Love Songs: The Wrong Note - A Collection of Short Stories

A Helpless Woman

Chapel lived at the bottom of Old Ferry Landing, where the dirt lane abruptly ended and Alligator Swamp began. Her tar paper shanty was surrounded on three sides by a mongrel mix of scrub pines and a tangle of overgrowth too stunted to be called brush.

Both shack and swamp were bathed in soft tones of muted grays and silvers, broken occasionally by a scruffy patch of green clinging to the moldy sides of the dwelling or hanging tenaciously to a ragged evergreen overhead. Her shack teetered at the swamp's edge, a shadowy mirage on a dimly lit scrap of earth, and beside it, the great, bleak swamp loomed.

Lazy. Dangerous. Like the sleeping gators whose name it bore.

Alligator Swamp was immense, stretching across miles of undeveloped land too poor to farm and too soggy to support foundations. Its brackish waters, only inches deep in places, gave off a fetid odor, like salt marshes at low tide.

Craggy stumps broke its still, unmoving surface. Black, rotting roots clawed for the sunlight, hop-scotched and ragged in a willy-nilly pattern along its edge. Long swags of Spanish moss draped the piney forest, scratching the water with matted fingertips.

When the winds blew, the woods breathed, sighing with the groans and rubs of trunk against tree limb. The moss danced, trailing the breezes with their flowing tresses like elegant ladies circling a ballroom floor.

It was a ghostly place. Forgotten, forlorn, and lonely. Just a speck on the map where hopelessness could lie as undisturbed as the reptiles who sought the warmth of the noonday sun.

And it was a perfect place, THE perfect place, to bury oneself.

Chapel had lived beside the swamp for many years. Her once tawny hair, now streaked with gray, was tied from her face with a scrap of rag stripping. A large woman, big-boned and muscular, she exuded strength, but her meaty, blunt-end hands, though still strong, were knotted and swollen with tangles of arthritis. Time-etched wrinkles traced her face in a hodge podge of parchment rivulets, the skin leathery and mottled from decades of outdoor work.

Her features were coarse, and her voice, when she used it, was deep and full like a man's. A layer of downy fuzz shadowed the area on her lip, and her twin eyebrows met above the bridge of her nose in one dark line.

In the solitude of Alligator Swamp, it didn't matter much that she lacked any delicate quality or refinement.

The morning was crisp, almost biting, but she knew the coolness would not last. She worked with a dogged determination, head bent and hands swinging the hoe to a slow steady rhythm.

She looked up occasionally to gauge her progress. The rows were long, seemingly endless. She knew that she could no longer work through the noonday heat until the dusk of evening, so she paced herself and stopped at mid-morning to let the blister of the afternoon pass before commencing again near sundown, when the biting scorch and hot humidity had eased.

Her arms responded involuntarily, rising, falling, rising, falling endlessly once, and then again. It was monotonous labor. Occasionally, a metallic clang rang out as the blade of her hoe sparked against a rock. She was nearing the end of a row that bordered the wooded edge when the snap of a branch stayed the hoe in mid-air.

She stared at the man in the shadow of the forest's rim. He stepped across the mossy carpet and onto the turned land, spreading his legs and planting his feet, hands upon his hips as if he was rooted there. He seemed to be standing his ground, staking his territory. She lowered the hoe.

"Whut 'cha be wantin'?" she asked, her unused voice rough and low.

She had no idea why anyone would be here, but she saw the flash as the switchblade opened, a split-second glint of sun on steel.