Midnight

The Deep South

Ecstasy,

It's finally spring down here on the Chattahoochee—the azaleas are in bloom, and everyone is dying of cancer. I am writing you very late at night. We have just one kerosene lamp, and the bugs outside are positively battering the screen at my elbow, trying to get at the light—like so many people we knew in New York trying to get Love, n'est-ce pas?—pushy, pushy, pushy.

I cannot tell you where I am, because I want to make a clean break with my former life. At this moment I know my apartment is rotting beneath a swarm of rats and roaches; the woman downstairs is coughing her tubercular cough; the man next door is beating up his wife; the sound of canned laughter from an I Love Lucy rerun reverberates up the stairwell; the phone is ringing, and I do not care. I cannot go back. I would rather die like a beast in the fields, amigo, with my face to the moon and the empty sky and the stars, than go back; expire with the dew on my cheeks.

For example: At this instant a rust-red moon is hanging low above the water lilies on the lake, and the leaves of the live oaks gleam in its light. There is not a sound in the world except the ducks in the weeds that take up when the frogs die down. The egrets are nesting there, too, white egrets that, every afternoon at dusk, fly in great flocks to roost in the golden weeds, and after a long, hot day, we sit out under the trees to watch them and feel the breeze that comes up across the water. Everything is in bloom, azaleas and dogwood, the air is soft as talcum powder, so soft you can't imagine people dying here; you imagine them crumbling to death, like biscuits left out in the rain, biscuits and talcum powder and azaleas rotting beneath the bushes in drifts of petals—and at noon, dear, the odor of pine needles rises up from the earth when I walk through the woods, rises up and envelops me in a cloud, and one feels like swooning.

There are convicts along the roads down here, cutting the grass while a man with a rifle watches them; there are convicts and egrets and azaleas and rust-red moons, and water moccasins and pecan farms, and outside my window at this moment a brown thrasher sleeps by the nest he is building. He brings one twig at a time and then stands on the branch outside it, looking all around, guarding his work; it is fascinating, and so much nicer than those sooty pigeons. (How do they live in that filth up there? How did I?)

And the boys downtown who walk around in blue jeans and no shirts, lanky, long-limbed southern boys—and our Irish priest who returned from the missions in Guinea! We go to mass every week and are quite active in church affairs. I am in love with him, and the mockingbirds and hot blue skies and intense white clouds under the noonday sun, and the pine trees that bristle in the heat, as if they were plugged into electric sockets, and the flies droning over the gardenias, and the red skies at dusk crossed by egrets flying low over the lake. At noon I lie in the hammock in our garden and listen to the mockingbirds carrying on high up in the live oaks and watch the cardinals dart through the Spanish moss.