MUSTARD BAYOU

 The small boy reaches for the two hands on either side of him, to swing over another gap in the boards. When he feels the coarse hairs wrapped around his grandfather’s rough hand, he lets go, forcing his grandmother to use both hands to keep him from falling. The boy hates harsh things. His grandmother’s hands are soft and velvety, much better, and covered in blue veins that the boy likes to watch trickle over her wrists and elbows and disappear into straight shoulders, covered by a buttercup-yellow sundress that her daughter-in-law thinks is kind of inappropriate for someone her age. But buttercup is her favorite yellow, and her favorite flower, too. Tame, drab little things that cover a field like someone’s yellow spittle—but a cobra’s spittle, for they are actually quite venomous. Few know that about buttercups. The boy certainly doesn’t. He laughs at the feeling of sailing through the air, unmindful of her grimacings, or of the poison of certain yellow flowers.

The boy’s father has walked ahead with the boy’s mother. He runs to meet them when he sees them stop. They peer into the boggy water, pointing at the nest of a black watersnake that has just given birth. Its brood squirms over her weak body.

The boy, whose name is Bae, asks where they came from. “They’re hers,” Halaboji O says. Bae, not an O but an Oh, reserves “Halaboji” only for his mother’s father. There is Halaboji, and there is Halaboji O. Bae’s favorite is Halaboji Oh, a preference he freely admits. But Halaboji O isn’t so bad. “They’re called hatchlings,” he tells him.

“Hatchlings,” Bae repeats, even though already he knew that.

“Actually, Riley’s cornsnake just gave birth last Tuesday,” Father says. “How nice,” Halmoni O says, smiling in her way (like an owl’s smile; it wasn’t any way). “Riley?” “Yes, Dr. Herman Riley, a patient of mine.” “He’s that dentist I was telling you and Umma about.” “Oh yes,” Halaboji O chimes in, bell-like, “the one with triplet sons.”

This exchange is of little significance to our story, however, or to Bae, though he might have been interested to hear of such fanciful things as triplets and dentists and cornsnakes had he known to listen for them. He was too busy testing a stem he pulled from the muck—nice and sturdy, didn’t wobble a bit. He was often busy, especially for a seven year-old. Now, he reaches toward the nest with it. Thinking it would make for a fine pet, he tries to goad one of the dark twisty babes into curling round the end, but none will wrap itself tight enough. While the others make adulting, mawkish chuckles that are supposed to be indulgent but which Bae finds circusy and macabre, Mother tells him to put it down, now, using only her eyes and teeth. She is talented like that.

After a few minutes more of Halaboji O politely asking after Father’s work at the veterinary clinic, his veterinary clinic (Father was quite accomplished), Mother looks down into the nest and is reminded of her own. She asks: “Where is Sun Young?” The edge in her question slips out, like a knife up a sleeve.

The boy, who, as you’ll recall, is only seven, listens in silence as the four adults begin to politely throw harsh words at each other, like Responsibility and Blame. He has known all along that his sister is missing, but no such words are thrown his way.

Bae reaches Sun Young first. She isn’t missing, she’s only gone ahead. She is sitting at the base of a historic marker that reads:

BATTLE OF MUSTARD BAYOU

Fought February 21, 1872

Gen. Richard Vidmark’s Confederate army failed to prevent the Union army from

crossing Anpaytoo River at Norwood.

She is reading Sailor Moon, which on the ride over she kept hidden in her Sailor Moon backpack. She isn’t supposed to be reading. She’s supposed to be “spending time” with Halaboji and Halmoni O, whatever that was supposed to mean. (What was she going to buy with it?) Bae leans over and cocks his head to see which volume.

“Ooh-ooh,” he exclaims, like a—well, you know. “Number 37—that means you’re in the Infinities! What just happened? What’s going on?” Even at seven, Bae is already quite the Sailor Mooner.

Sun Young looks up from the page to glare at him. All the girls, except for Sailor Moon, of course, have just been knocked unconscious, and had their powers drained, and right now really isn’t the time for—

She sees the adults coming down the boardwalk towards her and stands, out of appreciation for the beast of a WereParent her father turns into upon the coming of the two full moons that are his parents. Dad, not Father, she reminds herself. Normal people, my friends, call their fathers “Dad.” It’s time we start, too.

“Sun Young,” Dad says, still coming down the path. She hears him spit out her name like a dog that’s bitten a toad, but she is the only one who hears it. Bae thinks Father seems somewhat insouciant, actually. “Now, Sun Young—shouldn’t you be with your grandparents instead of off on your on? Now—” Now, now; Father is always very present when he tries not to lose control. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing.”

Sun Young is frightened, but not intimidated. (She isn’t easily intimidated.) Her grandparents may bring out the monster in Father, but so long as they are present, he is a tame monster—one which, temporarily, cannot bite.

“I’m reading Sailor Moon,” she yells back. (Bae makes a grab for the book but she slaps his hand away. She slaps his cheek as well, and he kicks her knee. She screams, and knocks Bae onto his haunches. He starts to cry. But enough of Sun Young & Bae, let’s go back to Sun Young & Father.) And upon further declaring: “And you can’t stop me!” she squeezes the book between her upper arm and ribcage and flies up to a perch atop the signpost where Father and Bae can’t reach her. For everyone knows that girls have wings and boys have scales.

That’s what they tell us, anyhow. But Sun Young isn’t quite sure they have that right. Bae has wings. They just haven’t developed enough for flight. And Father doesn’t have either, only big skin-toned lobster claws where hands should be.

Typical Father.

The Builders of the Boardwalk hadn’t thought to put a Do Not Climb sign next to the Mustard Bayou sign. They didn’t have much foresight.

Shocked at this display, from both their granddaughter and their shouting son-in-law, Halaboji and Halmoni look on reproachfully and say not a word. Mother is silently entreating herself not to cry again.

Typical Mother.

As slim and agile as Sun Young is, the marker cannot hold her weight. It cracks, she loses her balance, and both Sun Young and Sailor Moon fall into the marsh. Through the tears and the mud that his sister splashed onto him, Bae howls.

The boardwalk creaks and groans and Sun Young’s soiled capris drip, drip, drip as the four Ohs and two Os march steadily on. The sun neither rises nor sets. It only stands there shining stupidly, emitting a dull, lowly orange light. Time sits in the twilight of the seventh hour, and the boardwalk goes on and on. 

Bones young and old begin to ache. They have been walking for hours. Minutes. Seconds. So long.

Hand-in-hand, Halaboji and Halmoni O walk in silence. They say nothing, and they do not share their thoughts. They merely watch.

They watch Mother see her husband’s frustration so clearly. They watch her wonder if his parents see it, too. Surely they do.

They watch Bae, who had galloped off heroically at some point and has returned bearing a striped hatchling from a different nest, his conquest. They watch him wonder what he should name his newfound friend. He settles on Benton. He tells Sun Young. She calls him, or his snake, or his snake’s name, juvenile.

They watch Sun Young wonder whether Venus, Mars, and Jupiter would be alright. Was that a power drain she just witnessed, or something more sinister? They watch the thought strike her that she doesn’t really care what happens to any of the Sailor Senshi, not even Sailor Moon, and then squash it, and remind herself why she reads Sailor Moon in the first place, and become a dedicated Fangirl once again who can relate to and will not disappoint her friends. And they see that even with her grandfather’s jacket draped around her shoulders, she is very cold.

And they watch the Passersby, the ones the others do not see.

I don’t remember it taking this long to get back…

Shouldn’t we be back by now?

Soon, I’m sure.

Gah, does it ever end?

Would you stop stepping on my shoes already?

Now, now…

Do you think we took a wrong turn somewhere?

We haven’t made any turns, the boardwalk is just one path.

I just don’t understand…

Eventually, they stop talking altogether, and become merely six vacuous faces floating across the surface of the marsh.

Finally, Father has had enough. He steps off the boardwalk and motions for his wife and children and parents to follow. Mother is right behind him. The Os shake their heads.

As for the children, the moment their father step off the boardwalk they begin to feel afraid. They hear silence. Then they hear a ringing. A nervous, twittering reverberation. It suddenly seems much darker at 7:55 than it did at 7:54. (AM? PM? Sun Young couldn’t say.)

A splash.

Then the sounds of the marsh pierce through the ringing and the silence, and the squishing and bubbling of the muck hits them with a cold, hard terror, and they run back, away from the parents who are trudging through the bog and away from the grandparents who do not look back.

Mother sobs piteously while Father disguises a push forward with a consoling pat on the back, telling her it will be alright and that soon this nightmare will be over and the four—sorry, six—of them will be back safe in their own beds before she can say: “Totoro.”

They push through dank, mucky swamp—much of which comes bubbling up to their waists—until they reach a small island. There, on the island, they see the Passersby.

The children’s panic grows increasingly realer and realer to them, to the point where Sun Young thinks she sees dark, menacing shapes leering out at her in the gloom. Bae thinks he sees them, too. But then they watch in horror as one of the Shadows stabs two eyes and slits a smile into its face and laughs at them, and they know they see them.

As Sun Young and Bae run as fast as they can run, the Shadows around them take on corporeal form. The children scream. For standing all around them, now, are the haunts of all children’s nightmares: Trolls, Witches & Warlocks, Ghosts, Werewolves, Vampires, Goblins & Hobgoblins, Spirits, Giants, Ogres, Dragons, and Ghouls. Quite an assembly.

Two strange men lie prostrate on the moss. One is blind, the other is mute. Dressed only in strange leathery cloths that drape over their crotches, they look as though they haven’t eaten in a year, both gaunt and skeletal beyond imagining.

The two men are brothers, and from what little Father can make out from the blind brother, they are from a strange and far-off place. How they can afford LSD when they can’t even afford to dress themselves properly, Father doesn’t know. He finds himself disgusted by these two men, and embarrassed by their near-nakedness. He hopes they don’t start to beg. Father hates being asked for money.

The blind brother tells them their story, but Father keeps interrupting him. Mother, meanwhile, has not taken her eyes off the strange, indecent man with the stranger tale to tell. To her ears, he is not interrupted.

The mute brother sits quietly (ha, ha) beside his brother, watching them, just like the Os. He watches Mother listen, watches her expression turn… he couldn’t say how, exactly, but it was like looking into a zoetrope, the cylindrical film projector of Ancient Greece. You might think this gives you some indication of just how old these brothers are, but you’re wrong. It doesn’t.

This is what Mother hears:

One day, my brother and I—our names, at that time, were Sy and Jon—decided we could not stay under our parents’ roof for one more day. So we fashioned for ourselves a boat and two oars, and, bringing along with some provisions and one very special package which we did not touch, we set out across the sea.

After many days voyaging, Sy and I came upon a shore on a strange and beautiful country. Rolling hills of sand and stardust, trees of the hues of the sun. (Though a golden sun did hang over this fair land, these trees were the colors of the sun of the world we had left far behind: blood-orange, and yellow, and red.)

Setting forth to explore this new world, we found it to be a place of magic and mystery. Its citizens were creatures of the Fantastic, stuff of myth and legend; yet, we were hard-pressed to find another man from whom we might learn more of the what and the why and the who of the where we had landed. More than anything, though, we wished to speak to another who spoke our own language. All the fauns and centaurs spoke the language of the Faerie, a barrier we could not cross. But no matter how long or hard we looked, we were unable to find a single human.

It wasn’t until we stopped carrying the package with us on our explorations that we discovered members of our own species. We watched them as they, one-by-one, slowly came out of the woodwork (which I don’t mean as a figure of speech), eyeing us warily. After expressing our peaceful intentions over and over again, the humanoids eventually let their guard down long enough to speak with us in brief, fragmentary conversations—unfulfilling, but would have to do, for the time being.

We had come to the Hallows, as we had suspected, a land populated by the People of the Üther; a country twice-blessed and thrice-cursed; a hallowed nation, the wit amongst one’s company might say.

Though all the Ütherans we encountered were courteous and civil, it was plain that, for reasons unknown to us, the people there both feared and loathed us. We tried to find out why…

The children don’t scream for long, however. Soon, their screams are replaced with a numb silence, then a bewildered quiet; then, finally, soft laughter. muffled by their panting, and by the pat-downs and shake-outs of Bae’s abrupt search for Benton, who Bae has just discovered to be missing, if his cries are any good indication. These creatures, these Passersby, aren’t the stuff of children’s nightmares, but of infants’s. Children nowadays, with their claws and scales and wings, are plagued with much more eminent, imminent fears than the stuff of fairy tales. Whoever heard of a twenty-first century kid being scared of an honest-to-goodness Ogre?

These are all Sun Young’s thoughts. Bae is too busy looking the M.I.A. Benton, and hoping and praying he hasn’t dropped and trampled him, or worse. Which is appropriate, as that is when things do, indeed, take a turn for the worse.

Conrad—a man with sharpened teeth, skin stained dark and hair stained light—a dark, brooding man who seemed to find himself at odds with every third man or beast that crossed his path—was the only Ütheran who was willing to converse with my brother and me for any lengthy period of time.

Though brash and braggadocio around his fellow native-man, being in our presence seemed to humble and subdue, even frighten him. The Conrad we knew was far different from the one we watched.

When we asked our friend why all the other natives seemed to so hate and fear us, he said nothing for a long while. Finally, he asked: “How did you come to our land?”

“We came in a boat, by the sea,” Sy said.

“And how came you by this boat?”

“We built the boat ourselves last Winter, by hand. We made it out of twine and bone. Why? Do the natives not like our boat?”

“From whose bones did you make your boat?”

“From the bones of our parents,” I said. “We needed to leave them, you see. We had to set ourselves free. We couldn’t stand to stay in that house another day. Why do you ask?”

“When did your parents die?”

“When we needed material to make the boat, why?”

“Could you not have made your boat out of trees?”

“There are no trees in the land of our parents.”

“And are there no animals you might have killed in your parents stead?”

“Sadly, there was not,” my brother said. “We only did what we did when we found that it was absolutely necessary.”

“It was the only way,” I pitched in.

Conrad only said: “I see.”

“But why, Comrade Conrad, why do you ask us these things? What are you driving at, man?” my brother asked. “What we are attempting to understand is why—”

“And the oars,” Conrad interrupted. “How did you come about those?”

“Well that seems rather obvious now, doesn’t it? The real difficulty lay in that we couldn’t hold onto the oars without them slipping. We needed a grip.” It was strange to see Sy, who was otherwise levelheaded and even-keeled, so unflappable he was very nearly monotoned, addressing poor Conrad so sharply. Being treated so disgracefully by the natives must have distressed and weighed upon him more than I realized.

And so it went on like that for quite some time. After my brother told Conrad about our oars’ unexpectedly comfortable ivory grips, we continued telling him of our boat, the contents of our provisions, and the excitement and anticipation we felt in those last few days living under our parents’ roof. It was an excellent conversation between friends, a lovely talk.

“And the bundle you brought with you. I’ve seen you carrying it all over the Hallows, The stench of that package is unbearable, why do you insist on polluting our lands with it?”

“Well, when we set out, we didn’t know what sort of place we might end up at, and we wanted to be prepared to encounter all sorts of different kinds of natives…”

“In other words,” my brother said, “we weren’t sure if you were the sacrificial kind.”

“I see. May I see it?”

We showed him.

The Shadows now finally seem to realize that certain haunts fail to withstand the test of time. But that is no matter to the Passersby; they are quite adaptable. For now, they regress to their shadowy states, and while they reevaluate, the faces return as well. Eyes are stabbed, mouths are slit. Some cut themselves noses—all the better to smell the children with.

No longer running, Sun Young and Bae stand and wait. They hold hands.

Eventually, the Shadows will take on the forms of monsters with whom the Oh children are oh, so familiar. Bae will faint and Sun Young will be paralyzed, and they will soon, both of them, be swallowed up by the shadows of the night. For the boardwalk is no place for children.

This is the end of the brother’s story:

The citizens of the states of the Hallows (the people of the Üther, and the others) wanted to see the brothers hanged for the murder of their parents; for you see, the Hallows have the Death Penalty. But when they took them to the Hallows Gallows and brought them before the Great Witchy Judge—or the Ingrate Judgey Witch, depending on who you are; and just who are you, anyhow?—she said: “Double, double, toil and trouble, you can’t try a defendant twice for the same crime. That’s called Double Jeopardy.” For the brothers had already evaded conviction when they were brought to trial on Canary Island, which, you’ll remember, is halfway between the brothers’s country and the Hallows. “You’ll have to find something else,” said the Witch Judge.

So in a gross misuse of the Hallows state justice system, the brothers were tried and convicted on other charges: Sy, for Hearing that which he was not meant to Hear; and Jon, for Seeing that which he was not meant to See—which he didn’t even think was a real law.

The punishments fit the crimes.

In the meantime, Halaboji and Halmoni O continue on their way, smiling and tipping a hat, respectively—a hat that isn’t there—at any Passerby who would go unseen by you or I. The Passersby of the boardwalk seen by the Os are quite different from those seen by the Ohs: the Shadows of the Night, and the Two Brothers. These Passersby are kind and gentle, and many an old friend of the Os walks among them.

Soon, the two grandparents pass a sign: BATTLE OF MUSTARD BAYOU, and soon after that, they reach the end of the boardwalk. There they will wait, for a son, a daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren that, quite possibly, may never reach them.

How typical.