Where Devils Drown
Ravenel Rappley | October 31, 1999
The boys say she washed up on the riverbank, a few days back—from out there in the swamps. Nobody knows how she died, though the boy with the rolled up pants looks like he’s got a guess.
They stand over her, the barefoot tanned boys, against sagging curtain rows of laundry that stiffen in the sun. I watch through the window of my truck, stopped at a red, as they pick into the alligator’s open stomach. Glinting polyester, masks pulled up over matted foreheads—it’s Halloween. One of the boys spindles her white insides out onto the cement. His ankles are thin, toes sunk into the eating earth, scrap of lawn where grass won’t grow. I’ve always liked alligators, reptiles. I like the way their skin glistens in water. Probably means something strange, but to me, they’re beautiful.
The insides sizzle.
She has no blood.
“I’m gonna eat her,” the boy tells the others, voice cutting through the heat.
On the other side of the street is the Estates trailer park, as a sign at the front used to say. Got stolen so many times they stopped bothering, but we all remember. And I swear to you, the faces have not changed. Don’t have to turn into the park to see the same bleach-haired women, same brindle pitbulls in the underporch shade. The same white trash babies, plastic flip flops, playing on cracked sidewalks and in between trailers. Guess I used to be one of them, the sidewalk babies—shirt off, sweat beading my braids.
The funeral home in Jacksonville offered to take the casket back to town, but I said no. Wanted to make the drive myself. I didn’t want someone else doing it.
“You her daughter?” the funeral director asked.
I wasn’t sure what to say back.
Could read her name in his notepad, upside down.
Samantha “Antha” Katarain.
My eyes moved to the door behind his desk, the part of the funeral home where only he was allowed. There were bodies back there.
Desiree, my real mother, did the hair of the dead. She did hair for the living, too, but it was the dead where she really excelled. I think she liked how she could pull at the knots, hard. First time she brought me along, Ms. Theda was dead, but her hair was oh so alive. Box-black and tangled, coarse and full of things to say. She was laid out across a folding table, covered except for that hair draping down to the linoleum floor. Ms. Theda kept everything in her bra—pens, dollars, American Spirits—lived in the doublewide next to our single, and when it was hot as shit she would make us iced tea, and she’d be smoking and pulling things out of that bra. I never asked Desiree if she was scared of touching the dead people. Don’t think she thought of it that way. Other things scared her, like banana spiders and the walk between our station wagon and the screen porch door after dark. Losing a sewing needle in the carpet, maybe, but the bodies? I think they were a relief.
“What happened that night?” the funeral director asked as I sat across from him, staring at the swatches of silk lining laid out on his desk. It felt like a piece of my skull was missing, beneath the scalp.
“She drowned.”
He watched me.
“And it was your boat she took out?”
I couldn’t answer, couldn’t even nod.
“They think she crashed on her own volition?”
“They don’t know,” I said, my mind feverish. “I don’t know.”
I don’t tell him how I saw her the next morning, coated in sand and wrapped in the wet weeds of the river bank, just like the alligator.
“Good thing she was only in the water a few hours,” he concluded, leaning back in his chair. “Water does things to the human body.”
Antha’s casket fit tight in the bed of my truck, like it was made for it. I pulled a tarp over the mahogany, started driving. The way to get to Kandlelight is to follow the Nassau River through the Timucuan preserve, until the road turns to dirt and woods. Palmettos, Spanish moss hanging like heirloom lace, sunlight getting lost and unlost in the longleaf pines. Turn off the main road, cross the bridge to the old-money side—the river holds this place together like a spine. This town is hard to learn, but in a way, it’s easy. The undergrowth twists into mouths, into claws that rake and stroke and beckon.
The trees explode into space and there—the Katarain house, white and widowed and alone on the riverbank, ringed by palms and twisted, bulging oaks. The last stand of the morning plunges down onto the mansion’s hulking shape, the old sugarcane fields stretching out behind.
The first time I came here, it was afternoon, too. I was 11, and it was September. Antha Katarain adopted me in 1978, a month after Desiree was killed in a hit-and-run on the street outside our trailer in the Estates. I’ve had two mothers, so I exist in the in-between, the strip of door frame that separates two rooms.
Two mothers, and now they are both dead.
Represented by Danielle Matta (Robin Straus Agency, Inc.)