After the neighbors went home, Eli and I watched Papa Roy place the violin in the case in his bedroom, where he had been hiding it for months. Maybe more than a year. He clicked the case shut, sighed, and said that he should bring it out more often, now that we were here.
As I took Eli’s hand to lead him away and help him get ready for bed, we passed a line of framed photos on a tall dresser pushed to the wall. Some of Ma as a child, and of my great-grandparents, who had already died. At the very end of the line, in the most gilded of the frames, stood a picture of Papa Roy and Mama Ilene in their youth, posing in a dim high school gymnasium, Papa in a suit and Mama in a saffron yellow dress, plastic crowns tucked into their hair. In the photo, Papa Roy wore a sash that hung from his shoulder to his waist, with the words “Homecoming King” stitched to its front in pale embroidery.
Mid-summer arrived, and we continued to go frogging in the swamps. Eli had grown happier, and he slept well. Mama Ilene encouraged Papa Roy to play more violin, but he became embarrassed after I mentioned what Mama told me, about him not knowing he had been playing Bach all along, here in the swamps. After that, I could hear him practicing sometimes. He had bought some sheet music, its pages printed with scales and arpeggios. Basic things he had never learned properly. I think that’s what led to his announcement.
The schools here were no good, said Papa Roy, as Eli and I faced him and Mama Ilene across the kitchen table. They weren’t good when he was a boy, and they weren’t good now. So we would move at the end of summer, he said. North to the capital city on the big river, where that doctor he chartered had been able to secure him a job at a sporting goods store. People are always looking to escape to the water, he said, especially in big cities.
He told me that he looked it up, and the capital contained no less than fourteen libraries. And did you know, he said, that there are more public libraries in America than McDonald’s restaurants?
I told him that was hard to believe. And he said that he knew I would say that, and between two fingers flipped me a copy of some statistics he had printed out at the only library in town.
A week before we left the house in Bonne Chance, Papa Roy took Eli and me out for one last frog hunt in the late setting sun. We took both of his canoes this time, because I liked to be on my own. When we came to the water, I stood back while Papa Roy and Eli entered first, the reflective panels on their vests flashing like lighthouses.
I pushed off after them into the marshy water and grabbed the flashlight hanging from a rope around my neck. Beneath the roofs of lifted roots, clovers bent their gossiping heads, quieted, then rose again in slow, offended stares as I drifted onward past them. A dewdrop fell from a lily blossom, a spider shirked from its crystal web. A barred owl asked its neighbors over and over, “Who cooks for you?” All this familiar to me now, I bowed my head into my chest until I could not see the beam from my flashlight, until I was the darkness of caves covered with etches, the drawings of turmoil, of animals running from so many spears. A place of fire, a place of refuge. A waiting place. What must I seem like to the creatures outside, blinded by the light I pushed into their faces? A hungry bear? A gator in hiding? A rougarou, which nobody knew?
In the darkness, I stopped and listened to it all—the dew, the owl, the Muskogee footsteps reverberating westward, sent away so long ago. I listened to what was, to the animals cawing and the plants swaying, and then to what could be. The sigh of a will-o-the-wisp? That snap in the branches, the ghost of a young cypress retreating back to its lightning-struck spine? Anything could be any color, any shape, any sound.
From deep underneath, in the undertow of senses, something new emerged, like the echo of a name across a crowded room. I cocked my head to listen. A murmur like the blip of a radio searching for its satellite. Quiet, quick, like a disappearing figure in a passing searchlight. A creature whose voice seemed to gurgle already with the water below.