My Sunshine Away by M. O. Walsh Read Free Book Online Page A

heads of dead insects.”
    This is no small point.
    It is this type of wrong-ended telescoping that gets Louisiana in trouble.
    When I was a boy, for example, I played football with Randy behind his house. We set up end zones between twin oak trees in the back lot and used rows of bright yellow ragweeds as our boundary lines. We drew up plays by tracing our fingers through the thick grass and imagined scores of rabid fans there watching. We hiked, spun, dodged, and threw tight spirals to each other through the hot and heavy air. We dove and we caught. We scored and we celebrated. On one particular day, Randy punted the ball and it careened off his foot. It hit a tree and bounced into the small swamp behind our properties, covered at the time by a thin layer of green algae. Together we stood at the banks of this swamp, a place our parents told us not to go, and we were wary of snakes. We watched the football float in the still water, a child-sized football, mind you, for we were children, and we knelt in the mud to catch our breath. We tried to think. Before we could devise a way to retrieve it, we saw a nutria, a large swamp rat that looks like an otter, swim up to our ball through the muck. It nosed the thing, watched it spin around in the dark water, and it ate it.
    Now go into the world and tell this story.
    No one will ask you the rodent’s history, how legend has it that they were brought here from Argentina by the McIlhenny family, the founders of Tabasco, to be bred for their fur on Avery Island. So you will not get a chance to tell the epic tale of the hurricane that is saidto have followed this event, allowing two of these rats to escape their cages like some brave and famous lovers and start a family in an unfamiliar land. The listeners are not interested in that. They do not see these animals setting off into the wetlands like pilgrims, like our own ancestors, to whom we owe a great debt. Nor will they see the two happy boys like me and Randy in this story, with bright glowing eyes and big hearts, witnessing a spectacle as bizarre to them as it would be to you. Instead, your listeners will only reaffirm to themselves what they previously thought about Louisiana: that it is a backwoods place with huge rats in the algae, some wild nightmare they’re glad not to face.
    As another example, it once rained so hard in my youth that the swamps behind Woodland Hills backed up. It looked like we lived on a lake. Piney Creek Road itself also flooded, and our proud houses stood like chalets on some muddy gulf. For two days we watched snakes cruise the water. We watched our family dogs splash about like children. We threw fishing lines from the tops of our driveways and we waded with our poles into the lawn when the hooks got stuck on the concrete. We ate canned foods and drank warm Cokes. When the rain stopped, Old Man Casemore launched his aluminum boat right from his carport and trolled up and down the street like our own private Coast Guard, delivering us food that he’d made. Then the water receded and normalcy returned.
    I imagine that many children in South Louisiana have stories similar to this one, and when they grow up, they move out into the world and tell them. This is not the problem. It is the way these stories return that dog us, the way they are altered by the outsiders who hear them. A man from California once asked me, for instance, if I rode to school in a boat. A woman from Des Moines said, “What was it like? Growing up chasing gators off your porch? It sounds horrible.”
    It isn’t like that. I promise.
    Even in the summer of Lindy’s rape, for instance, there was joy.
    We played baseball in the street. We chased the ice-cream man from two blocks away.
    Lindy was a part of this, too.
    In fact, in the weeks immediately following the crime, after the police had made their rounds, the only difference we noticed in Lindy herself was a change in her schedule. No more piano lessons, to my dismay. Lindy