Salvation of Miss Lucretia Read online

  Little wisps of steam were still rising up off the goat stew, and the cornbread had a brown, crunchy-looking crust on it, which I knew would make a good scoop to sop up the gravy with. I had eaten mine and Poudlum’s mommas’ stew, and remembered them both tasting mighty fine, but as I chewed on my first bite, my taste buds told me this stew was from another league of cooking.

  Plus, there was something, some unknown spice or herb I didn’t recognize, that lent it a woody flavor I had never tasted before.

  The more I ate the heavier my head got, and by the time I had cleaned the plate, I glanced over at Poudlum and was shocked to see he had pushed his empty plate aside, and his head was resting on the table, with his eyes closed.

  At that same moment, my own eyes began to blink involuntarily, and it seemed as if the weight of the world was on my eyelids, pressing them down to what I knew would be total blackness.

  I willed myself to stand up, but whatever had a hold of me was much stronger than my will, and it was all I could do to push my plate aside so my face wouldn’t land in it. The last thing I heard was the clinking sound of my glass of goat milk as it overturned and hit my plate. The last thing I saw was the milk from the overturned glass. The little stream of spilled milk ran across the table and disappeared over the edge, along with my consciousness.

  I came back to semi-reality several times, only faintly, and then I would sink back into nothingness. But I kept fighting, and the next time I woke up, I refused to sink back. I pinched myself, wiggled my toes, clenched and unclenched my fists, trying to get my blood flowing.

  After realizing I was finally over the hump and would remain conscious, I turned my head to my left and saw Poudlum blinking his eyes.

  “She put something in that goat stew,” he said in slurred words.

  “Yeah, I could taste it,” I told him. “Let’s try to wake up.”

  “I’m trying,” he murmured.

  Looking around, I saw we were on the floor and the table where we had eaten the sleep-inducing goat stew was next to us.

  “Let’s try to get up,” I said.

  “Ain’t no use,” Poudlum responded.

  “Why not?”

  “She got us chained.”

  I attempted to lift my feet and felt some kind of weight on them. When I looked down through blurred vision, I saw something rusty-looking on my ankle. Glancing over, I saw the same thing on Poudlum.

  “Hey, Poudlum, what’s that on our feet?”

  “They on our ankles. They manacles, like they used to put on slaves sometimes. I’ve heard tell of ’em, but I never seen ’em before.”

  Still groggy, I asked, “How did they get there?”

  “How you think? The voodoo queen put ’em on us.”

  “We got to get out of here,” I said. But when I attempted to move I heard the rattle of heavy chains.

  “We can’t, not in the shape we in,” Poudlum said. “Best to just rest till this stuff wears off.”

  “What if she gives us some more? We may never get away from here?”

  “Don’t eat or drink nothing,” he said. “Try to sleep. I got a plan.”

  I closed my eyes and drifted off into nothingness again.

  When I woke up again, my head was clear enough to know it was Thursday morning. What woke me up was a grinding sound real close to me. I was stiff and sore from sleeping on the hard floor, but I managed to turn toward the sound and saw it was coming from Poudlum’s broken hacksaw blade, which he was using to cut through a link of the chain attached to the shackle around his ankle. I noticed then that the other end of the chain was bolted to the floor with only about two feet of slack in it.

  “Hey, Poudlum,” I said as I slid up into a sitting position and saw he had already cut through one side of a link of chain. He was halfway to his freedom.

  “Hey, yourself,” he said. “I need you to get up and stand on this chain so it’ll quit wiggling around on me. Soon as I get through this link, I’ll cut you loose. These chains are old and rusty, and it ain’t too hard to cut through ’em.”

  As I struggled to get up, I suddenly caught the smell of fresh-baked biscuits. My nose led my eyes to a big plate of them sitting within reach on the floor at our feet. There was another plate beside it with a Mason jar of blackberry jam and a spoon on it.

  Poudlum followed my eyes and said, “It was all here when I woke up. Don’t touch it or you’ll probably be back in the same shape as we was last night.”

  “What you think we ought to do when we get loose?”

  “I think we ought to hightail it out of here and get back to Mister Autrey’s house. Him and Mister Curvin will know what to do.”

  “But what about our dogs and our rifles?”

  “We got to let ’em go for right now and go get some help. We done bit off more than we can chew.”

  Poudlum was right, I surmised, and I stood up and put my foot on the chain to steady it so he could finish cutting it. But it was not to be, because at that moment the door burst open and a wild woman suddenly appeared before us.

  Chapter 5

  Miss Lucretia

  I was astounded and afraid at the same time because of her appearance and the suddenness of it. When the door slammed against the wall with a loud bang, there she was!

  On his knees looking up at her with his eyes as big as saucers, Poudlum froze with the hacksaw blade in mid-stroke. Me, I just about jumped out of my skin. I felt like I had hit both funny bones at the same time and was tingling all over.

  She wore a dress that looked like it had been made by sewing flour sacks together. The dress came down to her ankles. Below the hem of the dress she wore a pair of old brogans that had seen better days.

  Her hair was as wild as the wind and stuck out in all directions like thick, tangled barbed wire, the color of dark rust.

  Hung around her neck was a leather throng adorned with pieces of bones in varying sizes. The bones rattled with her every move.

  Her face looked ancient with deep lines and sagging folds, and she was breathing hard and ragged like she was out of breath and mad at the same time.

  What didn’t look old about her were her eyes, which were clear and sharp as they darted about, taking in the situation.

  The thing that was the least inspiring about her was her size. She wasn’t as big as a minute, and she couldn’t have weighed much over a hundred and twenty pounds, but we quickly found out she could move fast.

  The first thing she did was lash out with one of those brogans to kick the broken hacksaw blade from Poudlum’s hand. It went flying across the room and clattered against the far wall.

  Poudlum gasped and pulled his injured hand close to his body. My eyes got as big as his.

  When she finally spoke the sound of her voice instilled even more fear in my heart. Her voice was deep and raspy like it was coming from a much larger person than she was, and there was a sound of fury in it when she said, “Sawing my chain! Desecrating de memory of my granddaddy, who wore dem very chains when de white folks brought him here as a slave!

  “I heard dat sawing racket from way outside and knew something wuz going on. I can hear like a wolf and run like a deer, and you little interlopers best remember dat!”

  She glanced down at the untouched plate of biscuits and the jar of jam, and said, “Don’t want my food, huh? All right den, I’ll just feed it to de dogs!” she said as she scooped up the food and was gone just as suddenly as she had appeared, the door slamming behind her.

  It took me a few moments to recover my voice, and I could hear the tremble in it when I said, “Is your hand okay, Poudlum?”

  He wiggled it and shook it, and then said, “Yeah, it’s all right, just stings a little bit.”

  “That woman ’bout scared me to death,” I said as I sat back down on the floor next to him.

  “Scared me, t
oo, especially when she kicked my hacksaw blade way over yonder.”

  Looking across the room I spotted the saw blade, far out of our reach and said, “We got to figure out a way to drag that blade back over here.”

  “Won’t do no good,” Poudlum said. “She’ll hear us sawing and bust back in here. Probably kick me in the head next time.”

  “What if we fixed it so she couldn’t get back in the door?” I suggested.

  “How in the world we gonna do that?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ve figured our way out of a lot of jams before, and we’ll get out of this one, too.”

  While we were thinking, I said, “She’s just a little bitty old woman.”

  “Yeah, but she kicks like a mule,” Poudlum said, “and we are in her backyard and she’s got the advantage on us.”

  “And we still chained to the floor,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, that too.”

  We agreed we should put all our thoughts and energy into just getting loose and getting away from this place as fast as we could and let Mister Autrey and Uncle Curvin help us deal with the missing dogs and rifles.

  Miss Lucretia had also taken our hunting knives and left the empty scabbards on our belts, but we did have the pocket knives we had hidden inside our boots.

  After a great deal of thought we came up with a plan. It was somehow to retrieve the hacksaw blade and also to somehow fix the front door so she couldn’t get in. As far as we could tell there was no other entrance to the cabin. There were no windows and the only light was from the cracks in the walls.

  We figured out that Poudlum could reach the bottom of the front door with the heels of his boots, since he was the closest to the door, and that if we had some kind of wedges, or wedges, he could jam them in between the floor and the bottom of the door so it couldn’t be opened from the outside.

  Next, we had to come up with a way to retrieve the saw blade. The only thing we came up with was that I could take off one of my boots, attach it to some kind of rope, toss it over to the saw and drag it back. The question was which did we do first, jam the door or get the saw blade?

  It made sense to get the saw first, but we figured it would make a noise when we tossed the boot and alert Miss Lucretia.

  Poudlum came up with an idea to cover the noise. “Let’s rattle these chains and see if it brings her back. If it don’t, I can rattle the chains while you throw the boot and she won’t hear the thud when the boot hits the floor.”

  That sounded good to me, but first we had to have wedges for the door and we had to have a rope for the boot.

  There were two four-legged wooden stools next to the rickety table, and by stretching as far as I could, I finally hooked a finger around one of the legs and gently pulled one of the stools to us.

  “What we can do,” Poudlum said, “is to take our pocket knives and cut a big hunk off the bottom of each leg, cut ’em at an angle so as to form a wedge, and I think I can secure that door.”

  While we were cutting the wedges we set to thinking about how we could make us a rope.

  “We could tie out belts together,” Poudlum said, “But I don’t think they’ll be quite long enough.”

  “What if we cut three or four strips off the bottom of our pants legs and tie ’em to our belts?” I suggested.

  “That just might work,” Poudlum said.

  Once we had our wedges whittled out, Poudlum said, “Slide the stool back in place and let’s give these chains a rattle and see if she shows up. First, let me get these wedges hid behind me.”

  We rattled the chains vigorously and then lay there and waited in silence. After five minutes without her showing up, we gave them another good rattle with the same results.

  “All right,” Poudlum said, “let’s cut us a rope.”

  We each cut three strips off the bottom of our britches legs, tied these to our belts, and then to my right boot which I had taken off.

  I stood, let a little slack out on our improvised rope and swung the boot back and forth to get the heft of it and figure out how much strength to put behind my toss.

  “Just say so when you get ready,” Poudlum said, “and I’ll give these chains a rattle just before the boot hits the floor.”

  “Okay, here goes,” I said as I aimed and tossed the boot with the intention of landing it on top of the saw blade, and then dragging it back toward us.

  The boot flew through the air and Poudlum rattled the chains just before it hit the floor. Everything got real quiet afterwards, and we listened real hard for a while, but heard not a sound.

  The problem was that I had missed. The boot had landed just short of the blade.

  “Drag it back to you real slow and try it again,” Poudlum said.

  We went through the same process, and this time the boot landed right on top of the blade.

  “All right!” Poudlum cheered. “Pull it real easy now. Don’t lose it!”

  I pulled very slowly and dragged the boot, with the blade under it until it was close enough for me to reach out and grasp it.

  After I had passed the blade back to Poudlum, I dismantled our retrieval tools and we put our belts back on. I rolled up the short rope we had made from our pants legs and stuffed it into my pocket, and then I put my boot back on.

  Poudlum stretched out and placed the four wedges between the bottom of the door and the floor, then he twisted around and jammed them in real tight with the heel of his boot.

  “Now then,” he said. “She won’t come busting in here like she done before.”

  “How long you think it’ll take to finish sawing through that chain link?” I asked.

  “Maybe five minutes.” Poudlum answered. “But then we got to cut yours, too, so we looking at a good fifteen minutes or more of cutting.”

  “When you get tired, I’ll saw for a spell,” I told him.

  Poudlum hadn’t been sawing but a minute when there was a loud thump on the door. He didn’t pause one stroke, just kept on sawing.

  Then there was a rattling and shaking of the door, after which it got all quiet again.

  “Looks like she give up real quick on opening the door,” Poudlum said. “My hand’s cramping up. Here, take the blade and start sawing on yours for a while.”

  Besides the table where we had eaten the goat stew, and two stools, the cabin was desolate and bare. There was a small bed on the far side of the room, and next to it was a stone fireplace, blackened with soot from years of use. Beside it were three shelves with what looked like some cooking supplies on them. A cooking pot and a big black skillet sat on the hearth of the fireplace, where Miss Lucretia evidently did some cooking.

  In the last corner of the room, well away from the fireplace, a curtain was hung by two nails driven into the wall.

  While I was sawing, Poudlum said, “What you ’spose is behind that curtain over yonder in the corner?”

  I said I didn’t have any idea and kept on sawing.

  “Maybe our rifles are hid behind it,” Poudlum continued. “Then again they could be some kind of voodoo mummy behind it and she’s gonna come busting out from behind it any second now with a big rattlesnake in each hand.”

  I paused from my sawing, and said, “Poudlum, stop imagining things. You ’bout to scare me to death!”

  “She went away too easy,” he said. “She’s up to something!”

  “Well, whatever it is, maybe she’ll still be at it when we get these chains sawed in two so we can run out of here.”

  “She said she could run like a deer,” Poudlum reminded me.

  “That’s true,” I agreed, as I kept scraping the hacksaw blade back and forth across the rusty length of chain. “But I don’t think she can outrun me, even with this old iron slave manacle on my ankle.”

  “You don’t understand,” Poudlum said.

  “Do
n’t understand what?”

  “Miss Lucretia and her voodoo. If we get loose and run out that front door, no telling what kind of traps she gonna have set for us. Then she’ll blame it all on magic if we fall in a hole and break a leg, or something like that.”

  “Then what else you got in mind besides us running out of here?”

  “We might just have to talk our way out of here,” Poudlum replied.

  “Well then how come we getting blisters on our hands trying to saw ourselves loose?”

  “In case we can’t talk no sense into her,” he said.

  The blade finally cut through one side of the link of chain. “Halfway home,” I said. “Here, you saw a while. My hand’s just about raw.”

  Poudlum took the saw black, then he froze for a moment and his eyes got big and intense.

  “What?” I asked in alarm.

  “Got an idea!” he said with excitement in his voice.

  “Well don’t just sit there! Tell it to me!”

  “What if we saw the other half of our links almost all the way through, enough so we can break it real quick if we had to. We could rub some rust over the bright parts where we have sawed so she can’t tell it. That way we could try to talk our way out of here, and if that don’t work, we could bust loose!”

  “Sounds like a good plan to me,” I said, and we set back to sawing.

  We were finishing up our task by rubbing some loose rust over the cut places in the chain links when we heard a plopping sound coming from toward the fireplace.

  Our heads jerked up and we looked that way, and saw a cloud of wood ashes puff out of the fireplace and form a little dust cloud.

  It began to spread and we heard a rustling sound inside of it. A moment later we saw the movement of something inside of the ashy little cloud.

  My heart fluttered inside my chest when I saw what was beginning to emerge from it.

  Chapter 6

  Butterbeans and Okra