it up by the shoulders. The girl held the man steady while the old woman shifted the legs until the knees caught and held the rim. They together they lifted his back and pitched him headlong into the well. They did the same for the last body, and the cloud of gnats followed in a descending vortex like a school a fish chasing a proffered meal. The women did not notice; they returned to the trampled and bloodstained clearing to collect their piles. They stuffed what they could into the haversack then slung the straps of the sack over two of the rifles like poles for a spit. The old woman hung the third rifle crossways over her shoulder , the strap bisecting her pendulous breasts, then both women bent and rested the rifle-ends on their shoulders to raise the haversack slung between them. The girl in the lead and carrying the musket and cane pike while the old woman steadied their load. Neither had said one word the entire time, all their deeds by habit unspoken.