"His mother said, "Are you going to Sunday school this morning, Sugar?"
Sugar Mecklin said, "Haven't decided."
His mother said, "I wish you would put on a clean shirt and go to Sunday school once in a while."
Not today. Today was a Sunday, this was a whole summer,
in fact, in which magic might prove once and for all to be true.
It was summer in which Sugar Mecklin noticed many things,
as if they had not been there before, like the mice in the mattress,
like Elvis on the Philco. This summer Sugar Mecklin heard the high soothing music of the swamp,
the irrigation pumps in the rice paddies, the long whine and compliant, he heard the wheezy,
breathy asthma of the compress, the suck and bump and clatter like great lungs as the air
was squashed out and the cotton was wrapped in the burlap and bound with steel bands into six
hundred pound bales, he heard the operatic voice of the cotton gin separating fibers from seeds,
he heard a rat bark, he heard a child singing arias in a cabbage patch, he heard a parrot make
a sound like a cash registar, he heard the jungle rains fill up the Delta outside his window, he
heard the wump-wump-wump-wump-wump of bi-planes strafing the fields with poison and defoliants, he
read a road sign that said WALNUT GROVE IS RADAR PATROLLED and heard poetry in the language, he heard
mourning dove in the walnut trees.
And for a moment, when he arrived at the edge of the water, Sugar Mecklin almost believed that he had
found whatever magical thing he had come looking for...
Lewis Nordan
"Music of the Swamp"
