A Far Piece to Canaan

by Sam Halpern

  I moved my foot around. “This one ain’t runnin’, it’s just wet.”

  “Hit’ll run though, if we get lots of rain,” Lonnie said, coming back toward me.

  While Lonnie and I were trying to see what was in the back of the cave, LD was fooling around one of the walls. “Look at this,” he said. “There’s a big old stick in here.”

  “Maybe it warshed in,” I said.

  “Ain’t likely,” said Lonnie. “Cracks th’ water runs out of are too small for a big stick.”

  It got quiet, then LD spoke. “Lordy, I wonder if this here’s Satan’s cave.”

  “Naw.” Fred laughed. “Must’ve been somebody up here before and left hit. Hit’s a easy climb. Bring it over t’ th’ light, LD.”

  LD started for the front of the cave and we all got there together.

  “Blood!” croaked LD. “Blood ’n’ black dog hair! Let’s git!”

  We did, boy, scrambling down the cliff as hard as we could go. At the bottom, Fred grabbed the fish and we took off for the path up.

  “Hit’s Lucifer!” LD screamed and pointed at some tracks coming toward where the cave was, “Hit’s Lucifer! Hit’s Lucifer! Hit’s Lucifer!” and we run harder, shooting up the cliff path we come down. When we got to the top we kept running until we couldn’t go anymore.

  We must’ve lay on the ground ten minutes sucking air. I sat up. LD, Lonnie, and Fred were on their backs, and the fish were draped across Fred’s belly with one big buffalo gone.

  “Lost a buffalo, Fred,” I said.

  Fred pulled the stringer up straight with both hands until he could see them all. “Must of ripped out hits gill,” he mumbled.

  “Wanta go back and look for it?” I said, and we all laughed.

  “Hun’ney, ain’t no wild horse gonna pull me back there,” said Fred.

  “Gonna do my river fishin’ down below th’ sandbar from now on,” said Lonnie. “Man, I ain’t ever been that scared.”

  “Me neither,” said LD, and he was still shaking. “You see them footprints? They was twisted and cloved! I tell you we dealin’ with Lucifer here,” and he shook even harder.

  That scared me silly. We never talked about the Devil at home, but I had heard a lot about him at school. Fred and Lonnie didn’t seem too scared though, so I calmed down.

  Fred rolled over on his side, pulled a blade of grass, stuck it in his teeth, then glanced at Lonnie. I could tell Fred was thinking. Pretty soon, he pulled some more grass and looked at Lonnie again. “You gonna tell your pa, Lonnie?”

  Lonnie set up. “Hadn’t thought about it.”

  Little time went by and Fred pulled some more grass. “Whatcha figure he’d do?”

  “Don’t know,” said Lonnie, and he made kind of a choking sound.

  “We talk about th’ cave and th’ Devil ’n’ all, I’ll get a hidin’,” said LD. “My pa will figure I been around th’ Blue Hole, and he’ll ask. He knows if I lie. I promised not t’ go nowhere ’round that thing. He’ll beat th’ tar out of me for breakin’ my word.”

  Fred picked a little more grass. “Yeah, hit’s th’ same with me, only hit’ll be my ma what does th’ lickin’ so hit won’t be too bad. She’ll never let me go river fishin’ again, though.”

  Then I remembered what Mom said about getting into something. She wouldn’t let me do anything with my buddies again and it shaping up to be such a great summer.

  Lonnie swallowed. “Reckon you guys can say what y’ have to,” he said, and there was that choking sound again.

  By this time Fred had dug a little hole where he was pulling out grass. “Ain’t no fish.”

  “Huh?” said Lonnie.

  I could see right off what Fred was driving at. If our folks saw these big fish they were going to want to know where we caught them and we would have to lie and say we were downstream of where we were because LD, Fred, and Lonnie weren’t supposed to be anywhere around the Blue Hole. Maybe some grown-up would come upriver if they wudn’t catching anything below the sandbar and see our kid tracks. They might follow the tracks to the Blue Hole. Not much was going to happen to me and Fred if our folks found out, but it was going to be bad for LD and really awful for Lonnie. That had to be the reason Lonnie choked up when he talked about it. He was brave, but he was scared. Fred was right; we had to get rid of the fish.

  “We don’t take nothin’ home,” said Fred. “We don’t have fish. We can say we was just foolin’. Ma never asks me what I was doin’ if I say foolin’.”

  “Mine don’t neither,” said Lonnie, and LD said neither did his, and I said mine did, but that I could wriggle out of it.

  “We bury ’em then,” said Fred, getting up. “They’s some big rocks on a pile close t’ Bess Clark’s place we can roll over on th’ bunch after we bury ’em. That way they won’t smell as much and th’ rocks will keep the varmints from digging ’em up. Then we warsh our Levi’s in Cuyper Creek t’ get rid of th’ river smell.” Fred lifted the stringer again and shook his head. “Best mess I ever helped catch and I got to throw them away.”

  “Hit’s a real shame,” said LD.

  “Nothin’ else we can do,” said Fred with a sigh. “Let’s go, boys.”

  “I’m gonna cut across toward home if you guys don’t need me for fish buryin’,” said Lonnie, and he nodded in a different direction than we were going.

  “Go ahead,” said Fred, and Lonnie drifted off toward some brush and was gone almost before I could wave goodbye. That was the way it was with Lonnie. He’d come out of nowhere and disappear the same way.

  We buried the fish under the rock pile, warshed our Levi’s, wrung them out and let them dry some, then the three of us went to Fred’s house so everybody could see we were together.

  From the gap we could see Alfred out by their hog lot gate, talking to Pers Shanks. They looked funny together. Alfred was short with thick shoulders and his waist and hind end were about the same size, while Pers was tall and skinny. The thing everybody noticed about Alfred, though, was his head was kind of square and covered with thin hair, and he always had a black stubble beard. As we got closer, we could see their mouths moving, but being out of earshot, we couldn’t hear. It looked funny when Pers talked because his Adam’s apple jerked up and down.

  “Hidey boys,” said Pers as we come up. “What you three been up to?”

  “Just foolin’,” said Fred, and I could feel my belly churn.

  “Foolin’,” said Alfred. “Thought y’all were gonna get a mess of buffaloes t’day!”

  “Nope,” said Fred, “Don’t have a one.”

  “Well, I swan,” said Pers. “Hear tell you three can catch fish in a rock pile,” and Alfred and Pers laughed. Me and Fred and LD nigh puked.

  The three of us hung around the hog lot gate with Pers and Alfred, listening to Alfred talk about breeding the sows he had and feeding the pigs out with the corn Mr. Berman was going to let him raise, and how much money he was going to make from putting out the strawberries and how he was going to buy a team of mules. He figured with a little luck, the next year he’d get farm equipment and maybe get to rent Red Bill Rogers’ place because Red Bill was stove-up. We threw around a baseball until finally I said it was starting to get late and I had promised Mom I’d get home before dark.

  I climbed the hog lot gate and started down the path toward home. While I walked, I thought about what had happened. It didn’t make any sense that the ghost of Mr. Collins would have all those bones in his cave since ghosts didn’t eat. By the time I come to the gap I was pretty sure it wudn’t a ghost at the Blue Hole. Supposing it was the Devil like LD said, though. He could come right in the house at night. Wouldn’t even have to open the door. LD and Lonnie and Fred would be okay if it was the Devil because they all had crosses at their house, like in the movies where they hold up a cross and keep Dracula out. We didn’t have a cross at our place. A preacher had tried to give us one, but Mom told him we didn’t need it because we were Jews. Now when I needed one, I didn�
��t have it! I was going to have to make a cross real quick.

  About that time, I come to where the hickory and locust thicket ended. In the distance was our barn and house and not another tree until the yard. Lucky for me, the biggest hickory in the grove was right on the edge of the thicket and had a low dead limb. The limb was dry, but it was still tough to break. I wudn’t sure a hickory cross would work, but I decided it wouldn’t make any difference so long as the pieces got hooked up right. My biggest problem was I didn’t have any twine to do the tying with. I figured there had to be vines somewhere, and began running from tree to tree looking. Nothing! The more I run, the more scared I got. There was still about half a mile to go and it was getting twilight and I knew Dracula always comes out when it gets dark and don’t go back in until morning and maybe th’ Devil too. I grabbed the sticks and held them together but they kept slipping because my hands was shaking so I whipped off my belt and started lashing the pieces together but they wouldn’t stay like a cross and kept slipping like an X and I took off running as hard as I could go, my legs feeling like rocks was tied to my feet and I knew it was th’ Devil because I could hear night birds and rain crows calling with low sounds and swallows flitting through the air and I was starting to cry when something big came out of the side toward my eye looking like Daisy or Gabe, our horses, but could’ve been, probably was, the Devil in a horse shape, until he got on me and whinnied and electric shot my body and legs and I screamed and dropped the cross and went flying over the ground, belly-rolled the gates, banged through the barn door, and almost had it made until this big Devil shaped like a cow let out a bawl and I cleared the backyard fence and busted through the screen door into the house and run behind the kitchen stove.

  8

  Next couple days we were real scared. Didn’t make it any better for me that Mom wudn’t buying my story about just fooling and kept asking why my Levi’s were damp and why I wouldn’t say just what kind of fooling we were doing and why I was acting so strange, which I didn’t think I was until maybe I started acting strange because she thought I was acting strange. I still had nightmares about the Devil. I asked LD if a cross would help and he said it didn’t matter what it was, a cross was gonna help and that he’d been sleeping with his.

  I talked about it with Fred too. He didn’t figure it was the Devil at all but was the ghost of old Collins. He said he thought about it being a person but they’d have to be crazy and mean, and that there were only two crazy men around and one of them was Uncle Lex, and he was so old and blind he couldn’t do all the stuff had been done, and besides he wudn’t mean. The other was Red Bill Rogers, who was crazy and mean but had a stove-up leg and couldn’t climb the cliffs. The more I thought about it, the more I figured Fred was probably right. It bothered me though that there were tracks, because I had never heard of ghost tracks.

  To be on the safe side, I decided to ask LD how you made a cross. He gave me the measurements and told me to make it out of pine ’cause that’s what the wood was in theirs. I said it made more sense to make it out of oak because it would last a lot longer but he said it ought to be pine because all the crosses he’d ever seen was pine.

  I got on it that same day. The closest pine thicket was on Mr. Mac’s place and I traipsed over carrying Mom’s sewing machine tape, a handsaw, a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife for barking. Pretty soon, I had two sticks and it wudn’t nothing to nail them together. It was a good cross, boy. Trouble was it was sticky, being fresh-cut pine. No matter how much dust I rubbed it with to cut the stickiness, it was sticky again in no time. Sticky like that, I couldn’t put it in bed with me. I couldn’t put it under the bed either because Mom might see it, so I put it between the springs. I had some trouble with the pine smell because Mom couldn’t figure where it was coming from. I told her I’d been fooling around with pine and that was probably it. The cross worked great and in a few days I felt safe.

  It was a fine summer. Fred and me fished a lot and every now and then Lonnie and LD come down. Everything would’ve been perfect except Fred and me didn’t have slingshots. Something always come up that kept Dad from going to see his friend Ike. Lonnie and LD had their slingshots from the year before, and Fred was getting down in the dumps because we didn’t have anything to shoot. Finally, one Sunday, Dad said he had to go to see Ike about a heifer and promised to ask about an inner tube. What he brought home was a beauty.

  I had told Fred that Dad was going to see Ike the day before and when I got to the barbwire gap to tell him about the tube, he saw me and we started running toward each other, me yelling, “I got it! I got it! Whole inner tube. Grade A shapes.”

  “Hot dog! Whooee!” he yelled, and it was like light shot out over his face.

  “You got all th’ other stuff?” I asked.

  Fred started pulling pieces of rawhide and yellow Bull Durham twine out of every pocket. “Got it all ’ceptin’ th’ handles and we’ll cut some elm for them.”

  “Where’d you get that much twine?” I asked.

  “Pa and Uncle Charlie was a-savin’ hit for me ’bout six months now. That’s a purty good lot of smokin’, six months.”

  “How come we got to use that? We got lots of white string at th’ house.”

  Fred shook his head. “Hun’ney, white string ain’t no good. Always use Bull Durham twine for slingshot bindin’. You make five, six wraps with Bull Durham twine and hit’ll stay ’til th’ cows come home.” He cocked his hands like he was holding a slingshot and said, “Bam, got that big old frog right between th’ eyes,” then he jumped up in the air and flopped down flat on his back with his head to the side and tongue hanging out. I flopped down too, and we laughed like fools and rolled around on the grass. In a few minutes, we stopped and set up.

  “Well?” I said, waiting for him to make the next move.

  He didn’t though. He just kind of grinned. Then he jumped up. “Well? Well’s a hole in th’ ground. Hun’ney, let’s git t’ work!” And we struck out for an elm thicket.

  On the way to the thicket we went around a low rim of the volcano hill. It was too steep to plow and was used mostly as a sheep pasture, and like any sheep pasture it was full of little paths about a foot wide. Sheep paths are all alike. Nothing grows on them, not even Bermuda and it’ll grow out of rock. This part of the trip was nice since the path was covered with fine dust that we could drag our bare feet in. Fred was feeling great, and come on singing.

  Get out th’ way, ole Dan Tucker.

  Hit’s too late for t’ get your supper.

  Get out th’ way, ole Dan Tucker.

  Hit’s too late for t’ get your supper.

  Now, ole Dan Tucker was a nice ole man.

  Warshed his face in a fryin’ pan.

  Combed his head with a wagon wheel.

  And died with a toothache in his heel.

  When we got to the thicket, Fred started checking trees for handles. He wouldn’t use just any forked limb, it had to be a perfect Y and that ain’t easy to find. It took us forever to get just what he wanted and I thought I’d go buggy. Then we had to bark them. Elm bark don’t come off easy and you cut a little too deep you’re back hunting forks, so it took a couple more hours just to skin them and cut the grooves around the top. Once we had that done we cut rubber strips about a half-inch wide from the inner tube and tied them over the grooves in the handles with the Bull Durham twine. We made the loaders out of some soft rawhide. Boy, they were pretty. Fred loaded up a rock and took aim at a fence post. Bam! He hit it, leaving a dent in the split locust log. I didn’t do so hot, but managed to hit the post third time around.

  “Bet you never been a-froggin’, have you, hun’ney?” Fred said, grinning at me.

  “Not with slingshots,” I said.

  Fred cocked his head. “Well, that’s just what we’re gonna do. I been watchin’ around th’ pond and hit’s got th’ best crop of bullfrogs in years. Let’s go!

  “You ever eat frog legs?” Fred asked as we walked.

&n
bsp; “No.”

  “Well, hun’ney, they’re good, but you got to keep a tight lid on when you fry ’em.”

  “How come?” I asked, stopping to pick a nettle out of my heel.

  “’Cause they’ll jump right outta th’ skillet’s why.”

  “Aw.”

  “Yeah, I ain’t a-lyin’. When your ma fixes them she better put a lid on or they’ll come right out on th’ floor.”

  It sounded like a tall story, but Fred had never lied to me. “They taste good?”

  “Oh, little like chicken. We ain’t had a good mess of frog legs this year ’cause I didn’t have a slingshot. Pa’s been a-workin’ so hard. I’d like to bring him home a mess.”

  “You can have mine today,” I said, wondering if frog legs was kosher. I felt sorry for our dads because they had been working so hard. When Alfred did find a day off, he’d have his old radio on, listening to the Cincinnati Reds. Most of the time, though, he just worked terrible hard.

  It was almost three before we got to the pond because we had to pick up rocks for ammunition and get a gunnysack. The rocks had to be perfect to suit Fred, of course. When we finally got started, Fred said he’d lead and that I could get the second frog.

  “Keep low,” Fred whispered, hunching down. “There’s a big one usually sets right in that little nick in th’ bank just on th’ other side of that willa.”

  We hunched down more at the edge of the tree, getting lower and lower until we were on all fours and going so slow and quiet you could hear all sorts of sounds around us. At the spot, Fred put in a load and slowly started getting up like he was afraid his backbone would pop and make noise. Finally, he was standing straight as an arrow. You couldn’t even see him breathe. Then he raised the slingshot and pulled back until the rubber got tight, then back some more.

  Yurrkkk ker-splot, splot, splot, splot and I almost jumped out of my skin as the frog shot out over the water making four or five leaps on top before he sank.

  “He’s a big one,” said Fred. “Half a foot long if he’s anything. I’m gonna get him before this day’s over,” and he didn’t seem put out at all about not getting the frog.