Trouble on the Tombigbee Read online

  When I pointed it out to Poudlum, he said, “Praise the Lawd!”

  Now all we had to do was swim across the creek and get it.

  We started that way and were slap dab in the middle of the creek, which was starting to get wide at this point, when we heard something that sounded like a giant horsefly coming down the creek.

  We both knew what it was because we had heard the same sound on the creek where Poudlum had discovered the moonshine still.

  It was a motorboat and it was coming fast, and we both knew we didn’t have time to get to either bank before they got to where we were.

  “Oh, Lawd,” Poudlum exclaimed. “I do believe they got us!”

  “Not if we go under,” I told him.

  “Not if we do what?”

  “We got to go underwater. It’s the only way,” I said as I gave the paddle a shove toward our boat. “Dive deep and swim underwater toward our boat! Take a deep breath and do it now!”

  I had swum under water before and had even opened my eyes while I was doing it, but never at night. It was the darkest dark I had ever seen, blacker than black, as I descended deep in the creek. I felt the vibration of the boat’s motion and the motor as it swished by on the surface above me, after which I immediately began kicking and pulling for the surface.

  When I emerged I saw the lights of the motorboat as it disappeared down the creek, then I turned round and round in the water, riding the wake of the boat, looking for Poudlum.

  I was just about to panic when he finally burst up from the depths, spitting and spouting, closer to the boat than I was.

  We both began swimming toward our boat and after we had grasped the side rail of it, Poudlum asked, “How we gonna get in it?”

  “You go first,” I told him. “I’ll hold it to keep it from tipping, then after you get in you can pull me in.”

  After we got aboard we both just lay there in the dry bottom of our boat for a while, catching our breath.

  Finally, Poudlum said, “Shore is glad to back on this boat.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  I dimly saw Poudlum start moving about and he said, “This boat even got paddles.”

  “In fact, it has three now,” I said as I reached over the side and snagged the one we had been floating down the creek on.

  “You figure that motorboat be coming back this way any time soon?”

  “Sooner or later it will,” I told Poudlum. “But I figure they’ll go up and down the river a while first. We ought to have time to get back to our original campsite. We’ll cover the boat back up when we get there, get us some dry clothes on and break out them cheese and crackers.”

  “Sounds like a good plan to me,” Poudlum said as we both grabbed a paddle.

  We took the padding off the handles so we could go faster and began paddling hard. It only took us a few minutes to get back to our campsite, where we drug the boat up on the bank far enough so it couldn’t drift off. Then we covered it back up with the saplings we had cut earlier.

  All our gear lay undisturbed where we had left it. We were beginning to get chilled so the first thing we did was change into dry clothes. Then we broke the hunk of cheese in half and feasted on it with crackers in the moonlight.

  “Shore would be nice to have a fire,” Poudlum said after we finished our late dinner. “What time you think it is?”

  “Probably about ten or eleven.”

  “Where you think that motorboat come from?”

  “It probably come from further up the creek and belonged to some of the Klansmen who come to the meeting from up that way.”

  “Uh-huh, after one of the ones who didn’t have no paddle run up that way and told ’em.”

  “Yeah, they probably thought we were in a paddle boat and they wouldn’t have no trouble catching us.”

  “We would have been and they would have caught us if that old rotten rope hadn’t broke.”

  I thought about what Poudlum had just said and realized he was exactly right. “You know what, Poudlum, you’re right. We was real upset when we first realized the rope had broken and our boat was gone, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to us.”

  “Uh-huh, looks like the Lawd was looking out for us. Hope he keeps on ’cause we ain’t out of this mess yet.”

  No, we weren’t, and we set to thinking and talking about what we should do next. What we finally decided was that we couldn’t venture out on the river until that motorboat went back past us up the creek. And once that happened, we came up with a plan we would implement.

  Since we were real tired, we decided to roll up in our blankets under the bushes and get a little sleep, knowing the sound of the motorboat would wake us up when it came back by.

  I saw the moonbeams dancing off the water in the mouth of the Satilfa as my eyelids grew heavy. Poudlum was already snoring softly next to me.

  In a deep and peaceful sleep I was dreaming I was at the old sawmill where I had first met mine and Poudlum’s friend Jake, and I could hear the droning of the giant saw blade. Then the sound became more refined as I climbed toward wakefulness, and finally as I sat up fully awake, the sound turned into that of a motorboat speeding past our resting place.

  “Wake up, Poudlum!” I said as I reached to shake his shoulder.

  “Shoot, I’m wide awake,” he said. “Who in the world could sleep through a racket like that? They must be going wide open.”

  “Yeah, it’s late and I ’spect they wanting to get home,” I said as I stood up and began to study the sky to see if I could figure out about what time it was.

  The moon was glowing bright in a clear sky way up over the river so I knew it was well after midnight, maybe one or two o’clock in the morning.

  “That’s about a brightest moon I ever seen,” Poudlum observed. “Shoot, it’s about light enough to pick cotton. We ought to be able to see good out on the river now. What time of night you think it is?”

  When I told him he said, “You want to let’s get on out of here while the gitting is good?”

  “I think it might be a good time to do that instead of waiting for daylight. Let’s get our stuff loaded on the boat.”

  The river was wide and bright as we paddled into it from the mouth of the creek. The current wasn’t too strong, but it was still slower paddling upstream instead of down.

  “Looks like it’s pure silver in this moon light,” Poudlum said between paddle strokes. “With nary a Klukluxter to pester us.”

  The river was quiet as a church when the collection plate is being passed. It was just Poudlum and me alone with the river, but some nagging little doubt kept popping up in the back of my mind, telling me that all wasn’t right.

  A few minutes later it came to me and I cried out, “Wait a minute!”

  “Good Lawdy, what now?” Poudlum moaned.

  “Those men whose paddles we took! They must have got some more paddles and I bet they put their boats in the water just like we did, which means they could be out here on the river right now!”

  “Or, they could of paddled by while we was still sleeping,” Poudlum suggested.

  “That’s true,” I agreed as I looked back down the river behind us. “On the other hand they could come up from behind us.”

  “They is a mighty big shadow that comes out a ways from the riverbank on the Choctaw County side, cast by the moon. If we paddled in that shadow couldn’t nobody see us.”

  “That’s a good idea, Poudlum. Let’s get out of the middle of this bright river.”

  By and by we could see the dark outline of the road across the river from the ferry up ahead. At first I though it was lightning bugs, but as we stayed in the shadows and drew nearer we saw it was actually the light of several lanterns and some pickup trucks, and there was quite a commotion going on up there.

  Chapter 5
r />   Camp Visitors

  We stayed in the shadow of the riverbank but got close enough to see what was going on. Sure enough it was the bunch of new Klan members whose paddles we had relieved them of. They were loading their boats onto the backs of their pickup trucks.

  “So they did paddle by us while we was snoozing,” Poudlum confirmed in a whisper. “Wonder where they got some new paddles.”

  “I ’spect some who come to the meeting from up the creek loaned ’em some.”

  Their voices had a tone of anger and frustration and we could hear an occasional cuss word.

  Poudlum moved up next to me in the front of our boat and said, “Don’t sound like they in too good a mood. I bet they expected to get home way before these wee hours.”

  I silently shared Poudlum’s mirth as we watched their final preparations for departure from the river.

  We waited until the last tail light had disappeared and the last sound had faded from up on the road before we paddled on up and beached our boat.

  We flopped down on the cool grass and relaxed for the first time since we had heard the thumps of their paddles down at the mouth of the creek.

  I was real sleepy and I knew Poudlum must be too, but I also knew we had some deciphering to do, so I sat up and said, “I don’t think we ought to make camp here for the night, Poudlum.”

  “Ain’t much of the night left,” he said as he rubbed his eyes in the bright moonlight. “What? You think some of ’em might come sniffing around here in the morning?”

  “That’s exactly what I think, and we can’t say we camped here all night because they came and went from right here.”

  “You think we ought to paddle ’cross the river and leave the boat next to the ferry? Won’t nobody see us this time of night, and we could be at my house by daylight.”

  “No, that won’t work. Too many people know we come down here. And besides, we done had our fishing trip ruined last year by them bank robbers, way up the creek. I don’t think we ought to let the Klan ruin our fishing trip down here on the river.”

  That got Poudlum all riled up. “They done caused us to abandon a good camp and have a hunk of cheese for our supper instead of fried catfish. Caused us to have to swim down a dark creek and be up all night when we ought to be sleeping with a belly full of fresh fish.”

  He wound down, sighed deeply and said, “But I don’t know what we can do about it except skedaddle out of here.”

  “We could go up the river,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, we could go up the river a ways, find us a campsite, build us a fire and fish all we want to, then if anybody comes around we’ll just say we been there since we got to the river.”

  “Like we ain’t never been down the river?”

  “Nobody never seen us.”

  “I do believe that will work,” Poudlum said as he stood up. “Glad we didn’t unload the boat. Let’s get on up the river and find us a good spot before it gets daylight.”

  We paddled about a half mile up the river and found us a spot on the Choctaw County side where a big cypress tree had been blown down into the edge of the river.

  “Probably be some good fishing round that tree,” Poudlum said. “And look, ain’t that a pretty good clearing right past the roots of the tree?”

  I figured it was only about two hours left before daylight by the time we got a fire going and our camp secured.

  I was wrapping myself up in my blanket next to the fire, so tired I ached, when the last thing I remember was hearing Poudlum say he was going to put out a line before he went to sleep.

  I could tell it had been daylight for a while when I started waking up. The sun was already way out over the river, shooting little darts of sparkling light up from its surface.

  After sight, the next one of my senses to come alive was smell. There was a delicious aroma in the air as I sat up. The source of it came from over towards our campfire where I spotted Poudlum frying fish in a skillet.

  “Wake up, you old sleepy head,” Poudlum said as he grinned and waved the skillet under my nose.

  “Where did you get them fish, Poudlum?”

  “I got ’em out of the river. You hungry?”

  “So hungry I could eat a dead mule. How long you been up?”

  “’Most an hour. Had two fish on the lines I set out last night. Come on and let’s have us some breakfast.”

  While we munched on the delectable fish, Poudlum gave his account of our new campsite. “You know, this ain’t a bad place to camp, and I reckon we ain’t got much choice since the Klan done chased us out of our last one. I figure we can walk way out on the trunk of this big old tree, what done fell in the water, and tie us a trotline way out on it, and then run it across the water and tie it to that black gum tree up yonder,” he pointed. “And we can troll up and down the bank in our boat, and I bet we catch us some fish.”

  “Them catalpa worms still alive?”

  “Uh-huh. I stuffed some more leaves in the jars for them to munch on.”

  “What kind of leaves?”

  “Just leaves off some bushes.”

  “You think they’ll eat them instead of catalpa leaves?”

  “Shore they will. They just fat worms and I don’t think they can tell one leaf from another.”

  It occurred to me that Poudlum and I were making small talk, both of us reluctant to talk about what had happened to us last night.

  We were licking our fingers when Poudlum said, “You remember everything about last night?”

  It all flashed through my mind as I relived every vivid moment of it. “Yeah, I remember everything. Do you?”

  “I ’member every bit of it. We thought we would get to see who a lot of ’em was, but we only got to see who the —what did they call him?”

  “The Exalted Cyclops.”

  “Yeah, that’s it! We gonna tell?”

  “I don’t know. If we need to we will. Let’s just wait and see what happens.”

  “We know who one of the others was standing beside the Exalted Cyclops.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Herman’s daddy. Remember he told us his daddy belong to the Klan.”

  We put our camp in order, then we set and baited us a trotline like Poudlum had suggested. After that we fished from our boat up and down the riverbank until late in the day. We didn’t have the same luck we had had down at the mouth of the Satilfa, but by the time the sun got low we had our bucket almost full of catfish.

  Our catch was way more than we could eat, so we decided to paddle down and across the river and give them to Mr. Henry at the ferry.

  He was piddling around tying up the ferry for the evening when we arrived.

  “Looks like you young fellers had some luck,” he said when we presented him with a big mess of fish. Dis gonna be more than enough to feed me and de missus and a few more. Mighty generous of you boys to think of me, and I appreciate it. Where y’all catch all dese fish?”

  After we told him where our camp was, he asked, “So y’all ain’t been down de river?”

  Poudlum found a way to answer him without telling a lie. “We might fish some down that way before we get a bait of fishing, but right now we camped a little ways up on the other side of the river.”

  “Well, I’m proud to hear dat,” Mr. Henry said. “De reason I ask is ’cause word in de Quarter early dis morning wuz dat some kind of a ruckus took place down de river and up de Satilfa last night.”

  He had my interest now. “What kind of a ruckus, Mr. Henry?”

  “Some folks heard a gunshot going off and others say dey wuz a lot of coming and going on de creek.”

  I knew I shouldn’t push my luck, but we needed to know, so I asked Mr. Henry, “You hear any more about it today?”

  “Not about what de ruckus was about, but f
olks been mighty curious about who been crossing de river.”

  “What you mean?” I asked.

  “Two mens I didn’t know come down here ’bout midmorning and wanted to know everything about everybody I took ’cross de river yesterday.”

  My heart skipped a beat when I heard him say that. “Did you tell ’em about us?”

  “Naw. Dey asked me who crossed de river, not who paddled out on it.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief until I heard him say, “But I did have some mo visitors about noon, and dey was looking fo’ you two boys.”

  When I heard what he said I desperately wanted to ask who it was, but I was struck dumb with fear.

  Finally Poudlum stuttered it out for me. “Who-who-who they was, Mr. Henry?”

  “It wuz dat boy ’bout y’all’s age what lives up between Coffeeville and Center Point. Herman, Herman Finney, yeah, dat’s his name. He said he wanted to fish wid y’all some, but he had his daddy wid him and he de one who ask most of de questions.”

  “What kind of questions?” I asked with dread.

  “Just when y’all got here, what you had wid you, where you got de boat from, and had I seen y’all since. Sounded like he had some kind of special interest in you boys, so I thought you ought to know.”

  “We appreciate you letting us know, Mr. Henry. Has my Uncle Curvin come back from across the river yet?”

  “Naw. He say it may be a couple of days fo’ he gets back. It’ll be tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “Would you please tell him we need to see him when he gets back?” I asked.

  “Shore I will. I got a pretty good air horn on my ferry. How about I give it three long toots on my way ’cross de river to fetch him? You can hear it a good mile or more up and down de river. Dat way y’all could paddle on in and catch up wid him.”

  “That sounds like a good plan and we appreciate it, Mr. Henry,” I told him as Poudlum and I prepared to launch our boat.

  “Uh, one other thing,” Mr. Henry said as we were pushing off. “If you boys need a place to come to, Poudlum knows where I stays down in de Quarter.”