Part One
My mother first told us stories about the Ghost Lights when I was young. My brother Nathaniel had come home from school one day in tears, having heard stories from the older boys at recess, fantastical tales of monsters and murders and mysterious disappearances in the old Idabel Swamp.
One version told of an ancient creature, worshiped and revered by the indigenous peoples who used to live in these lands, beasts of great size and violent temper who would fiercely defend the last piece of sacred land against white invaders. Another told of an angry Witch, exiled by the townfolk at the beginning of the century, in the town’s earliest days, who’d sworn to exact her revenge by snatching up the town's children and bringing her enemies' bloodlines to a tragic end. Yet another claimed that the Devil himself took up residence in the swamp, anxious to entice boys and girls who snuck off into the swamp into corruption, damnation, and ruin, though it seemed that this version mostly got told from the pulpit on Sunday mornings.
These stories were mostly fun and games for the respectable, middle class folk who lived in town, no more than cautionary tales designed to warn children from wandering off into the swamp and getting lost - or to prevent good Christian folk from sneaking away for any funny business far from the prying eyes of neighbors. But we didn't live in town, and we sure weren't what folks would consider respectable. We were poor and lived in a small, two-bedroom house on a few acres that backed up right against the borders of the wetlands, placing the horrors of Idabel Swamp quite literally in our backyard.
To console Nathaniel, my mother poured us each a tall glass of lemonade and sat us down at the kitchen table, my brother in her lap. At almost eleven, four years older than me, I hadn't seen my brother cry in a long time, and I remember being quite shaken by the sight. But my mother was unfazed, however, smoothing his hair as she whispered reassurance in his ear.
When he finally settled down, my mother asked us, would we like to know the truth about Idabel Swamp?
I nodded with excitement, my brother with reluctance.
"The swamp is an ancient and magical place," she began, "like all the great places on earth. A place unbothered by man for thousands and thousands of years, so peaceful and sacred that time begins to falter and the spirits of the past can get caught in the present. There are no monsters, no witches, no Devils out there. Those are just tall tales told by small men who like to see others afraid. Your Pa goes fishing in that swamp all the time, have you ever heard him talk about seeing a monster? Or the Devil?” Nathaniel shook his head where it was nestled against her shoulder. “No, of course not. And you best believe if your Pa ever came across a monster, it’s the monster I’d be worried for.” She gave a sad laugh.
“There are ghosts in the swamp, but they mean no harm. They’re just memories of people like you and me. They watch over us like lights in the darkness, spirits of the loved ones who keep us safe and give us direction whenever we feel lost. That’s the thing about spirits and ghosts; they’re just people. It’s like meeting someone from another town or even another country, only they’re from another time, just passing through ours like an overnight train” her eyes burned with excitement. “No, the only thing in that swamp to be afraid of are mosquitos and a couple of snakes, but you boys already know to be careful around those.”
She sat Nathan up on her knees and looked him in the eyes. “Now it won’t be long before your Pa’s gonna want to take you fishing with him out there, so you promise me that if you ever get scared, you just close your eyes and take a deep breath and remember where home is, remember that I’m here and I’m looking out for you and I love you. Okay?”
Nathaniel nodded again. “So there aren’t any monsters, just lights?”
She gave him a sympathetic smile. “Just lights, baby.”
"Then why does everyone tell such scary stories?" Nathaniel asked, punctuating his question with a pitiful sniffle.
"Because the swamp is something they don't understand," she replied gently, her eyes falling on mine. "And people always fear what they don't understand."
My mother was like that, always able to say the right thing at the right moment, always able to find wonder and magic in the harsh world around her. She’d grown up in town and married my father when she was just seventeen. He’d been eight years older than her, an age difference not uncommon in those days. I never did know the whole story of how they met or how they’d fallen in love or how my father managed to steal her away from town for our little homestead near the swamp, but whatever the circumstances, I don’t think her family had approved, given we’d never really known them.
My parents’ marriage was a mystery, one that never made a lick of sense to me. In my eyes, they couldn’t be any more different. My father was stern and serious, distant on his best days and cruel on his worst. His father had bought this farm and built the house sometime in the late 1920s, shortly after he’d married my grandmother. My father had come along a few years later, and he'd grown up in the house with his little brother, my Uncle Tommy - in the same room I now shared with Nathaniel. From what little he talked about his childhood, he and Tommy had been expected to work from the minute they got home from school till the sun went down. This was in the days when small farms like ours were common, long before big companies started buying up all the land, and my grandfather made it his sole purpose to keep their little farm alive.
When he finished school my father began helping with the farm full-time. Tommy, on the other hand, moved to the city to go to college, an act of betrayal my father had never gotten over. When my grandparents passed away, Pa continued to look after the farm, never doubting his decision, like a man called by God into some holy vocation. He worked all day, managing to rear a modest enough crop to keep us fed and sell leftovers in town for a little income, and he appeared only at dusk with the expectation of a hot supper and a quiet house.
During the days, I stayed indoors with my mother, helping her with household chores as I became old enough to contribute. This upset my father, whom I remember more than once accusing her of trying to turn me into a girl, but I always enjoyed the work. And I enjoyed the time with her. She filled our house with laughter and music, always telling stories of when she was a girl or singing a song she loved, though she never could quite remember all the words. But when my father came in, those tunes and tales vanished, and she made herself a good wife - quiet and obedient.
As a child, the only memories I have of my father speaking to us was to say grace at the table or to read Scripture to us before bed. He was deeply religious, as his father had been before him, but he carried a deep distrust of the local church, saying he didn’t need any of those “spoiled, stuck up townfolk” anywhere near his business. And so he safeguarded the family religion and led it himself. My mother was religious in her own way, she prayed with us and quoted Scripture, but for her religion was something warm and life-bringing. She could tell us Bible stories with the same glint in her eyes other parents might have telling tales of knights and dragons; she spoke about the world God made with wonder and admiration. But she let Pa lead, and didn’t put up a fuss when he wouldn’t let her take us to church. I could tell she was sad, but I think she mostly missed the music.
Sometimes, in the afternoons while my father was at work and Nathaniel was at school, I’d catch her looking out the window at our land - a fertile little meadow that flooded easily when it rained and served as suitable breeding ground for endless mosquitoes in the hot nights of summertime - with a hint of sadness, and I wondered as I got older if she ever missed her life in town, the one she had lived and the one she never got to.
I never got the chance to ask her.
She died when I was ten. As Autumn turned to Winter, she got sick, and before the year was out, she was gone.
My father, true to his distrust of the religious authorities in town, refused to organize a funeral or have her body interred in the churchyard. Instead, we dug her a humble grave in the back corner of our land, just out of reach of the swamp. Pa read scripture - something out of Revelation - and showed little emotion as we began to fill the shallow hole.
I’d been inconsolable, crying for days and hardly able to leave my bed, until finally my father came in, hit me, and told me that if I didn’t pull myself together and get back to my chores I’d have no place under his roof.
And so, at ten years old, I took over all the work my mother had been responsible for around the house - cooking, cleaning, laundry, tending to the chickens, and helping when it was time to harvest crops. For years, I’d wake up at dawn to prepare breakfast, go to school for the day, then come home in the afternoon and get straight to work on supper. Nathaniel would often be up before dawn to accompany Pa fishing in the swamp, then head immediately into the fields after school to help tend the crops. It was exhausting work, and I’d often get scolded for falling asleep during class.
I never made many friends at school, nor did Nathaniel. People called us the Swamp Children, and often teased us about living so near the Devil. One time I got into a fight with a boy at recess. He asked me if we didn’t have a mother anymore because she ran off into the swamp to become a witch. I jumped on top of him and punched him again and again until Nathaniel and another boy pulled me away. I’d managed to get a black eye in the process, and when my father asked me what happened Nathaniel told him I got into a fight. My father hit me with his belt and said if I ever caused trouble like that again he’d really give me some bruises.
Later that night, I laid in bed and cried quietly, afraid I might wake Nathaniel and he might tell Pa I was crying and Pa might come in and beat me again. That day changed things between Nathaniel and me. We’d never been close, not really; he had always spent more time with Pa growing up while I’d spent time with my mother, but he’d always been my big brother, in a way. My mother had always made a point of reminding him so. “Now you take care of Thomas,” she’d say, “You’re his big brother and he needs you.” But that night, laying there in my bed crying, I realized that it was he and Pa against me, it had been since my mother died.
I had noticed other changes in Nathaniel. He’d grown quiet and harsh, rarely showing any emotion or tenderness, much like Pa. He also started getting taller; his shoulders got broader, his voice got deeper, and his muscles started to grow from his work around the farm. He started growing hair in places I didn’t have any, like on his chest and under his arms and below his belly button. We had always shared a room and rarely had the luxury of privacy, so these changes were noticeable. One day, I asked him how come he was getting hair on his privates, but he just told me to shut up and stop looking at him while he was undressed.
I tried, but I couldn’t shake a sense of confusion and curiosity. I’d seen Pa come in on particularly warm evenings when he’d taken his shirt off, and he had hair on his chest too. Now Nathaniel was getting some, and I wondered - Did Pa also have hair on his privates? Why didn’t I have any? Was it because I didn’t work outside with them in the fields? Why was I different? Was something wrong with me?
I spent that night tossing and turning, feeling a sense of loneliness that threatened to crush me in my bed. As soon as the first, gray light of morning began to gather outside my window, I quietly rose from my bed, found my shoes, and slipped out of the house. I wandered aimlessly for a bit, weaving in and out of the rows of grain and corn that ran the length of our property, drifting further from the house and nearer to the swamp. Having reached the end, where the ground dropped quickly down into the waiting arms of water, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I listened to sounds of the early morning - the chorus of frogs, the chirping of crickets, the occasional buzzing of insect wings that hopped across the surface of the water.
After a few minutes of this, just as I was about to make my return to the house and begin my morning chores, a new sound appeared: the crisp, clear chime of something like bells, echoing out faintly from deep within the trees. My eyes snapped open, and I gazed out into the swamp, still shrouded in darkness as if resisting the approach of morning. I concentrated hard, watching and listening, being drawn further and further into the cacophony of sounds and darkness, until I heard it again, the high ringing of bells. As the sounds appeared, I thought I saw the faintest trace of light floating behind a far cluster of cypress trees, like a lightning bug dancing above the water. Only, instead of the cold yellow of a lightning bug, this glowed with the warm amber light of a torch or a lantern. It lasted less than half a second, quick enough I wasn’t even sure whether I’d made the whole thing up in my exhaustion from the sleepless night. Nevertheless, I continued to stare into the dark until my eyes hurt and I realized the sun was nearly up and I was about to be late starting my chores.
So with all the self-control I could manage, I pulled myself away from the water’s edge and returned to the house to begin my day. Things carried on as normal, but the echo of bells and the image of a dim, dancing light remained in my head for quite some time.
- - -
When I turned thirteen, my father told me to join him fishing one morning, saying it was high time I learned to navigate the swamp. I was excited. I hadn’t been included in any of his and Nathaniel’s work for years, and I would often daydream about the wonders of the swamp on mornings when they’d be gone fishing. I felt my time had come, that I was finally a man. I also hoped that time in the swamp would bring about a change in my body, that I’d begin to look more like Nathaniel and less like the pale, hairless child I was. With Nathaniel nearly a fully grown man himself, I felt the distance between us more than ever, and I was over the moon at the idea of being invited to join them for man’s work.
Our trip into the swamp was hardly eventful. We left before dawn, taking one of the two canoes we had moored at the back of our property, silently slid through the waters to one of the areas my father frequented. He showed me a system of cloth rags he’d tied to various tree branches to serve as a trail marker back to our property; he taught me to fix bait onto the fishing line, how to best cast the line without scaring the fish off, how to know when to start reeling in without losing the catch. For the first time I saw a new side to my father. Out here, in the swamp, he seemed at peace. It’s not that he was more gentle or uncharacteristically kind; but he seemed calm, at one with the environment. It was one of the few times I felt I could be relaxed around him. I understood why. The swamp was enchanting, as if something in its very air made us at peace.
We returned home, and my father told me to remember what he’d shown me in case he or Nathaniel were ill, so I could make myself useful when needed. He never asked me to go with him again.
But after that, I made it a point to escape into the swamp whenever I had the chance. On Saturdays, Pa and Nathaniel would often go to town to sell produce and get whatever food and supplies we needed for the week. They’d often be gone several hours, sometimes they wouldn’t return until supper, and I used that time to explore.
I started by retracing the routes Pa had marked with the cloth rags, and for a while I didn’t do much on my expeditions, just tie up my boat and listen, picking apart the different sounds of the swamp, the timbre and cadence of the different creatures that lived there. As I explored, I began to see these creatures more and more, birds in the trees and turtles resting on logs and the occasional snake slithering across the surface of the water. I loved watching them go about their business, curious and determined, as if unbothered by anything. For a place that the stories so often associated with death, it all felt incredibly alive.
Eventually I became more courageous and would venture away from my father’s carefully marked trails. I started small, keeping the familiar landmarks in sight, until one day, grabbing an old shirt from my wardrobe and tearing it into strips, I began to plant my own trail markers and push further into the swamp. On these adventures, I discovered all sorts of sights - a fallen tree covered in moss and mushrooms, a long tunnel of low cypress branches so thick that going through it felt like twilight. One day, I even discovered an island. It was small, only about forty feet across, and contained a large tree in the center that covered the soft, grassy soil in cool shade.
Back home I dug out an old pad of paper and a few pencils, and I began to draw these places I’d discovered and the creatures that resided there. I spent hours teaching myself to draw - trying to capture the shapes and shadows of the trees, the texture of the animals - and over the years I got pretty good. I began to stage scenes for these creatures and write little stories to accompany my drawings, simple tales of the animals and the adventures they got up to. I would imagine where a bird flew off to after leaving a nearby branch, or where a turtle swam home to after a long day on the water. I began to visit my little island every Saturday, and there I would create - writing and drawing and dreaming the day away, listening to the music of the swamp and, every once in a while, the chiming of distant bells.
Out there, forging trails of my own invention through unfamiliar territory, I felt freedom in a way I’d never experienced, freedom to think and dream and say and do whatever I wanted without anyone else around to dismiss or discredit my ideas. These trips into the swamp became sacred to me as the years went by. They were the only thing in my life that wasn’t determined for me by my father and Nathaniel, the only place where I felt myself truly come alive, the only place that I could call my own.
- - -
That is, until one Saturday morning, I arrived at my island to find it occupied. It was the Spring just after my seventeenth birthday, and I was excited to resume my Saturdays in the swamp after what had been a particularly cold winter. I grabbed my things and headed to the canoe as soon as Pa and Nathaniel left for town, excited at the prospect of having the day to myself. So imagine my surprise when, upon approaching my tiny island refuge, I saw a small aluminum fishing boat pulled ashore, and next to the boat, laid out on a large, brightly colored beach towel, was a person - a boy - looking right at home, his arms outstretched, hands behind his head, naked except for a pair of cutoff denim shorts.
He must have heard the sound of my canoe, because he sat up quickly as if startled. He looked to be about my age, maybe a bit older. He was tall and lean, with tan skin and shaggy blond hair that felt out of place, almost exotic. A simple black necklace curved about his shoulders and the nape of his neck, weighed down by a small arrowhead that rested against his smooth chest.
In my surprise, I froze stiff in the canoe and felt my breath hitch in my throat. The sunlight reflected off his straw-colored hair, and a swirl of butterflies appeared in my stomach. My mouth went dry. I was about to turn and flee when I heard him speak.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Jonathan.”
I tried to speak but couldn’t seem to formulate any words. “Thomas,” I finally managed to croak.
He looked at me curiously, his brow scrunched together, his head cocked to the side.
“Where’d you come from?” he asked.
I cleared my throat as a wave of defensiveness swept through me. “My house,” I said sternly.
“No way,” his eyes lit up. “You live out here? Is your house on stilts or something? I’ve heard of people who lived in swamps on stilts but I never knew anybody who actually did!”
I was taken aback by his excitement. “Um, no,” I muttered. “My family’s land backs up to the swamp. Couple miles that way.” I pointed back over my shoulder.
“Oh,” he looked disappointed.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
“I put my boat in about a mile or so that way, just by the old bridge,” he said nonchalantly, gesturing over his right shoulder.
“Oh,” was all I could reply. In all my years by the swamp, I had come to think of it as singularly ours, my family’s, and more recently, as I’d journeyed further away from our little corner of it, I’d come to think of it as mine. It had never occurred to me that other people may be puttering around their own little corners of Idabel Swamp.
“Yeah, I got this old boat from a buddy’s dad for five dollars…” he continued, while I tried to wrap my mind around this unexpected visitor. In that moment, something in me shifted, and I felt a sharp sense of loss. I knew, logically, that the swamp didn’t just go on forever, but in my imagination it had remained this vast and wonderful wilderness, a land of creatures and spirits and stories from my childhood. But before me was living, breathing, talking proof that this land of enchantment existed only in my mind.
At the same time, however, a realization dawned on me. Maybe I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought. I always felt a little like I lived at the end of the world, cut off from everyone and everything. But here, before me, in a chance meeting on a sunny Spring morning, was someone new.
“...and so I decided that I’d get out here and see it for myself.” He looked at me, proudly, expecting a response, clearly unaware I hadn’t been paying him any attention.
“Oh,” I said again. My eyes met his, a piercing blue unlike any I had ever seen, and I felt my stomach once again curl into knots.
“Anyways,” he went on, looking away self-consciously. “I found this little spot and thought it would be a nice place to spend an afternoon.”
“It is,” I agreed. “I’ve been coming here for years.”
“Oh,” he sounded surprised, then looked around himself as if noticing something he hadn’t seen before. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything.”
“No, it’s fine,” I heard myself saying. “You’re welcome to stay. Surely there’s room for two.”
He smiled and scooted over on his beach towel as a gesture. I pulled my canoe ashore, staying several feet from the spot he’d claimed, and made my way up to my usual seat at the base of the tree. It was strange, at first, sharing a space I’d become so used to having to myself, but after a little while I found his presence strangely comforting. He didn’t try to talk to me at first; he just went back to his sunbathing. I was trying to finish a sketch I’d started the previous day - a family of turtles sitting down to dinner, a plump roasted fly and a small salad plated before each of them. It was a silly thing I’d started, drawing the animals acting like people, writing out stories of them as families and parents and children.
I found myself getting distracted, though. From where I sat, I could see Jonathan’s long, lithe body stretched out in the sun, his skin drawn tight over his rib cage, his stomach gently rising and falling with his breath, a small trail of hair reaching from his belly button down into the waistband of his denim shorts. I’d never seen anyone besides Nathaniel in such a state of undress, and I found myself entertaining the same curious thoughts I used to have when I was younger, seeing Nathaniel change before bed, wondering how my body compared to his.
My body had changed, finally, around the time I was fourteen. I had gotten hair under my arms and on my privates, which had gotten bigger and seemed to have taken on a mind of their own. Whether it was from my time in the swamp, I never really knew, though I suspected it was just a thing that happened at that age, as that’s about when it happened to Nathaniel. I remember that day I first noticed those hairs sprout, the wave of relief that had flooded through me. The pang of excitement. I was finally becoming a man. But it brought on a few surprises. Many mornings I’d wake to find my member sticking straight up, forming a tent in my bed sheets, and though I never knew why I always felt embarrassed, hoping Nathaniel hadn’t seen. I wondered if that ever happened to him.
And now, staring at Jonathan laid out in the sunshine, my curiosity was as alive and potent as ever, but this time bringing along something new. Something like longing.
Jonathan stretched and yawned noisily, snapping me out of my daydreams. I went back to drawing in my notebook, trying to act as if I’d forgotten he was there. To my relief, he didn’t turn around or look my way; instead, he reached into a canvas bag laying against the hull of his fishing boat and pulled out a book. He leaned back, propped up on one arm, and thumbed through the pages until he found his place.
“What are you reading?” I asked after a few minutes, unable to contain my curiosity.
He turned to look at me with a friendly smile, as if relieved to finally break the silence that had settled between us. “It’s called One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he replied.
I was struck by the title. “Sounds sad,” I said, though mostly to myself.
“It’s about a family who lives in an isolated town in South America and the changes in society and political conflict that starts to threaten their way of life. And a lot more than that, but yeah, that’s it in a nutshell.”
“Is it any good?” I asked.
“Very,” he said enthusiastically. “I’ve really enjoyed it.”
“I don’t read much,” I said absentmindedly.
“Well I’m about to finish it. You can borrow it if you want,” he said.
“Really?” I asked skeptically.
“Sure,” he said, and we settled back into a comfortable silence. I returned to my drawing, he to his book. A little while later, he closed the book and sat it on the blanket at his side. I could see his eyes were closed as he lifted his face to the sun, and for a minute he just sat there, a contented half-smile on his face. Suddenly, he hopped to his feet and walked the book over to me, extending it out before him like a peace offering. Or an invitation.
I took the book from his hands and thanked him.
“What are you working on?” he asked, eyeing my notepad.
Hesitantly, I showed him my drawing of the turtles at the dinner table. He looked at the image for what felt like an eternity, then he threw his head back and laughed. I felt my cheeks go hot. “I love it! They’re adorable,” he said, sitting down next to me. I felt his bare arm against mine. “Do you have more?”
And I showed him. I flipped through my notepad and showed him all the drawings I had. I told him how I often came to the swamp to get away from home, and how I began to draw, and how over time I started taking the animals I drew on little adventures. “It’s silly, I know.”
“No, it’s not silly,” he said, gazing at a drawing of two birds having a picnic on a branch. “They’re wonderful.” I blushed and tried to dismiss his compliment. “I mean it, they’re really good! You should put these in the paper.”
I met his eyes and couldn’t help but return his smile. “Thank you,” I said, feeling suddenly shy. “I’ve never shown them to anyone before.”
We talked for a while after that, resting against the tree. He told me he lived in Wallace, the next town over, and started to explore the swamp after buying his fishing boat just before the Winter. He told me that today was the first day he’d come across the island and that he felt like an explorer when he brought his boat ashore on strange lands for the first time. He was about to graduate high school, and wanted to move to St. Louis in the Fall where his uncle had offered to get him a job at a bank. He’d only ever been out of Wallace one time, when he’d gone to Little Rock with his family for a weekend trip, and for years now he’d been dreaming of moving to a bigger city as soon as he had the chance.
He was smart and funny and talkative, which I found comforting. I wasn’t used to being around other people, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to fill a conversation. But Jonathan was happy to talk for the both of us; he told me stories about his little sister, about books he’d read for school and music he loved listening to when his parents weren’t around, about places in the world he’d learned about and where he’d want to go if he ever had the chance to really travel. I asked him about his favorite books and he told me about a few he’d read that he really loved. Books with poetic titles and exotic settings. He told me that one day, when he had a house of his own, he wanted a library full of books and a big chair where he could sit and read for hours. I told him that sounded nice.
It was surreal, this day spent in the company of someone who, in another life, could’ve been a friend. As the afternoon progressed and I noticed the sun beginning its slow descent toward the horizon, I told him I needed to get home.
“You said you come here on Saturdays, right?” he asked me as I climbed into my canoe. I nodded. “Well, maybe I’ll see you around then.”
He flashed a smile as I pushed off from the shore of our tiny island, and all I could do was mumble in agreement, blinded by his smile.
That night I dreamt of blue eyes and golden hair, of tan skin disappearing beneath faded, blue denim.
To Be Continued...
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