Secret of the Satilfa

by Ted M. Dunagan

“I can understand that, boys, and it’s all right. But now y’all need to get up on the road and run.”

  Poudlum and I slithered out of the secret place like two snakes. We lowered ourselves to the ground and crept out from under the bridge. But when we took our first step up the bank we were shocked when we slid right back down. The bank was a sheet of ice from the sleet.

  “Uh oh, what we gon do now?” Poudlum whispered.

  Thinking fast, I told him, “Feel around and find a good stick. We’ll break them so they got sharp ends and stab them in the ground and pull ourselves up.

  I heard a sharp crack when Poudlum broke his stick, and mine followed. “You think dey heard dat?” he asked.

  “Probably did, let’s start climbing.”

  The sticks worked well enough and soon I felt my hands on the crusty sheet of ice on the ditch next to the road. I pulled myself up and Poudlum was right behind me.

  We stood there on the side of Center Point Road in the predawn light for a few moments, breathing hard.

  “You hear anything?” I whispered with a frosty breath.

  We listened real hard for a few moments before Poudlum said, “Naw, does you?”

  “No, me neither,” I responded. “Let’s start running!”

  It was so cold it hurt to breathe, but we ran hard until we got to the Mill Creek Bridge, where we stopped to catch our breath. “You okay?” I asked Poudlum.

  “Uh-huh, I’m rested. Let’s see how far we can run fo’ we has to stop again.”

  It was uphill all the way from the Mill Creek Bridge to Uncle Curtis’s house and Poudlum and I were both blowing like a mule pulling a ground slide loaded with watermelons by the time we got there. But we weren’t cold anymore; in fact, we were both damp with perspiration.

  We turned off the road down toward Uncle Curtis’s house and I could see a light inside when we got to the front porch.

  There was a smell of bacon frying and it made my mouth water. I knew Poudlum was experiencing the same feeling when I glanced toward him and saw his eyes roll while he licked his lips.

  We told the story of our all-night vigil, including the bank robber’s visit, to Uncle Curtis while he served us up some thick sliced bacon along with some fried eggs with syrup and biscuits.

  Afterwards, he told my cousin Robert to go crank up the truck and get it warm. Shortly after that, while Poudlum and I soaked up the warmth of the inside of the cab, we drove down to Miss Lena’s Store.

  To our surprise, there was a small crowd of people gathered there. It seemed that Poudlum’s momma and daddy, my two brothers and my own momma, plus a few other folks had all gathered there for the purpose of finding us and Uncle Curvin.

  After everybody fussed over us for a while, Uncle Curtis and some others headed back up Center Point Road to go rescue Uncle Curvin, and some others headed off toward Coffeeville to find a telephone to call the sheriff and tell him the escaped bank robbers had been sighted.

  Things got kind of fuzzy after that. I remember being on a pallet on the floor in front of our warm fireplace covered with a quilt. I felt my momma’s cool, soft hand on my burning forehead and heard her voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere way off when she said, “This child’s burning up with fever.”

  I drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes sleeping lightly, sometimes deeply, but I woke up clearheaded on Thursday morning, so hungry I felt like my belly was scraping my backbone.

  “We thought you had pneumonia for a while,” my momma said. “But you just got chilled real bad after you sweated through your clothes with all that running in the freezing cold.”

  “Has anybody heard from Poudlum?” I asked while I sopped up syrup with a hot biscuit.

  “He’s been sick, too,” my momma told me. “At least that’s what your brother Fred heard from over at Miss Lena’s Store.”

  “Where are they?” I asked her. “Ned and Fred?”

  “They both out cutting firewood to get us through this cold spell. Now you finish up your meal and get back under them covers for a while.”

  The fire had died down to a bed of hot coals when I crawled back into my pallet. With my belly full, I propped up on a pillow, pulled the quilt up over me and watched as Momma piled fresh logs on the fire.

  Pretty soon little blue and yellow flames began to spring up from the bed of coals and lick up between the cracks of the logs like flaming cat tongues. It wasn’t long before the flames leapt higher and the fire turned into a roaring and popping solid blaze, radiating heat that lulled me back to sleep.

  The rumble and thump of wood being stacked on the floor next to the fireplace woke me up.

  I looked up, sleepy-eyed, and saw my brother Ned grinning down toward me. “You gonna sleep all day?” he asked as he reached down and rumpled my hair. “Wake up, Fred’s got something you’ll be wanting to see.”

  I heard a rattling and crinkling of paper as Fred sat down next to me. “Move over,” he said. “Quit hogging the fire and I’ll show you this story in the Clarke County Democrat.”

  What he had was the weekly county newspaper. It came out every Thursday. “Look here on the front page,” he said.

  The cobwebs disappeared from my mind and my eyes bugged out when I saw the headline.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Rope

  The headline read: “Bank Robbers Recaptured, Money Still Missing.”

  “They caught ’em!” I gasped.

  “Yep,” Fred confirmed. “They caught ’em ’bout froze to death right there at the Cypress Hole. I heard they was wet and so cold they were almost glad to be caught again.”

  “But—but what about the money? It says the money’s still missing. They didn’t have it?”

  Fred didn’t answer, but my brother Ned chimed in. “Nobody found no money. The bank robbers said they had sunk it in the Cypress Hole and they were there trying to pull it out of the water. They claimed to have tied a rope to the base of a black gum tree, which did have a mark carved into it, and sunk the money in a waterproof rubber bag, but they said there wasn’t no signs of the rope when they got there.”

  “What you ’spect happened to it?” I asked.

  “Everybody thinks the rope probably came loose and the bag of money washed on down the Satilfa,” Ned said.

  My fever was gone and I was thinking clearly now. I knew that Poudlum and I should have gone after that money when we first figured out where it was. We just hadn’t thought to dig down into the leaves and look for a rope. We wouldn’t have had to go into that cold, deep water after all. We could have just found the rope and pulled that money up and be rich now. We had figured everything out except that last little simple detail.

  “Do y’all think that really happened?” I asked. “I mean that the rope came loose and the money floated on down the creek?”

  “Half the folks in the county seem to think so,” Ned told me. “They’s folks trampling all up and down the creek in the freezing cold looking for it all the way down to where it runs into the Tombigbee.”

  I felt kind of like when you spill your last glass of milk, or lose your best friend. “Do y’all think anybody will find it?” I asked.

  Fred was throwing some good hickory logs on the fire when he said, “Nope, I don’t think anybody is going to find anything.”

  It wasn’t long after that before our momma ran us all to bed. She said she thought I was well enough to get off my sick pallet and get in my regular bed.

  It was cold in our room, and Fred and I drew up two quilts and tucked them up under our chins, and it wasn’t long before we got good and warm, But I wasn’t sleepy and something my brother had said was still bothering me. “You still awake?” I whispered to Fred.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered softly.

  Brother Ned, across the room in his bed, was snoring softly.

  Befo
re I could say anything else Fred sneezed and then coughed with a slight rattle in his throat.

  “You ain’t getting sick, are you?”

  “I might be getting a little bit of a cold, but I’ll be all right.”

  A cold, soft rain had begun outside. I liked it when it rained at night. The sound of distant thunder and the sound of the rain pinging on the tin roof always gave me a feeling of being snug and secure in my warm, dry bed. “What did you mean when you said ain’t nobody gonna find anything looking down the creek?”

  “I meant just what I said.”

  “But how you know they ain’t gonna find the money floating down the creek or washed up on a sand bar somewhere?”

  “’Cause I just do, now go to sleep,” he said with a tone of finality in his voice that told me he wasn’t going to talk anymore tonight.

  I felt the bed move as he rolled over and settled into a final sleeping position, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any more information out of him tonight.

  Pretty soon he was snoring, too. Me, I was warm and cozy, but sleep was far from my mind. I supposed it was because I had been dozing on and off all day on my pallet in front of the fireplace.

  It was one of those times when you think you can’t go to sleep and the next thing you know it’s the next morning. But when I awoke the same thought still lingered in my mind—that we had come so close and still let the money get away.

  I had just noticed our room was empty except for me when my momma came in and asked me how I felt.

  “I feel good,” I told her. “Just hungry.”

  “Nothing unusual about that,” she said. “Did you forget what day it is?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Today’s your birthday, son!”

  I had plumb forgot. I was twelve years old today and Poudlum had turned twelve yesterday.

  “I’ve got you a hot breakfast ready. When you finish eating I want you to go out to the henhouse and gather the eggs so I can make you a cake.”

  The thoughts of breakfast and cake was enough to get me out of bed.

  While my momma was serving me fried eggs I asked her where my brothers were.

  “They’ve gone with Curvin to cut firewood for the hog killing tomorrow. Looks like this freezing weather is going to be with us for a spell, so tomorrow will be a good time for it.”

  We didn’t raise any hogs, but we always got a share of the meat because we all worked hard at it, especially my momma. She and Poudlum’s momma cleaned the chitterlings and stuffed them with ground sausage and made the best link sausage around; they also made the best souse meat in the county. Everybody would be wanting a piece.

  It turned out to be a grand birthday. Uncle Curvin came and ate supper with us. We all ate the cake Momma made for me. She stuck straws down into the layers while she applied the hot chocolate icing and it trickled all down into it so that when you sliced it you could see the dark streaks just waiting for you to bite into.

  Fred gave me a new slingshot he had made, Ned gave me an arrowhead he had found and Uncle Curvin gave me a fifty-cent piece. After supper, topped off with chocolate cake, we all went off to bed early in anticipation of the excitement and camaraderie of the next morning.

  Uncle Curtis always hosted the hog killings because he had a large level area in his backyard where several large, black wash pots could be set up with fires underneath them to boil the water used to scald the hogs.

  The fires were already leaping high around the pots when we arrived. Several hogs had been butchered and were hanging upside down from a wooden beam between two oak trees. Besides harvesting meat to get through the winter, a hog killing was also a social event, but only relatives, neighbors, and good friends were invited to share in the work and the bounty.

  I was glad when I spotted Poudlum warming himself next to one of the pots, but we didn’t have an opportunity to talk right away because the water in the pots had begun to boil and it was our job to use big dippers to transfer the hot water from the pots and pour it on the hogs. We had to concentrate while performing this task because the slightest mistake and you could scald yourself instead of the pig.

  Some other folks’ job was to scrape the hair off the hogs after we poured the boiling water on them. The bitter cold didn’t bother us since the heat from the fire and the hot steam from the boiling water warmed us.

  My arms were aching after countless trips between the pots and the pigs, but soon those pigs were as clean, pink, and smooth as a baby’s bottom.

  The next step was to take the hogs down and place them on a large table where the men cut them up into hams, shoulders, pork chops, bacon, ribs, and sausage meat.

  The hams, bacon, and link sausage were toted off and hung from the rafters of Uncle Curtis’s smoke house where the smoke from small hickory fires would curl up and around to cure the meat.

  About midmorning everyone gathered around one small pot and enjoyed a steamy bowl of stew made from the liver and lights.

  Everyone would have fresh pork chops for breakfast, dinner, and supper the next day, and would share the cured ham, bacon, and sausage through the rest of the winter.

  Things were kind of winding down by early afternoon. The only thing left going on was some ladies making souse meat and pickling the pig’s feet in big jars.

  That’s when Poudlum and I finally got an opportunity to talk. We met at the one last pot with a fire going around it where the fat was being rendered down into lard for cooking. “You see the newspaper?” Poudlum asked.

  “Yeah, I seen it,” I answered dejectedly.

  “Guess we should a got while de getting wuz good.”

  “Uh-huh, we sure should have. After all the trouble we went to and we didn’t even think to scratch around the bottom of that tree and find the rope. All we would have had to do was just haul it up.”

  “I guess we ain’t as smart as we thought, is we?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I went to Coffeeville to de store wid my daddy yesterday and heard a lot of talk,” Poudlum said.

  “What did you hear?”

  “Heard some folks saying the law had a crew of men dragging the Cypress Hole and working dey way on down de creek.”

  “Did they say how far they got?”

  “Uh-huh, all de way down to de river, and dey ain’t seen nary a dollar.”

  “Did you hear anything else?”

  “Folks saying all kind of stuff, like de bank robbers probably hid dat money somewhere else and made up dat story about sinking it in de Cypress Hole just to throw folks off.”

  “I don’t think I believe that, do you, Poudlum?”

  “Uh-uh, ’cause it don’t seem like dey would’ve gone to de trouble of carving dat arrow in de tree to mark de spot if dey hadn’t left de money in de creek.”

  “Me neither. They could have just made up that story without carving that arrow. They weren’t familiar with the creek and they wanted to mark that spot. We just happened to be fishing across the creek from where they decided to hide the money.”

  That’s when Fred walked up. “What y’all doing?” he asked.

  “Just trying to keep warm,” I told him.

  “Hey, Poudlum, I heard you just about froze to death the other night along with Ted and Uncle Curvin.”

  “Dat’s right, it was mighty cold,” Poudlum said. Then he glanced around to make sure no one was within hearing distance before he continued. “We probably would’ve froze to death if we hadn’t of knowed about yo’ secret place under de bridge.”

  Fred frowned a little frown and said, “Yeah, that may be true, but now Uncle Curvin knows about it. We might as well put a piece in the Democrat telling where it is.”

  “Naw!” I said. “Uncle Curvin won’t say nothing. We told him it was a secret.”

  “I sure hope you’re right about that. But l
isten, what I wanted to talk to y’all about was getting up another fishing trip for maybe this Sunday after church. We’re going to be tired of eating this pig by then.”

  “It’s too cold to go fishing!” I told him.

  “It’ll be good and warm by Sunday,” Fred retorted.

  “How you know dat?” Poudlum asked.

  “I read it in The Old Farmer’s Almanac. It predicted an extreme warming trend just before Christmas, and it’s never wrong.”

  “How you think dey can figure out de weather like dat?” Poudlum asked.

  “I’m not completely sure,” Fred answered. “But what I think is they keep charts and graphs of what the weather had been like for years and years. And I think they can see cycles that happen and make predictions based on those cycles. Everything in nature happens in cycles, including the weather.”

  Poudlum looked at me and said, “How come yo’ brother so smart and you and I is so dumb?”

  “He ain’t so smart, and we ain’t dumb,” I answered defensively.

  “Y’all both real smart,” Fred said in a conciliatory tone. “But y’all do need to listen to me on this occasion. Now what do you say? If I’m right and the weather warms up, do y’all want to go?”

  I glanced toward Poudlum, he nodded and said, “If it really do get warm, I’m always ready to go fishing.”

  “All right,” I told my brother. ‘We’ll go Sunday after church and stay all night on the Cypress Hole, if it really does get warm.”

  “It will,” Fred said.

  What he said next, just before he walked away, made Poudlum and me wonder just what my brother was up to. “Besides going fishing, I’ll have a little surprise for y’all, kind of like a late birthday present for both of you.”

  He coughed like he had a cold and walked away from us and began helping over at the table where they were packing pork chops on ice.

  “What you ’spect yo’ brother be up to?” Poudlum asked.

  “I ain’t sure, but I think we ought to go along with him and see, especially if it’s warm on Sunday.”

  “What you get for yo’ birthday?” Poudlum asked.