Trouble on the Tombigbee

by Ted M. Dunagan

  “I don’t rightly know,” I told him. “Hard to tell without being able to see the sun, but I think it’s getting on close to dark. What you think?”

  “My belly is telling me it’s about suppertime.”

  We inventoried our food supply and found we had a big hunk of cheese left, several slim boxes of crackers, four flat cans of sardines, three cans of beans, and a half-dozen cans of sausage. That’s what we dined on that night, the sausage with crackers and cheese, while the rain continued to pour down in torrents.

  We retreated to the center of our tent to escape the dampness and threw a couple of lighter knots on the fire. Just before we drifted off to sleep Poudlum said, “This rain keep up like this, the river gonna be swelled up like a dead possum.”

  It continued to rain hard all night and when morning came it was still overcast and drizzling.

  Poudlum got our breakfast off one of the lines he had set out while I stoked up our fire.

  While we were munching on the sweet fish fillets Poudlum said, “Look like this weather done set in. If the sun don’t come out soon we gonna get all mildewed and moldy.”

  We smoothed off a place on the ground and played mumblety-peg until we tired of it. After that we sat around and told a few stories until we became weary of that, too.

  About when we thought it ought to be noon, the rain stopped and a sliver of sunlight peeked through the dark clouds.

  “Look at that,” Poudlum said as we peered out the end of the tent at the sun rays filtering through the trees. “Now that’s more like it. It ought to clear up good by nighttime and we can head on down the river.”

  Within an hour there was bright sun flooding down on us from a clear blue sky. We flipped the boat right side up and hung our damp stuff on tree branches to dry. After it dried we packed it all up inside the boat and were prepared to light out down the river as soon as the moon came up.

  We also cut the long, slim lighter-hearts out of some dead pine trees and loaded us up a half-dozen six-foot-long poles to use as torches if we needed them. We were all ready to depart, but the trouble was, we had several hours before we could.

  After we folded up our tarp we placed it next to the trunk of a big tree and sat down on it so we wouldn’t get the seats of our pants wet.

  As we were sitting there leaning back against the tree trunk Poudlum said, “I purely do despise to have to sit here with nothing to do—nothing to occupy our minds.”

  “Why don’t we just sit and talk about whatever crosses our mind?” I asked

  “That’s fine by me. What you want to talk about?” Poudlum responded.

  “I don’t know. Oh, yeah, I read where you got a new principal at your school, that he had been one of them colored pilots in the war, the ones that went to school up at Tuskegee.”

  “Uh, huh, that would be Professor Jamison,” Poudlum said with a good amount of pride in his tone of voice.

  “Does he ever talk about the war?”

  “He does sometimes, but nothing about shooting and fighting.”

  “Well, what does he talk about then?”

  “He talks a lot about what it was like over in Europe and up north, about how it was different from down here in the South.”

  “How did he say it was different?”

  “For one thing, me and you would be going to school together, and they don’t treat colored folks like they all one big ignorant lot.”

  “What else does he teach y’all?”

  “That things are gonna change ‘round here and we got to do a lot of hard work to get ready for it and make the best of it.”

  “Colored folks already do a lot of hard work.”

  “Uh-huh, they do, but the professor is teaching us to work hard with our minds, and to act proper as well as speak proper.” Our talk kept us occupied until we saw the moon come slipping up over the treetops. We got up and walked to the boat, which was closer to the water, then we stopped dead in our tracks when we heard the sound. It was a swishing and hissing noise, approaching a small roaring sound.

  Poudlum said, “What you think that noise is?”

  “I think it’s the sound of the creek,” I told him.

  “The creek is rising from all that rain!”

  We slipped through the bushes and found the creek had risen several feet and was a raging torrent before us.

  “What you think?” I asked Poudlum as we gazed at it.

  “Might be all right after we get out on the river, but the creek is flowing mighty swiftly.”

  Neither of us wanted to spend another night where we were because if we did we would have to stay put all day tomorrow before we could start traveling on down to Jackson tomorrow night. We were anxious to get on down that way and hook up with my uncle and get away from the Klan, so we agreed to give it a try.

  After we had dragged the boat to the water’s edge Poudlum said, “We got to be real careful ’cause that water is moving faster than a cat with his tail on fire!”

  We eased the nose of the boat into the water and could feel the tug of the rushing water, then we got behind it, planted our feet on the solid ground, gave a mighty shove, and leapt aboard.

  The powerful surge of the water caught us immediately and turned the boat sideways and water was lapping up over the right side and into the boat. We grabbed our paddles and righted the boat a moment before it capsized.

  “Hold her straight!” I yelled at Poudlum as we fought the water with our paddles.

  The swiftness of the current shocked me, but I thought it would ease when we exited the mouth of the creek out into the river.

  I was wrong. As the creek swept us out into the river the raging water increased in its intensity and our boat was swept downstream as if it were some kind of toy. The current of the swollen river compared to the creek was like comparing a mouse to an elephant.

  “I think we done made a mistake, Poudlum!” I yelled out.

  “Uh-huh, a big one,” he yelled back. “What we gonna do?”

  “Ain’t nothing we can do except try to use our paddles to keep pointed downstream.”

  “Rate we traveling we’ll be in the Gulf of Mexico before morning,” Poudlum yelled as we fought the current.

  We barely kept from capsizing several times and it was all we could do to keep our boat pointed downstream.

  There was a bridge over the Tombigbee in Jackson, the place where Mr. Henry had told us he would tell Uncle Curvin to meet us. Sometime before daylight the mighty current of the river swept us underneath it and into a part of the river where we had never been.

  Not long after that our arms gave out and we had to just let the current take us. By then the moon had set and we were engulfed in total darkness, and we moved to the middle of the boat and huddled close together as we awaited whatever fate had to offer us.

  We expected to be capsized and have to swim for it, or to be rammed and sunk by some gigantic log, but to our surprise we came to a soft landing. It felt spongy when we hit it and we were engulfed in something which felt leafy and giving.

  We could still hear the sound of the current rushing by, but it did seem to have abated somewhat. In the meantime we had come to a complete halt and were very fearful of where we were. Poudlum dug out a box of our wooden matches and lit the end of one of our torches. When the flame caught and burned bright enough to see, we discovered we were lodged in the upper branches of a giant oak tree which had collapsed into the raging river.

  “As long as it don’t tear loose from the ground completely it ought to hold us,” Poudlum said.

  “You think we ought to tie up to one of these big limbs?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered. “But we’ll put a little slack in the rope so if the river goes down we won’t be hanging from a tree.”

  We tied the boat up real secure to one of the giant limbs and by t
he light of our torch we ate a can of sardines and some soggy crackers.

  The current was still raging, but once again we had found a little sanctuary, kind of like the hidey-hole underneath the Iron Bridge. After we finished eating we dug out our blankets and rolled up in them in the bottom of the boat.

  “I ain’t never been this tired before,” Poudlum mumbled as in our exhaustion we drifted off to sleep.

  “Me neither,” I told him. “You remember us going past the bridge in Jackson?”

  “I do. Maybe tomorrow morning, if this river quiets down some, we can paddle back up that way and wait on Mr. Curvin.”

  “You think the river will be down by morning?”

  “Maybe. It’ll probably quiet down just as sudden as it rose up.”

  “My arms feel like they too tired to ever do anything again. How about you, Poudlum?”

  “Yeah, mine too. Fighting that river was worse than picking cotton.”

  The river did sound like it was slowing down and I told Poudlum I expected everything would be back to normal in the morning.

  He agreed with me just before we drifted off to sleep.

  But we were both wrong.

  Chapter 10

  Silas and Dudley

  No matter what kind of turmoil is going on around a human being, they eventually reach a point of exhaustion whereby they collapse into a deep sleep. That’s what happened to Poudlum and me on the rushing river while we were hung up in a downed tree a couple of hours before dawn.

  The dim light of a foggy dawn was upon us when I felt movement. At first I thought we had broken loose and were floating further on down the river. But then the sound of our boat crunching onto solid ground brought me to full awareness.

  I bolted up from the bottom of the boat the same time as Poudlum, and what we saw just about scared us half to death.

  There was a dim figure on the bank of the river, who had pulled us up on the shore using our tethering rope, and he was tying the rope to one of the protruding roots of the fallen tree we had crashed into.

  He raised up and said in a gravelly voice, “Looks like you boys got caught in that there storm. Y’all are mighty fortunate to have got tangled up and caught up in this big old tree.”

  I rubbed my tired eyes, got them focused and saw a face which I couldn’t tell if it was a dingy and dirty white one or a colored one, but from the way he talked I suspected he was white.

  “You boys come on up to the house and get yourself dried out,” he said. “My name is Silas. Who might y’all be?”

  I struggled to shake the grogginess from my mind before I said, “I’m Ted and this is Poudlum. We were fishing up the river and the current caught us up and landed us in this tree.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Silas said. “Why don’t y’all grab all your stuff and follow me?”

  We did like he said and after a short walk we came upon a shanty with a saggy porch and a leaning rock chimney on the side of it. When he saw us hesitating he said, “I got a fire going and it’s good and dry inside.”

  He climbed the rickety steps to the porch and opened a door constructed of three wide boards going up and down and held together by two short boards nailed across them, one at the top and one at the bottom.

  “Make haste, boys,” Silas said as he held the door open. “It’s damp and chilly out here.”

  We reluctantly followed him inside and he closed the door behind us and dropped the wooden latch with a soft thud.

  There was a kerosene lamp burning on a bare table in the middle of the room, which gave off a little more light than the foggy early morning had outside, and I could see that Silas had on a pair of faded and dingy overalls with one gallus hooked over his shoulder and the other one hanging loose, with no shirt on underneath. That’s when I saw for sure he was a white man as the lamplight reflected off his pale white shoulders.

  Across the room there was a good fire going in a sooty limestone fireplace, and in spite of the shabbiness and stale smell of the room, it was warm and inviting.

  “You boys been on the river all night?” Silas asked as he removed his shapeless and sweat-stained felt hat, which revealed long but thin and stringy hair hanging down to his neck.

  His short beard was patchy surrounding his thin-lipped face, framed by bushy eyebrows and a big flat nose, which looked like it had been smashed in a few times.

  “Y’all just put your stuff on the table,” he said. “Take your blankets and just curl up on the floor next to the fire and get yourselves some shuteye. I figure y’all have to be plum tuckered out. The river ought to be going down enough by late today so y’all can paddle back up to where you come from. By the way, where did y’all come from?”

  “Up at Coffeeville,” I said without thinking.

  While Silas was adding some logs to the fire Poudlum leaned close and whispered, “Shouldn’t have told him that.”

  “I know,” I whispered back.

  “I don’t think I like Silas or this place,” Poudlum whispered again.

  “Might not hurt to just rest a while,” I told him.

  Suddenly Silas raised up from the fire and said, “What y’all whispering about?”

  “Nothing,” I responded. “Just talking about how lucky we are you stumbled upon us.”

  “You right about that, son. How long y’all been asleep in that boat before I come upon y’all?”

  “Two or three hours I reckon,” I told him.

  “Guess y’all mighty tuckered out. Well, go on and lay yourselves down and I’ll wake y’all up by noon and we’ll have us a bite to eat. Then we’ll see what the river looks like and if it’s calmed down enough for y’all to paddle on back toward Coffeeville. That’s a mighty far piece and take y’all two or three days paddling hard.”

  I didn’t feel real good about it, and I could tell Poudlum didn’t either by the way he was casting his eyes around the shadowy room. But our fatigue got the best of us and we stretched our blankets out on the floor and rolled up inside them.

  The sound and warmth of the fire was like food and drink to a starving person and it immediately took its toll on me. I looked across and saw Poudlum’s eyes were flickering in unison with the flames in the fireplace.

  In that paralyzing state between wakefulness and sleep I let my eyes give the room one last survey. Silas was rummaging around at something on his cot against the far wall. That’s when I noticed there was another cot beyond his and it looked like there was a big lump on it, and just before I succumbed to slumber, I thought I saw the lump move.

  The fire had died down when I woke up and I could see that sometime during our long nap Poudlum and me had cast our blankets aside. As I raised up on one elbow I heard something bumping and clanking behind me. Poudlum was still asleep when I rolled over to what was making the racket.

  Once I did I immediately wished I hadn’t, because the sight that met my eyes was enough to scare a body clean out of his wits. Little goosebumps popped up all over me and I could feel the fine hairs on the back of my neck standing erect.

  The bump I had seen on the cot past the one Silas used early this morning was alive and he was emptying our sack of food-stores out onto the little table, making a heap of noise as he sorted the beans, sardines, and little cans of sausage.

  But it wasn’t his taking possession of our food supply that scared me, it was the shape of him. He was a short man with little short legs and little short hairy arms, and he was also very fat and the perfect shape of a goblin if I had had to dream one up.

  His matted hair splayed out in all directions reminding me of a big black grease spot on a wooden kitchen floor. He must have sensed I was watching him, for suddenly he stopped all movement, then jerked around to face me.

  I just about jumped out of my skin when he did that and I saw his big bug eyes, which reminded me of a giant frog, and on top
of that they were crossed and I couldn’t tell if he was really looking at me or off toward the other side of the room.

  His belly stood out like a pot leg on a wood stove and above it decayed and snaggled teeth protruded from his open mouth, and I thought to myself this was just about the most unattractive human being I had ever beheld.

  About that time I heard Poudlum rousing up behind me. When he sat up and observed the goblin, in his state of fear he said, “It appears the Good Lawd has done forsaken us and let us float down the river to hell!”

  The goblin didn’t seem to hear him and spoke for the first time. “I see y’all done woke up.”

  It shocked me that he could actually utter words and it took me a moment before I could muster up the courage to respond, but I finally stuttered, “We-we-we have. Uh, where is Silas?”

  “He be out taking care of bidness,” the goblin replied.

  “What kind of business?” I asked.

  “The kind of bidness that ain’t no bidness of yourn,” he responded.

  Poudlum finally got the courage to speak and said, “Well, who in the world are you?”

  “I be Dudley, Silas’s brother. He takes care of me.”

  That’s when I realized Dudley did not have all of his faculties and was actually a child in his mind while in years he appeared to be middle-aged.

  That’s when Poudlum poked me and whispered, “We need to get on out of here.”

  We stood up and I told Dudley, “We appreciate y’all’s hospitality, and now we need to be getting on back up the river.”

  “Uh-uh,” Dudley grunted.

  “Huh?” I asked. “What’s that you said?”

  “Silas say for y’all to wait till he comes back.”

  “But we got a long way to go and we need to get to our boat,” I told him.

  “Silas be gone in y’all’s boat.”

  “He took our boat?!” Poudlum exclaimed.

  “Uh-huh. His boat got sunk in that storm what just ended.”

  “Dudley,” I said. “Where do you think Silas went in our boat?”