“I’ve known rivers,” recited Gogo, reading from a poem by Langston Hughes. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” Vern imagined it was the fungus speaking this poem. As old as the earth, it had seen all of history unleash.
“Keep reading,” Vern said. It was the type of night when she could no longer sleep for fear that she’d wake up with a man’s hand mashed against her lips and nose, suffocating her, or a body hanging from a noose tied to the ceiling fan.
Gogo offered up reading after reading like an exorcist banishing away a demon, like words meant something. “Please!” shouted Vern, desperate to hear words that spoke of her life in the woods. Words that reminded her the earth didn’t need redeeming. From it flowed infinite beauties.
“I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.”
The poem was called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and Vern wondered if it was possible that the fungus was Black. Born in Africa. A watchful spirit looking after her people.
“I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.”
Muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. That image sent Vern’s mind home to the forest, to the mud and the wet and the pink sky and the way her skin felt sucking it all in.
“Read about the woods,” said Vern.
There was one book that reminded Vern so much of her early days in the forest after she’d left Cainland, her soul’s grievances quieted for once as the trees sheltered her and the dirt warmed her skin and the river water licked her clean with its current.
“Rural Hours?”
“Yes,” Vern said. It was written by a woman in 1850, a recording of a year of her observations.
“The arbutus is now open everywhere in the woods and groves. How pleasant it is to meet the same flowers year after year!” Gogo read. Vern followed Gogo’s words closely, but there was knocking at the door, thunderous and insistent.
Footsteps creaked along in the corridor outside. Something dragged against the wall, the sound of it groaning, scraping. A stick. An ax.
“It aint real,” said Vern, as Gogo read.
“If the blossoms were liable to change—if they were to become capricious and irregular—they might excite more surprise, more curiosity, but we should love them less.”
“It aint real.”
The stranger in the corridor stopped at Vern’s door. A fingernail scratched against the wood.
“They might be just as bright, and gay, and fragrant under other forms, but they would not be the violets, and squirrel-cups, and ground laurels we loved last year,” Gogo read diligently.
The scratching against the door turned to knocking, then beating, then yelling. “Margaret May, you stupid bitch, let me in.”
Poor Margaret May.
“Whatever your roving fancies may say, there is a virtue in constancy which has a reward above all that fickle change can bestow, giving strength and purity to every affection of life.”
Drunken slurring from outside the door. A crying baby appeared next to Vern in the bed. It screamed with such a great fierceness it drowned out the drunk man yelling outside the door.
“We admire the strange and brilliant plant of the green-house, but we love most the simple flowers we have loved of old, which have bloomed many a spring, through rain and sunshine, on our native soil.” Gogo always snorted at native soil. Rich words from a colonizer, she said.
The man on the other side of the door kept knocking, and the babe still screamed. “Margaret Maaaaay,” he drawled tunefully, teasingly. “Margaret Maaaaay. Margaret May. You fucking bitch.”
The knob rattled.
Vern’s mind was violence upon violence. The crack of a shotgun cocking sounded from the corridor, and the knob of the bedroom door blew off. In came the man, younger than Vern would’ve guessed, more handsome. Once upon a time Margaret May must’ve thought him a catch, all slick and doe-eyed. His sleeves were rolled up past his forearms, and the muscles of his biceps pushed through the white fabric of his shirt.
Feeling now what Margaret May must’ve felt, Vern closed her eyes. Moments passed, and nothing happened, until the gun went off.
Vern let her eyes peek open. She patted her chest, surprisingly whole. The drunk man was on the floor, opened up, leaking blood. A woman stood smugly next to him, a rifle slung over her shoulder. “He’s gone now. Don’t worry, Mags.”