The Rusty Nail, February 2013
Swimming Underwater
by Raymond Cothern
D
aughter dying and I'm mentally clipping newspaper articles. Been doing it for years. Some are gruesome dealings like the lady soprano in Metairie who hacks up her best friend in the church choir because best friend is having an affair with the soprano's husband. Choir-mates. Both women, soprano and alto, faces upward, concentrating, the name of the Lord on their lips as they strain for clear notes. The description in the newspaper article of the polished kitchen floor is about the detectives slipping on the waxy tile from all the blood. Another clipping concerns a pregnant woman visiting the French Quarter who is shot in the stomach, bullet lodging in the brain of the fetus. Labor is induced, then baby undergoes surgery. Both okay. Random shooting not yet solved. Interest never waning in the dark dealings of human misery, the newspaper so filled with death, dismemberment, the reason for collecting them because of the oddity losing its appeal in sheer volume, clipping articles becomes even more selective. Humor and irony rule. The darker and funnier the benchmark the better. John Lewis Jones tells judge and jury that a voice from the dead told him to rob Max's Superette in Fat City. He loses the case when he adds that the voice also told him he could keep the money. Or these headlines: Bible-quote contest loser sought in killing. Golfer hits hole-in-one, drops dead in Mass. Assistant coroner commits suicide in autopsy room. Mugger hits mob boss's mother, 94. Woman scattering son's ashes drowns. Award-winning foster parent convicted of molestation. Husband, wife, shoot each other at church. Man holds chickens hostage in effort to ward off police. Five posing as New Orleans police stop real officers. Gun safety lecture misfires, leaving N.H. minister dead. Or one of my all time favorite headlines (which one way or the other tells the entire story about us all): Man on hike to prove people good, robbed, pushed from bridge. Aware that people I loved have died in this hospital where I was born, having lived long enough to be confounded by those facts, daughter struggling to live, to survive the horrible wound in her head, doctors and nurses always frantically trying to reduce the swelling of her brain, I stand in the hospital corridor, thinking about my daughter, clipped headlines flashing in my head like the one about the Colorado man who is killed bungee
jumping because he is attached to a cord that is 70 feet too long. The view from the hospital window in Travelers Rest is of the old neighborhood, experiencing the past as present. Rooftops and trees along Bernardo Street two short blocks away. Where it intersects on the south with Florida Boulevard its lane-like narrowness is apparent. Ten houses squeezed along its length and there's North Street and beyond that Roselawn Cemetery . There are whispered lies long ago of ruthless blacks digging up new graves for valuable rings, but strolling through the headstones forty years ago, reading inscriptions and calculating the time between the chiseled dates, there is rarely fresh dirt, just weeds and plastic flowers bleached white by the sun. The house on Bernardo is still there in memory. Where I grow up. Where, later, my wife and I raise our daughter. Although now among oaks on a few acres 17 miles east in Walker, Louisiana, moved years ago after my father died, the house still resides a short distance from the hospital, a simple frame design built in 1941 by my father and his father, Papa McCauley. Two bedrooms, front and back porches, kitchen, living room, one bathroom. The table in the kitchen is there also, in that phantom house on Bernardo, a reminder of a time when family and food are still linked, when meals are markers of everydayness; chrome, tubular legs, Formica top, 1950's to the max, the surface of the table bears its history in nicks and mars and scars from countless gatherings: field peas and okra and tomatoes and corn and butterbeans and summer squash and hot dishes of black-eyed peas that slip off the crocheted table pads and darken the polished surface, boiled crabs, platters of fried chicken and bream and bass and rabbit and squirrel and crawfish tails, bowls of strawberries and milk from Louisiana Creamery left on the doorstep before dawn, lemon and egg and coconut and apple and cherry pies. But there is other food as well, different: fried squirrel heads cracked with a tablespoon, tiny white brains scooped out, sardine sandwiches on mustard bread, butter and sugar sandwiches, fried Spam sandwiches loaded with mayonnaise, Vienna sausages and its petroleum-like gelatin. And then there are the holidays as land mines. The entire pot of soupy cornbread dressing before stuffing the turkey sitting on the table, father, three sheets to the seasonal wind, taking it, feeding it to the dogs, saying, Well, Goddamn, that son'bitching squirrel dog dove straight into that stuff. On the 4th of July, folded towels on the kitchen table under buckets of homemade ice-cream and fireworks in the backyard, the lighted punks like fireflies in the 5