But she had fished in Louisiana bayous for years and knew that they were as treacherous as any territory on earth. The surface might be only six inches deep, so shallow one had to drag a pirogue over it, but there were drop-offs so sudden that an unwary person could sink down to the ooze ten feet below and quicksand that could drag one to a gritty death, the silence of the swamp shattered by dying screams and a final gurgle.
“Can’t walk out,” Dani decided, accepting the inevitable. Then a thought came to her, and she stepped away from the wall and turned to look at the cabin itself. “But maybe a boat—?”
She dreaded the idea of spending long hours doing nothing, and the thought of spending endless nights in the cabin oppressed her. “Robinson Crusoe did it,” she muttered—and then she remembered the way the famous castaway had fared. “But he never got off his island with it.”
But she was taken with the possibility, and for the next two hours, she went over every board in the cabin, as well as every item inside the single room. The walls of the cabin were made of thick cypress boards, one of the best materials for building flat-bottomed boats. They were old and dark with age, but with cypress, that didn’t matter.
“I can’t even drive a nail without hitting my thumb,” she muttered finally. She made a cup of coffee and drank it slowly, at first rejecting the idea of a boat and exploring other possibilities.
By ten o’clock the swamp was heating up, and she was weary of her efforts to figure a way out. Seeing circles appearing on the smooth surface of the water around the cabin, she searched for something to fish with. Finding some line and a few hooks, she rigged up a fishing line and baited the hook with a morsel of Vienna sausage—which she hoped the fish liked better than she did. On her first try, she caught a thumping half-pound perch, and in thirty minutes she had caught enough to feed herself for a week.
“I’m not going to starve to death, at least.” She waited until noon, then cleaned the first fish and heated corn oil in the black skillet, which had obviously been used for such things before. After covering the perch with cornmeal, she fried it whole in the oil. When it was golden brown, she put it on a plate, got a bottle of orange juice, and went back out on the deck. After pulling the back fin out carefully, she ate the firm, delicious flesh along the backbone. She ate slowly, savoring the meal, then tossed the cleaned skeleton over for the blue crabs and small perch to finish.
The orange juice was not cold, but it tasted good to her. She sipped it slowly, watching a flight of snow white egrets fly over in strict formation. A snake made a wide vee of a ripple across the lagoon, and as always she felt a weakness at the sight. She would sooner face a grizzly bear than a small cottonmouth!
After eating, she moved restlessly, pacing back and forth on the narrow deck, straining her eyes for any sign of life, and listening for the slightest sound of some sort of human activity. Nervous and irritable, she went inside. The cotton mattresses were none too clean, but she lay down on the bottom bunk, trying to ignore the rank odors. Her wrists pained her, and her head was so tender where she had been struck by Fontenot’s hard fist, that every time she shifted and it touched the pillow, sharp pains brought her wide awake.
Finally, after an hour of tossing restlessly on the mildewed pad, she gave it up and rose to go outside again. A cool breeze was beginning to whip the smooth, dark waters, forming fine patterns on the surface. She stood there, hesitating, then came to a sudden decision.
“Don’t go down with your bat on your shoulder—go down swinging,” she said aloud. “At least that’s what Babe Ruth used to say. He didn’t have to get out of a swamp like this, though—”
But she wheeled and began searching at once for tools to build a raft. There wasn’t much—only a large screwdriver, a hammer, several small wrenches, one large crescent wrench, a pair of pliers, and a few other rusty odds and ends. She stared at the collection with dismay, but she set her teeth, saying, “It’s more than Edmund Dantes had, and he burrowed his way through about a hundred yards of solid dirt!”
Using the screwdriver, she pried off some of the boards, choosing those that were not too solidly nailed. Most of them came off with a screech as the nails pulled loose. She pounded the nails on the sharp ends until they stuck out of the boards. She had no idea how to build a raft, but decided to nail short boards across the longer ones. But she had no way to cut the long boards she’d pulled off. Her eye fell on the window, and she went at once to remove the short boards that framed it. Some of them were firmly nailed, and she skinned the knuckles on both hands getting them off.
Finally she had enough to satisfy herself, and she began to assemble her raft. Laying three of the short boards down, she carefully put the longer pieces on top, forming a rectangle eight feet long and about three feet wide. It was a job to pull out the rusty nails, but with the pliers, she got enough to nail the long pieces down. She discovered the nails were so long that she’d nailed the whole thing to the deck.
“Oh—blast!” she exploded. Looking around, she saw that the sun was lower in the sky, and she knew that she had to hurry. Using the screwdriver, she managed to loosen one corner of the raft, and then by inserting the stubby broom under it, she was able to get it free. She pried one end and lifted it. Then walking it on the narrow end, she let it fall into the water below.
Staring down at her creation, she nodded with satisfaction. “It floats, anyway!” But when she went down the ladder and stepped on the raft, she was dismayed to discover that it sank alarmingly under her weight. She discovered that it would hold her up, but her weight pushed it so far down in the water that there was no way she could control it.
She climbed up the ladder and began searching for something to get the flat raft to ride higher in the water. Again and again she looked, until she’d exhausted the possibilities.
Her spirit sank as she slumped down on the blue milk carton. She dropped her head, bitterly disappointed. Have to stay here until he comes back—and he won’t do that until Eddie Prejean is dead.
She picked up the large crescent wrench, staring at it. Then she thought suddenly, The stovepipe!
At once she ran inside and stared at the wood stove, then at the pipe. It was at least five inches in diameter, and when she moved to touch it, it remained firm, instead of crumbling as an old tin pipe would have done.
“Stainless steel!” Dani cried in astonishment. She’d helped her father install a woodburning stove, and she saw that this one was made out of the same material.
Quickly she studied the joints, her gaze going upward where the ceiling rose at a steep pitch. “Each joint is four feet, and there are four joints,” she calculated. “That means two pontoons eight feet long—Hallelujah!”
She began taking down the pipe at once, sending black clouds of old soot in such a thick cloud that she had a coughing fit.
She hauled the pipe outside, then stared at the open ends. Got to seal those ends and make the joints watertight!
She did it at last, but she discovered that a number two can of tomatoes was just a fraction of an inch smaller in diameter than the ends of the stovepipe. She opened four cans, stuffed one in each end, and considered the result. “Still not tight enough,” she muttered. “And the joints in the middle have to be sealed.”
She solved it by discovering an old inner tube and a roll of rusty wire. Cutting off a portion of the inner tube, she held it over the end of one of the makeshift pontoons and wired it tightly. Just to be certain, she put two pieces of wire about six inches apart, then twisted them tight with the pliers. When she had made a similar seal for the joint where the two pieces were joined, she hauled the raft back onto the deck—which was almost beyond her strength.
Fortunately, there was plenty of wire, and after using some of the shorter pieces of wood on the raft to form a sort of cradle for the pontoons, she put the stovepipes in place and wired them firmly. Just to be certain, she put the rest of the wire around the whole raft, and tightened it well. Then she pushed her h
andiwork to the edge of the deck and shoved it off. It hit the water, sank as it nosed down, then popped back and floated neatly on the pontoons.
“Praise the Lord, I’ve got me an ark!” Dani shouted for joy.
Then she glanced at the sky, and saw that the sun was far down in the west. For a moment she stood there, thinking it might be best to wait until morning. But she didn’t want to waste time, so she scurried around, throwing food and several bottles of water she’d boiled into a sack. She put them on the raft, then remembered she had no paddle—but she knew of something better.
Going to the back of the cabin, she used the pliers and the screwdriver to remove a long, slender pole someone had used for an antenna of some sort. It was at least twelve feet long—just right for poling a raft through the shallow waters of the swamp, much better than a paddle!
She tossed the pole down, then quickly tried to think what else she might find helpful. A thought came to her, and she went inside and grabbed up two of the yellowing sheets and the two old blankets. She looked around but felt the pressure of time.
Going to the ladder, she climbed down, tossing the coverings on the top of her craft beside the food and water bag. Carefully, she stepped onto the barge. It dipped alarmingly, but she was expecting that. Picking up the pole, she leaped to the center and was relieved to discover that the small barge held her easily.
Carefully she lifted the pole until most of its length was in the air, then lowered the end until it touched bottom. She’d poled flat-bottomed boats before, once even entering a pirogue race. It was a matter of balance, mostly. As she pushed on the pole, throwing her weight against it, the raft moved steadily forward. She quickly discovered that the blunt end of the raft dug into the water, slowing her progress, but when she moved slightly back, this lifted the end.
By the time she had reached the opening, she’d mastered the art. Giving one last look at the cabin, she steered the craft through and entered the world of thick trees. It frightened her somewhat, for at least in the cabin there was shelter and some sort of security. She’d heard of many who’d gotten lost in the bayous of the Atchafalaya Swamp—and were never found.
The temptation came to turn about, to do nothing but wait—but such waiting was not in her character. She shoved the pole and sent the small craft between two huge cypress trees that had been old when her grandfather had made his charge up the Little Round Top along with Pickett.
When she’d gone fifty yards, she paused and dropped her pole across the boat. Stooping, she picked up one of the sheets and tore it into ribbons. Then she tore some of the strips into short pieces about two feet long. One of these she tied to an overhanging branch, then she stuck the rest into her belt. Picking up the pole, she sent the barge deeper into the swamp, stopping when she could barely see the white strip and tying another.
“At least I can find my way back if I have to,” she nodded as she drove her small craft deeper and deeper into the murky depths of the swamp.
For an hour she poled steadily forward, careful to tie strips to mark her way. Her arms grew tired, and she stopped from time to time to rest them, taking small sips of water from one of the bottles. She kept the sun in position, so that no matter how she had to steer around islands or impenetrable stands of cypress, she always came back to the same direction. She’d been unconscious for most of the trip into the swamp, but she knew that by heading north, she’d eventually have to strike either a road or a stream that flowed into the river itself—and that would mean safety.
What she didn’t figure on was her own weakness. By the time darkness was no more than an hour away, she was trembling with weakness and had a splitting headache. Her eyes blurred, so bad was the pain that came to her temples, and finally she had to admit defeat.
“Got to tie up someplace—” she muttered and began to search for some sort of small island. But to her dismay, she discovered that she was in a part of the bayou where the waters were deep, and no land could be found.
Wearily, she pulled close to a giant cypress knee and tossed the loop of the rope around it, snugging the raft up as tightly as she could. She put the pole down carefully, then lay down and gasped for breath. By the time she had rested enough to sit up, darkness was almost palpable. She could see no more than shadows of the huge trees around her.
Saying a word of thanks that she’d thought to throw some of the candles into the food sack, she lit one of them, but almost at once, the hum of mosquitoes came to her ears. She used the light to dig a can of Vienna sausages out of the bag, along with a can of pickled peaches. She opened them and ate, letting the juice from the peaches dribble down her chin. She drank some water, thinking how wonderful a cup of coffee would be.
The mosquitoes were feasting on her, so she made a pad of the blankets and draped the sheet over herself to keep the pests off.
The little raft bobbed with each movement she made, and soon the sounds of the world she’d invaded began to come to her. Some were high-pitched and shrill, but some were hoarse and deep. From time to time, something would break the surface of the water. Once, something large surfaced nearby, making such a splash that it rocked Dani’s small craft.
There were panthers in the swamp, she knew, and bears, too. Not grizzlies, of course, but the black bears could be dangerous at times.
And she was very much aware that her small raft lifted her only a few inches above the surface of the water.
A cottonmouth could slither right on top of me!
The very thought of such a thing made Dani’s skin crawl. She tried to avoid the thought, and almost at once, she heard the hoarse grunting of a bull gator not far away. Ordinarily she was not afraid of alligators, for they were, for the most part, harmless to man.
But gators ate anything, and with one huge bull like the one that kept bellowing, who could tell what would happen if he found a tender morsel right on his level!
Time ran on, very slowly. There was no way she could sleep—not with that gator getting closer, or so it seemed to Dani, every moment!
Fear came, and Dani wished for a Bible and a light to read it by. Always that was her resource in times of trouble, but now she did what she could—which was to search her memory for favorite verses. And she knew a great deal of the Scripture by heart. She’d attended a Basic Youth Seminar when she’d first become a Christian, and the one thing that the speaker had impressed her with was the importance of memorizing Scripture. She had thrown herself into a program, and with her fine memory, she had stored entire chapters in her mind.
In her more recent past, she’d discovered that it was not the amount of Scripture, so much as the act of meditating on it, that was fruitful. She’d formed the habit of taking one small section, sometimes only a single verse, and thinking about it off and on as she went about her work or lay on her bed at night.
For half an hour she lay with her eyes half closed, whispering different verses—most of them simple praises from the Psalms, her favorite Old Testament book. They were filled with poetry in which desperate men poured out their needs before God—frantically, at times. Others were majestic and poetic statements made as men stood in awe of the God they served.
A calm came over Dani as she sat there whispering the ancient words. Finally, one psalm came into her mind with a vivid clarity, so sharply that she could visualize the words as they appeared on the well-worn page of her Bible. It was the third psalm, and she spoke aloud the heading: “A psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.”
Her mind went back to the tragic history of King David, the sweet singer of Israel, the man the Scripture eulogized as “a man after God’s own heart.”
She had often wondered why David should have been God’s special favorite, for he had fallen into gross sins—adultery and murder. After thinking of it for a long time, she had decided that God loved David because David loved God! With all his faults, nothing in the literature of the Bible was more poignant than David’s songs in which he poured out his love for Jehov
ah!
Dani thought of how the third psalm had come to be written. It was composed by David at a time when his favorite son, Absalom, had risen up to lead a civil war against him. Absalom, handsome and wise in the ways of politics, had won the hearts of the men of Israel, and David, with a small band of faithful followers, had fled the palace to save their lives.
Dani thought of that, then quoted the first verse of the psalm: “Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! Many are they that rise up against me! Many there be which say of my soul, there is no help for him in God.”
The words seemed to find a special lodging in Dani’s spirit. As she sat there thinking of the hopelessness of her condition, she wanted to say, “That’s exactly the way I feel, Lord!”
She thought of the trackless swamp and the unlikelihood of finding her way out. She thought it more likely that Fontenot might decide that it would be too dangerous to let her live. Fontenot, she knew, had such a simple mind, that if such a thing came to him, he would have no hesitation about carrying the thought through to a bloody finish. Easy enough for him to hide her body in this place!
She shivered slightly at the thought and quickly recited the next two verses: “But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory and the lifter up of mine head. I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill.”
Dani whispered those verses over, time and again, making a prayer out of them. They sounded feeble, the words in her whispered tones, and were lost among the sounds of the swamp.
Fear came to her, crawling along her nerves. It grew worse, and finally she began to weep. “Oh, God, help me!” she whispered.
And then she remembered verse five of the psalm she’d been thinking of:
I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.
Dani lay there trembling and fighting back the tears, but she thought of David, too. Surrounded by his enemies, with death at his elbow—yet, he lay down and slept!
Race with Death Page 21