The Beauty of Death Vol.2 - Death by Water

Walking on Water. Dona Fox-2

I stared at the wound I had made in Andy’s tree.

“Me, too, Uncle Bert.”

Mama was gone; she must have gone over the ridge while the demons’ songs distracted me.

ANDY’D CHANGED. The wheelchair tracks didn’t take long to roll straight over the ridge and down into the murky water. It looked like Uncle Bert had tried to save him. They sank and died together, Uncle’s sleeve bound up in Andy’s wheel. I hadn’t heard a sound that night, but I woke up soaked and screaming from my dreams.

I went to live in the town across the lake with Miss Palmer, my favorite teacher, the one I’d gone to when my daddy hung himself. Jeffy went somewhere else.

Miss Palmer dressed me up like a city girl and took me to church on Sunday. I didn’t fit in and I’m not sure I belonged in a religious setting. I’ll always believe it was my sinful thoughts that brought the demons down on us that Sunday.

Sister Moore led the girls up to the choir loft for Sunday school. She stood in front of the short wall that separated the loft from the main church below. As she recited the lesson, she rocked in hypnotic circles, it would be so easy for her to lean back too far, tip over the little partition, and hurtle to the floor below. Thick support hose that didn’t begin to hide the wormy purple veins strangled her stout legs. She balanced precariously on coal black heels that choked her swollen feet. The lenses in her glasses were bifocaled and thick as a serving dish.

She stumbled on the edge of the carpet. She slipped on the painted wood floor.

Mrs. Moore’s lips barely moved when she talked. I could only count the hairs in her mustache for so long before boredom settled in and a little voice began to frolic in my mind. One push. Just one shove, push the old biddy over the edge. Do it. Now. One push. I could feel the act gathering as my muscle juices built up, my body was getting ready to rise, and then I felt the tingly needle of anticipation, that preceded the heady rush as if I were pushing her, as if it were actually happening. Like pushing Daddy out of the haymow.

I let the feeling tantalize me, ride me. I could feel my palms sticking on her shiny purple Sunday dress. She would topple so easily.

I could picture the panic and the horror on all their little faces. They didn’t grow up on a farm as I did. I’d seen so many dead things. Maybe she wouldn’t die. Not right away. What would happen if I pushed her? I folded my hands and crushed them between my knees. I was saved from damnation when the organist struck the first chords announcing the end of Sunday school. We lined up, marched single file, and joined the main congregation downstairs for the morning service.

I slid into the pew beside Miss Palmer, shut my eyes, and began to swing my legs.

The Devil and his demons placed the spires on your churches; baptized children in His name. I kicked the bottom of the hymnal lodged in the holder on the back of the pew in front of me in rhythm to the words beating through my head. The Devil and his demons placed the spires on your churches; baptized children in His name…baptized in His name…children in His name…Devil (kick) demons (kick) baptized (kick) children. Your Daddy…Uncle Bert…they had to be stopped…

I opened my eyes and quit kicking the back of the pew in front of me. Where the heck were these thoughts coming from? I knew they weren’t my own thoughts. I looked around the church, the whisper still damp in my ear.

The congregation was in silent prayer. Every cell phone was respectfully turned off. Brother Johnston’s bald head glowed at me tenderly; it wasn’t he, he hadn’t spoken. Miss Palmer stood beside me with her eyes only half-closed, always slyly checking to see who might be watching her.

I smoothed down my skirt and was rethinking my irreverent slouch when the double doors at the back of the chapel opened and the air became warm and so humid it was like being in a pan of water.

I can’t say why I didn’t scream and run or at least duck under the pew. Maybe television has inured me to the fantastic, the strange, and the peculiar. Even the monstrous. Perhaps I thought it was a joke at first or that we were being filmed. Or perhaps I’d finally gone mad. I certainly had the right.

In any case I just sat there, a TV-trained immobile spectator while a swarm of the aliens, demons, or followers of the revivalists, more likely that’s what they were, preceded by the two more recognizably human of the bunch, the ones I came to know as the leader and his pale wife, passed down the aisle and up over the altar, leaving the carpet rumpled and soaked in their wake.

They surrounded and incorporated Brother Johnston. He didn’t scream. He actually chuckled; which probably led me further into believing there was nothing wrong, a few of the parishioners even laughed with him. But when the damp and misshapen monsters backed away, Brother Johnston was gone, just gone. I figured later that must have been when he became part of them, because from that time on they knew my name, my sorrows, and my weaknesses. But they weren’t there to give me comfort as he’d been.

Thus, they came into what had been Miss Palmer’s church, and relativity changed; it was her church no longer, this new leader became the host.

It all seemed normal at the time. Even the fact I never heard him speak; his words rang only in my mind. In retrospect, there were so many oddities, which should have sent me as far from him as I could find a means to travel.

I was unable to discuss his physical appearance with anyone; my tongue tied as soon as I tried to describe what I saw when I looked at him. If I tried to write or type a description of him, my fingers stumbled. Any attempt to take a photo of him came out blank. I attempted signing and my arms went wild. I had to assume everyone else’s experience of him was as intoxicating as mine.

Miss Palmer began to keep strange hours. I followed her to the church one night and watched her with the leader; both of them were flirting and laughing. The light from the full moon hit the stained glass and glorified them both. My heart broke outside another, plainer, window; his wife fumed in the choir loft.

Miss Palmer came home in the morning, glowing. “You’re going to be baptized. The leader and I are preparing the program together, choosing the songs, and some bits of poetry.”

“Not Bible verses?” I said.

She stared at me for a moment, a line between her eyebrows. Then she smiled, “No, just some bits of poetry.”

Her period of delight went on for a week then one morning she came home subdued.

“What’s wrong?” I touched her hand. She was cold and damp. The early morning light showed the tiny green lines that crisscrossed the whites of her eyes.

She put her hand on my forehead. “You’re skin’s burning. You’re sick. Let’s get you in a cold bath.”

I raved in the bath; I tried to warn her about demons and drowning.

She put me to bed in a thin gown beneath a cool cotton sheet. After she left I tried the door. She’d locked it.

“Miss Palmer, let me out. Talk to me.”

I heard her crying on the other side of my door.

That night she came to me, her skin pearlescent, she was leaving again.

“Miss Palmer?”

She pushed me to my pillow; a damp handprint shimmered on my shoulder.

On her return, she locked herself in her room. This time her sobs were so plaintive I pulled a chair up to her door and waited for the night to pass. Her cries ceased, light came in the windows, but the door never opened.

Finally, I broke it down. All manner of damp footprints covered the floor. It was obvious she’d been drawn out the window. A streak of brackish water marked a wicked path down the side of her bed, across the floor, and over the windowsill.

I ran to the church.

They enfolded me. You’re our child now. We’re baptizing our children today.

They pressed a goblet of green honey wine to my lips and held back my head.

The dangling horizon, quicker to the sight than Earth’s sky should ever dare to droop suspended at the twelve tiny figures in a shadow box. Gray cotton on the cardboard above, a tiny mirror denoting the black lake before me, icy, hungry. My bare feet tentative in the frozen blades of silver.

We stood in the cemetery.

The lake was different now for they were in power.

The breeze mocked the thin white gowns of the initiates calling the rose to our cheeks. We blinked into the wind, licked the dryness from our lips, and struggled to hide our shame with slender arms as the rough muslin inflamed our virgin skin.

Then he was ready, arms everywhere, bare below his several knees, ghost of a tremble in his hand, One rule that must be obeyed. Do not open your eyes in our water. You will not know what you will see.

The ceremony had come to an ellipsis…

Holding for the first sight of my teacher, this had started out as Miss Palmer’s affair after all, she’d spent too many darknesses with him sweating, apparently over which melodies would be sung and when. Laughing together, they’d chosen the poetry that would roll across his golden tongue.

Someone knew where she was…someone surely knew.

Hanging his head, the leader rubbed his neck and closed his eye, as was his wont.

A dust devil blew by us playing with a bit of burlap.

The cold families huddled, whispered, and glared at me; the orphan farm girl, conversant with swamp gas and death.

My fellow initiates hugged their chill arms even as the leader’s wife was warming, steam rising from her skin.

We shall begin. One rule; do not open your eyes in our water.

The leader worked his way through all the others. He dunked, they gasped and choked and took great gulps of the lake that then became a vital piece of them; the core that spread its roots within as they bobbed back up soaked and shaking with the cold, water running down their exquisite forms as if they were [still human] fountains, now accepted by our hosts.

My time came, still no Miss Palmer, so he went ahead and plunged me under. His [webbed] fingers outstretched, cupped over the top of my head, he thrust me into the water. I held my mouth clamped against the lake.

Weeds became conversant with my thighs, wrapped around my ankles, and yanked me urgently away.

The leader’s hand squeezed my head one last time as if to say, No choices, no choices.

I chose to open my eyes and I knew what I saw.

I drowned in the visions and that was my choice, too. You won’t find scrapes on my palms and fingertips. I don’t have torn or broken nails. I didn’t change my mind and go back to be revived.

This carpet of bones is awkward for escaping; they make tiny tick tick sounds I can hear even in the bottom of the lake as I flee through the dark water, no time to kick them from beneath my feet.

I avoid the roller coaster paths created by both man and nature. Here dangerous chunks of cement jut from the slimy bed into the water. Roots of fallen trees thrust up a hazardous impediment just over there. Weeds thrive in the rich soil, fed as it is by the graveyard, ropey weeds that encircle and explore a car, a tricycle, an empty wheelchair.

I hear someone calling my name, as if there were anyone left who knew of me, who cared.

I lie down on the familiar bones; press my cheek against a smooth ivory bowl.

The water turned colder as it leached my heat. The surface beneath me grew harder as inertia drew the softness from the planes where my body and the bones made contact.

As time passed, moss covered my face and the roots made of me a home. Police cars cruised by periodically, searchlights illuminated the water and scanned the old farm and the graveyard. In the echoes above the lake, I no longer hear my name. I am an orphan, broken and abandoned. I chose that.