Salvation of Miss Lucretia Read online

  “We don’t know for sure she did.”

  “If anything else had happened to ’em we would’ve heard some kind of a ruckus. I promise you they is some voodoo going on.”

  “Well, we’ll just find her place tomorrow and see.”

  I woke up twice during the night and added wood to our fire and I thought I remembered Poudlum doing the same thing, but the next morning while we were cleaning the bones of that rabbit, he said, “That pine straw made a mighty fine bed. I slept real sound all night.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t you get up and stoke the fire up a couple of times during the night?”

  “Naw, I slept like a rock.”

  Suddenly, I was alarmed and the first thing I did was look toward where the rifles were, or where they should have been, leaning against a big tree. The rifles were gone!

  “Poudlum!” I cried out. “Did you move the rifles?”

  “Huh? Naw, I ain’t touched ’em,” he said as he looked toward the tree and realized what I already knew. Then he said, “Oh, no, she done took our rifles, too!”

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “They wasn’t but ten feet away from us!”

  Poudlum shook his head and said, “Stay out here one more night and she be done took our clothes.”

  I could feel a little anger as well as frustration welling up inside myself. “It just ain’t right for somebody to take your dog. Anybody might be able to entice a dog away, but you can’t entice a rifle. That’s stealing!”

  “You think we might ought to go back and tell Mister Autrey?” Poudlum asked.

  “Naw, it might be too late by then. I miss my dog and I want my rifle back. Come on, let’s go find that fence.”

  We came upon the fence not by sight, but rather by obstruction. When we attempted to fight our way through a huge growth of vines and bushes, we discovered an old fence with rotting fence posts underneath them.

  “All right, here’s the fence,” Poudlum said. “So which way do we go?”

  I had no idea, and when I suggested we split up and go in both directions, Poudlum said he didn’t think that was a good idea and that he thought we ought to stick together.

  I realized he was correct so we decided to leave it to luck and flip a coin. Heads we go left and tails we go right. The nickel landed on heads and we turned left. We hadn’t gone very far when Poudlum suggested we cross the fence and proceed on the other side of it.

  “Why would we want to do that?” I asked.

  “Cause I got a feeling she might be expecting us, and if she is, she’ll be expecting us to be on this side of the fence.”

  “What difference would that make?”

  “Voodoo got ways of making people fall into holes, fall off cliffs, and other bad stuff like that.”

  We found a minor gap and clawed our way through it over the rusty wire and emerged on the other side.

  “Now then,” Poudlum said, “let’s go along quiet-like and maybe we’ll see her or her place before she see us.”

  “You think that old woman’s that smart, Poudlum?”

  “She took our dogs and our rifles right out from under our noses, didn’t she?”

  She had apparently done both of those, so I knew Poudlum was right. We moved with caution along the line formed by the old fence which separated Mister Autrey’s land from this unknown forest.

  “What if we going in the wrong direction? Poudlum asked.

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to turn around and go in the other direction. We could walk by her place and not see it for the woods going in either direction.”

  “We’ll just have to rely on our senses,” Poudlum said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean our sight, smell and hearing. Listen for sounds, look for maybe smoke, and be aware of anything that don’t smell natural here in the forest.”

  It wasn’t long before Poudlum said, “I done got hungry. We might be in a bad fix here without our dogs and rifles.”

  “Maybe we made a mistake by not going back to Mister Autrey’s,” I said.

  “Miss Lucretia might’ve already been eating dog stew by the time we done that,” Poudlum said.

  Dog stew sounded awful, but it did remind me that I was hungry, too.

  Several minutes later Poudlum suddenly came to a halt and said, “Listen!”

  “What?” I whispered. “I don’t hear nothing.”

  “Listen hard. Hear that buzzing?”

  I cocked my head to listen better and sure enough I heard it. “It’s bees!” I said. “There’s a honey tree around here somewhere!”

  It took us about ten minutes to find the bee hive. It was in a hollow tree and there were a few bees buzzing in and out of it.

  “We gonna have to light a little fire, just enough to get a little smoke to run the bees off long enough to get to the honey,” Poudlum said.

  “What if she sees the smoke?”

  “That’s a chance we got to take. We can’t pass up this honey. It may be the last thing we get to eat for a while.”

  We gently put a pile of dry leaves at the bees’ entrance to the hollow tree and Poudlum lit a match and stuck it to them. As soon as the smoke started, I fanned it into the entrance of the hive with a broken pine tree limb.

  It didn’t take long before all the bees disappeared, and then we stamped out the fire and poured a little water on it from our canteens to make sure it was all the way out.

  “We got to move fast,” Poudlum said as he reached inside the hollow tree and pulled out a big hunk of honeycomb. His hand went straight to his mouth. Then I heard him sighing with pleasure as he bit into it and began chewing.

  It felt soft, but almost crunchy to my hand, as I blindly tore off a big chunk myself. The comb was made up of lots of little waxy-tasting cells filled with sweet, golden honey.

  My taste buds sent waves of pleasure to my brain. I don’t know if it was the sweetness of the wild honey or the fact that I was so hungry that made it taste so good.

  By the time I spat the wax part out after I had chewed the honey out of it Poudlum was reaching inside for a second helping. I did the same just a few moments before we heard a faint buzzing over our heads.

  “Grab a hunk and let’s run with it,” Poudlum said as he reached into the hive again.

  We escaped without a single sting, and dashed off back toward the fence line, both of us with a handful of honey comb. When we were at a safe distance, we finished off the honey and then concerned ourselves with the stickiness of it. We had to use some of the precious water from our canteens to rid ourselves of it.

  While we were washing up, Poudlum said, “I hope them bees don’t go hungry on account of us.”

  “They won’t. How much honey can a bee eat? There was plenty left and they’ll just make some more. What we got to worry about now is water. How much you got left?”

  Poudlum lifted his canteen, shook it, and said, “Ain’t but a few swallows left in mine.”

  “Mine either,” I said. “We need to be on the lookout for some water.”

  “Something else we need to be worried about, too.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You remember Mister Autrey said they was panthers and bobcats in these woods? What we gonna do if we run up on one of them critters and us with nothing but our hunting knives?”

  What we did was cut down two straight hickory saplings and used our knives to sharpen one end of each to make us spears.

  “I do feel some better now,” Poudlum said as he hoisted his. “Between the two of us we could probably fight one of ’em off.”

  It was just luck that we found water. How it happened was I stumbled on a root and fell on my face. As I was getting up, I spied a small game trail through the underbrush.

  A game trail is faint, but still a
trail, and it told me that small critters went that way often, which probably meant it led to water.

  The trail took us about a hundred yards deeper into the unknown forest before we found the spring. It was small, but there was plenty of crystal-clear water to quench our thirst and fill our canteens.

  We couldn’t believe our luck when, just beyond the spring, we spotted a grove of huckleberry bushes and proceeded to eat our fill.

  On our way back to the fence line, with some concern in his voice, Poudlum said, “That honey and them berries was good, but come nightfall, we gonna need us a real meal.”

  We walked for another few minutes, and then suddenly I remembered what Poudlum had said about using our senses. It was my sense of smell that made me remember.

  I came to a halt and held my hand up for Poudlum to do the same, because I could smell that distinct odor of a goat once again, except this time, it wasn’t a rattlesnake.

  Chapter 4

  Shackles and Chains

  A moment after that smell came wafting through the air, we heard a bleat.

  “That sounded like a goat!” Poudlum said quietly out of the corner of his mouth as we both sank to our knees to hide in the tall grass.

  “Did you catch which direction it came from?” I asked softly.

  “Had to come from the other side of the fence ’cause she lives over there on Mister Autrey’s land.”

  “You think we’re close to her house?”

  “Got to be. That had to be one of her goats, and the goat pen wouldn’t be far from where she lives. Let’s listen a little bit and see if we can hear any more sounds.

  It wasn’t long before we heard the goat again, and then we heard the cackle of a chicken.

  “It’s her place all right,” Poudlum said. “And the sounds are coming from over yonder on the other side of the fence.”

  “I can’t see a house or anything,” I told Poudlum as I strained my eyes in that direction.

  “We got to get closer,” he said. “Come on, let’s crawl through the fence and see if we can see anything on the other side of it.”

  “Wait a minute, Poudlum! Don’t you think we ought to think about this a little? Maybe we should wait until after dark.”

  “We won’t be able to see after dark, and we don’t want to use a torch.”

  “Good point,” I replied. “But let’s move real slow and keep our spears handy.”

  We went back through the fence on our bellies like two moles, squirming our way through the tangled vines until we came to the rusted fence itself.

  “Looks like we’re going to have to stand up and climb over this old wire fence,” I said.

  “Naw, we don’t,” Poudlum said as he reached into his hip pocket and slid out the broken hacksaw blade. “You hold the wire steady, and I’ll saw through it.”

  It didn’t take long for the saw to cut through the rusty wire, and after we sawed through four strands we were able to bend it upwards and make a hole big enough for us to crawl through one at a time.

  Once we got clear of the fence, we peeked up over the tall grass, but still couldn’t see anything. There was still the goat and chicken sounds though, and they were getting louder.

  “Her house must be a little farther through the woods,” Poudlum said. “We gonna just have to keep crawling till we can see something. Maybe she got our dogs tied up and we can just take’ em back.”

  “What about our rifles?”

  “I would be willing to give up mine if I could just get Rip back.”

  I supposed at some point I would be willing to make the same sacrifice, but not yet. “I want my rifle back, too,” I said. “Why don’t we just walk in there and confront her?”

  Poudlum stopped crawling, looked over at me, and said, “Oh, Lord, we can’t do that!”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause there is probably all kinds of voodoo traps all around her house. We got to go in real slow and careful.”

  “What kind of traps?”

  “Stuff like deep pits full of snakes that are covered over so people will fall in ’em, maybe some sharp sticks with poison on the tips, and who knows what else.”

  I shivered at the thought of such things.

  Poudlum continued, “What we need to do is get the dogs and get out of here as quick as we can. If we have to confront her we want to get as close as we can before she knows we’re here.”

  “How come?”

  “Cause that way she’ll think we got the mojo on her, and we can be gone before she gets over the surprise.”

  After some more slow crawling we came upon the goat pen. It was constructed all of wood with crooked rails attached to the posts. Inside the rails was a small herd of goats.

  “One of them must to had twins,” Poudlum whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “There’s a billy goat, four nanny goats and five kids,” he said.

  “Oh, okay,” I said.

  “She been milking them goats, too. See them milk bags?”

  I did indeed and the thought of milk reminded me of how hungry I was.

  “I ’spect Old Bill and Rip could smell us if we’re close enough to ’em,” I whispered.

  “I bet she could, too,” Poudlum whispered back. “Lucky for us they ain’t no wind. Them dogs, if they here, would make a ruckus if they caught our scents. She probably would, too.”

  “Maybe she already knows we’re here and is just laying a trap for us.”

  “Guess that’s a chance we got to take if we want the dogs back,” Poudlum said.

  “We need a plan, Poudlum. We can’t just keep on crawling around like blind folks.”

  “If you got anything in mind, let’s hear it.”

  I didn’t but I told him we ought to try to think of something. So we set to thinking while we lay there in the weeds next to the goat pen, and what we came up with was about the only sensible thing to do. It was pretty simple. What we planned to do was get close enough so we could see her house, and then wait until it got dark. After that we would wait until we saw some light, and hopefully some movement inside before we went any closer. Beyond that, we still didn’t have a plan.

  “Ought to be good’n dark before long,” Poudlum said. “Let’s work our way around this goat pen and find her cabin.”

  Giving the goats a wide berth, we crawled around the pen to the right, but after struggling for a good while, we found nothing but more of the forest.

  “It must be the other way,” Poudlum said. “You think we ought to go back or just keep crawling?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe we ought to just keep circling.”

  “We got to do something!” Poudlum urged. “Gonna be so dark we can’t see before long.”

  We decided to keep circling, and we had just about got back to where we started from when we came upon a well-worn path.

  “I bet this trail leads to her cabin,” Poudlum guessed. If we had gone the other way, we would’ve already found it. Now it’s just before being pitch black.”

  “There’s still enough light to see how to get down this trail,” I said. “It has to lead to her cabin, ’cause this is probably the way she comes every morning to milk her goats. And I’ll bet this trail is trap-free, too.”

  “Why you think that?” Poudlum asked.

  “’Cause she would probably expect any company to come from the other side of her house, and not from back here where her goat pen is.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” Poudlum warned. “Folks delving in voodoo think backwards sometime. This here trail is probably kind of like the edge of a giant spider web, and we fixing to get all tangled up in the web and Miss Lucretia gonna be the spider waiting to pounce on us.”

  “You scaring me, Poudlum.”

  “Scaring myself,” he said. “And on top
of that I’m about to starve to death. All that food back at our camp and we didn’t even think to bring a biscuit.”

  It felt good to get up off the ground, and as we stood up and gazed down the dim trail, one of the goats bleated again, causing us to jump with fright.

  “We stay out here much longer I’m gonna have to milk one of the goats,” Poudlum said.

  “Could you do that?” I asked.

  “If I had to I reckon I could. It would be just like milking a cow probably, ’cept a little bitty one.

  “That billy goat would probably butt us,” I said.

  “You could hold him off with one of our spears while I done the milking.”

  “What would we put the milk in?”

  Poudlum thought for a minute before he came up with the solution. “I could pour what’s left of the water in my canteen into yours, and milk that goat into my empty one.”

  Just as I realized we were so hungry we were seriously thinking about milking a goat in the dark, this wonderful and tantalizing smell came wafting up the forest trail. It took me by surprise and almost made my knees buckle. I heard Poudlum gasp, and I knew it wasn’t my imagination caused by hunger.

  It was the smell of roasted meat and gravy, and it smelled like there might be some cornbread, too.

  I don’t know at what point our stomachs took over our brains, but that’s exactly what happened. We dropped our spears and began stumbling down the path toward the source of the scents. The smell was like the Pied Piper, and we were the rats following it right to our slaughter. The farther we went the more enticing it became, and soon there was a light leading us to our destiny and destruction.

  We seemed to be in a trance, and when we saw the light coming from the open door of the cabin, it served as our beacon to safety, comfort and food.

  There was no one on the porch, and when we peeked inside the open door, we didn’t see anyone in there either. What we did see was a kerosene lamp lighting a table laid with what we sought. The sight and the smell of it bound us to that table with the steaming plates on it as surely as if we were a part of the table itself.

  We didn’t say anything or even look at each other. Mesmerized, we stepped to the table and pulled out the stools in front of the plates of heaped food and proceeded to eat as happily as we would have if we had been at our own homes.