The Lost Skiff

by Donald Wetzel

  “In a stupid cloud of smoke,” I said, but I was satisfied all right, and leaned into the oars in a way that felt good. For such a big old boat and loaded so heavy, it moved right along.

  Now that we were actually on our way down the creek for the one purpose of seeing if I could find Mr. Haywood’s lost skiff, it began to seem important to me again, the way it had at first. I soon noticed that Jack had stopped spying around at the landscape like some Indian scout in a movie, and was just looking around enjoying the scenery as though we were only out for the ride. By the time we reached the island, I believed he had forgot about the skiff altogether. This bugged me a little, but on the other hand I figured that if it had been the way I really wanted it I would have been going down the creek without Jack along, and as far as I was concerned I decided that it was all right with me if he lay back on the tarp he had put behind him for a back rest and closed his eyes and went to sleep. So I just kept rowing easy and watching both shores and said nothing.

  The day warmed up fast, but in the narrow part of the creek we still got a good bit of shade from the trees on either side, although around each bend as we came around it I could see the creek opening up and getting wider, the way I remembered it, with bigger and longer patches of sunlight waiting for us up ahead. It was a pretty sight in a way, with the water flat and smooth in the shade of the trees, and the trees reflected in the water, so that at times we would seem to be gliding along with trees both above us and below us, too, like we were on a kind of elevated parkway, except that it was a creek. And then up ahead when I glanced there would be patches and streaks of sunlight, with the same to be seen behind, and as long as the creek was narrow and we were moving along in a shady part it was a colorful and pretty sight, as well as being cool and quiet. In the sun, though, you felt the heat, and, surprisingly, things didn’t seem to show up as clear, but seemed blurred, particularly at a distance. I guess it could have been mostly a matter of my eyes being somewhat weak and sensitive to light, like my father’s.

  I wondered if it was the cigar smoke that had quieted Jack down or if he was just naturally less loud around water, but I had better sense than to ask him about it. I was satisfied to go along being quiet for a change. Once we came to a sunny place where there was a turtle stretched out on a log, and I noticed him in time and just let the boat drift by without making a sound, and we had got so close when he did notice us that I could hear his claws scraping the log as he quick scrambled off the log and went plop into the water, a drop of not more than a foot or two, but a loud plop even so. Jack had noticed it, too. “I doubt if anything wild is more clumsy than a turtle,” he said. “The only way they can seem to get down off a log is to fall off.”

  “For a turtle,” I said, “that is probably as good a way as any.”

  “If you watch one walk,” Jack said, “it is like watching a dog trying to scratch a flea in under his side where he can’t reach. He just paws away and does his best; but it hardly makes sense. The same with the way a turtle swims, although I guess you have to say he can swim better than he walks, although either way he waddles.”

  “What have you got against turtles?” I said.

  “They catch fish,” Jack said.

  This seemed to me to be no small feat for a creature that according to Jack could hardly swim, but I said nothing and we stayed quiet again for a while. But I decided that the next time I got a chance to watch a turtle swim I would take a closer look, and see if it was true that it waddled when it swam. It hardly seemed likely to me, but still, I have found it is sometimes surprising the things that Jack will have noticed and remembered right.

  So we moved on down Little Star Creek, keeping to the shady side as it widened out, but coming more and more into long hot stretches of sun, and longer bends, where the sun would first be in your face and then at your side and then at your back, with the creek bending back again until the next thing you knew you were doing the same thing all over again. “We are being roasted all around,” Jack said, complaining already, “like pigs on a spit.”

  The creek was still narrow enough so that we could stay to either side to catch what shade we could and still watch along both sides for the sight of the skiff caught in under some low-hanging limbs or bushes, or stuck aground in a marshy place, although only once had we come upon what could be called a stretch of marsh along one shore, and it had been a small one. Mostly, it was thick tangled woods on either side coming right up to the water’s edge, with now and then a place where the ground lifted up a few feet above the level of the water, where there would be bushes growing, too. Close to the banks the trees were generally pines of one sort or another, mostly cypress, according to Jack, although he was not sure of the names of the others; farther back where the ground was higher there were the regular pines such as grow everywhere around The Hill, loblolly pines, they are called, and others bigger and older-looking, which Jack said could be the true longleaf yellow pine, although most of it had been timbered out in this part of the country long ago. And now and then you would see, back from the creek, the big solid mass of green that only the flat wide leaves of a hardwood make, swamp maple and sweetgum and blackgum and hickory and others that Jack could not name at such a distance. “There are more oaks back in there than you can name,” Jack said, “but the water oak is most common due to the fact of all this water. But there are live oaks, too, the ones like a big low cloud with the millions of small shiny leaves that don’t look like an oak leaf at all. And red oak and white oak, which some call green oak, and post oak, with new kinds still coming along, according to Pa. I have give up on oaks a long time ago, except for the most common; but I will tell you this, if it has an acorn it is an oak, and if it don’t have an acorn it is something else.”

  All I had done was ask Jack what kind of a tree it was that we had just gone under where it leaned out from the shore about one-third of the way across the creek. It looked like it must have been growing in several feet of water, and it was hard to believe that it could lean that far over and still have a good enough hold in the muddy creek bottom to keep it from falling the rest of the way down. I’m not so interested in trees that I would generally like to know all their different names and that sort of thing, but Jack had said that the tree I asked about was a cypress, and then he had gone on mentioning the different kinds of trees there were going by on either side as though I had asked him about the whole subject of trees.

  But finally he quit. “To me,” I said, “it still looks like one big mixed-up woods, with some of the trees pines of one sort or another and some of them not, but with the members of the pine family having the edge in numbers. But the one thing that seems positive to me is that it is not the kind of a woods that you go walking around in.”

  “You have figured something right for a change,” Jack said. “Unless you could jump from limb to limb like a squirrel, of course. What those trees along both shores is mostly growing in is a matter of pure muck.”

  Then we were quiet again for a time and sooner than I had expected it we came to the clearing with the PRIVATE, KEEP OUT sign on it. “It is sure nice to come on a clearing and some solid ground now and then,” Jack said. “Reminds you that the world is not just a place for fish and animals and bugs, but for people as well.”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I was relieved to find it here myself the day I lost the skiff.”

  “I bet you was,” Jack said.

  Then a little farther on we came to high ground again and then to the little overgrown clearing where I had landed and gone off following a game trail and come back to discover that Mr. Haywood’s skiff was nowhere in sight. I stayed out in the creek but stopped rowing for a minute and said to Jack, “That’s the place,” and then we slowly drifted on by it.

  “I figured it was,” Jack said. “As you soon will see, there is not another place like it for quite a ways now. Just solid woods, growing up out of the water, it looks like, on both sides all the way, without a break or dry
ground anywhere. You’ll begin to notice a good bit of Spanish moss hanging down from the limbs, but otherwise there is little change, with nothing but trees, mostly cypress and some of the biggest you’ll ever see, all jammed together with their roots in the muck, and with the creek not even widening out, it seems, but twisting and turning around through the woods like it was doing its best to get lost and end up nowhere.”

  “Sounds like it could get monotonous,” I said.

  “You will see,” Jack said. “Along through here, according to Pa, you are probably seeing a sight still much the same as it was when first seen by man and even before.”

  “I will watch for it,” I said. “As well as for the skiff.”

  Jack shook his head the way he will do sometimes when to his mind I have shown my ignorance again. “You’ll see,” he said again. “Strange enough, it is a favorite with Ma. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘we surely trespass.’ And I believe her. To Ma, of course, it somehow has to do with God; but to me it is the loneliest, most awesome stretch of creek that I know of anywhere.”

  Then the clearing was out of sight and Jack offered to take the oars and I let him. It must have been about ten o’clock. “With me rowing,” Jack said, “we should make the next clearing by noon.”

  8

  Judging by the sun, we got to the clearing about when Jack had figured we would. In fact I was surprised at how right Jack had been about all of it. The stretch of creek we had finally covered was just as lonely and awesome and as wandering and lost-seeming as he had said it would be, but the more and more it went on the less you could say it was monotonous. It was something to wonder at. I would never have guessed that a little creek no bigger than this one could come to make you feel so small, the way a sky full of stars at night can do, or the Empire State Building, if you have not seen it up close before.

  But then we finally came around the last sharp bend and could see the creek suddenly opening up on both sides and getting wider, and then the clearing coming in sight, a bright big piece of green cleared land, stretching away up an easy slope on solid ground; that was a sight to remember, too. And to land and pull the boat up safe and get out and walk around, it was like discovering land for the first time. It was a strange sensation, which I mentioned to Jack. “When I get this far,” Jack said, “particularly if I have rowed and come alone, it always seems like I have come much further than I have, like I had been on that dark twisty stretch of creek forever. While actually it has not taken long, as you noticed, and as far as really getting somewhere, as far as this creek is concerned, you have hardly got good and started yet.”

  I looked back the way we had come. “I can see what you mean,” I said. “All that twisting and turning is deceptive. On a straight line, so to speak, we have probably not come a mile.”

  “As the crow flies, probably even less,” Jack said, back to nonsense again, whether on purpose or by accident I wasn’t sure. “But whatever time of day I get here, I am starved as one of your uncle’s cats.”

  So we went down to the boat and got out one of the big jars of Polish sausages and a can of beans each and a box of crackers and some forks, and went back up to the back of the clearing where there was some shade. The tree we sat under was a live oak, a big one, and while all those acorns did not feel exactly like little cushions under me, the thousands of little leaves up over our heads were like a single solid roof, and the shade was a relief. I was uncertain about the sausage at first, but I tried one and it seemed pretty much the same as a Vienna sausage to me, except bigger, and while this is my idea of a food chiefly good for people without teeth, mushy as it is, I kept dipping in the jar for another one right along with Jack. “See,” he said, “I knowed you would like them. We should have got more.”

  There were two more jars of them in the boat. “Well,” I said, “they are all right, but I would not want them every meal.” Between us, we finished the jar.

  “I found out about these Polish sausages from Pa’s Cousin Nat,” Jack said. “Who you probably remember for his drinking. He would carry them around in his car, when he had one. Claimed they were the standard tavern food for drunks the world over and was all that kept many of them alive. So I turned down the whiskey he was offering me at the time and tried the sausage instead, although I might have tried the whiskey, too, except that this happened right on our own front porch, with Pa sitting there laughing and putting up with Nat, but keeping his eye on me as well. Well, before Nat had finished his whiskey and left that night I had finished the last of the sausages he had left in his jar, and have craved them ever since. Probably lucky for me I didn’t try his whiskey, too.”

  “You are right,” I said. “One thing can lead to another. All I hope is that I have not overdone it with these sausages already.”

  “Well,” Jack said, “whenever Nat will come by with his whiskey and his jar of sausages, Ma will generally say, ‘I see Nat has brought along his baby food again,’ meaning the sausage, I guess. So don’t think of these sausages as food for drunks, but as baby food if you want. And what’s good for a baby should give you no worry.”

  “I don’t know how I could have made this trip without your tremendous help and wise advice, as well as your humorous stories to help keep my spirits up,” I said, “but I would have liked to try. Even at the risk of loneliness and failure.”

  “Ha,” Jack said, “I was wrong. Those sausages are clearly all caught sideways in your gut already. We better move on down the creek toward some civilization in case a doctor should be needed.”

  “I would just like to move on down the creek and get back to looking for your father’s skiff,” I said, “which is why we are here and not for a picnic, in case you have forgot.” Then Jack took the two empty bean cans and heaved them off into the woods behind us. “Hey,” I said, “you are littering up the woods.”

  “With two empty cans of beans?” Jack said. “I never knowed you was so neat. Anyhow they will have disappeared into rust long before they will be seen by another human eye. As you may have noticed, we have not so much as seen another soul so far today.”

  That was true, and I had noticed it all right. So I said nothing and watched Jack dump the last of the juices out of the sausage jar and then hang it from a small branch of the oak tree. “Well,” I said, “I suppose you are waiting for me to ask why you have done that. So it can be seen from the creek? As a sign to the passers-by that other humans have been here? Or just to catch some acorns when they fall?”

  “Just to liven things up a bit,” Jack said, “for the jays. They is the most inquisitive bird in the world.”

  I had asked a silly question and got a silly answer, even if true, so we cleaned up the rest of our mess, which amounted to brushing the cracker crumbs off our clothes and washing our forks at the creek, and then we shoved off and started down the creek again, with me rowing, and Jack telling me a long story about how once his mother had put a sewing thimble on their gate post on her way over to see my Aunt Vera about something, while he had sat on the porch and pretty soon noticed a jay hopping around in the branches of the little dogwood next to the gate and looking down at the thimble and talking away to himself about it and then calling up other jays until finally the dogwood was bent down under the weight of blue jays, according to Jack, all hopping around and looking down at the thimble with first one eye and then the other and raising a racket among themselves, until finally one of them flew down and pecked at it and knocked it onto the ground and then another one flew down and picked it up and flew off toward the branch with it, with all the rest of the jays chasing after it, raising a racket until they were out of sight. Then his mother came back and looked around on the gate post for her thimble and down around on the ground, until finally Jack felt he had to tell her what had happened, knowing she wouldn’t believe him. But to his surprise she had not the slightest doubt but that he had told her the truth. “What Ma said,” Jack said, finishing it up, “was that I could not have made up such a clever lie and at th
e same time been so right about the nature of jays, which are as inquisitive as cats when it comes to something new, and not half so fearful of it.”

  I had only half listened, being busy rowing and keeping my eye out for the skiff, but I could see where Jack had not been altogether joking when he left that sausage jar hanging there from a limb. He had actually done it for the jays, even if he would never get to see if it had aroused their curiosity or not. It still seemed to me a pretty silly thing to do, but on the other hand, I figured that it had actually done no harm, while to Jack, he had got a kick out of it. It is not every day that you will find a kid who will take the trouble to kid some birds, and have the sense to know how to do it, and not even have to stay around to see if it works or not. So I saw no reason to knock it. Jack is sometimes a pest, but his way of seeing things is at least his own and sometimes not as dumb as it seems.

  We had stayed in the shade at the clearing longer than we should have done, according to Jack, and would have to keep moving along steady if we wanted to reach a place to camp for the night before dark. The place he knew of, he said, was at a sharp bend where the creek had undercut the bank at a clearing years ago, and tumbled it into the water, and now there was a nice sandy beach there and bream beds, with some marsh grass across from it where the green trout liked to feed. “Bream for supper, if we get there in time,” he said, “and with any kind of luck, green trout for breakfast.” There would also be two small blackgum trees down by the creek, side by side, with a red-oak sapling already running from the lowest branch of one tree to the lowest branch of the other, unless whoever had put it there the year before had since come and taken it down. All we would have to do was throw our tarp over the sapling and we would be camping in style, with plenty of firewood right at our backs. Jack made it sound good, and I rowed right along.

  The creek was slowly getting wider, but we could still see both shores clearly enough if I stayed out in the middle, which was not always the easiest thing to manage, as even if the creek was getting wider it still wasn’t getting much straighter. And now there was no getting out of the sun for a minute. Without a breeze, the water was flat and like a mirror to the sky. And the quiet all around somehow didn’t help much, either; we could have been wandering along in a desert for all the sense of loneliness and heat we had around us. The only sound was Jack, if he said something, or just the slow, steady creak and then the slipping sound of oarlocks turning back and forth as I kept rowing. I looked at the water as little as I could, and tried to watch the shores along either side, although the sun on a stretch of bright-green bushes bent out over the water could seem as shiny and as glittering with light as the water catching the sun when I lifted the oars at the end of a stroke. When I could, I tried to look back into the darkness of the woods, to rest my eyes from the glare, but the wider the creek became the more the woods on each side seemed like solid walls. Once, we passed a tall, dead tree sticking up all by itself in the middle of a marsh, with a bird Jack said was a kingfisher sitting at the top of it and never moving once in the long time it took us to go past, as though he was as dead for the time being as the tree itself, with even something in the way the feathers at the top of his head stuck out in back, as jagged as some of the dead limbs broken off the tree, making him look like he had sat there at the top of that tree and died along with it, struck by lightning, or just burned up, slower, by the sun. In the heat and stillness, even the fish seemed quiet, where during the morning you would every now and then hear the plop of a jumping fish or come around a bend and see the ripples still spreading out where one had jumped. But now, it seemed, we were all that was making a sound or a change in the scenery at all.