Baptism

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I wasn’t so much born as I just followed the water out.

There was the fitful, gnawing struggle of first-time labor, the uncertainty, the cold, weary dread in my Daddy’s eyes as he watched his 19 year old bride suffer an ancient curse in the name of childbirth.  There was the greenish room and sad, stark lighting, cold tile and stainless steel so clean it hurt to look at too closely.  There were dim wavering voices rising and falling on the septic air, some hopeful, some sad, some despairing for the skinny girl on the table tiptoeing through the valley of the shadow of death.  And there was at last a final moment of unbearable searing hot pain, the final muscle breaking tremor of delivery, the final push, the final joy-choked scream, and the child.

Then came the water.  The date of my birth arrived with the height of the spring tide, the very hour marked by the final mass reversal of a thousand tons of water weight in every creek, slough and bayou in the county turning upon itself like a panicked crowd, the first suddenly last as the water followed the pull of the moon out to sea.  Just as the rush of pain piled up in my Mama’s womb the water stacked and stacked itself into every tide pool, pot hole and crook it could find, seeking its own, tearing a hole, finding a home to lay until the moon called it out.

When the tide turns, better find something that floats and follow it out, or get out of the way.  The moon will not be denied its slow, quivering dance, and the water must follow, must obey, must release.  And so the womb finally gives way to the too wide head of a firstborn son in the spring, and the water flows. 

They say my Daddy held me up and couldn’t say a word, couldn’t laugh or call my name, just cried the saltwater tears of fatherhood, cried for his son’s arrival, cried for his young wife’s pain, cried for his life forever altered.  They say he cried more than usual, his Mama saying, “You alright, Sonny? Hey, you alright?”  But he held me up and father and son unified cries made the green walls sing and our tears irreversible followed the far distant call of the bayou, sliding darkly out into the wide open water.

As far back as I can see the pages of my memory are saltwater soaked, infused with the dark brown brine of the inland bayous and streams I’ve always known.  There has always been the black organic mud and the sharp reeds, the ripple and rail of the afternoon tide standing still before the dance.  And I know that something ancient and eternal has leaked into my soul from hours and days and years standing knee deep in tannin water, something haunting and wonderful and warm.

Early boyhood explorations found me ingesting anything that didn’t wriggle away from me first, testing the elasticity of bayou mud, stumbling wildly through the black warm shallows.  And although Daddy and Mama were ever watchful, the leash was long in those days as dangers were few and the call of the mysterious underwater darkness too painfully intriguing for a boy to ignore.

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