“You want me to climb down there and look under this bridge?” the deputy asked in an incredulous tone.
“That’s what I said,” the sheriff answered.
“But it’s real snaky down there, and besides, I got me on a clean uniform.”
“Do like you told, or you won’t be wearing a uniform at all,” the sheriff threatened. “I’ll look off the other side of the bridge and see if I see anything down the creek.”
Poudlum gripped my arm hard and said with a stammered whisper, “We—we—we trapped down under here!”
The sounds of the deputy gingerly picking his way down the bank drifted towards us, and I knew I had to make a decision, so I did.
I leaned close to Poudlum’s ear and whispered, “It’s all right, I know a hiding place.”
My brother Fred had discovered it and shown it to me. And at the time he had made me promise not to ever reveal it to another living soul. But I knew he would release me from that promise if he knew the situation Poudlum and I were in.
When the old bridge had been replaced with the new Iron Bridge, some of the beams of the old bridge had tumbled halfway down the bank under the bridge and had been abandoned there. The beams were solid heart-of-pine, almost as hard as stone and would probably turn into petrified wood eventually.
The unique thing was that they had fallen together to form a bunker, which was hidden when you climbed up into it. No weeds or anything grew inside because the abutment of the new bridge blocked the sunlight from reaching it.
When we quietly scampered inside of it, Poudlum cast his eyes about and whispered, “Dis is some kind of neat place. It’s high up above de creek and under the edge of de bottom of de bridge where can’t nobody see you.”
“Shhh,” I cautioned as the deputy came crashing underneath the bridge.
“See anything?” the sheriff called down from above.
“I see the creek,” he sarcastically yelled back.
From above him Poudlum and I eased our heads up over the edge of the top beam and peeked down from our hiding place and watched as he poked around. We watched as he cupped his hand to his mouth and yelled up to the sheriff, “I don’t see nothing down here, sheriff.”
“All right,” the sheriff answered. “Come on back up.”
We sat still and quiet for awhile until we heard the car doors slam, the engine start and then the fading sound of the car as it headed on up the road.
“Dey gone!” Poudlum said as he exhaled a long breath.
“Yeah, that was a close one.”
“I likes dis place,” Poudlum said as he explored around inside the secret hiding place.
“I thought you didn’t like being under the bridge.”
“I don’t, but I do like to be in a safe place when danger is around, ’specially if it’s a neat place like dis. We could camp out in here.”
“Well, you can’t never tell anybody about it because it’s supposed to be a secret.”
“Who found it?”
“Fred found it and made me cross my heart and promise not to ever show it to anybody.”
“He knows I wouldn’t tell,” Poudlum said. “Besides, I figure he would’ve done de same thing if he had been in yo’ shoes.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Let’s get back up on the road.”
When we were back up on Center Point Road, we were once again undecided about what to do.
“We could still just go back and finish our fishing weekend like we never had no visitors,” Poudlum said.
“We can’t fish any more. They took our knives, remember?”
“Dat’s right, we couldn’t clean no fish even if we caught some.”
“We could just camp out and not fish, but those greedy bank robbers only left us enough to eat for tonight. We would be starving in the morning.”
“All right,” Poudlum agreed. “Let’s head toward home. We can be there before dinner time.”
The only sound besides our footsteps in the dirt was the rustling of the last few leaves as they fell from the oaks, hickories, and other hardwood trees along the road. An occasional green area appeared where there was a patch of pines or cedar trees.
“What y’all been studying in school?” Poudlum asked.
“We been learning all kinds of stuff. Math, science, history, literature, and stuff like that.”
“Us too. What yo’ favorite one is?”
“I don’t really like any of them, but if I had to pick one out I guess it would have to be the literature. It’s fun to read some of the stuff. How about y’all?”
“We doing about de same stuff,” Poudlum said. “But, you know, it seems like to me it would make a lot mo sense if we all did it in the same school ’stead of separate ones, don’t you think?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer Poudlum, so I just agreed with him and kept on walking. But I resolved myself to ponder the real answer to his question.
The Center Point Road Baptist Church came into view as we rounded the curve.
“Dere’s yo’ church up ahead,” Poudlum.
“Yeah, that’s where I usually spend every Sunday morning, no matter what.”
“Any of yo’ family buried in that graveyard next to it?”
There was a large cemetery on the left side of the church. “Yeah, I got a lot of uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents buried in it. You know how many dead people are buried in it?”
“How many?”
“All of ’em,” I told him.
We laughed together and had almost passed the cemetery when I had a thought. “Poudlum, my granddaddy wrote a poem about dying and it’s on his tombstone. You want to let’s go read it?”
“Uh-huh. Long as it’s daylight. I’ll go in a cemetery, but you ain’t gonna catch me in one after dark.”
“Come on then,” I told him. “You’ll like it.”
There was a fence around the graveyard, but the gate was never locked. Folks liked to bring in flowers on special occasions and put them on tombstones.
On this occasion, someone had left a bundle of wild purple violets on my granddaddy’s grave.
We stood in front of his big tombstone and Poudlum read the poem out loud:
Where has my youth flown to
On the relentless wings of time
It left me abruptly and without warning
Taking with it the sweet taste of wine
The wind-filled sails seemed so slow
Yet they raced across the decades
Until the wonderful ports of call
All became memories within my gaze
Only yesterday I was a young soldier
Fearing no evil or the shadow of death
And the winds of war left me still alive
But the winds of time have given me no rest
Though the blustery winds have blown me far
From the endless journey I once imagined
At last they took me to a valley of green and gold
Where I shall begin again and never grow old
“Dat’s a beautiful poem,” Poudlum said. “Was he yo’ momma’s daddy or yo’ daddy’s daddy?”
“My momma’s. We called him Pa Will. His name was William Murphy. His daddy was Jim Murphy and Jim’s daddy was Tim Murphy, who came over here all the way from Ireland in 1821.”
“Good Lawd,” Poudlum exclaimed. “Dat was way over a hundred years ago. I ’spect my great-great-granddaddy was still chained up then.”
“What you mean, chained up?”
“All us colored folks be slaves back den.”
“Yeah, I forgot about that. But y’all ain’t slaves no more, Poudlum.”
“It’s true don’t nobody own us no more, but you and me, we still can’t do a lot of things together.”
As far as
I was concerned, I would have loved to have shared a school classroom with Poudlum. Even though we were different, we were a lot alike. We were both the youngest child in our respective families and we would both be twelve years old this month. My birthday was the seventeenth and his was the sixteenth, making him one day older than me, a fact about which he never ceased to remind me.
I had been called a “nigger lover” because of our friendship, but that didn’t bother me.
As we were closing the gate to the cemetery, Uncle Curvin’s old truck came skidding up to a halt next to the fence.
He leaned out the window and said, “I was on my way to the Cypress Hole when I seen you boys up here. Looks like y’all done cut your fishing trip short.”
While we were loading our sacks on the back of the truck, Poudlum leaned over and whispered, “We got to be careful ’bout what we say to anybody.”
“What you mean?” I asked.
“We don’t want to mention dat riddle Frank told us, ’cause I think dem bank robbers left all dat money somewhere back yonder in de Satilfa Creek.”
Chapter Nine
Chewing Sugarcane
We lost our knives so it was no use to catch no more fish ’cause we wouldn’t have been able to clean them,” I told my uncle. It wasn’t really a lie, we had lost our knives, and that was one of the reasons we hadn’t continued with our fishing trip.
“Well, did y’all catch any before you lost your knives?”
“Yes, sir,” Poudlum blurted out. “We caught over a dozen big cats and a few nice perch, too.”
“Doggone, boys, it sounds to me like y’all had some good luck. What did you use for bait?”
“Mostly sawyers,” Poudlum answered.
“They do make good bait,” Uncle Curvin said. “But the best bait of all is catalpa worms. Only thing is, they don’t make theyselves available ’cept for ’bout two weeks every summer. I’ll keep a watch out and when they show up on the trees next summer, I’ll take you boys over to Horse Shoe Lake and we’ll catch a passel of fish. What did y’all do with all them fish? You couldn’t have ate all of ’em.”
“We had some of ’em for supper last night and some more of ’em for breakfast dis morning, and dey wuz mighty good,” Poudlum told my uncle.
“I ’spect they was, but what about the rest of ’em?”
Poudlum look in my direction, asking for help with his eyes. That’s when I knew I was going to have to tell my uncle a fish story. “We had ’em on a stringer and let ’em go after we lost our knives.”
Lies compound themselves and lead to more lies, beginning with the first one.
“How in the world did both of y’all come to lose your knives?”
I decided to tell my fib and leave Poudlum to make up his own. “I lost mine in the creek when I slipped down on the shoals while I was running the trot line.”
Nobody said anything for a few moments until Poudlum realized I had left him to make up his own story. “Uh, I ain’t real sure ’bout mine,” he said. “Last I remember using it wuz when we wuz playing mumblety-peg. It must’ve just slipped outta my pocket somewhere.”
After Poudlum finished with his fib, he cut his eyes toward me, and I knew he was asking what I thought of his fish story. It was amazing how Poudlum and I could communicate with each other without even using words. I grinned my approval toward him.
Uncle Curvin was sympathetic about our loss. “Next time I go to Grove Hill, I’ll stop by the hardware store and get both you boys a new knife. Y’all save your money and maybe we can afford to get both of you a Barlow. A fellow needs to have a good pocketknife on him.”
We were almost to Miss Lena’s Store when Uncle Curvin said, “That sorry old Sheriff Crowe came by Lena’s a while before I headed down y’all’s way. It looks like them bank robbers got clean away. He said he couldn’t find hair nor hide of ’em no matter where he looks. He headed up toward the Satilfa. Y’all didn’t pass him on the road, did you?”
“No, sir. We must have been off the road when he came through,” I mumbled, comforting myself with the fact that we had actually been off the road.
“Hey,” Poudlum said as we pulled off the road at Miss Lena’s Store. “Ain’t dat yo’ brother Fred sitting over ’side de store?”
I gazed out through the windshield, outlined with milky, white edges from age, and saw that it was indeed my brother. “Yeah, that’s him.” I answered. “What’s that he’s got leaning against the tree next to him?”
“Looks like he got hisself a few stalks of sugarcane,” Poudlum observed.
As I looked closer, I saw that it was indeed several stalks of sugarcane. Sugarcane was a curse and a blessing to the South.
The curse was the terrible labor it took to grow and harvest it. The plant grew in stalks with joints in each of them like bamboo, except it was solid instead of hollow inside, filled with a thick pulp packed with sweet juice, but encased with a thick and tough peeling on the outside. The stalks were covered with long, slender leaves with edges like a saw blade that would cut your skin and sting for a long time afterward. Planting it and weeding it while it grew was very hard work, and cutting it and harvesting it was even more brutal labor. Back before the slaves were freed, being a worker on a sugarcane plantation was the worst possible place to be.
The blessing of it was that the thick, heavy syrup produced from it was life-sustaining through the winter, and the sugar refined from it was a staple which could be traded for other goods and services.
In 1948, there were no plantations left and certainly no slaves. But folks still grew small patches of sugarcane and made syrup from it. And young boys like us peeled it with our pocket knives and chewed hunks of it for the sweet juice, before we spat out the dry, white pulp.
That’s what my brother was doing, chewing sugarcane.
“Y’all must not have caught any fish,” he said when we piled out of Uncle Curvin’s truck next to him.
He had a big, thick stalk between his legs that he was peeling and chewing. His mouth was full while he talked and there was a pile of dry, spent pulp next to him on the ground that he had chewed the juice out of and spit out.
“Naw, we caught a bunch of fish,” I told him. “Where’d you get all that sugarcane?”
“Uncle Clyde gave it to me for helping him cut his. Y’all come on over and chew some. I got plenty.”
Uncle Curvin limped into the store to gossip with Lena while Poudlum and I sat down next to the big water oak tree with my brother and each took us a stalk of sugarcane.
After all the slender leaves were stripped from a stalk of sugarcane it was deep blue, almost purple on the outside with a light, silvery transparent film on it. The girth of the stalk increased in size from the top toward the bottom, where it was cut down just above where it emerged from the ground with a sharp machete. The juice got sweeter, too, as you got closer to the bottom of the stalk.
To chew it you had to peel it. To peel it you needed a sharp knife to cut the first joint off, then cut through the tough peeling just above the next joint below that one. Next, you slid the blade of the knife under the peel at the top and pushed it downward to remove the peeling in strips until you had a joint of the stalk reduced to the white pulp.
Now you had to cut off round blocks of this pulp about an inch long, split the block into four parts so it was small enough to put into your mouth, and chew the delectable juice from it before you spat out the dry pulp.
It took a lot of work, but it was worth it. I had tasted a lot of juices, and sugarcane juice was about the best I had ever put in my mouth. I could hardly wait until syrup-making time when we could drink it by the dipper straight from the pulping mill.
“Can I borrow your knife?” I asked my brother.
He had just split enough blocks to last him for a while. As he surrendered his knife he asked, “What happened to yours?”
“I lost it,” I told him as I began working on my stalk of sugarcane.
“Where did you lose it?”
“At the creek. All right if Poudlum uses it next?”
“He lose his, too?”
“Yep,” I said as I sliced peeling off the stalk.
“Yeah, he can use it too,” Fred said. “I just don’t see how both of y’all could lose your knives at the same time. And I’ve never known of you two to get tired of fishing. I think something fishy is going on.” Sometimes I wished my brother wasn’t quite as smart as he was.
We chewed in silence for a while, relishing the sweet nectar we hadn’t tasted since last year.
Suddenly Fred said, “Did Uncle Curvin tell y’all Sheriff Crowe and one of his deputies came by here heading up Center Point Road toward where y’all was?”
That’s when Poudlum let the cat out of the bag. “We seen ’em both and dey would have seen us if we hadn’t of hid in yo’ hidey hole up under de —”
Realizing what he had done, Poudlum cut his words off.
Fred sat up straight and glared at me. “You broke a promise! Why’d you do that?”
I knew then there was no way out of it. We had to take my brother into our confidence and tell him everything, otherwise he would never understand or forgive me for breaking my promise.
A promise is a promise and should never be broken unless extreme circumstances absolutely force you to. And even then, an explanation should always be forthcoming.
“I had to!” I told my brother. “You would’ve done the same thing. We had some visitors while we were camping at the Cypress Hole!”
My brother sat up real straight, and I knew I had his attention. “Who? What kind of visitors? What you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the bank robbers, that’s who!”
“Uh-uh! How you know it was them? How could y’all even know about the bank robbery?”
“Just hang on, you ask more questions than a school teacher. Uncle Curvin told us about the robbery when we saw him on the road yesterday just before we got to the Cypress Hole.”
Secret of the Satilfa Page 7