Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Well, it’s the thought that counts, Ava,” he told me in an almost-shout.

The Bigtree Family Museum, next door to the gift shop, contained all kinds of crap from our house that the Chief had relabeled as BIGTREE ARTIFACTS. The entryway to the palmetto-thatched museum burned green in daylight: WELCOME TO THE “LOUVRE” OF THE SWAMP ISLANDS! Sometimes you’d find a disoriented tourist in there, sucking a Fine Lime through a straw and looking mournfully for a bathroom. Ladies liked to change their babies’ diapers on our glass cases. On one wall, the Chief had framed the flyers that had lured Grandpa Sawtooth away from Ohio in 1932. He named this exhibit Antique Promises. Each flyer featured an artist’s sketch of the Florida islands “post-drainage”: our swamp as farmland, complete with milk cows, orange groves, a heaven of clover “where the sea beasts once roamed.”

Grandpa, who was born Ernest Schedrach, the white son of a white coal miner in Ohio, bought the land after losing his job at the Archer Road Pulp Mill, which was just as well because he was tired of the pitiful wages, tired of his ears ringing like Sunday church bells all shift and of his bleached vision caused by blinking into the chemicals. He changed his name to outwit his old boss. It turned out he owed a sizable amount of money to the mill foreman. He picked “Sawtooth” in homage to the sedge that surrounded his island; “Bigtree,” because he liked its root-strong sound.

The farmland he’d bought, sight unseen, at the Bowles and Beaver Co. Land Lottery in Martins Ferry, Ohio, turned out to be covered by six feet of crystal water. Stalks of nine-foot saw grass glittered in the wind, in every direction, the drowned sentinels of an eternal slough. The only real habitable “property” in sight was the island he later named Swamplandia!: a hundred-acre waste. What the cheerful northern realtors were calling — with a greed that aspired to poetry — the American Eden.

Grandpa Sawtooth and Grandma Risa took the train from Ohio to Florida and then traveled by glade skiff to their new home. When they first docked on the lee side of the island, my grandparents’ feet sank a few inches before touching the limestone bedrock. Sawtooth cursed the realtors for the length of an aria. A tiny crab scuttled over Risa’s high buttoned shoe—“and when she didn’t scream,” Sawtooth liked to say, “that’s when I knew we were staying.”

According to Bigtree legend, it was that same day that Grandma Risa got her first-ever glimpse of a Florida alligator, the Seth of Seths, lolling in a gator hole near the cove where they had stowed their boat — and she later swore that as soon as they locked eyes, they recognized each other. That monster’s surge, said our grandfather, sent up a tidal wave of black water that soaked Grandma Risa’s dress. The prim china-dots on her skirt got erased in one instant, what we called in our museum Risa’s Chameleon Baptism.

Alongside this bit of Bigtree history, the Chief kept an ever-changing carousel of objects from our lives, accompanied by little explanatory cards that he typed up and framed himself. Often the deck of our past got reshuffled overnight. He took down Grandpa’s old army medallions, which did not fit with his image of our free and ancient swamp tribe. And nowhere did his posted descriptions of Hilola Bigtree’s many accomplishments mention her maiden name — Owens — or her mainland birthplace. Certain artifacts appeared or vanished, dates changed and old events appeared in fresh blue ink on new cards beneath the dusty exhibits, and you couldn’t say one word about these changes in the morning. You had to pretend like the Bigtree story had always read that way.

So it was with precedent that the Chief vandalized the Bigtree Family Museum, looting from my sister’s past to find her a birthday present. Kiwi and I just grabbed some stuff from the clearance bin in the Bigtree Gift Shop: a variety pack of hats and this XXL version of a puffy-logo Seth sweatshirt that she already owned and hated. This is what the sweatshirt said: STOP IN THE NAME OF SETH, BEFORE HE EATS YOUR HEART. The Chief had ordered dozens of these. So far as I knew, nobody in the history of our gift store transactions had ever exchanged legal tender for one.

“Thanks, guys,” Osceola said drily.

The Chief unwrapped Osceola’s old shoes for her, hog-tied together in our mom’s red ribbon.

“Remember how much you liked these moccasins?”

Ossie did not really remember, no.

“Do you want to do a birthday show, honey?” The Chief was smiling and smiling at her, pop-eyed with the strain, a smile that looked almost frightening in the dim Swamp Café. “Do you want to … what do you want? More cake?”

My sister shook her white head very slowly behind the tiny fence of birthday candles.

Ossie was polite, licking icing off the twisty candle stripes, pretending this was exactly the sixteenth birthday party she’d wanted. But I knew better — I thought she must be pretty lonely. I’d seen her on the ferry docks, trying to talk to the small knots of mainland teenagers. The only boys her age we’d ever met were tourists. Sometimes, to impress them, Os would corner a posse of older boys and play them her favorite songs in the blue iceberg glow of our jukebox. Yet this jukebox had not been updated since Dwight D. Eisenhower ruled the land.

“Cooool.” The boys would drone, catting their eyes at one another. “Who sings that one? The, ah, the Scroobie Brothers, huh? Never heard of them …”

In fact, those Scroobie Brothers were playing right now, song after song off their only album, Scroobing the Tub , Ossie’s jukebox pick. I think Ossie liked them because they sang about things that were exotic to us, like corn and car accidents. Between bites of cake I caught her mouthing along the words, but even these hokey songs weren’t cheering her much. After the presents were opened nobody could think of what to say, so the Chief cut us second helpings of the rock-hard cake.

“What, you don’t like your presents?” the Chief asked out of the blue, his voice alive and crackling. “Is that it? You don’t think that sweatshirt is going to fit you?”

We all looked up. The thin whine of the jukebox seeped into the crater his voice had dug into the café dining room.

“No, Chief. It’s great.”

Ossie stretched the shirt between them like a fence.

“Try it on.”

“Dad?”

“You’re right, it looks too small to me. Kiwi, go get your sister the next size up.”

Osceola stood. “Dad, I’ll be back in a little while,” she said. She tightened the ends of her long white braids. She’d smoothed three different shades of Mom’s powder onto her eyelids. My sister, I realized with a funny dip in my gut, looked very beautiful. I think the Chief must have noticed this, too, because his face did something funny.

“What are you talking about?” He glanced down at his watch. “It’s nine o’clock.”

“I know. I’m going on a walk.”

“Now? Baby, sit down. As long as we’re all together I thought we could have a tribal meeting. We’ve got some important business to discuss …”

But Ossie took a step toward the door, where a fat green anole was clinging to the metal hinge and silently watching everything.

“I want to. Walk.” She paused. “It’s my birthday.”

Ossie made it across the room. When her hand closed around the doorknob he finally spoke.

“Well, you’re going to miss some really good news, Osceola.”

“Okay. Ava can catch me up.” She smiled at him sweetly. Her sweatshirt, all her birthday stuff, was still on the table. “Good night, guys. Thanks for a good party.”

And then the door closed, and somehow we were not allowed to ask: where is she going? The Chief turned his attention back to us.