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| Blackwater by Donna Burgess (Issue 8) |
"Do you know how much I love thee? Let me count the ways," Mother whispered. Her breath was warm, soft and scented with the cheap, stale cigarettes she smoked secretly when Father was out on the water. It caressed his smooth forehead and pale, rounded cheeks. "One," and a dry peck to his small button of a nose. "Two and three," and her lips rested an instant on each of his translucent eyelids.
Though he was more than four years old, she held him in her thin arms, cradled him and rocked forward and back in the squeaking chair. But he did not feel as comfortable as he should have in the arms of his mother. A question troubled him. He dreaded coming sleep for the nightmares.
In the far corner of the small living room, a TV played, black and white images moving silent and blurred like ghosts unnoticed, for Mother's attention was now turned from her son to the front window. The boy's attention was rooted deeply in his dark and worried thoughts.
Finally, one starfish hand rested on Mother's white cheek and he asked: "Mommy, do dreams come true?"
"Yes, Del," she answered, a small, hidden smile touching her lips. Her eyes drifted once again to the darkness of the front window. "Sometimes, if we're lucky, they do come true."
***
Little Del lay awake in his bed, listening to the bell-like clank of bottleneck against wine stem drift down the short hallway. If sleep did not come, he reasoned, then neither would the dreams.
He listened for the sound of his father's return--the heavy footfalls on the wooden dock, a hearty greeting for Mother at the front door of the house.
Their voices would then float into his room from the kitchen where Father would eat his late dinner. The voices sometimes grew hushed and serious--that was when they discussed him, or more often his nightmares. Other times their voices twined into one playful sound, laughter, a bit louder than the first. These times were when Father told Mother about "those silly Yankee tourists," their ridiculous questions, and how they actually became frightened on the boat. Those were the same voices they used when they were feeling loving toward each other. When Del heard those tones, he felt a bit safer. He knew the muffled click as their bedroom door closing, then the ghost-like singing of the mattress beneath them would soon follow.
He had not heard those playful voices in a very long time.
***
His mother and father thought the dreams came on account of Father's work. You see, Del's father owned a small vessel called Blackbeard's Ghost. Blackbeard's Ghost was a tourist boat. Not big enough to be called a ship, it could never hold its own on the open waters of the Atlantic. Yet it cruised the dark currents of the intercoastal waterway, and wound its way up into salty rivers and moss canopied inlets.
"St. Claire's Ghost Tours" was his father's business, as his father before him. One day it would become Del's most likely. But Del was not big enough to know whether to feel excited or not.
The ghost tours frightened and intrigued Del. He had accompanied Father almost nightly until the nightmares began, sitting to Father's right on a low stool as the little flatboat cut through the haunted waters of Georgetown's long dead. Up into old Waccammaw Neck they motored, where the phantom of a young Confederate still prowled Hagley Landing, over into Murrells Inlet to the sight of the Hermitage where beautiful Alice is said to be forever searching for her lost engagement ring, up into the Pawleys Island causeway where the Grey Man mysteriously appeared as warning to all islanders of impending treacherous weather. There Del would sit, absorbing the mysterious, glamorous tales of the old South, solemn and silent, eyes drifting from one joyously terrified and shadowed face to another, all lined up on musty bench seats like crazed worshippers at five dollars a head.
His father would recite the old tales from memory, his voice deep and roughened from the drink he would sip discreetly, theatrically lowered to something not quite a whisper, over a cracking and static-filled intercom. Del loved that voice, mostly because it hid the night sounds of crickets, bullfrogs and owls, and the occasional slicing splash as a gator slipping into the black water.
He wondered what would happen to them if one night the boat motor quit running. Ah, the horrible silence, he imagined without that constant hum. How would they ever get back?
But he never asked his father. Again, he was too frightened of what the answer might be.
***
Lying awake, he thought he heard the boat banging gently against the dock down front, and climbed out of bed.
Nothing out his window but night. A fat moon shone twice--once above, again below, wavering ghostly on the night water. The sky stretched outward, an endless blanket of black studded with bright, hard rhinestone stars and stained with the grayish blot of an approaching thunderhead. Across the water glowed the pale houselights of their nearest neighbors. Tall leaning marsh grass danced in the summer breeze just beyond the sparse, sandy lawn. The breeze lifted his bangs and brought the smell of the still distant rain and saltwater that was like perfume to his senses.
He climbed back into his bed, the sheets cool on his legs and small feet, and he vowed not to sleep.
But in the end, he did.
***
Waiting, his mother smoked her secret cigarettes and finished Father's wine at the kitchen table, the overhead light humming and flickering, threatening to burn out.
"Sometimes dreams do come true," she whispered. Her hands trembled, as did her lips, because she was afraid for what she had done.
She must get up the mess before Del woke for breakfast in the morning.
Father lay in the floor, staring blankly at the flickering bulb. Blood flowed from him, seeped into the wood of the old floor, became one with it, with the ancient little house. It ran under her chair, staining her bare feet, but she did not notice its warmth against her skin.
One swift whack with his very own mallet and she was free of him, free of the secret, hidden slaps and curses and rapes. She was free of having to pretend to be happy, though the lines of her face told the truth.
As the thunder began to roll loudly, she dragged her dead husband out of the house, his skull very loud as it dropped and thudded across the threshold.
On the front porch, she had to rest, her upper back and arms already weak and shaking from the big man's weight. Her blond hair fell across her face and brushing it back, she smeared her man's blood on her cheeks like a crude warpaint.
She cringed as his head dropped and bumped again as she made her way down the porch steps. Dark blood splattered, mixed with flecks of shattered skull and bits of gray tissue that the crabs and the gulls would peck at later if she did not remember to scrub it away.
Eventually she made it to the docks, just as lightning began to split the sky in half.
***
Del heard what he supposed was his father, and snapped awake. He scrambled to his window once again and . . .Yes!
There was boat, docked, a single, dim and flickering lantern swinging from the deck.
But where were their voices, Mother's and Father's? Had they left him alone? A four year-old's irrational panic ceased him momentarily, causing his stomach to tighten. Tears stung his eyes.
But there, on the dock, he was able to make out a shape, thin and bent at the waist, tending to something, some lump, on the boards of the dock.
Then lightning broke once again and night became day.
Del saw Mother roll Father into the black ghostwaters of Waccammaw Neck.
*** She came and looked in on him, swaying in the doorway. Through the dark fringe of his lashes, Del could see how she looked--like a dark, frightened angel, stark light from behind striking her dirty hair and her pale face, brown-streaked with Father's blood. She smelled of fear now, rotted lilacs, cheap zinfandel wine and sweat. Del wanted to vomit.
But he pretended to sleep instead.
He knew the nightmares would come now, no matter how he tried to will them away. And they never starred the ghosts from the dark waterway tours. They were of Mother. They always had been.
***
It hurt her that he cried when she touched him. Sometimes he would scramble and struggle from her grasp when she wanted to cradle him, grunting like some sort of animal in pain.
At night he would cry for his dead father, and she knew he knew what she had done. She missed holding her little son. At meals there was nothing but silence.
There was silence when the police came and found the body. Drowned, they determined, death by folly. There was silence when the bill collectors came and towed away the boat.
The house fell to disrepair and the silence became deafening, especially during the evenings when the candles burned because the electric bill had not been paid. Together but not touching, they sat among the cobwebs and the ghosts of the voices that once echoed through the little house.
When it rained in summer, Del and his mother bathed themselves outdoors, and they did not care if anyone saw. Mother was proud of the white skin of her breasts and back and arms because they were no longer marred by blue and yellow fist marks.
Del never knew they had been.
When he looked at his mother, he saw only a dark angel swaying and blood striped in his doorway on a thunderstorming summer night.
***
For years she did not touch her beautiful son. He slipped out of the house for school, and then back in later. To feed them, she mended pants and suits and dresses in her bedroom, head bent, brows knitted tight in concentration and sadness.
They co-existed in silent knowing and guilt.
Mother wanted to hold her boy again like she had when she wore the bruises.
Del dreamed horrible dreams and wondered if they would eventually come true like Mother once said.
***
One foggy, rain misted morning Del awoke to find Mother was gone. She had packed all she needed and escaped while he dreamed of her standing in his bedroom doorway on a thunderstorming night.
He felt freedom, yet he felt loneliness, also, although they had not spoken since he was small. Suddenly he felt the need to be held.
He sat at the kitchen table, watching gray through the windows. And he waited. Shortly he heard a familiar footfall on the dock down front, followed by a hearty greeting.
Del smiled to himself. "It's better this way," he whispered. "It's better for us all."
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