Our House Is Sound

We have to walk, caterwauling, down the hallways after dusk so that the wolves hidden between the panels of the floorboards are afraid to sneak out and strike. It’s a habit left over from before there were even walls, when the wooden planks were the trees, and the glowing eyes nursed the canine brains toward the hunt. It’s a habit left over from before we were born.

Our house is sound, most days, so it’s really only in the hallways where we have to keep on our toes. Once, maybe two or three winters back, the storm window came lose in one of the second story bedrooms, and Pa liked to have a stroke trying to figure out where that rattling sound was coming from every time the wind blew north-easternly. It took us nearly two weeks to figure out it was that thick piece of glass, polished clean, banging back and forth between the screen and the rose-colored trellis frame that enclosed the actual window. But that’s a rarity. Our house is sound, most days, and on the days it is not, we figure out a means of containment.

It’s the nights we have to worry about.

Sometimes, when we’re all sitting in the house, when all the work is done, we let our hands trace along the hardwood floors. We sit there, Indian-style, our bare feet warmed beneath the denim, and watch our fingers seek out the knots in the boards. They’re oak, the boards, most of them, but some of them are from the cypress trees that used to tower out back. We shoved them in ourselves, wherever they’d fit best, so that, really, it’s only us who can understand the pattern they make. A few though already need to be replaced; the softwood sags beneath our steps.

The sun lights the dark spots on the planks, and we let our fingers swish gingerly across where Mama’s smile would have been.

Most folks, they think there ain’t no more wolves in the swamp, but we know better. Most people will say the wolves all got hunted out, or else they figured out that the bog isn’t all that hospitable and hightailed it on out. They ignore the howls at night, pretend they didn’t hear nothing, or maybe they blame the noises on the South Georgia Pig Man out searching the grounds for some deer to gut or fisherman to scare, but we know the truth. We know there’s still wolves and that they reckoned on a way to live with the tepid waters, that they figured out a way of living forever.

When Pa died, that’s when we stopped going into town. We didn’t like the idea of being state property any more than we liked having to use our last two fifty-cent pieces to keep him blind and pay his way up to Heaven. But we figured we couldn’t spend it none at the market anyway without drawing attention to ourselves, and that, anyway, penny candy was out of the question.

On occasion, a hen would get out over at Ms. MayBelle’s—who lived a ways down across the water—and end up in our yard. We’d eat pretty well for a coupla days and then a sow would turn up and we could feast for weeks. We were of a mind to think sometimes that it was Ol’ MayBelle herself who was chasing the livestock towards us, but whenever we’d catch sight of her across the bog she never once smiled or waved.

The outside world is much brighter at night than most people give it credit for. From inside the house we watch the night air alight with fireflies in their incandescent call-and-response mating dance. Some nights we get the will-o’-the-wisp and the burning off of decay slipping into the air, like the life part of it was finally released and the world has to temporarily explode to absorb it back in. Some nights we get the swamp gas, and only we can spot the difference between what is what, and then it’s every night we get the red eyes of the wolves.

In the moments just when night sets in, when the air is still warm and hazy from the sunshine that was searing down, that’s when we feel them start to stir. The wind that’s coming off the bog twists and jetties to avoid the gnats, to trickle a few leaves here, a few blades of grass there, and maybe the fur around their jaws. The cicadas emerge from their brown shells, leave ‘em clinging to tree trunks and wisteria vines, and twitch their hind legs together with all their might, the roosters of dusk calling all the night creatures to arms. When they’re especially loud, when the whimpers beneath the house start to vibrate the wood nails and the old iron pots Mama left hanging in the kitchen, that’s when we pull out her old gramophone.

Mama, she loved the opera. She’d made her way over to Mobile once, before we was born, and Pa liked to joke that those big city lights had never left her eye. She’d laugh her woodpecker laugh and say with a flourish of her skirt that the light in her eye was just Pa and us, and then put on one of those records with the warbling arias and try to sing along to the falsettos.

When the cicadas and the wolves get particularly loud, we put on those records too. We aim the horn of the gramophone out the window, out over the peat grass and pretty soon the whole swamp, all the nocturnal parts of it, everything is all swaying along at a syncopated pace.

If we know the rhythm, sometimes the wolves are easier to evade.

On nights that we’re especially afraid of the hallways, we sit in the living room with Mama and Pa. It’s always pitch black, and we push the mat aside to sit with our backs to the front door, letting our eyes adjust so we can make out two of the cypress patterns in the floorboards. The June bugs click against the screen door and we let our ears map out the jumble of their movements at our backs. Mama used to hate June bugs. She would scream as they’d bang against the windowpanes and crawl a crisscross on the porch light when we’d sit taking our evening tea or lemonade in the springtime dusk. Or if she were hanging out the laundry and one of their little brown beetle bodies clung tight onto the sheets, she holler so as you might think the Pig’an’d done made it out of the bog and was set upon her. Pa’d take off to running fast around the house and swat the bug away and Mama’d call him her hero and they’d laugh about it while we watched from the water’s edge and the toy boat armada we’d made of folded paper got consumed by the swishing and sank down. We knew if we waited long enough those paper boats would make their way back up, but they wouldn’t be usable anyway so we’d turn our backs on the water and skip up toward Mama and Pa and ask what we were having for dinner.

Everything that sinks down in the swamp has a way of rising back up again. That’s how come we knew the floorboards were a safer bet than the marsh waters. We were eleven when we lost Mama, and we already understood that about the mire. We were eleven when we lost Mama and twelve when we lost Pa, but in all fairness it was in the span of one night. Mama went before midnight on our twelfth birthday and Pa was gone soon after. We had to wish ourselves a happy birthday and the two dollars, our parents had left for us on the kitchen table beside the card and the balloon to surprise us at breakfast, the four fifty-cent pieces went right back to them to buy their ways off this plane. Two to Mama just before midnight; our last two to Pa just after. They went right back to them to keep them blind.

We didn’t go to school the next day because it took us a while to get the oak flooring to move. Eventually we figured we’d just have to smash up the boards. And we couldn’t go to school the day after that ‘cause we needed to down one of the Cypress in the back to cover Mama and Pa so they’d be at peace. And after that there was work to be done around the house, laundry and pruning, and hemming and hawing and scratching and spitting—all those things our parents had once done—and so our days became pretty much occupied.

When Mister Clarence showed up at our doorstep one day, we weren’t at all surprised. He was the county truancy officer and he’d be obligated to come and check out where ‘bouts we’d gotten to. We sat with our back ups against the front door like a barricade, our fingers tracing the knots in the floorboards while we waited to hear his footsteps departing. What did surprise us though was the sound a few minutes later of the screen door slamming on the kitchen side of the house and Mister Clarence’s footsteps making their way into the living room where we were waiting. In that moment, in the heat of it all and the heat of the July shade, there weren’t many options we had, really. And Mama and Pa had the coins so they didn’t see a thing.

Mister Clarence had had to park his car about a mile back—it’s amazing how fast a driveway can grow over in the summer heat and damp of the bog—so it was nearly a month or so before anyone made their way over to our place to check up on him. It was another state official, but a petty one, not like a sheriff or a deputy or anything, and we never learned his name before he went to join Mister Clarence.

We cut down another Cypress.

The swamp muddles. The blackwaters remain all tied up with the peat moss, even as currents push out toward the Gulf of Mexico to the south, push east down the St. Marys to the Atlantic. The waters in our backyard, they just stop. On the surface they rest all sedentary ‘cept for when a gator peaks out. On the surface they sleep all soundly in the moss and the ferns and the cypress roots and the mud. And we have to walk above the surface. We have to learn to step gingerly so the stillness doesn’t get a chance to catch us.

It’s easier to wrangle this barefoot, which is good for us since our toes outdone our shoes about a month or so back and Pa’s old soles just hang and fidget on our feet. Without them though, we can almost waltz out the right sequence of steps through the house without even thinking about it. We know which steps we have to twist our big toe up over the next two before the light down. We know when to make our knees jump backwards and how to make our arms follow suit so as we can keep our balance. We almost never hit the Cypress anymore so we rarely get the mist of their breath on our heels.

It’s been about six months since anyone else made his or her way out here. We figure local legend took hold and since no one but Ms. MayBelle knows we’re here anyway, no one was brave enough to come out looking. People go missing all the time in the swamp as it is. And after seven folks done evaporated in near ‘bouts the same place—more if our family is included—the townsfolk just chalk it up to a bog witch or a panther or the Pig’an or the motorboats of the drug cartel passing through. So the townsfolk really just figured it better off to leave the place alone.

It was better off for us too, seeing as how our hallway was almost wholly cypress now and getting harder and harder to navigate. The howling helps, especially at night, and we dug through every drawer in Pa’s room looking for more half-dollars to try to blind out a few of the wolves beneath the floorboards, but we never did find any. So we yell as we move down the hallway, hopscotching on the few oak boards left, until we reach our rooms and can finally get some rest.