Hush, little baby, don't you cry Mama's gonna sing you a lullaby And if that lullaby goes dry, Mama's gonna bring you a nice big eye
The song had been running through Caleb's head for days now-he wasn't sure why. He didn't know whether his mother sang it to him or not. Maybe she did, but he didn't trust any memories of that time. He tried not to think about her, because when he did, he saw her face on that last day. As he shook his head to rid himself of the image, another song popped into his head.
Down in the valley, the valley so low Hang your head over, hear the wind blow
He had been down in the valley that day, rummaging among the weeds and willows at the riverbank, spending all day outside so he wouldn't have to come home to his pa. Just the two of them in the house now, and his pa was almost always in an evil mood. Caleb tried to make himself inconspicuous, and he was pretty good at it, but sometimes his father had a few drinks and was feeling chatty. He hated it when Pa was feeling chatty, because then he would sit Caleb down at the kitchen table and lecture him on women and their evil ways, about how you could never trust them and they were all just a bunch of she-devils who would betray you the minute your back was turned.
Caleb would nod and pretend to listen, but it was the same thing over and over, and it made his head ache. He tried instead to hear the chirping of the frogs in the pond outside, or the soft scuttling of the mice upstairs in the attic-anything to drown out his father's voice. Perhaps his father was right that women really were wicked and evil, but he didn't want to hear about it night after night.
So that day he was down by the river playing with his pet frog, whom he had named Bogie, because the frog made a noise that sounded like "BO-gie." He was watching the frog swim over to a lily pad in the rushes, hoping he would climb up and eat some mosquitoes with his big gray tongue. Caleb loved watching that long tongue dart in and out of Bogie's mouth-he imagined what it must feel like to have a tongue like that, and be able to catch your dinner by swiping it from the air. It was nearly dusk, and a dense cloud of mosquitoes was swarming around the pond. Bogie had a great dinner ahead of him.
He knelt down to watch as Bogie struggled to get onto the lily pad, placing one splayed, padded foot on it and heaving up his fat green body. Caleb noticed something in the rushes softly bobbing up and down in the little ripples created by Bogie's swimming. It was gray and lumpy and looked like an old dress someone had thrown out. He rolled up his trousers and waded out to it, the water soft and warm on his bare legs, the river mud squishy under his feet. He reached down and tugged at it, but to his surprise, there was something inside the dress-something heavy and spongy and bloated.
His brain couldn't come up with the word or even the image of what might be inside a dress floating in the river, as if his mind rebelled against the thought itself. Odd as it was, it didn't occur to him until the moment he rolled it over and saw the dead, fish-white eyes of his mother staring up at him. Her face was hideously gray and swollen, as though someone had pumped air into it.
He stumbled backward in the shallow water, splashing violently in his attempt to get away from the horror he had just uncovered. Startled, Bogie leapt from his perch on the lily pad and dove down through the water to hide among the weeds along the shoreline.
Caleb heard a shrill, high-pitched sound. He realized it was his own voice, and that he was screaming. He scrambled back up the bank and plopped down amid the skunk cabbage and tree roots, panting heavily, river water running down his forehead and into his eyes. He wiped the water out of his eyes and put his head between his legs in an attempt to catch his breath.
He had developed a selective memory, and had buried deep within his psyche any recollection of the trip to the river with his father the week before-hidden it so well from his conscious brain that after his initial shock at seeing his mother's corpse, he felt puzzlement. It was only after sitting in the skunk cabbage along the riverbank, shivering in his wet clothes, that he remembered accompanying his father down to the river on that dark night.
It is a peculiarity of the mind, which seeks to protect itself from knowledge too terrible, that it was only at this moment Caleb linked the two events, realizing that what he had done the week before was to help his father dispose of his mother's body. It was only now he allowed himself the awareness that-in all probability-his father had murdered his mother.
Back in the river, Bogie the bullfrog settled himself on his lily pad and shot his swift, sticky tongue into the air, plucking an unsuspecting mosquito from the thick cloud of insects hovering above the water in the gentle evening air. But the boy on the shore did not notice. He was bent over in the tall weeds, crying and retching into the broad leaves of the skunk cabbage lining the river bank.