Southern Gothic Dreams II

I grew up in front of a swamp. My first lie to my parents after we moved into our new home in front of the swamp was that I looked into the water and saw an alligator with a snake on its back. Both my parents laughed, but I was horrified by the notion, which was a frighteningly real concept to my young mind.

My imagination had no limits when I was a little boy. At dusk, when little black bats flew overhead, I'd throw rocks in the air to watch them use their radar and swoop down toward what they expected to be food. I'd imagine that the Spanish moss in all the trees behind our house was actually hair, and the trees were giant monsters that stood frozen in the day, but transformed and roamed freely at night, sometimes peeking into my bedroom window. I told the neighborhood kids that some of the trees turned into giant frogs at night, and would sometimes hop onto houses, crushing homes flat, and killing everyone inside them; then, in the morning, stray tornadoes would be blamed, because grown-ups didn't like to admit the truth that magic existed. The kids would usually laugh and tell me I was just kidding, but there was a part of me that believed.

Swamp monsters consumed my thoughts at night, but in the day, well, I sometimes walked hip deep in the swampy waters behind the house, wholly unafraid of what might be lurking beneath the surface. Sometimes items would wash into the swampy lake behind the house, down past the hill that my father had constructed with landfill, which was mostly tires and shingles (the latter of which my older sister set ablaze one afternoon, not knowing that shingles will burn forever once they catch fire. Fire trucks were called out when the flames reached the top of the treelines behind our home). I found old Tom and Jerry comic books in the swamp, and an electronic football game made of metal that I dried out and was surprised to see that it still worked, and I even found a giant bear trap at one point that still worked. My father took the bear trap away and disposed of it, afraid that I'd end up losing a finger or foot.

Once, my best friend from next door - who happened to be totally deaf - went with me into the swamp behind the house, and we could have sworn we'd found an old football. He was surprised when he realized we'd come upon a live hornet's nest, and the hornets were surprised, too, and angry. They attacked my friend first, who ran home screaming, and I couldn't stop myself from laughing, although I knew it was wrong. I stopped laughing when a hornet stung my in my right butt-cheek. I couldn't sit comfortably for quite some time after that.

The swamp had a particular smell to it that I can remember to this day. It was, sort of, like the aroma of a freshly opened bag of Frito's, although a bit more pungent. The swamp water was surprisingly clear, with white sand beneath it in some spots, and because it was part of the Cape Fear River, which bled into the nearest beach down near the island of Wrightsville, salt water creatures would sometimes make their way to the swampland near my home, usually little crabs that I imagined were tiny mutants from outer space. When my dad gave me a bee-bee gun, I used to shoot the claws off those little crabs, and I was always surprised to see, sometime later, that the claws had grown back. They'd wave their claws around as I shot at them, and I imagined they were screaming at me in defiance in the best way they knew how.

Little green lizards came out by the score in the springtime when I was a little boy, and they'd take on the color of whatever they were sitting on, as a defense mechanism. I used to shoot them, too, with my bee-bee gun, until the day I hit one and opened a large wound in its side that allowed me to see its internal organs, including its little heart which beat rapidly.

There were frogs of all sorts, but they fell out of favor with me when neighborhood boys gathered around them and stomped on their backs to watch their guts come shooting out of their mouths in a slimey and light green pile of ooze and doo. Sometimes they'd put firecrackers in the frogs mouths, and light them, and would squeal with delight when they exploded. This revolted me, and when one kid threw a particularly slimey toad on my back, I never liked frogs again. My fear of them was made worse when I went next door one day to see my best friend's younger brother crucifying frogs to the wooden door of his father's tool shed. He was a Roman Catholic, and he was fixated on the crucifixion stories he'd heard at mass. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was crucifying the frog Jesus for the sins of all the other frogs.

I will never forget the look on the crucified frog's face, or its fat, distended belly as it hung there: its expression, as it looked to the left and to the right was, "What is going on here?" or "Why are you doing this to me?" - and the bones from its little hands remained nailed to that shed door for years, preserved under the rusty nails that kept it fastened tightly there.

Fossilized and dead animals were a particular fascination for me following the Easter when our favorite friends drove down to Wilmington to celebrate the holidays with us. Since there were no little green lizards back in Newport News, the three boys who came to visit collected as many lizards as they could in jars, and were wholly fascinated by them. They planned on taking them home with them but, as little boys are, they forgot all about the lizards, and left them in the jars. I found them behind the house nearly a year later, and they had all died on their feet, frozen in time and stiff as boards, desperately trying to escape from the confines of their Mason Jar tomb.

My deaf friend from next door was even more fascinated with dead animals than I was, and when we found the bones of a dead puppy dog, he kept saying what sounded like, "Ooh, da bone-ah, da bone-ah." He poked it with a stick, and I can still see him standing there wearing a dark blue shirt, over which lay a white harness that housed two hearing aids that enabled him to hear to a small degree. He was my very best friend, he and his little brother, and we had a lot of adventures.

When my friend's family moved in next door, their New York accents were so thick that my older sister asked them if they were foreigners from another country. My sister was hired to babysit for the mom and dad on occasion, and I'll never forget hearing how shocked she was when they asked her if she wanted a ding-dong, which was something like a chocolate Twinkee. I fell out of favor with the mother of this family at one point, when the younger brother decided it would be acceptable to play catch with one of their dog's puppies. I didn't want to, and said so, and when the puppy was tossed in my direction, I was reluctant to catch it, and the poor little thing busted its lip on the wooden edge of a rocking chair base.

My mother had been trying to lead the neighbor to Jesus, and it wasn't going well, and when it was discovered that I was, essentially, responsible for allowing an innocent little puppy to bust its lip, she sent me home with the parting shot, "SOME CHRISTIAN YOU ARE!" - It really hurt me.

My cousins had an old horse named Rusty, who died of pneumonia after being left out in a rainstorm by accident, but in its heyday, I loved that animal. I can still smell its feed, and the little room where the oats were kept. This room also housed the family dog, who gave birth to pups at one point, some of whom were stillborn. My older cousin, in an incident that echoed what happened with the neighbor's puppy, decided it would be fun to play catch with a dead puppy, and - again - I didn't want any part of it. And, again, the animal was tossed at me. I can still see it in my mind's eye, hovering in the air like it was moving in slow motion, pine trees in the distance, the puppy coming ever closer toward me as a stream of urine trailed behind it in the air, and spattered all over me. My cousin howled with laughter, but I felt sick to my stomach. It just felt wrong, and unnatural, and the thought that I was now covered with dead puppy pee made the scenario even worse.

Quite often I was the butt of jokes at the hands of my cousins when I would visit them, and while I had one cousin who was my favorite, his older brother loved to humiliate me, and beat me up whenever it struck his fancy. Even their dad loved to humiliate me, and when I fell out of the family van one Sunday after church, and split my best Khaki pants, he laughed at me until his face turned red. He also laughed when I tried to ride his old horse, Rusty, who didn't like the feel of my girth, and rolled over on top of me as a way of getting me off its ancient back. I was wearing my brand new WILLIAM H. BLOUNT PIRATES football shirt, and I cried when I realized I was covered with horse droppings. I'd gotten the shirt earlier that day, and felt it was ruined forever.

Whenever I'd visit my cousins, my uncle would always feed us boiled hot dogs and bagged potato chips on Friday night, and on Saturday morning, he'd make us ALL get up and clean the house; once I found the fossilized remains of an old, dead lizard behind a couch in the rec room, and I left it alone, checking to see if it remained in place from weekend to weekend. It did.

My cousin and I attended Boy Scouts together, and I'd wear my uniform to school on Pack Meeting days, and the bus driver would let me off at my cousin's house, which was about 5 miles from home (to a little kid that might as well be 50 miles). I went to school one Pack Meeting day, but I didn't see my cousin, and when I got off the bus, I realized that there was no one home, and I had no way of getting into my cousin's house. I was panic stricken at the thought of being stranded, and I was too afraid to break open a window to gain entry, so I just wandered around the yard for a while and waited for someone to rescue me. I spent some time with the horse in the back yard, where he was fenced in, and mostly just sat on the porch trying to figure out how to get God to answer my prayers to send someone to either take me to the pack meeting, or take me on home. Although the pack meeting wasn't too far from my cousin's house, I was too afraid to walk there, and I ended up just exploring. Luckily, the family minister spotted me somehow, and he asked me if I wanted to go home, and I said yes, and I got home safely. To this day I don't know if my dad asked him to check on me, but I assume that he did. Both are dead now, so I won't ever know the truth in this lifetime. It was a scary experience for me, made all the worse when the bus dropped me off, and I realized, "Oh, yeah, the family's out of town." Such were the days before cell phones.

MORE TO COME!