Forgetting My Faith in Thunder

When the den thunders, I follow Georgia up the stairs and into the attic on Peach Tree Street, the first place where we learned to love our ghosts before the tops of all our heads were scoured off by Katrina. On the third level of our grandmother’s house that no longer exists, I’m plotting my escape and waiting for another storm to deliver me to the precipice of the life I could’ve been living if I hadn’t wasted two decades trying to prove I could love someone. Anyone.

Anyway, I’m dreaming of building a Tudor home with a wrap-around porch in a meadow of pecan trees in south Mississippi, close to the blueberry farm down Brooks Road. There'll be magnolias in every room, Pati Bannisters dancing along my floral wallpaper, white orchids and peace lilies on wire shelves behind the breakfast table, and all the neighbors leasing and lunching down the backroads of Biloxi will claim that everybody’s moved out west ‘cept for that lil area in the Oaks. And then they’ll tell me to pick a new story, to stop stealing my mother’s past, and I’ll answer that her Sweet Grace is all I’ve ever had.

Another Sunday spent singing in a Southern Baptist church, and now I’m falling down Chapel Hill, clutching my stomach. I’m reminiscing on Georgia’s southern drawl, how it’s warm and sounds like a place I might’ve called home if things had turned out different. I’m stealing my family’s stories because nobody wants to hear my own, or maybe I never had any to begin with. Sometimes, I think me and Georgia dreamt our childhoods away entirely. Most nights, we were woodland creatures on her trundle, doing what we could to make use of all our rotten memories of Tennessee before they spoiled us to nothing.

Like any children who grew up in haunted houses, we felt safest when being hunted, and in the mystery of the awful marshes we sought solace in, there were enough eyes and stars to haunt the horizon. It was easier to believe we weren’t some ruinous things when we could move by moonlight—anonymous, and free of all selfishness or desire. Just rot on the wind, a shadow in the wild, a mere wax and wane, a timid floodplain. I suppose that’s why we grew to adore our endless fox chase across states.

We trudged down Hurricane Creek in the depths of June together, losing our faces in pools of vomit and whiskey on cruel midsummer nights, and waking to cups of black coffee and old flannel shirts without fearing for our lives. Together, me and Georgia tended a garden of chaos to replace home, at least for a little while, growing patches of sweet clover and rosehip. We may never be kings, but everyone needs something to worship, just as Momma cared for her killers—with something in between fear and trust, but not quite love—like the comfort of a cross or gospel when falling for the notion that somebody was going to save us.

Lord, she was always talking about belief, even with her men of smoke and restlessness—her soft-spoken pleas for a savior, her descents into madness, the bird nests in her hair, the crows congregating in her curls. We wasted every season drinking ourselves into something strange, with our parents’ wild eyes and no way to run or hide but to dissociate into something else entirely—something in between woman and hurricane.

In our grandmother’s Oak Grove cottage, I fell asleep every summer dreaming of Pati Bannister paintings. My Aunt Mindy’s always been creeped out by the dead girls that dance along the walls, but I found comfort in the tender landscapes they haunted. My favorite piece, Low Tide, still sits in miniature by my bedside, featuring a lighthouse and a dark-haired girl cloaked in blue that reminds me of my mother. I’ve named her Alexandria. She waits by the shoreline before an easel, facing away from Pharos, aflame on an epic crest over the winged victory of the waves. I tried not to deify the light, but it’s astonishing—how fast we fall to magic to escape our suffering. Every blue on the horizon is a separate eschatological vision, and Mrs. Bannister painted them all, taking great care with the sea—that strange portraiture of temptation.

Tell me, would it kill you to let me be sentimental for a moment? I’ll not let the lamp fade. Here’s a cross stitch, a seance. Everyone is invited to my coven. Please take your shoes off at the door.

When our great-grandmother was still ours, she and my sister spent most of their time in graveyards. Her last words to our mother were Take care of my girls. My memories of the subsequent years we spent across the South are quilted with meadows and fables. Teapots tipping out of my hands. Ever-waxing promises of lake scenes and Lazarus rising from the impetus of our collective belief. Before we started our endless cross-country road trip, Georgia and I took ballet lessons in Franklin, and since then, I’ve held onto a vision of the world stuck spinning. We feared we were always at risk of disappearing, so we spent every Sunday in a Southern Baptist church before setting china on our grandmother’s oak table for brunch. The season was always spring on Peach Tree, always music and lace, always barefoot in the kitchen eating petit fours.

Of course, I wouldn’t want to be selfish in my own poem; let me share my grief like rotten supper dishes, pass plates reeking with the stench of my luck around the table and wait for it to take. You’re in my house. I’ll say grace.

I was raised much in tune with the music of dead things, brought up by the blood of taxidermists, pallbearers, and cremators in the center of Tennessee. I’ve memorized their soft soliloquies as they succumbed to fire or flood or the stern touch of a gun. I’ve seen many creatures reduced to ash and dust, delivered remnants in envelopes across the Deep South. I’ve watched the last waltzes of countless dogs. I’ve long been a witness to all kinds of loss. But it’s the remnants of the living that haunt me, twenty abandoned houses around the country that once trusted I would come back to quell their burning—to save the indoor animals that maintain a permanent residence in their attics.

All morning, I rode with the dearly departed into the gates of Pinehaven and turned them to ash. Bodies loaded from Mississippi in August are sailed away at 1400 degrees Fahrenheit. I watched a hundred shells waltz on fire. Let me reminisce for a while on the dance of the carapace as it begins its soft deliquesce into death.

Wrecks weave, mythic, across the beach. Dizzy spells hum from the water, my mother’s suffering bound to mine with blue ribbon and sharp desire. Evermore, the tide sweeps in to gather what remains. Tell me, have you ever heard a word so sweet and sick as evermore? Forever back to this godforsaken shore, its deep sorcery and our deep ruins.

Watching words hang in a drunk and dangerous languor from the mouths of attic ghosts and indoor animals, Georgia and I grew up afraid of the lake and its creatures, so we hated going anywhere without our mother. But Mississippi was a different place for wandering children, and we knew that every time we returned, she would be home. We were enchanted by Oak Grove in a way that, even now, is almost intangible. I remember Tudor houses hidden by vines; air so thick it dripped like marmalade over our limbs.

I’m tired of this dream. Let me stitch the threads together like sailboats docked in the lure of God. Again and again, on loop, my grandfather tells me women tend to burn hotter than men, but there are no women to burn today. He says the body is just the vessel for the soul, so he has no problem seeing the faces of the dead daily. In every landscape, I’m haunted by remnants of the living. All night, I dream of a burning woman. By the shoreline. Behind an easel. Scarier than death as she unmakes me.

Our grandmother spent entire summers telling us our family’s folklore from a blue recliner with a view of the porch, where she watched her blue jays eat. I’ve held onto her dreamy, far-off stare more than anything else—her stories about our strange history interrupted by soft smiles and hummingbird sightings. Soon after this summer, we left the South behind, but I’m still stuck in the dream of Her jazz.

I’m still stuck in a vision of the woman by the water—the one I spent my lost childhood looking for in the dark. Still trying to sense my mother’s music before it takes her back to Mississippi for good. But in the morning, she’s always there to pull me from every dream. She’s always home, always ours, never at risk of disappearing.

My grandmother fostered my mother’s appreciation for hummingbirds, and Momma taught me. I’ve always fed the birds. I guess it’s just one of those things. Another morning ritual to keep my hands tired. Still, it doesn’t entirely abandon charm, and, like all landscapes attuned to death, I’m fond of fables. Every time I lean beyond that kitchen window of complacency to see the hanging tree just past our back patio, I’m half expecting a sea of bird bones. A new disease from a congregation of corpses, weaving its way through the worst half of the Deep South.

Even while approaching a blue jay mid-flight, I prepare myself for the likelihood of its stitched-shut eyes. Its feathers sewn into pretty patchwork. Its remnants in ruins. Another flightless bird that couldn’t escape its keeper. But as I creep closer, all I find is a hungry animal with tired wings. Not yet succumbed. I’m surprised anything makes it out of this prairie alive.

Since I can remember, I’ve dreamt of New Orleans’ kingdom of caskets—aboveground and crowned with angels. Something romantic about being able to hide between the gravestones. When my burial season graces Mississippi with jazz and sweet tea, let me be taller than all the rivers. Let me supervise the serpents that sit and wait in tall grasses for the sightless to despair. Let me be immovable as the twisted roots of my history, unreachable as the untangling thread. Hold on. Let me go put food in that feeder. Would you mind terribly if I let my dreams take over from here? I’ve got a blue jay that can’t eat.

It's always summer in the South, even as the skies mourn the passing of the warm seasons. In the Decembering backwoods of Hattiesburg, me and my sisters are a helpless swarm of wild ivy swaddled in snow. I dream us far, far away from our lost years, when we were forgotten in Tennessee and made real again in Texas.

In this dream, Momma packs the reckless purples of our young lives into three suitcases and rids us of Ohio’s remnants for good. I am silent at the breakfast table, swallowing twisters and reminiscing on how I could’ve done so much better for Georgia. We could’ve been more than the tired, violent animals our first father raised us to grow into. In another world, Georgia inherited his eyes instead of symptoms of his sickness. Maybe I got his quiet hands instead of his quiet destruction.

A sudden series of misremembered houses flash by on film—some real, some figment, all lost to time and wine. Another attic in waiting. Another child in a perpetual state of reminiscing. Another fiction. A fable. Then, back to a kitchen table, where we loved first and most fervently.

The morning we left Mississippi behind, Momma convinced us we were chasing white rabbits through curious pastures, down the same left highway lane that sang “Drunken Angel” on loop and would continue to bring us back to Oak Grove and its ghosts nightly for the next two decades. She made being a single parent look mythical. Georgia and I used to pretend our ramshackle house in Thompson’s Station was a lighthouse, and our mother, its devoted keeper. She’d come home from work with nothing but joy in her hands, enough to light candles around the kitchen table as we prayed over our supper. Everything she did was legendary. She was always checking on our hurricane lamps, keeping an eye out for arcus clouds on the horizon.

We were always so proud to belong to each other. After we began our endless cross-country road trip, every night in each new house was another opportunity to dream of a sedentary life, but our mother convinced us to adore the rickety foundations every home was built upon. Like our great aunt’s house on the shores of Bay St. Louis, its bottom floor swept out from under it during Katrina and rebuilt on stilts, we grew to love transience. Soon enough, our only comfort across every new city was the assurance that someday soon, we would get to leave. Me and Georgia both got Momma’s watchful, silent gaze, and her restlessness—now a holy trinity—chased us all to separate sides of the world, inventing a divided coven of women witnesses.

We were raised reading the gospel according to Heather and Hyacinth, dreaming of hummingbirds fluttering through the halls of our mother’s mind when our bible studies made her proud. She has always been our scripture. Like most landscapes long advanced in the practice of suffering, we’ve grown accustomed to the loneliness, and the leaving, and the lilt of a father’s voice when he calls to tell us he’s finally sobering up to be the man his new family deserves. Always gentle, even in his cruelty. Quiet, even in his leaving. I can’t speak for Georgia, but part of me will always resent him for his newfound ability to hold himself to his promises. I’ll never be prepared to hear his perfect speech or his wiseness. To see his weathered face or his new kids—three and six. Forgiving him feels like surrendering our history, forgetting all the ways he failed us.

It’s coming down hard on Hattiesburg, and I’ve never felt closer to my mother than I do right now, unlatching the middle dormer to let the rain in. For twenty years, we chased the songs of each conch across the country to find the one note that could heal us, but every shell just whimpered and flooded the house with liquor. She didn’t believe me or Noah, even as her kitchen windows ached to repent from their frames.

I swear, I didn’t mean to take ownership of her suffering, but now we’re both soft and sober in the sea, and I can’t reach her hands, smooth sacraments of sunken earth and sudden Septembers, whispering of impending storms and seaspells as the morning comes crashing in—that carnal, blessed leviathan of lost hours and sullen waters—to christen the last decade she will spend submerged in the war of our father’s weather. Her hummingbirds sit, shell-shocked, in my palms, remnants of Tennessee branding themselves into both our tongues as we venture into hundreds of dark seas and clutter across their empty hands like tin cans until one of them is compelled to keep and kill us.

Decades are wasted in every state across the South, the three of us wandering like lost dogs or gospel notes in our pink prairie gowns, spending countless blue and red nights convincing ourselves we can reconcile his pain with our lives. When the den empties itself of him and reclaims our battered shapes, I follow Georgia down the stairs and into the basement on Peach Tree Street, the first place where we learned to hide from storms. I’m rebuilding another house on stilts, trying to forget my faith in thunder.