Music of the Swamp Read Online Free PDF

don’t want your fucking ball.” He dropped the ball into the ditchwater and tossed the mouse underhand out in front of him in my direction. It was spinning in the air. I tried to catch the mouse but I missed it. It hit my hand and then my thigh and fell to the ground. The mouse was stunned but not badly injured. In a couple of seconds it got its bearings and scuttled off into the weeds.
    Roy Dale picked the ball up out of the water and dried it against his pants and handed it to me. “Good as new,” he said.
    I said, “Thanks.”
    He said, “You might as well not lie to me about being your friend.”
    Roy Dale went his way and I went mine.
    M Y MOTHER was in the kitchen making homemade noodles and chicken broth. She hated noodles and broth, but it was the only thing my father would eat when he was drinking.
    I walked into the kitchen and said, “Roy Dale caught a mouse and let it go.”
    She said, “To my mind a body needs a balanced diet.”
    I said, “Mr. McNeer hit Dixie Dawn over the head with a hoe and made her bleed.”
    Mama said, “Oh.” She stopped what she was doing. She looked at me with sadness, her hands still covered with flour. I was glad I had told her.
    I said, “She didn’t do nothing. He just started beating her with the hoe.”
    She said, “Anything. She didn’t do anything.” And then she said, “Those poor sad people.”
    S OON AFTER the incident with the hoe Mrs. McNeer began a campaign to make her children’s lives happy. She surprised local children on the street by giving them money. She wouldsay, “My treat!” She volunteered to “help out” in the youth groups of every church in town. She made sandwiches for Methodist kids, she hired a truck for the Presbyterian hayride, she taught in the Baptist Vacation Bible School, she folk-danced with the Episcopalians.
    Her unhappy children were always there with her. Dixie Dawn was forced to sing solos. John Wesley, who was tone deaf, stood around with his knuckles on the sidewalk.
    Nothing worked, of course. Every child in town grew to fear and despise Dixie Dawn and John Wesley all the more.
    The saddest event in the attempt to conscript an army against the McNeer children’s misery was a birthday party for Dixie Dawn. I should say “birthday party,” in quotation marks, since it was still summer and nobody’s birthday at all. Dixie Dawn’s birthday was not until February.
    The party was elaborate. Maybe the most elaborate single event in white-trash history. Mrs. McNeer had prepared for forty or more children. She worked day and night for weeks. She strung crepe paper streamers from every available place, four separate colors of crinkly paper twisted together in a bright rope looping and swagging from house to store, from tree to bush. The yard was practically canopied in streamers.
    Mrs. McNeer had rented a tent in case of rain, and had set it up and rolled up its sides and placed long cloth-covered tables beneath it. On the tables were foods that most of the children of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, had never seen before.Cucumber sandwiches cut with a cooky cutter, pickled herring, olives, smoked oysters, raw vegetables with a mustard dip, smoked bluefish and trout and salmon, even a liver pâté. There were two large cakes. One of them said You’re a Big Girl Now. The other said Let’s Boogie Down. There was a banner that said Happy Birthday, and another that said Let’s Have a Party.
    All across the lawn there were areas arranged for various games. Card games here, board games there, blindfold games, running games, croquet, badminton, every game you can think of, all over the yard.
    There were party favors beyond imagining. Honkers and tooters and squeakers and clickers and tassled hats and sheriff’s badges and painter’s caps and small magic tricks. Handcuffs, fingercuffs, whoopee cushions, hand