Salvation of Miss Lucretia

by Ted M. Dunagan

  While we were finishing up our breakfast, he said, “Here’s what’s gonna happen, boys. I’m going in dat cabin and gather up de guns and my pack, den de three of us is gonna march out of dese woods. I don’t know where my auntie got off to, but she can make herself reappear after we gone. Y’all understand?”

  His hard eyes and stern voice were certainly intimidating, but I had already formed a plan in my mind. I used my eyes to communicate with Poudlum, and I could tell he understood we weren’t going to do what Cudjoe was demanding.

  I had to wait until Cudjoe left us to use my voice, and as soon as he disappeared into the cabin, I reached into my pocket and pulled out several of the .22 bullets I had and tossed them into the hot fire.

  “Throw yours in, too,” I whispered to Poudlum. “Then let’s move over behind the rock firewall so they won’t come toward us when they start going off. When he takes cover, we’ll hit the woods!”

  Poudlum followed my instructions, and then we moved to safety, and watched as Cudjoe come out of the cabin lugging his pack and the guns.

  He was about halfway back to the shed when the first shell went off. Bang! Zing! The first ones exploded. Then the rest started popping like popcorn.

  Cudjoe dropped everything, ran back to the cabin door and dove inside. That’s when we broke for the woods in a hard run.

  Poudlum and I had been chased by big mean dogs, bootleggers, the Ku Klux Klan, and by a murdering Chinaman before. So when danger was on our heels, we didn’t just run, we ran with abandon.

  After we penetrated the edge of the forest we soared over fallen logs and leaped over bushes as we put distance between ourselves and Cudjoe. We didn’t stop until we came to the edge of a small familiar clearing where we bent over and gasped for air.

  When we had caught our breath, we started jogging across the clearing, forgetting the danger in the center of it. We only got about halfway across, it before the earth underneath our feet gave away.

  At first I thought I had just stepped into a hole, but my foot, and then the other one kept going, down, down, and when I reached out to grab something to hold on to, everything gave way and caved in on me.

  I heard Poudlum yell out, “Grab on to something!”

  But it was too late, we dropped below the surface as we clawed at the debris that had given away beneath us.

  I felt the wall of the hole we were falling into, and I clawed at it with my hands as I attempted to slow my descent. It did slow me down some, but I kept falling and falling until I landed hard, so hard it almost knocked the breath out of me. Then Poudlum came crashing in on top of me.

  I just lay there for a moment, breathing hard, trying to wrap my mind around what had just happened to us.

  Poudlum scared the dickens out of me when he made clear what had happened. “We done fell into the panther pit!” he said through ragged breaths.

  It was true. That was what had happened, and it gave me a terrifying feeling as I looked up to the small circle of light, far above our heads. I began to feel a panic spread over me, and I cried out, “We got to get out of this hole, Poudlum!”

  Take some deep breaths,” Poudlum advised. “It’s gonna be all right. We’ll get out. It just might take us a while.”

  “I don’t know if I can stand it!” I told him.

  “Keep taking deep breaths, calm yourself down. Then we can use our heads to figure out how to get out.”

  I followed his advice, breathed deep, and slowly pushed the panic back.

  “I saw Miss Lucretia,” I told Poudlum.

  “Where? Where did you see her?”

  “When I went to the chicken pen to get the eggs. She told me we needed to get away from Cudjoe so he wouldn’t make us leave with him.”

  “So that’s why you come up with that little shooting war we had under the shed?”

  “Uh huh, and I told her we would meet her back at the cabin later and get her.”

  “We sure done a good job of getting away from Cudjoe. Now, let’s figure out how we gonna get out of this hole and get back to the cabin. You got any ideas?”

  “How about using our hunting knives to climb out with?” I said as I pulled mine out of the back of my boot and began rethreading it back onto my belt.

  “How we gonna do that?”

  “We can use them to climb with.”

  “Show me what you mean,” Poudlum said.

  “Let me have your knife and I’ll show you.”

  Poudlum handed his knife to me, and I grasped the handle in my left hand while holding mine in my right. Then I reached up as high as I could and drove the blade of Poudlum’s knife into the side of the pit wall, all the way up to the hilt. I pulled myself up by it, reached up a little higher and drove mine in a little farther up than his. But when I started pulling myself up with my right hand, the soft dirt gave way and I fell back to the bottom of the pit.

  “Dirt’s too soft,” Poudlum observed.

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “Let me try it by turning the blades sideways. That way the blade won’t cut through the soft dirt.”

  “Worth a try,” Poudlum said. “But first, let me lift you up so you can start a little higher.”

  He laced his fingers together, I put one foot on them, and he lifted me up. I plunged a blade into the pit wall sideways, and it did seem to hold better.

  Once again, I pulled up with my left, and reached up and plunged the other knife in with my right hand. I put the pressure of my weight on it, and to my great joy, it held. I pulled up and at the same time extracted the knife in my left hand, reached up and plunged it in again. It was working!

  I made three repetitions of this process before the muscles in my arms began to ache and burn. Looking up, the bright round hole at the top looked like it was a mile away. Still, I didn’t give up. I gritted my teeth and strained as hard as I could, and lifted and plunged another knife. After two more repetitions my arms began to tremble and I realized I couldn’t hold on any longer.

  “I can’t hold on no more, Poudlum,” I called down to him.

  “Just drop back down and we’ll try something else,” he said. Then as an afterthought, he said, “But don’t leave the knives stuck up there. We gonna need them.”

  I had just enough strength left to twist the knives out of the dirt before I let myself drop. I expected it to be a hard fall, but I landed lightly on my feet, and realized I hadn’t gone far up at all.

  Poudlum and I sank down on the floor of the pit and leaned back against it while I caught my breath. Once I did, I said, “Bad idea, huh?”

  “Maybe not,” Poudlum said. “Your idea done give me another idea.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The dirt in the walls of this pit is real soft, so we just gonna dig our way out.”

  “Dig? How we gonna do that?”

  “We’ll use our hunting knives.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Poudlum took his knife back from me, turned to face the wall of the pit, and started stabbing into it, and with a twisting motion, pulled a big hunk of the dirt out of the wall out onto the floor. “See, we’ll dig a cave, then cave it in and spread the dirt out with our hands to form a ramp. Then we’ll dig another one, and keep doing that till we can just walk right out of this pit.”

  I imagined this process in my mind, and said, “But the further we get up the deeper the cave is gonna be and we’ll have a lot of dirt caving in on us.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But we gonna be moles if we have to, to dig our way out of this hole. Besides, it won’t be exhausting work like the climbing was, and we can stick to it real steady like.”

  “All right,” I agreed, and we started digging like moles.

  We kept steady at it and had us a ramp of dirt about four feet from the middle of the bottom of the pit when we heard someone from up above
yell, “Hey boys!”

  “Thank the Lord,” I said. “Somebody done come to save us!”

  “Shssss,” Poudlum cautioned. “That’s Cudjoe’s voice!”

  We looked up at the circle of light and sure enough it was Cudjoe peering down at us!

  “Be quiet!” Poudlum whispered. “He can’t see us. No need of letting him hear us.”

  “But he might help us out,” I whispered back.

  “He won’t do no such thing!” Poudlum hissed. “Let’s just be quiet and see what he’s up to.”

  “I know y’all down there,” Cudjoe called out. “And I found de casings of dem bullets y’all chunked in de fire. Think y’all mighty smart, don’t you? All I had to do was follow y’all’s trail, and it ’pears to me y’all done got what was coming to you.

  “In fact, dis is probably better dan just taking y’all out of dese woods. And y’all knows what else? I got a surprise fo’ you. I was gonna take him wid me, but I thought, no, de boys will be wanting some company down in de panther pit.”

  “What you think he’s talking about?” Poudlum asked.

  We didn’t have to wait long to have Poudlum’s question answered.

  I looked up at what Cudjoe had in his hands and it struck terror into my heart. It was the cage with Miss Lucretia’s prize rattlesnake in it!

  We watched with horror as Cudjoe tilted it forward and opened the latch of the cage, and then that giant rattlesnake came tumbling out of it and came floating down towards us like a wingless dragon.

  It hit the bottom of the pit with a big plopping sound, and evidently it was stunned, because it didn’t move.

  “You think it’s dead?” I asked.

  “Maybe so,” Poudlum answered. “But let’s don’t take no chances. Let’s make sure of it.”

  “How we gonna do that? I ain’t going near that thing!”

  But Poudlum was way ahead of me. He had picked up two of the tree branches that had covered the hole and had fallen in with us. “Here,” he said. “Take one of these and use your knife to trim off the twigs and cut the top out of it, and we’ll have ourselves a stick. They might be a little flimsy, but they’ll keep that snake off us if he ain’t dead.”

  No sooner had we trimmed our sticks than we saw movement from the snake, but before he woke up completely Poudlum slid the end of his stick underneath it and flipped it over against the far wall of the floor of the pit. That made it mad and we saw the dim form of his tail lift up into the air and the ominous sound of his rattlers reverberated off the sides of the pit.

  “I do believe he done come to,” Poudlum said as we retreated up the ramp of loose dirt we had dug out of the side of the wall of the pit.

  The snake settled down, kept his distance, and so did we.

  We were startled when Cudjoe yelled down, “Y’all having fun yet?”

  “Don’t say nothing,” Poudlum whispered. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of knowing for sure we down here.”

  “But he still might help us out of here,” I protested.

  “No he won’t,” Poudlum said. “If we ask, he’ll refuse, and if we condemn him for not helping us, he’ll make it worse on us.”

  “I don’t see how it could get no worse,” I told him.

  I’ll always remember what Poudlum said at that dangerous time. It served me throughout my life, and it was the first time I thought that my friend might have a calling, when I heard him say, “No matter how desperate your situation is, there’s always something to thank the Good Lord for!”

  Chapter 13

  A Face from Above

  We hadn’t heard a sound from up at the top of the pit for what I figured was about an hour. So we concluded Cudjoe was long gone, along with Miss Lucretia’s valuable skins.

  We had been sitting there staring at that rattlesnake while he stared at us. We could see its red eyes through the dim light. It didn’t have its head up in the air, but it was coiled up with his head lying on top of its coil, looking straight at us.

  “I do believe that snake is watching us, Poudlum.”

  “Course it is. But the good news is, that we watching him too, and got four eyes to his two. Plus, we human beings with sticks and knives, and he’s just a snake.”

  “I know all that. The question is, what we gonna do about it?”

  “Why, we are going to destroy that old snake, get out of this hole and go on about our business.”

  “We are?” I said, thinking he had come up with a new plan. “How we gonna do that?”

  “I ain’t figured that part out yet, but I know in my heart and my mind that it’s true.”

  Poudlum’s words and his attitude lifted my spirits and my hopes. They also inspired me to think. “I know one thing, Poudlum.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That snake ain’t hungry, ’cause if you remember, Miss Lucretia fed him before we even knew he was behind the curtain.”

  “That don’t mean it won’t strike at us if we provoke it, and it could probably reach us all the way ’cross this pit if he take a notion to. That’s why we got to keep a constant watch on it. We can’t dig as fast now ’cause one of us has to watch while the other one digs. We’ll just take turns. I’ll dig first. Here, you take my stick and if it moves you got to tell me quick.”

  So Poudlum took to digging with his knife and I kept watching the snake. Its red eyes reminded me of two hot embers peeking out of a bed of ashes, except they didn’t fade away like a hot coal would. They just kept staring with unblinking intensity directly at me.

  After a while I got an eerie feeling that those eyes were hypnotizing me, were going to render me motionless, then it was going to strike.

  “Hey, Poudlum,” I said.

  “What! Is it moving?” Poudlum said as he ceased digging and turned to face Mister Red Eyes.

  “No, but I can’t stand it no longer. We got to do something about that snake.”

  “Well, listen,” he said. “I’m ready to cave in a big pile of dirt here. It’ll extend our ramp and we’ll be able to move a little farther away from it. Move to your left a little while I do it.”

  I kept my eyes on the serpent, but out of the corner of one I watched as Poudlum stabbed his knife into the dirt above the small cave he had dug, and the dirt came tumbling down. We both backed up and pushed the dirt down with the heels of our boots.

  “All right,” Poudlum said. “I’ll take over the snake-watching and you take over the digging.”

  I gladly accepted the invitation and began stabbing my knife into the soft dirt, but I hadn’t been at it for five minutes before Poudlum said, “Hey, Ted.”

  “What? It ain’t moving, is it?”

  “No, it ain’t moved, but I see what you mean about them eyes. Just staring at ’em almost makes me lose my concentration.”

  “What we gonna do?” I asked with my knife still stuck in the dirt.

  “You need to stop digging.”

  I extracted my knife and eased myself down next to Poudlum on the soft dirt that formed our ramp, knowing he had made an important decision about our dire predicament, and asked him again what we were gonna do.

  He didn’t hesitate. “What we gonna do is to destroy that snake. I got nothing against it, ’cept maybe them spooky red eyes, but down here it’s us or it, and I choose us.”

  I began having vision of attacking the snake with a stick, my boots and my knife, and wondering if I would be swift enough to avoid its lightning-like strike.

  But then I was much relieved to hear from Poudlum that we weren’t going to use any of these methods I had imagined. No, he said we were going to destroy the snake in a biblical way. I was glad to hear that, but I still had no idea of what Poudlum had in mind about our visitor, so I asked him, “Poudlum, what way is that?”

  “We gonna stone it to death,” he replied.
/>
  It took me a moment, but then I asked, “Uh, where we gonna get the rocks?”

  “We sitting on ’em,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Well, not exactly rocks, but this is real soft and clayey dirt we digging in, and I figure we can sit right here and ball us up about fifty of ’em.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we stone it, hard and fast, taking turns busting it good till it’s covered with dirt, then before it can recover we’ll push all this loose dirt we dug on top of it.”

  I must have still had a question on my face because Poudlum added, “Then we’ll stand on it and stomp it down with our boots.”

  That was one of the things I loved about Poudlum. He knew how to make a plan. Now it was up to us to make it work.

  Poudlum was right about the dirt having clay in it; consequently, the balls we made, about the size of a baseball, were almost as hard as rocks.

  “I shore would like to bust Cudjoe upside his head with one of these,” Poudlum said as he stacked another ball on our pile.

  “How many you think we got,” I asked.

  “I figure thirty or forty. We need to make a few more,” he answered.

  We were beginning to get a little more light as the sun moved upward and we could see the snake clearly now.

  “Must be close on to ten o’clock by now,” I speculated. “We got to get out of here before it gets dark on us.”

  “We got a heap of digging to do if we gonna do that,” Poudlum said. “But if we don’t, we’ll just keep digging.”

  “In the dark?” I said in horror.

  “A blind person can dig, and pretty soon we can get serious about it ’cause we won’t have to be watching no snake no more.” Poudlum said as he finished another ball.

  I figured we had fifty or sixty clay balls when Poudlum declared we were ready. “When I give the signal, you make the first throw. Aim for his head, and throw it like a flaming fastball. I’ll let one fly a split second after you do. It’s important to stun him at first. After that we pick ’em up and throw ’em as fast as we can. It ought to be covered up by the time we hit it with all of ’em.”