Trouble on the Tombigbee

by Ted M. Dunagan

  Once again we could hear their voices, but from above us now.

  “I don’t see nothing,” one of them said.

  “Yeah, must have been a big old fish or maybe a frog.” the other one said. Then to our great relief the first one said, “Yeah, let’s get on home. It’s late.”

  After we heard the sound of their feet retreating from the ferry and the sound of the truck’s doors slamming, we went back under water to get out from underneath the ferry, but didn’t get out of the water until the sound of their vehicle had faded away in the distance.

  As we sat in the moonlight on the ferry, soaking wet, Poudlum said, “We is in a mess now. Gonna have to walk through them dark woods with no light and wet as two drowned rats.”

  “We don’t have to walk back,” I told him.

  “How come?”

  “’Cause they is two boats right over there. We can just take our pick.”

  I could hear the mirth in Poudlum’s voice when he said, “Or we can take ’em both, one for our flashlight and one for our hush puppies.”

  “You lose them hush puppies?” I asked.

  “I turned ’em loose under the ferry. They wouldn’t be no good soaked in river water. Let’s get them boats in the water.”

  As we struggled to get the boats into the water Poudlum said, “You don’t think this be like stealing, does you?”

  “No,” I told him. “I think it’s more like survival. You heard what them two men said about us.”

  “About how they would make us tell who sent us? How we gonna tell something we don’t even know?”

  “Yeah, and they wouldn’t believe us when we told ’em that. No telling what they would do to us.”

  “Well, this will make three boats they done lost to us. ’Spect they might run outta boats fo’ long.”

  Once we had the two boats in the water we took a bailing bucket out of one and slung river water up on the bank to wash away our tracks, then we used the tethering rope and tied one behind the other. After that we climbed into the front one and started paddling.

  We were shivering in our wet clothes once we got out on the river, but there was nothing we could do except paddle harder.

  “I think it’ll be all right to build us a fire,” I told Poudlum. “It’ll probably be around one or two o’clock in the morning by the time we get back to our camp.”

  “A fire would feel mighty good right now,” Poudlum said.

  “What we gonna do with these boats after we get there?” I asked.

  I knew Poudlum was pondering on my question when he didn’t answer for a while, so I just let him think. Finally he said, “We could burn ’em and have ourselves a real fire.”

  After we stopped laughing I suggested we could just turn them loose and let them float on down the Tombigbee.

  “We could do that,” Poudlum said. “But some of the Klan might live down the river and recover ’em.”

  “What if we just chopped a hole in ’em and let ’em sink?”

  “I know how we could burn ’em and sink ’em both at the same time,” Poudlum said.

  “How in the world we gonna do that?”

  “We could load ’em both up with a bunch of fat lighter, set it on fire, then turn ’em loose on the river. That way they would probably go on down the river a ways before they sunk.”

  I thought about his idea for a while and decided I liked it. “That sounds good, Poudlum, but we need to do it tonight. After we get a fire going we can make us a torch and pick up some lighter in the woods.”

  The mouth of the Satilfa finally loomed up ahead of us and we paddled thankfully into it and arrived at our campsite. Once we tied the boats up it didn’t take us long to get a roaring fire going, then we retrieved our gear from where we had tied it to the tree limb and changed into dry clothes.

  It took us a while to load the two boats with lighter, but once we did we tossed a burning torch into each of them. After the fires got to burning good we removed their tethering ropes and turned the two burning boats around so their bows were pointed toward the river and gave them a shove in that direction.

  It was an eerie sight as we watched the current catch the boats as they slowly made their way out into the river.

  We stood on the bank watching in awe as the flames leaped higher. They looked like two ghostly fireballs before they disappeared around the bend, where we knew they would soon sizzle and sink into the river, never to be seen again.

  We settled down around our fire, grinning with satisfaction through our fatigue. After we had wrapped up in our blankets beside our fire I was almost asleep when I suddenly had an awful thought, sat up and said, “Poudlum, we got to move!”

  Poudlum sat up, blurry-eyed, and said, “Got to move where?”

  “Somewhere else. We got to move our campsite!”

  “How come?”

  “’Cause if they come up this creek and look real close they gonna see where we cut bushes down and used them to cover our boat.”

  “They ought to be just about out of boats. We done sunk three and one motor.”

  “They’ll get more. They’ll come with more boats with motors on them. We got to move!”

  “Where we gonna move to?”

  “I think we ought to move across the mouth of the creek and instead of cutting bushes to cover our boat, we ought to drag it up in the woods so our camp will be concealed completely.”

  “I thought we was gonna paddle down the river to Jackson.”

  “We will, but I think we ought to travel at night and sleep during the day tomorrow.”

  “That’s a good idea. So far we been able to outthink ’em and outrun ’em, but they might be out here thick as moss on this river tomorrow. Let’s get up and do it right now!”

  The move was no fun because it was approaching the wee hours and we were tired from all the running and paddling we had done, but we made us another torch and loaded everything in the boat before we put our fire out. Rather than attempting to hide the fact we had camped there, we just left the tracks of where we had dragged the boat down to the water.

  Our thinking was that if we left an obvious campsite they wouldn’t ever consider the fact that we were just across the water, but rather that we had lit out somewhere.

  Poudlum held the torch while I paddled. When we got to the bank on the other side we saw that the underbrush was much thicker there, which was good.

  We got out of the boat and transferred our stuff a little deeper into the woods than we had on the other side. We found a little clearing and hacked it clean with our ax, then we took our newly found ropes and used them to drag our boat through the thick foliage all the way to our camp, then we started ourselves a new fire.

  It must have been three or four o’clock in the morning by the time we got ourselves settled and ready to finally get some sleep. But just before we rolled ourselves into our blankets Poudlum said, “I smell rain coming.”

  I had learned to pay heed to Poudlum’s instincts so I said, “We better make us a tent with our tarp, then. We don’t want to wake up wet.”

  As weary as we were, once again we put forth the effort to flip the boat upside down with all our gear and supplies underneath it. Then we cut a long straight sapling, trimmed it, and placed each end of it on the low limbs of two trees, after which we draped our canvas tarp over it and used pieces of our ropes from the Klan boats to secure the edges to stakes we had cut and driven into the ground.

  “That’s a mighty fine-looking tent,” Poudlum said as he stood back and observed it in the moonlight. “But we better gather some wood and put it inside. Be hard to start a fire in the morning with wet wood.”

  “It’s already just about morning,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I can feel that in my bones,” he said.

  As exhausted as we were, we made that one last effor
t before we finally rolled up in our blankets again, this time under our tent.

  “What time you think we ought to get up?” Poudlum asked.

  “How about we just get up sometime after we wake up?” I answered.

  “That sounds mighty fine to me,” Poudlum said as he snuggled deeper into his blanket.

  I did the same and it seemed like I was asleep before I even closed my eyes.

  I had no idea what time it was when the pitter-patter of raindrops on our tent woke me up. I could tell it was daylight, but I had no idea how long it had been that way.

  Poudlum was still sleeping when I crept outside to ponder our situation. It wasn’t raining hard yet, but the fog was so thick it seemed like I could cut it with my knife.

  I felt my way through the thick foliage down to the creek bank and almost fell into it because the fog was so dense you couldn’t hardly see the edge of the water. I went back and dug our food sack out from underneath our boat and when I got back to the tent Poudlum was sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

  “What time of day you think it is?” he asked.

  “I ain’t sure, probably late morning and way past breakfast time,” I told him as I began digging around in the sack.

  It wasn’t cold, but there was a slight chill in the air, so we started a small fire before we breakfasted on canned sardines, canned beans, and saltine crackers.

  “These little salty fishes is tasty,” Poudlum said. “But they ain’t catfish. I think I’ll catch us some after we finish eating.”

  “What you gonna use for bait?”

  “I’ll find a rotten tree and dig out some grub worms.”

  “It’s so foggy you can’t half see, so I guess it’ll be all right ’cause won’t nobody be out in this weather.”

  “Good,” Poudlum said as he wiped his mouth. “I’ll go set out a line or two.”

  “How you gonna catch a fish with it raining?” I asked.

  “It ain’t raining underwater. The fish don’t know it’s raining,” he said as he headed toward the woods to look for bait.

  I went in the opposite direction to gather more firewood before it got real wet. By the time I got back to the tent with an armload of lighter knots Poudlum was back from the creekbank.

  “What did it look like out there?” I asked.

  “It look like Mother Nature giving us a break. That fog done covered us up with a blanket so thick can’t nobody find us. But I was also thinking they might be thinking that we thinking won’t nobody come looking fo’ us in this weather, so they might come anyway, ’cause of what we thinking.”

  It took me a few moments to unravel what Poudlum had said, but then I said, “We done prepared for that situation.”

  “Huh? How we done that?”

  “By moving over here to our new camp. Even if they are looking for us all they’ll find is the deserted camp across the mouth of the creek. If they find it they’ll think we left and they won’t know whether we went up the river or down it.”

  The rain got serious about that time and began to pepper our tent hard and steady. We were isolated from any wind because the surrounding forest protected us, and we had placed the tent on a small knoll so rainwater would flow away from us.

  I tossed a lighter knot on the fire and sparks flew up for a little while before it exploded into flames.

  “I like them lighter knots ’cause they hard as a rock and burn for a long time. What you reckon makes ’em burn like that?” Poudlum asked.

  “They got turpentine in them,” I told him.

  “Who told you that?”

  “My brother, Fred.”

  “Well then, I ’spect it be true if Fred said that.”

  “He said the turpentine concentrates in the pine tree’s stump, its heart and the knots, which is the bent elbow part where the limbs are attached to the trunk. He even said it could be ground up and used in dynamite.”

  “I wish we knowed how to do that, then we could light ’em and toss ’em into some Klan boats.”

  Poudlum caught a monster catfish later on and the two fillets dressed out to about a pound each. We didn’t have any fear about the smoke from our fire because of the rain and the fog.

  After we had eaten our fried catfish dinner Poudlum said it was the second best thing he had ever put in his mouth. When I asked what was the first he said it was the catfish we ate last night.

  Later on it got to be kind of boring just sitting in the tent and listening to the hard rain pounding on it.

  “We needs something to do,” Poudlum said.

  “What you got in mind?” I asked.

  When he said it, as on some other occasions, I couldn’t believe what came out of Poudlum’s mouth.

  Chapter 9

  The Storm

  “I wants you to tell me everything you knows about the Klan,” Poudlum said.

  At first I was astounded by what he asked me, but then I considered his point of view, his wondering at the causes which made grown men chase boys up and down the river, so I resolved to do the best I could with my limited knowledge, but I still wasn’t in any hurry to get started.

  “I don’t know a lot, Poudlum, and I ain’t sure what I do know is what really happened, but what I do know come from my brother Fred and my Uncle Curvin.”

  “I ’spect it would be mostly right then,” Poudlum said.

  It was mighty cozy in our tent, being high and dry with a small fire, while the rain continued to pour from an overcast sky.

  “I like it in our tent,” Poudlum said. “It kind of makes you feel safe and secure like it did when we used to get in the hidey-hole way up the Satilfa under the Iron Bridge.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m sho’ glad Uncle Curvin thought to put this tarp in the boat.”

  “You think he ever gonna get back from over in Choctaw County?”

  “Not today he won’t. They won’t be nobody crossing the river in this weather. I figure wherever he is, he’ll stay there until it clears up.”

  “I thought we was gonna talk about the Klan?”

  “What you want to know?”

  “Nothing in particular, just start way back as far as you knows.”

  “From what I’ve been told it was started back during Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War ended.”

  “Seems funny they calls it the Civil War. From what I learned in school it was most uncivil.”

  “You got me there, Poudlum. Uncle Curvin don’t call it that, he calls it the War of Northern Aggression.”

  “Don’t matter what it was called. Let’s get back to the Klan.”

  “Okay, what I heard was that after the war it was a time of corruption and destruction of society, a time when folks had no protection by the law for their property or even their lives, and the Klan was organized to keep all that from happening.”

  “How come all that was happening, if it was?”

  “Because of the vengeful laws passed by the Congress, which made it unlawful for Southern white men to hold public office. Because of them laws all the public offices was filled by carpetbaggers from up north.”

  “What you been taught a carpetbagger is supposed to be?”

  “I think that was what people from up north, the ones who came south just to make a big profit, was called.”

  “So you saying the Klan came into being to protect decent folks after the war was over?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “That ain’t how Professor Jamison tells it. He says that after the Civil War some white folks in the South used the Klan to get power back in politics and keep control over the freed slaves. He says they threatened, beat, and even killed folks till they got what they wanted.”

  “Uncle Curvin said ain’t no need for the Klan nowadays.”

  “Then how come they come d
own in the Quarter and pester folks like they did last night?”

  “Nobody never give me the answer to that, Poudlum. But I ’spect it may just be bred into ’em or they just stuck in the past. It could also be they are afraid of change that’s coming, but to tell you the truth, I really don’t know.”

  “One thing we does know,” Poudlum said. “We knows they is chasing us ’cause they think we discovered who the Exalted Cyclops is. What they don’t know is we know who the Night Hawk is, too.”

  “You hit the nail on the head. They also think we was spying on ’em on behalf of somebody else, and ain’t nothing we can say or do gonna change their minds on that.”

  “So what we gonna do?” Poudlum asked.

  “We got to come up with a plan and stick to it.”

  We spent the remainder of the dreary day considering and reconsidering our options. What we finally decided was we would paddle on down to Jackson, but would take our time about it and travel at night as long as the weather permitted. Along the way we would seek out another good campsite where we could be concealed, and get in as much fishing as possible.

  Once we hooked up with Uncle Curvin we would get him to take us to see our lawyer.

  Poudlum and I did have a lawyer. He was Mr. Alfred Jackson, who had represented us and sprung us from Sheriff Elroy Crowe’s jail, and he had also invested our reward money for finding the money Jesse and Frank, the bank robbers, had hidden in the Cypress hole way up the Satilfa Creek from where we were now. He let it out for interest so me and Poudlum, along with my brother, would have money to go to college on.

  Actually it had been Uncle Curvin who had found the money, but he couldn’t have done it without our help, and he had given us credit for it.

  Mr. Jackson had told us to come see him if we had any troubles, that his door would always be open to us. He was an elderly lawyer who provided a lot of free legal service to poor folks, white and colored alike, so we admired him very much.

  “Mr. Jackson will know what we ought to do,” Poudlum said. “What time of day you think it’s getting to be?”