Read The Drowned Life for Free Online Page B

was ingested and the drinker had climbed aloft, sleep would invariably bring him or her to some realm between that of dream and the sweet hereafter. In this limbo they’d come face-to-face with their relatives and loved ones who’d passed on. That’s right. It never failed. As best as I can remember him having told it, here’s my father’s recollection of the experience from the year he won the lottery:
    â€œI found myself out in the swamp at night with no memory of how I’d gotten there or what reason I had for being there. I tried to find a marker—a fallen tree or a certain turn in the path—by which to find my way back to town. The moon was bright, and as I stepped into a clearing, I saw a single figure standing there stark naked. I drew closer and said hello, even though I wanted to run. I saw it was an old fellow, and when he heard my greeting, he looked up and right then I knew it was my uncle Fic. ‘What are you doing out here without your clothes?’ I said to him as I approached. ‘Don’t you remember, Joe,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m passed on.’ And then it struck me and made my hair stand on end. But Uncle Fic, who’d died at the age of ninety-eight when I was only fourteen, told me not to be afraid. He told me a good many things, explained a good many things, told me not to fear death. I asked him about my ma and pa, and he said they were together as always and having a good time. I bid him to say hello to them for me, and he said he would. Then he turned and started to walk away but stepped on a twig, and that sound brought me awake, and I was lying in the back of Witzer’s pickup, staring into the jowly, pitted face of Bo Elliott.”
    My father was no liar, and to prove to my mother and me that he was telling the truth, he told us that Uncle Fic had told him where to find a tiepin he’d been given as a commemoration of his twenty-fifth year at the feed store but had subsequently lost. He then walked right over to a teapot shaped like an orange that my mother kept on a shelf in our living room, opened it, reached in, and pulled out the pin. The only question my father was left with about the whole strange episode was “Out of all my dead relations, why Uncle Fic?”
    Stories like the one my father told my mother and me abound. Early on, back in the 1700s, they were written down by those who could write. These rotting manuscripts were kept for a long time in the Gatchfield library—an old shoe repair store with bookshelves—in a glass case. Sometimes the dead who showed up in the Night Whiskey dreams offered premonitions, sometimes they fingered a thief when something had gone missing. And supposedly it was the way Jolle had solved the Latchey murder, on a tip given to Mrs. Windom by her great-aunt, dead ten years. Knowing that our ancestors were keeping an eye on things and didn’t mind singing out about the untoward once a year usually convinced the citizens of Gatchfield to walk the straight and narrow. We kept it to ourselves, though, and never breathed a word of it to outsiders, as if their rightful skepticism would ruin the power of the ceremony. As for those who’d left town, it was never a worry that they’d tell anyone, because, seriously, who’d have believed them?
    On a Wednesday evening, the second week in September, while sitting in the pickup truck, drinking a beer, old man Witzer said, “I think you got it, boy. No more practice now. Too much and we’ll overdo it.” I simply nodded, but in the following weeks leading up to the annual celebration, I was a wreck, envisioning the body of one of my friends or neighbors sprawled broken on the ground next to the bed of the truck. At night I’d have a recurring dreamof prodding a body out of an oak, seeing it fall in slow motion, and then all would go black and I’d just hear this dull crack, what I assumed to be the