“I will leave right now,” I said, “I won’t even bother with breakfast.” I could smell it cooking by this time, and it sure smelled good, but I figured the sooner I got away from the Byrds the sooner Jack’s father could come for him.
“There’s not that much of a hurry,” Jack said, “and anyhow, you may need all the strength you can get before you have made it back to The Landing by yourself.”
“I’ll take that chance,” I said. And Jack was still arguing about it when I went in to thank the Byrds and to say good-by, and they all argued with me, too, all except Brenda Sue, who just kept watching me, like she understood. So finally I lied and said I almost never ate any breakfast anyhow, and then I thanked them all once again, and went down to the pier, with Jack and Brenda Sue coming with me, Jack giving me directions all the while about how to find the point, the place where Mr. Byrd had seen the skiff. “You stay on the west bank, the way you have been doing, and along about midmorning you will find the creek is running almost due south, with most of the landings already left behind you, and just cypress swamp on either side. Then you just keep going straight until the next thing you see, straight ahead of you, will be Lucian’s Fishing Camp, a kind of big old shack with about a hundred plywood skiffs tied up in front of it. It looks like the creek just stops there, but naturally it don’t. It turns due west, and once you make that turn you are just about in the basin and practically at the point. You just keep going west, still keeping to the west bank, which actually will be to your north, and soon there will be nothing but marsh at your side, with the marsh grass thick and higher than your head. You keep watching it, to the north, and when you come to a break, the first one you come to, not much bigger than will let a boat through, you turn north there, and when you come out on the other side of the marsh grass, ahead of you, about half a mile away, you will see the point. There are woods behind it, but the point itself sticks out into the marsh and has three big live oaks growing on it.”
“Sounds simple enough,” I said. I was anxious to get going. I had not done without breakfast just so I could sit around and listen to Jack tell me how to get down to the end of a creek. “I’ll follow the creek to the basin, and in the basin I will look, to the north, for the point.” And then I looked at Jack, who would know I was lying, and then to Brenda Sue, where I was telling the truth. “With luck,” I said, “I will see you both this evening, pulling Mr. Haywood’s cypress skiff behind me.” Then I jumped down in the boat and started getting ready to leave.
But then Mr. Byrd came walking down the path from the house, and Brenda Sue said, “Wait,” so I waited, watching Mr. Byrd taking his time and looking off down the creek as he came, until finally he got to the pier and came on out to the end.
“Rodney,” he said, “the missis is worried that this wind will hold you back rowing, and I have this little three-horse motor you are welcome to use, and gas, if you think it will help you any. It would probably beat rowing, anyhow. You could take it back up to The Landing with you, you and Jack, and leave it with Mr. Matthews, and that way it would speed things up some in getting Jack to a doctor to see about that wrist of his.”
I looked at Jack and he looked at me, and when I glanced at Brenda Sue she was looking down at the planks in the pier. We were tangled in our lie, and I believed she knew it. And for a minute I couldn’t think of what to say, and Jack couldn’t either, and then Brenda Sue said, “It’s hardly a thing worth the offering, Pa.”
He nodded. “It’s not much,” he said, agreeing with her, “but it might be of help.”
I felt like the worst sort of phony, and even Jack had his head hung down when I looked at him. I knew it was up to me to get us out of the mess somehow. Nice as the Byrds had been to us both, I was not going to go ahead and use his motor just to save myself some rowing, knowing that the question of Jack’s wrist would be taken care of sooner than he knew. “Mr. Byrd,” I said, “I am sure it is a fine motor, but it would not be fair of me to use it. You may not believe this, but I am somehow the sort of person that just naturally has bad luck with things not my own. As last summer I burned down my uncle’s barn by mistake, and this summer, already, I have lost Mr. Haywood’s skiff, the first time I ever used it. I just could not take the risk with your motor. Thank you all the same, but it would be wrong if I did it. You can ask Jack; I am just no good with things I’m not used to, and I have never used an outboard motor in my life.”
It was quite a little argument I had made, but it sounded truer than I had thought it would. I could see that Mr. Byrd was giving it some thought. “I hate to say it,” Jack said, “but as long as Rodney has said it first, it is every word the truth. Through no fault of his own, in a case such as this, he is hardly to be trusted.”
Seemed to me that this was going a little too far; made me sound like some kind of a nut. But I sat there, feeling the wind blow my hair around, all ready to go, smiling up at Mr. Byrd as though I had never heard of truer words being spoken. Finally Mr. Byrd shook his head. “Well,” he said, “I would take the risk, but I would not have you feel beholden. I’ll explain it to the missis as best I can.” Then he shook his head again. “I most certainly hope you find that skiff,” he said, and then he turned and started back up the path to his house.
Then there was just the three of us, quiet for a bit, and then Jack said, “If you find it or not, Rodney, no one can say you haven’t tried.” Then he surprised me. He turned to Brenda Sue, and like I might have been someplace else, he said, “You might not believe it, but Rodney there is a good old boy,” and then without saying good-by to me or anything else, he turned and walked off the pier and on up toward the house.
Which left just Brenda Sue and me, neither of us knowing much what to say. “Well,” I said, “I better get going, if I am going to find that skiff and get back here before dark,” and I untied the rope and started drifting off.
“Rodney,” Brenda Sue said, “there is no need for you to fight that wind too much. I will see you before dark, no matter what.”
I was not at all sure what she meant by that, sounding so certain about it. I was still drifting, with the wind starting to blow me up the creek, the wrong way. “You will?” I said to her, shouting a little over the wind.
She nodded her head yes, and laughed, her hair blowing in the wind and the sound of her laughing being blown out to me. “Yes,” she said, calling out so that I could hear her plain, her voice sounding happy and excited, it seemed, “I have got Pa’s motor that you left me.”
And then I started rowing and she stood there smiling and waving in the wind, until all I could see was the shape of her, a kind of darkness, standing there, growing smaller, shining in the sun and kind of shimmering in the wind, the way it is in the movies sometimes when what they mean to show you is something in a dream. Only I knew it was real.
I was surprised at how quick Byrd’s landing faded away back down the river and was lost from sight, strong as the wind was at my back, and as slow as it seemed to me I was rowing. Then I was alone on the creek, with not another boat or a landing anywhere in sight, with the wind a kind of steady racket in my ears, and the water blown into a million little pointed waves, all sparkling in the sun, and with the boat going slow against the wind but kind of light and bouncing, even so. And for a while I didn’t even think much about where it was I was going, or why. I just rowed, knowing I was alone, for sure, and with a long way to go, yet feeling a kind of excitement, just to be there rowing along alone in the wind, with the sunlight on the waves half blinding me, feeling strong and being satisfied with that, just glad to be alive, I guess, and not feeling worried or lonely at all. And I stayed surprised at how I moved right along, more than equal to the wind. For a while, now and then I would even discover I was on the point of saying something out loud, some little thing I had noticed or thought about, like the strange stiffness of a dead cypress along the near shore, like a skeleton, with all around it the live green trees, bending in the wind, or even thinking stran
gely to myself about a thing my science teacher had said once, meaning nothing to me then, that high above the earth there are no winds, and thinking now, surprising myself at the thought, well, then, that is not the place where heaven is, and almost thinking it out loud, as though I was somehow not really alone at that. And while I have never thought about such things, I thought about it for a time, about being alone, and all the other things you see that may seem to be alone, too, but you have seen them, and so maybe in some way you are being seen as well. It sure seemed that way, at least. Or else why was I half the time about to talk out loud? Or if that seems crazy, then why didn’t it feel crazy? Because it didn’t. It hardly seemed a bad mistake.
I thought about it, and finally I thought, well, if a bird lets out a call, what does he really know about where it gets heard? And why should a man think he is so much different? So just for the hell of it, I stopped and coasted a bit and let the wind swing the boat around while I took a deep breath and let out a crazy, wild kind of yell, high up and loud, a kind of sound I could not remember ever having heard or made before. And I don’t know why this should have pleased me, but it did, like I had finally hollered hello to the whole crazy world, or to whatever there was in it that might have heard me at least.
And then I went back to rowing, and, thinking about it, it didn’t strike me as being altogether the most foolish thing I had done yet in my life, at that. To be honest, it half seemed to me that whatever it was I had hollered, it had been the first true thing I had ever said on my own.
Rowing along, it finally started fading in my mind, and I could see that it probably wasn’t just something about being alone on the creek in the wind that had somehow got to me in this unusual way, but a more usual thing with me, too, which is to say, girls, or in this case a girl, in particular, Brenda Sue Byrd. Babe Honey Byrd. It would have made sense, it seemed to me, if I had let out a holler just about such a name alone. Plus the fact of the girl. But that was not the whole of it, either. It was the whole situation. And a wind, while it will always come to be an aggravation in time, sometimes, in a good strong wind, I will get caught by it, so to speak. There will be an excitement to it. It had happened before. Only this time, it hadn’t caught me quite so much by surprise—barn burner, skiff loser, daydreaming girl watcher, all of it—it had caught me, for all of that, ready to look around at everything real, maybe not from as high as heaven or like Superman, but like a man in the wind, up high, anyhow, and looking around like a man at the world, more excited than afraid.
But then it pretty well faded, and I got back to thinking about the skiff I was looking for, and about Brenda Sue, and just what she might have meant about having her father’s motor that I had left her and seeing me before dark, even though I had already said I would make it back to their landing by that time on my own. Whatever it was that she was so certain about was something I could only wonder on, and in time I pretty much gave up on it, as the wind, instead of helping ease the heat, seemed only to increase it, like a million gnats swarming around and being a nuisance, while I rowed along and the wind couldn’t even manage to dry my sweat, but only hold me back and make me work that much harder.
Up ahead then, I saw some landings and houses coming into view, and I went back to thinking about Mr. Haywood’s skiff that I was looking for, and I got hopeful about it again, believing that this time, alone, I might finally find it. I remembered the awful feeling that day when I had come back out of the woods and down to the creek and found the skiff gone, the way I could see it so clear in my mind, standing there looking around and not seeing it anywhere in sight; and now I saw it that clear again, smooth and clean-looking, plain bare wood, dark and solid, and perfect, except for the one small piece broken out of one end. The nicest little skiff I had ever seen. And I had been the one to lose it; and now, if anyone was going to find it, it was also going to be me. I was sorry—I really was—that Jack had been acting foolish and got his wrist broken, and I was glad he waited, much as it must have hurt him, and let me come looking for the skiff alone. But this was the way I had wanted it all along, and for once, the way it happened, even though it had been me that had given the boat the actual shove that broke Jack’s wrist, I just couldn’t keep telling myself that it was all my fault. It wasn’t, and I knew it.
So I swung in closer to the shore, noticing that most of the landings were strung out ahead along the west bank, while way over on the east bank, as well as I could make out against the distance and the sun, there was nothing but a couple of houseboats tied up to the shore. Then I started coming up to the piers, and I slowed down and one by one looked over all the different kinds of boats that were tied up to the different piers, big ones and little ones, new and old, all different sizes and shapes and colors and all bobbing about in the wind and the waves and straining at their ropes like they were all half alive and wanted nothing so much as to break loose and drift off and get lost. But as many as they were and as different as they were, when I finally got on down a long straight stretch of creek and then halfway around a long slow bend and came at last to the end of the landings and piers and boats, I had not yet seen a single skiff that even looked like the one I had lost.
I guess I really hadn’t expected to. For some reason, I finally was almost sure I would not ever find it tied to some ordinary pier, but in a place off by itself, about as far away as it could get from the place where I lost it, such as down at the end of the creek, at the point in the basin, where Mr. Byrd had seen it, or one just like it at least. It surprised me, but I couldn’t say I was even disappointed. Having come this far down the creek, it just wouldn’t have seemed right not to keep going on down to the end; and now I not only had the same old reason still to keep going, but it had more or less boiled down to being my last real chance as well. Find the skiff or not find it, win or lose, for this one time there was just this one last thing left for me to do, and I would know at least that I had actually done all that I could have done. It was a good feeling. It was what I had promised I would do.
Then far up ahead I noticed an empty clearing, just a green spot opening up between the trees along the bank, where the bank kind of jutted out, with not even a pier coming out from it, or a boat tied up to a tree or pulled up on the shore, and I made for it, remembering that I had not stopped to eat breakfast yet, with half the morning already gone. When I got there I saw that it was a bigger clearing than it had looked like from a distance, but just as bare and empty as I had thought it was, with no sign of use about it at all, not even any old beer cans thrown about, the way I had been noticing them now and then thrown up in the bushes and along the shore since I had left Byrd’s landing. It seemed a good place to stop for a while, and I pulled the boat up a ways on the shore and tied it to a stump, the only one that was there, and got a can of pears and some crackers and a jar of Polish sausage and went to the back of the clearing, where there was a kind of a bank with some trees growing at the top of it that cut off some of the wind and gave some shade.
The food didn’t taste at all like the smell of the breakfast Mrs. Byrd had been cooking when I had left, but it was food and I was used to it by this time, and I was hungry, so I ate and was done with it fairly quick. Then I just sat there for a time, resting, and looking around me and out at the river. I could see that the place where I was sitting was one of the highest bits of ground along the western bank, the highest since I had left the Byrds’; and I figured that at one time it had been even higher and had stuck out farther into the creek, because I could see how the creek had undercut the bank and spilled the top of it down into the water, making it only the third place of shallow water and a sandy bottom that I had come to on both the Little Star and the Big Star yet, with all the distance I had traveled. The way I was sitting, and the way the creek curved back the way I had come, it was like I was sitting somewhere out toward the middle of the creek, looking straight back up it, almost as if I was on some kind of an island. It was about as nice a clearing, with as clear and lo
ng a view of the creek, as I had found. I was surprised that Jack had not told me about it, especially as it seemed to just be there, unused and belonging to no one, and a perfect place, for whatever reason, to stop for a while.
Far out in the creek I watched some mullet jumping, three or four of them, swimming up the creek and sort of taking turns at jumping, it seemed, shooting up out of the shining water and flashing in the wind, like mirrors to the waves below, and then dropping down again almost without a splash, or without changing the way of the waves at all. I watched them until they had gone so far up the creek they seemed hardly more than little flecks of light when they jumped. And then coming down the creek I saw the small dark shape of a boat, in near the west bank, a motorboat with only one person in it, with the boat so far away that I couldn’t hear the motor yet, but could only see it bouncing easy in the waves and moving along, with somebody small sitting in the back that I guessed was a girl. Then I could hear the faint sound of the motor, fading and rising in the wind, and then getting steadier and louder, and I could see the girl’s hair now and then whip about, a quick dark flash in the air, and somehow I knew it was Brenda Sue.
But I waited until she was close enough so that I was sure of it; and by that time she must have seen my boat, because she swung in closer toward the shore and I got up and stepped out into the sun and waved and ran down to the edge of the clearing and waited, seeing her wave back once, and then get closer, looking so small, somehow, in her father’s big boat, with the river stretched out so wide and windy behind her, while she sat there, with only her hair moving, being tugged around by the wind. Then she was close and she turned and cut the motor and then turned back and just sat there watching me, letting the boat drift on in, not paying any attention to it, and not smiling, almost as though she was uncertain about my being glad to see her so soon again. Then I caught the bow of the boat and pulled it up on the shore and fussed around getting it grounded good. And when I looked up, she was still sitting there on the back seat, and it gave me kind of a shock, the way she looked, so beautiful, her face so serious and her eyes so big, her hands folded in her lap, almost like a scared kid, it seemed. And then I noticed she was wearing tan-colored shorts and a blouse so much like the color of her skin that it startled me; and maybe I showed this somehow in my glance, because for a good while longer, even after I had said hello and something about how glad I was to see her again, she still just sat there, without having even smiled yet, as though it would make her half embarrassed just to stand up. I guess I must have stared.
The Lost Skiff Page 15