CHAPTER SEVEN. The Dredge Appears

Now that the Chief was gone on his business trip and we’d temporarily closed Swamplandia! we girls were the queens of the island. The Seths followed the sun around the Pit, the moon continued to whir. I could sleep into the deep yolk of any afternoon, wear my dirty pajamas to the Pit, stow away on the Library Boat and read murder mysteries until four in the morning. I could watch the World of Darkness commercials with the volume cranked. All this possibility made me dizzy with a strange kind of grief. I wasn’t sleeping right. On the nights that Ossie didn’t come home, I dragged a blanket down to the sofa and left our whole house lit up like a ship.

One Saturday, four or five days after the Chief’s depature, in the late red light of June, a black shape appeared on the westernmost edge of our park. At first it was just a mote that I glimpsed between the bayhead hammocks, floating in the blue eye of the island like a speck in jelly. I blinked and rubbed my eyes and the blot stayed put. Then Ossie said that she could see the blot, too.

Ossie and I were a mile from the house, walking the limits of the touristed park. After the Last Ditch the trail became impenetrable palmetto scrub. All day we had been hunting for melaleuca saplings.

Water once flowed out of Lake Okeechobee without interruption, or interference from men. Aspiring farmers wanted to challenge her blue hegemony. All that rich peat beneath the lakes was going to waste! Melaleuca quinquenervia was an exotic invasive, an Australian tree imported to suck the Florida swamp dry. If you were a swamp kid, you were weaned on the story of the Four Pilots of the Apocalypse, these men who had flown over the swamp in tiny Cessnas and sprinkled melaleuca seeds out of restaurant salt and pepper shakers. Exotic invasives, the “strangler species” threatened our family long before the World of Darkness. The Army Corps of Engineers had planted thousands of melaleuca trees in the 1940s as part of their Drainage Project, back when the government thought it was possible to turn our tree islands into a pleated yellowland of crops. I was raised to be suspicious of the Army Corps of Engineers, with good reason. The dikes and levees that the Army Corps had recommended for flood control had turned the last virgin mahogany stands into dust bowls; in other places, wildfire burned the peat beds down to witchy fingers of lime.

Now the melaleucas had formed an “impermeable monoculture.” That meant a forest with just one kind of tree in it. Most of the gladesmen had long ago abandoned the dream of farming their islands. You could sum up the response of the Army Corps of Engineers and the swamp developers in one word, said our dad: “Oops!” Forest fires raged and burned the swamp down to peat. Frosts came and a man could break his knife trying to slice through a glade tomato. By 1950, the dream of drainage was largely dead. The Army Corps of Engineers changed its objective from draining the “wasteland” of the swamp islands to saving them. Unfortunately for my family, the melaleucas were still root-committed to the old plan, the drainage scheme. They swallowed fifty acres a day. Back in May, Kiwi had discovered a punky infestation behind the Gator Pit: saplings the width of mop handles. The Bigtree men swung axes into them, bled them, flooding the world with the smell of camphor. We kept cutting them down, and the earth kept raising them. It was a haywire fertility, like a body making cancer.

Why, the swamp is writing her own suicide note! A visiting botanist looked down and said this to me once on an airboat ride, running a thumb around the pinky-gold rim of his glasses as if he were extraordinarily pleased with this phrase. We’d taken a team of five Corps engineers, hydrologists, and botanists out to a hammock behind West Lake where the new forest had come in so thick that “a chubby wood rat couldn’t get through it.” The afternoon was full of these “Stanley, look!” kinds of comments from the scientists. Like our dereliction was a zoo for them.

“Fifty trees to an acre, my God” was how Stanley the stunned hydrologist summed up the problem; he’d taken a photograph for a journal article.

“Do you folks believe in God?” my dad had asked. “Because that’s who I’m praying to now. I’m through waiting on you people.” The Chief said that the Army Corps had a funny amnesia about the fact that our crises — the wildfires, the melaleuca stands, the fatal flooding in the gravity canals — had each originated as a Corps blueprint.

“Die, melaleuca!” I’d been hollering all afternoon, swinging my paintbrush. Ossie was cutting the saplings down, and I was painting herbicide onto the stumps. We were tree warriors, I told Ossie. We had come to the Last Ditch for a massacre.

“This is a pretty boring massacre,” said my sister. “When is lunch?” I was stirring the bucket of vitreous poisons when I looked up and saw the shape: something black, liquefying and resolving behind the reddish grain of the pines.

It took us five minutes to get through the scrub. Spanish moss and pineapple-like bromeliads waved in tall curtains from the bay trees. The shape kept changing dimension on us between the trunks; I thought it might be a house of some kind. But how could a whole house wash up here?

“HELLO!” we both called into the Last Ditch.

“It’s a boat after all, Ava …,” my sister shouted, running ahead. But not a boat like we’d ever seen. It was a twenty-five- or twenty-six-foot vessel with a cuddy cabin and a maze of ropes that was in a process of solving itself, the pulleys lying on the stern where some knot had collapsed; a thin crane with rusting struts was attached to its bow. Its dipper bucket was thirty feet above us, like a dinosaur’s little yellow skull. Tall palms stretched around the latticed crane as if in competition. My sister punched straight through the willow heads and pulled me after her.

“Hello?” we asked, more quietly now.

“Ava!” said Ossie. “It’s a dredge.

“Oh.” For some reason the word made my heart speed. Now that she’d found the name for it I saw immediately that Ossie was right — this boat had a bucket and cables and a crane arm, presumably for bringing up the crumbling muck and digging a road or canal. We had black-and-white pictures of them hanging in our museum: The Dredge and Fill Campaign, 1886–1942.

Ossie was already moving toward it. The canal had swollen to seven or eight feet and twisted and hissed now like an unbungalowed snake; the recent rains would have driven it even higher. I guessed that the dredge would have continued on, too, but it had gotten hung up in the crooked pincers of the mangroves. Something about the angle of its entry made me think of a key that had been jammed hard into the wrong lock. Several buzzards sat on the dipper bucket. Once I noticed the birds I started to see them everywhere: one was slim-winged on one of the crane’s ladders. One was eating a squirrel on the hull. There was something canny and bald about their attention, their tiny wet eyes. I felt like these buzzards had been waiting here for us, for a long time.

Ossie didn’t seem to notice them; she was intent on reaching the boat. She took the first-moon-man leap over the canal and I followed. The deck was a dull, uneven black. Slick. We got the cuddy cabin door to open, which took a lot of one-two-three!ing and team wrenching. When the door came loose, colors flooded over us. I screamed, too, and covered my face with my arms, and if Ossie hadn’t caught me I might have fallen into the wedge of canal between the shoreline and the boat. In that second I knew that I’d been wrong this whole time: that my sister was psychic, that the whole world was haunted, and now a ghost was tuning itself like a luminous string above me. Then the ghost broke into particulates of wings.

“Calm down, dummy, it’s just a bunch of moths.”

Moths jumbled tunelessly above our heads, kaleidoscoping in this way that looked like visible music to me — something that would be immediately audible to an alligator or a raccoon but that we human Bigtrees couldn’t hear. Could my sister hear them? I wondered. She was picking a wedgie on the deck.

“Hear what, Ava?” She freed a tiny, beating moth from my bangs. Moths kept coming at us in unbelievable numbers. “My God,” she whispered, “there must be thousands of them in here!”

“More than that.”

“You heard somebody in the boat, Ava?”

“No, that’s why I was asking. I don’t hear anything.”

The cloud of moths drew their darker blues across the pale egg of the sky. Now I felt stupid. Nothing about these cake-icing blues suggested ghosts or monsters.

“Well, only one way to know for sure. Ready, Ava?”

“You bet I’m ready.” Wings painted our faces. “For what?”

Ossie yanked me into the cabin, sunlight flashing everywhere as we pulled at the door; a second later the moths were outside a dark porthole, and we were inside the machine.

Inside the cabin of the dredge barge we found:

Flaking metal everywhere in these fantastic reds and greens;

The staring socket of a pole sticking straight out of the floor;

A box of lemon candies called Miss Callie’s Pixie Dust, which looked like the flavors of spinsterdom, yellow and soda brown;

A man’s work shirt, size medium, long sleeves and white-and-canary checks;

A mosquito veil;

A dingy WPA jacket;

A cypress workbench, rotted through, its surface slimed with various life-forms;

A rag beneath this that looked as powdery and dry as the last century, something the last century had used to wipe its lips; it smelled wheaty and sicksweet, like beer, and it stuck to the floor;

A skeeter bar bleached the lunar blue of salt;

A four- or five-gallon bucket with the initials “L.T.” scratched in these somehow polite letters onto the side;

Tools I didn’t recognize inlaid on hooks along the walls, fishermen’s swords, I thought: something like a spear with an antlered tip;

A mucky key — I wiped it golden again on my shirt hem and bit its teeth straight;

A map.

We smoothed the scrolled things: illegible mechanical diagrams, the map and the veil. The wavy mosquito netting was made of an amazingly old and weird material that couldn’t be straightened; I tied it over my face like a surgeon and it kept crimping at my nose. I sneezed into its tiny squares. Haunted, a frantic voice in me said, haunted, but my hands disagreed with this hysterical lady: everything I touched here confirmed itself as solidly cloth or wood or rope.

“Be careful with that stuff, Ossie! The Chief might want it, for the museum …”

Ossie was climbing into the galley. I saw cabinets furry with damp greenery, an accordion pump, a sink with a pox of rust around a black faucet. The sink was still full of tiny copper forks and spoons and a squat thermos that for some reason made my heart constrict. I wished we’d thought to bring flashlights. We’d only been inside the dredge cabin for a few minutes but I half-expected to see a moon outside, stars the color of blood, a totally changed world. I peered through a porthole: there was the sun, beaming down at us like a dim-witted aunt. There were the same oblivious trees.

I ducked my head back inside the dredge; Ossie was taking swimmer’s breaths with her eyes closed. She was sitting on the floor between puddles of water and clotted oil, the Ouija board on her lap. She tugged her skirt over her dirty knees and blinked up at me like some waylaid picnicker.

“What are you doing? What — you think there are ghosts here?” I tried to use Kiwi’s roller-coaster intonations on her (I’d seen his sarcasm work like an ax to break her milder possessions). “Tell the ghost it smells like farts in here. Ask the ghost if I can have one of his lemon candies.”

One eye snapped open. “Gross, Ava. Let me concentrate, okay? Please don’t eat the candies from the thirties. Remember how sick you got from the candy corns, and that stuff wasn’t even six months old!”

Ossie smoothed the work shirt that we’d found and put it in her duffel. She was always muling around this duffel now, which must have weighed a ton — it contained The Spiritist’s Telegraph, apple snacks, and her bath-towel turban and various occult supplies.

“Why do you get to have that? What if I wanted the map?”

“You can have the hammer. And maybe the rag.”

“Oh, gee, thanks …” I stared into the crowd of shadows toward the barge’s stern. The buzzards had all vanished from the railings. The hull was rocking slightly.

“We should go pretty soon, Ossie. We should probably go now.

But we stayed, opening the years-glued cabinets.

I kept returning to the map, which we’d weighted with a rock on the wormy workbench. The map had the greenish tint of great age and drew a world I didn’t recognize: MODEL LAND COMPANY/DREDGING OBJECTIVE read the insignia on the bottom, each word boxed together in gray and red lines like a locomotive car. The initials “L.T.” in the left-hand corner again, that same well-mannered handwriting. L.T. had added a date this time: December 12, 1936. Above this inscription, a filigree of golden hairs with tiny numbers (A-7, A-8 …) cut through the grid. Water was blue, that was easy to figure out. Also you could see the black powder kegs of the pinelands, and teak shadings that seemed to correspond to the saw-grass prairies. Other lines were drawn in golden pen, each one numbered and lettered — were these supposed to be rivers? A system of canals?

“Ossie! Do you know how to read this thing?”

I pinned the map against the starboard dredge window with my thumb so that sunlight filtered through its onionskin of colors. We crowded in and touched the parchment in the same nervous way, pinching our elbows back in wonderment, because lookit, Osceola said: the bottom half of the map was totally empty, just pleated space.

“I wonder why these guys never made it to the Gulf?” Ossie traced the green spindle of our panhandle, letting one long fingernail trail all the way down to the colored line between our swamp and nowhere. “Ava, see that? The map just stopped.”

“Ossie! That sounds like a question from a scary movie. Now watch, here comes the part in the movie where a monster bursts out and eats us!”

“You’re right. He’s been hiding here all this time!” She made claws with her hands and rose onto her toes, pretending to menace me. “Blah!”

We giggled for too long; then we turned to stare at a padlocked hatch door in the center of the cabin. It was stained the thin green of bread mold and wouldn’t open. I thought about the silhouette of a man that I had seen or imagined. I could guess what the Chief would say: Girls, that dredge crew just ran out of money. The Gulf route got cut short because this Model Land Company couldn’t finance it. Nothing supernatural about that fate.

When no monsters materialized, we went back to looking at the map.

Ossie pointed to faint shadings that we thought might be Mahogany Hammock, West Lake, the Wet Lungs, but we couldn’t be sure because the map didn’t have a key. The names that did appear — Syrup Kettle, Snake Bight, Poor Ashley’s Island, Dead Pecker Slough — were different from the ones people used now. Some of the hammocks and camps didn’t exist anymore, if they ever had. We marveled that the mapmaker wrote in a lovely cursive, just like our mom. This amazed us, that a muck rat had looped his p’s and q’s during the Great Depression (as if cursive were somehow our mom’s invention). This map was like unfinished homework. Whoever drew it up had missed dozens of tree islands that we had personally explored.

“Eew, Ava, look!” Ossie kicked backward and nearly knocked me over. In the corner a mullet screwed its eye at the low roof, still scaled in gel and gloom.

“You scared me, Ossie! What’s wrong with you? It’s just a dead fish. You act like some Loomis girl …”

A foamy urine-yellow liquid came sloshing out of the galley hole, our movements having caused the great barge to rock on its keel, and we screamed with laughter and disgust as we scrambled up onto the workbench. Perhaps we’d jostled or reanimated something? Because just then the death stink, which I’d barely noticed until now, became overpowering. I hid my nose and mouth under my T-shirt collar and breathed in my mother’s perfume. For a moment I pretended to feel a wonderful guilt, like Mom will hate that we are out here. When she finds out she will punish us for sure. Our mother had that maternal sixth sense for when her kids were up to stupid or dangerous things. For a second I could really see our mother sitting in her wicker chair, humming one of her tuneless songs — in addition to being the world’s worst chef our mom was cheerfully tone-deaf. I knew this vision wasn’t anything like Ossie’s possessions — it was just a stupid, lucid daydream — but with my face inside my orange T-shirt I breathed Mom’s smell in the weave of my clothes and I just pretended. Mom was angry, not worried yet. She was drafting punishments. Her brown foot in a lake of sun on our porch, tapping at air, waiting on us …

I shivered and heard my breathing getting shallow. The dredge felt like a plummeting submarine to me, even though the portholes were level with the shining leaves.

“Give me that key, Ava.”

“What? No! Why?” This was the one item I wanted to keep. I tossed the bag of ossified lemon drops at her instead.

“Hey, I dare you to eat one of Miss Callie’s Grossest Candies. I’ll give you a dollar.”

“Where’s the key, Ava?”

“You don’t even know what it’s the key to,” I whined. “One more minute …”

Ossie returned to the galley with her Ouija board in tow and let me fool with the key for a little longer. When I next looked up, a dark blue had wrapped around the portholes. Outside I saw clouds rising like bread; one of these turned out to be the moon. A storm was coming, then — on a clear night on Swamplandia! we could see millions of stars. “We should go, we should go,” I kept saying, trying the key in various metallic fissures, bouncing on my sneaker rubber to make the barge jump. I touched the puckered rag, my share of the treasure. I was going to leave that candy. I’d read enough myths and fairy tales to know how eating some deadman’s candies would end. Most likely they were poisonous or carried some bad enchantment.

“Ossie, hurry up. It’s late and I’m starving. If we wait any longer we’re going to be like those Donners …”

Then I regretted bringing this up. Ossie, to the best of my knowledge, had not yet dated a Donner.

You go. They’re not finished with me yet.”

Ossie was hunched over her Ouija board, which she’d spread onto the grouty galley counter, where dead mosquitoes turned on little black puddles.

I returned uneasily to our damp treasure: I squeezed a candy and discovered that it was uncrushable; I mopped my sweat up with the elderly rag; I ran the bitter green teeth of the key up and down my underarm. The odd key didn’t fit into any slot or box on the boat. When nothing happened I ran the key along my collarbone. I tried again. I could hear my sister humming one of her pig-Latin-sounding spells in the galley. The key bit into the flesh of my neck, two dots of blood appearing. Turn, turn, turn. Come on. Do something. I glanced over at Ossie and placed it on my tongue; it tasted like a soda tab. I put the key under my right armpit like Mom’s thermometer and I waited.

Nothing flew open in my heart or brain. I didn’t start speaking in tongues or brim to fullness with some spirit. No hinge swung. So my body was not a keyhole after all.

Then my whole face felt hot and tight as a mask and I realized that I’d been hoping for real sorcery. The Spiritist’s Pathetic Black Telegraph! It was an embarrassing hope; I hadn’t conjured anything but a ragged red scratch up to my armpit, where I’d pushed up my shirtsleeve and tractored over my skin with the key. Disappointment had introduced us, me and the hope — it took the key’s failure to teach me what I was doing with the key.


Once Mom and Ossie and I spent an afternoon alone together in her hospital room. We were watching the small TV above her bed politely, as if the TV were a foreign dignitary giving an unintelligible lecture, and waiting for any news from Dr. Gautman. As if on cue, that lame movie from the sixties started playing, Ladies in Waiting. A quintet of actresses haunt the punch bowl — they are supposed to be spinster sisters or spinster best friends, or maybe just ugly and needy acquaintances — anyhow, these pink chameleons, voiceless in their party chignons, they stand around the back of a ballroom having flashbacks for most of the movie, regretting older events in their minds, ladling cups of glowing punch from a big bowl, and only after the dying violin note of the final song do they at last step away from the wall. “Oh, but we did want to dance!” the actresses cry at the end of the scene, their faces changing almost totally. All these angry multiplying women.

Hopes were like these ladies, Mom told us. Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart. Our mom had become agitated as the movie credits rolled: There had never been a chance for them! What stupid women. That day we watched TV with her until the hospital began to empty, until the lights went white as a screech and the room grew so quiet …

Mom said that she was meeting all her pink ladies in the hospital. She had been hoping for the craziest things! For another baby. For your father to … well. For you girls … (and in her silence you could hear at least a thousand verbs). She’d touched her IV bag and sighed to us that a wallflower in bloom was very very angry, very scary.


“Okay,” Ossie called from the galley hole, packing up the Ouija. “I’m ready to go.”

“Who were you talking to?”

My sister reached a hand up to fix my hair, her palm stained a deep maroon from touching the old gaffs. They did not really look like gaffs though. Not in that half-light. They hung flat against the aft wall like long red and black piano keys, or farm tools for the harvest of an unimaginable crop.

“Nobody. Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Nothing. Ava, I think we’d better go now.”


“Hey, are you lonely here, Ossie?”

We were back in our room, dozing in that span of light-headed, hungry time that comes before dinner. “Dinner” didn’t really happen anymore — we were defrosters of burgers and Pick Up Club meals — but for some reason we still rolled down the stairwell every night at seven o’clock. In the old days, good smells filled the kitchen (misleading smells, since our mom’s cooking strategy was to throw a couple of raw things into a greased pan and wait to see what happened, like watching strangers on a date). Two voices, the Indian braid of our parents’ voices, called up to us.

“No.” Ossie frowned without looking up at me. “I’m busy, chickee. If you’re lonely, go watch TV.”

“I don’t mean here, like in this room. I mean here-here. Where we live. Are you lonely on the island? Do you wish we could, I dunno, live on the mainland? Go to high school, like Mom did?”

Ossie rolled over and stared at me thoughtfully. She stood and walked to the windowsill, hugged the raw pillow to her chest — I’d been pretending not to know where all of Risa’s daisy pillowcases had gone, making noises of annoyance along with her for weeks, encouraging my sister to blame the phantom of Millard Fillmore, when in fact I had used all the pillowcases in the house to make a carrier for my pet alligator, who was now eleven inches — almost a full foot! I was going to tell my sister about her when she hit a foot for sure. My sewing was bogus and the carrier looked like a Franken-quilt of weird linens. To be honest, I think the red Seth was a little embarrassed to ride around in it.

“The mainland. You’re asking me if I’m a Kiwi? If I want to leave home for Loomis County?”

“Yeah. I don’t want to go there. You neither, right? I mean, I bet Kiwi likes it. I think it could be okay to go visit him. Remember when we stayed on the mainland during the hurricane? At the Bowl-a-Bed hotel? That wasn’t so bad.”

Pins clattering in the lobby even after the storm began — that’s what I remembered — gutter balls and the occasional strike still audible over the rising wind. Cold sodas and nuclear-orange crackers you could get for a quarter from a vending machine. We’d all piled into a single room. The Chief and Grandpa Sawtooth had climbed onto the balcony during the eye of the storm to smoke half a pack of cigarettes, and eleven-year-old Kiwi had followed to inform them about lung disease. At eight o’clock the power went out. Mom had read the TV Guide to us by candlelight.

“Yeah, that time was okay,” said Ossie. “I liked the shower cap, remember that?”

“The shower cap! Mom said we looked like actresses in it!”

(To be clear, we were talking about plastic hats. Disposable bath hats, used, with black curls of stranger hair in them. My sister and I dug into those jeweled soaps and shrink-wrapped bath hats as if we’d found a sultan’s treasures next to the minty hotel crapper.)

“That was fun. And all the mainlanders got so grumpy when they didn’t have hot water, and the Chief said that a Bigtree could shower in a Seth’s spit, remember? How hard he made Mom laugh?”

“But it would be different if we lived there. That time was like a vacation.”

We both grinned — the idea of the Bigtrees on a vacation, of the Chief as some dummy tourist! A Loomis dad.

Ossie’s smile flickered. “I don’t think we’d do very well there, Ava. I don’t see how we could really ever catch up. What grade would they even put us in, at a Loomis school? I mean, are they going to offer a class for Spiritists? Gym class for you? Gym credits for alligator wrestlers?” She flopped onto the bed and pushed two stained pillows at our ceiling like pom-poms: “Ava — I know! We can try out for the cheerleading squad!”

I laughed, startled — Ossie sounded as bitter as any adult. And Ossie was never the wise guy in our family. The jags of intelligence inside my sister shocked everybody, tourists and Bigtrees alike — she’d say something smart out of nowhere and prove to us that she wasn’t only a dreamer. Every time Ossie was funny or mean it surprised me; it was like your skiff hitting an intricate reef, all those delicate white fans that wouldn’t yield, or like your foot scraping a rock in the middle of a deep empty lake. Even her fantasies had such rocks in them.

“I’ll be the prom queen.” She grinned a terrible grin at me. “You can be the class president. We’ll make posters.

“Okay, I get it. Good. I think it’s a dumb idea, too. I was just wondering.”

Hours had passed since we’d returned from the Last Ditch, and already the dredge had taken on a pleasant, hallucinatory quality in my memory. Ossie did a studious belly flop onto her mattress, frowning down at the Model Land Company map through her white bangs. The map was four feet by three feet and thin as a butterfly wing; its blank half made the Floridian peninsula look like an amputated arm. It covered the whole floor between our beds, and the “L.T.” kept catching the light. A tiny lizard scurried over the Gulf of Mexico and disappeared behind the chest of drawers.


On Tuesday night I heard the bed groan at one a.m., the thud of Ossie’s shoes as she snuck out. Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long. It was five in the morning when I heard the door hinge squeak.

“Ava?” she whispered. Outside gray light was tenting the pines. “You’re not awake, are you?”

What a dumb question. I cracked an eye at her. My sister looked beautiful, I noted with a grudging pride. She’d copied a style from a magazine. Soft hair floated onto her cheeks.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

Her smile faltered. “It was wonderful. But he had to leave me; I think it was my fault? I couldn’t hold him. I started thinking my own thoughts again.” She looked at me with a face I didn’t understand, and I hated her new ghost, whoever he was. Was this guy just going to live inside her forever? Could she possibly want that?

“Good! I’m glad that guy is gone. Do you feel better now? Is it like climbing out of the Gator Pit? It sounds like waking up.”

But she shook her head sharply and I felt pained now, too, like I was the one hurting her. Ossie’s hurt was an airborne virus, it could travel at you fast as a sneeze.

“I’m sorry, Ossie. Don’t be like that.”

“You don’t understand, Ava.” She pushed at her hair. “That’s okay. Maybe in a few years you will. It’s not like waking up. I was awake before. We were together, and now he’s gone.”

I got up on my elbows in the bed.

“Kiwi says your boyfriend’s not real. Or he’s real, but he’s some Loomis kid you’re meeting up with in the woods.”

We stared at each other across the channel between our two beds.

“I won’t tell anybody, I swear. Is he older than you, this guy?” I paused, running down the list of boys with heartbeats who we knew. “Is it Gus Waddell? It’s not Cubby, is it?”

“Oh, well shoot, Ava!” she laughed, flopping back on her mattress. “Yes, he’s much older than me. He’s not some Loomis kid, either. Cubby Wallach, oof.” She scrunched her face in a way to further underscore: Not. Cubby. “Cubby’s just some kid. My boyfriend is a dredgeman from Clarinda, Iowa.”

Her fist contracted into an abacus. She counted knuckles for a while.

“I guess if he’d lived he’d be Grandpa’s age. But he still looks like he did the day he died.”

“Oh.” I frowned up at her. “That’s lucky, I guess.”

She leaned in and patted my head. “Good night, Ava,” she whispered.

“Good morning, you mean.” This was the fat cherry on the whole crappy sundae because it was obviously morning — the skies were pinking up behind the kapok.

“Not for me. I’m exhausted, Ava. The Spiritist Telegraph says some Spiritists sleep for a week after a possession, but I’m going to set the alarm for lunchtime.”

“Mmnh.” I mummied myself in the bedspread. Osceola could sleep forever, for all I cared. Fine by me. I would save the park by myself. I had important training to do with my red Seth.

“Okay. Getting into bed now.” But she sat on the edge of my bed instead. “Listen, I’m sorry I left without telling you. There’s a secret I have to keep for someone. Don’t worry, okay?”

I did my best to inhale like a sleeping person.

“Hey, chickee, I do wish I could tell you,” she mumbled sadly somewhere above my head, the mattress sagging with her weight, “what’s happening to me …”


Two thirty a.m., about ten days after the Chief’s depature: I walked downstairs to investigate an animal rumbling in the kitchen and found my sister gorging on a lump of cauliflower — there was nothing left to eat, she said, and she was ravenous. Swamp rats could not have cleaned out our pantry more thoroughly. I saw an apple core, broken spaghetti, six cola cans. Her lipstick had left a glossy print on the plastic we kept our bread in. She’d sucked the stick of butter into a little fang. “What the heck are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing, Ava?” She shook a box at me. “I’m starving.”

“But why are you dressed like that? Did you run out of clean clothes to wear?”

“This is my boyfriend’s shirt. He asked me to wear it.”

I recognized the canary checks, the stains on the collar that had probably set in the spring of 1936. She’d pushed the green cuffs up above her elbows and left the long shirttails flowing over her knees, which looked small and white as clams beneath this big guy’s shirt. My eyes settled on the mole just above her wristbone. Ossie had complained about this dumb mole her whole life and it was a relief to rest my eyes on it; I had the disorienting suspicion that this black mole must be where my real sister was hiding. My real sister had gotten sucked inward and in her place was this weird stranger.

“You’re probably going to get smallpox from that shirt,” I frowned. “Malaria. You’ll probably die now, too.”

Ossie rolled her eyes. A weak film of light rinsed the stairwell and I could see our shadows bending upward on the far wall like candle flames. At a certain point the tall women of our shadows intersected, became the blank upstairs.

When we were younger, two or three years earlier, we used to play a stupid game called Mountaineering on this stairwell, Osceola on the bottom step and me belaying her with the bedsheets on top. We crumpled Kiwi’s looseleaf to make the avalanche; if as a super bonus a pissed-off Kiwi emerged from his study cave, he got cast as our Yeti. It was very life-or-death.

“Remember Mountaineering?”

“Oh, Ava.

“That was a fun game.”

Ossie looked stricken.

“Remember End of the World, how mad Mom got when we ruined her towels? Remember that time we got Mom to play, too?” I paused. “The Chief says you’re lovesick. He says it’s just a phase.”

“What? It’s nothing like that. This isn’t some dumb crush. It isn’t … I really can’t …”

Ossie was anguished, or just insulted, I couldn’t tell. I was watching her hands move up and down, as if they might be reaching for something the words could not touch.

“And afterward, when I’m coming out of it? When he leaves me …?” she tried to explain.

“Uh-huh.” I pictured this withdrawal as something invisible, painful, autonomic, a reflexive ejection, like a Seth disgorging feathers.

“Oh, it’s much worse than that stuff you hear on the radio. Your heart breaks, too, but that’s just kid’s stuff, Ava. Heartbreak is just for starters, for mortals …”

Ossie pushed the white apples of her fists into her stomach, as if she were trying to find a new way to feed herself. After a possession came a condition called Spellbreak (The Spiritist’s Telegraph, page 206). This was when your ghost left you, the end of your séance experience. Ossie said the loss of contact with her ghost was absolute.

“Every time I get afraid he won’t come back, Ava. He’s my same age, can you believe that? He’s a teenager. He’s like us.”

“Oh boy. I bet we have so much in common.” I knew what our brother would say: Way to pick a winner, Osceola.

Don’t come back, ghost, I thought in a shout. Leave her alone. Whoever you are, stay lost.

Ossie thumped the cabinets for more dry food, and I thought of the Chief drumming up a Seth. A jar of gherkin pickles got passed down to me, followed by a brown tin of these prehistoric Little Cheddars, a discontinued brand of cracker. Ossie’s hands puffed huge and white behind the aqua light of the jar. I used my alligator-wrestling muscles to open it.

“He needs me to live,” she said mournfully, crunching into a pickle. “He needs me to hold on to his memories, and to move around the world … Death kidnapped him, Ava.” She stared at me with dry, serious eyes; for one second she looked exactly like Mom if you netted her offstage and unawares. “He was so young.”

I touched her arm through the soft cage of the dead boy’s plaids. I had just brushed my teeth but I ate these disgusting foods to keep her company. (That was my grand sacrifice — I ate miniature pickles with my sister. In retrospect, it seems that I might have done a little more for her.)

“Are we playing a game, Ossie?”

“It’s no game with him. He’s sincere. Serious about me. You know what I mean?”

“I know,” I said, sick with questions. “Were we playing a game before, though?”

Ossie ignored me. “We are a couple now. We live together here—” She touched her heart through the thin cotton. I noticed two initials embroidered on the shirt pocket in raspberry thread: L.T.

“You and the ghost.”

“Me and Louis.”

And then she gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shoot! I wasn’t supposed to tell you his real name.”

“Louis,” I said slowly. Got it. That was easy: the L of the L.T. I didn’t like this. Something was changing here, speeding up like a heartbeat.

“Okay. And when can I meet him?”

“My ghost is on the move, Ava,” she said — as if her ghost were some prowling scoundrel or a moon on the wane. She smiled at me, her eyes raw and wet. “I think I’d like for you to meet him.”

I loved my sister, so it was with some discomfort that I realized I didn’t want her to be happy. Not like this, anyways, because of some ghost.


She let slip that her new boyfriend Louis’s earthly title had been “the Dredgeman,” but she wouldn’t tell me any more about him. Who was this guy? When she dated the morgue-fresh dead of Loomis County, she taped their newspaper obituaries above her bed. These were recent tragedies: local sons our age like Camden Walsh, the handsome brunette prom king from Jupiter High, who had drowned in a canal, or Julio Sáenz, a football star and galumphing freckle-spattered sophomore in Fort Pierce who got struck by lightning on the forty-yard line. But I couldn’t find Louis’s papers in our bedroom or folded inside The Spiritist’s Telegraph. He wasn’t in her binders or pinned up on her headboard. His name didn’t seem to exist anywhere outside of my sister.

At noon I did my sleuthing on the Library Boat. Again I couldn’t find any trace of him, his origins — no books, no pictures. Possibly she had found something hidden inside the dredge itself, an engineering manual or another Model Land contract? A diary? Old letters from the cook’s wife?

“The Dredgeman???” I wrote on a café napkin. Probably Sherlock Holmes carried a pad with him. Fans creaked and spun to life in the quiet café. The generators hummed. Moths were sparkling around our ceiling in patterns that seemed almost meaningful, stitching a violet-brown lace between the blades, and I mopped my face with the blank side of the napkin and waited for more clues to accumulate.


For a week the Model Land dredge barge didn’t budge an inch. It remained pinched between the clothespin trees along the canal’s eastern bank. It was a delicate and temporary-looking captivity, and I bet the next major storm would wash it further downriver. The boat was always covered in twenty-odd buzzards, and mysteriously denuded of the swamp birds you usually saw out here: anhingas and cormorants and a beautiful variety of heron. The buzzards continued to pour over Swamplandia! in clothy waves; on the radio, the university scientists speculated that the unusual migration had something to do with the late frosts in the Midwest. Disturbances in the raptors’ diurnal cues.

That may have been the case, but once these birds got to Swamplandia! it was hard not to take their presence personally. Bundles of feathers quivered all along the Pit walls and the tramway railings, sprouting bright doll’s eyes and talons as you drew closer. The flock of them watched over our doings like disinterested angels; at that point the buzzards probably knew more than I did about my sister’s nighttime activities. They saw more of her than I did.

“We are in love, Ava,” she told me one night while we were brushing our teeth. “We’re practically married.” Her face in the mirror seemed so sad. “When he left me tonight, Ava? It was terrible. It hurts worse than when a Seth bites you! It’s like the opposite of that feeling — like an unlatching. You know what I mean?”

I shook my head. I did not know. Nods weren’t going to come cheap anymore. If she wanted a nod, she’d have to do better than her easy, lazy invocation of “love.”

“Is it like being hungry?”

“Not really … maybe a little. It’s hard to explain. You know how light-headed you get when you don’t eat?”

“Sure. You feel bad.” I licked a pea of toothpaste off my finger. “Starved. About ready to eat Spaghetti Surprise.” Spaghetti Surprise was a simple equation for indigestion, invented by Mom: noodles tossed like a blond wig over all your leftovers. Noodles as a culinary disguise for gross, inedible root vegetables: surprise! In a trash can this dish was raccoon kryptonite; even Grandpa couldn’t finish it.

“Hey, remember when Kiwi goes, ‘Forget the cheese, Mom, you should grate antacids over these noodles,’ how hard she laughed …?”

“I don’t want to talk about Mom tonight, Ava, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We were talking about my boyfriend.”

Ossie made her voice shiny, doing her best impression of the mainland girls’ gossip:

“… and people think a ghost is just air but Louis is heavy, Ava. There’s so much to carry — he gave me his whole life …

“… his death, too.” She touched his shirt pocket and shivered a little. She felt cold, she said. Her heart, her vocal cords, they’d gone cold.

“I won’t feel warm again until my boyfriend comes back.”

I stared at her with the toothbrush in my mouth. Was she crazy? She was crazy — I hardly needed to ask the question. It was 80 degrees in our room. I tugged at my hair with both hands and watched her performing hygiene in the mirror. My sister didn’t look possessed — we were both wearing the same ankle socks and the striped pajamas that we wore to bed every night. Ossie had a green freckle of toothpaste on her upper lip, her hair was pulled into a high ponytail for sleep purposes, her cheeks were sunburned, she looked pretty and dumb with her same big-eyed, ostrichy features, and all these outside things were so as-ever and ordinary that I wanted to scream at her: You are faking, you are lying! There is no such thing as your dredgeman.

“You know who I miss? I miss our brother. I miss Mom. I don’t miss some invisible boyfriend. That’s …” But the words I tried to stick to the knot I felt all drifted away.

I told myself that I didn’t believe in ghosts at all, or at least not with the ardor of my sister, but at night the huge, paperwhite moths flew up to hit or kiss their wings against our bedroom window screens and even the tiniest rasp made me want to cry out.

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