by Kathi Appelt
Bump, bump, bump!
Rock, rock, rock.
The boat began to spin in a circle as if it were trapped in a whirlpool.
“SSSTTOOOPPP!!!!!”
As soon as the hoarse yell escaped his throat, the bumping ceased, but the boat continued to spin. Dizziness engulfed him. The yell that had split the air seemed to sink into the bayou along with the alligator. Gar Face lifted his flask to his mouth and drank, long and hard.
The liquid slid down his throat like a salve. The boat rocked again, this time gently, atop the water. It had been a long time, twenty-five years to be exact, since the night he had chased the deer to its death in the woods, a quarter century since he had felt so close to panic. An unpleasant tick of fear crawled across his chest. He panted.
Then he sneered. He had won then. He would win now. He raised his flask to the beast in the water and saluted. Then he took another deep draft. His insides burned.
When he looked over the edge of the boat, he saw that it was pushed up against the shore. He did not remember feeling the boat move in this direction. He took another hard swallow of the wicked vodka. Then he stood up, his legs shaking, and quickly jumped onto the grass and pulled the boat up with him. His head swam. He felt the bile mixed with vodka in his stomach begin to rise in his throat, and it made him nauseous; he sank onto the ground. He closed his eyes to steady himself, but it didn’t help. Instead he lay down in the marshy grass. The last thing he heard was the high-pitched whine of the early-morning mosquitoes, settling in for breakfast.
86
AT THE TILTING house, Sabine knew that something was wrong. The morning sun was well into the sky and the man had not returned. This was unusual. For her entire life, the man had left the house just as the sun had settled beyond the trees, and returned just as it rose.
She relied on Gar Face’s regular schedule to do her evening hunting. She knew that as soon as the man left, she could slip out from the Underneath, find something to eat, and return before he came back. She had been back now for hours. And the man was still gone.
Sabine would have loved nothing more than for the man to never come back. Then she could be free of the fear she harbored of him. There was just one problem. Ranger’s chain. They still needed the man to feed Ranger, even if he sometimes forgot.
With Ranger tied to the chain, he could not join her on the hunt. She compensated by bringing home small lizards and mice for him. He was always grateful, but they were never enough.
What would happen if the man never returned and Ranger remained chained to the post?
No, she thought, surely he’ll return. She turned toward the dark corner where Ranger lay, asleep, and rubbed against her old friend, tucked herself under his big ear and started to purr. Ranger stirred. His stomach was empty and he was thirsty, too. But Sabine was curled next to him, her soft purrs filling his head.
Little Sabine. She was the only one left for him. Faithful Sabine. How could he ever tell her how much he loved her, how much she meant to him?
He tried to go back to sleep, but he, too, worried about Gar Face’s absence. As much as he hated his owner, he needed him for food and water. Surely he, Ranger, didn’t deserve to die by starving at the end of a chain. Surely.
87
PUCK LOST TRACK of how much time had passed since he had pulled himself out of the creek. All he knew was that with each day, his urge to cross it grew stronger. Each day his mother’s voice echoed in his ears. Promise. Promise you’ll go back.
And each morning, after he had eaten, he walked to the bank and looked down at his nemesis, the creek. On the other side, he knew, were his sister and the hound. But even if he could get across, how would he find them? Which way would he go? He needed a beacon, a signal, some way to locate the right direction.
Why didn’t Ranger bay? How many times had he asked this question, over and over and over? And how many times had he left it there, unanswered? But today, standing on the edge of the creek, the awful answer presented itself, an answer he had avoided all this time.
Q:Why didn’t Ranger bay?
A: Something awful must have happened.
There it was, right in front of him, where it had been all this time, lurking like a shadow. Hhhiiiissssss! The truth of it buzzed in his ears. The fur on his back stood up.
Something awful must have happened.
The certainty of it was like a gust of wind, knocking against his bones. That was the only answer, Puck knew it. If it weren’t so, Ranger surely would have howled by now, he would have held his head up and bayed for his small gray kitten and for the mama cat, too.
Something awful must have happened.
The sun grew higher in the sky. The creek boiled as it tumbled by. Puck had to get back to the tilting house. Something awful must have happened. He was about to hiss again, when . . .
Chat-chat-chat-chat-chat.
The sudden noise startled him. He looked around but couldn’t see anything.
Chat-chat-chat-chat-chat.
Puck spun in a circle. No one was near. He looked in the spots of sunlight on the forest floor all around him, but there were no bird shadows flying through them.
Chat-chat-chat-chat.
Where was it coming from? Then a shower of acorn husks fell down from the oak tree that stood near his den. He looked up.
Chat-chat-chat-chat-chat.
A squirrel! Puck could barely detect the sleek brown animal, it was so far up in the branches of the tree. It was the tail that gave it away. From where he stood, he could see the brushy tail swishing to and fro.
He had never seen any animal besides a bird so high up in a tree before. How high up was it? Twenty feet? Thirty? The height impressed him. Then, in a flash, the squirrel zipped from one limb to another, walked out to the very ends of the smallest branches and ran along their narrow limbs. He stopped only long enough to shell an acorn and drop the husk on the ground.
Puck continued to watch. The squirrel scurried from one tree to another tree, from one branch to another branch, from one thin limb to another thin limb, until he did the impossible, and made it look easy: The squirrel crossed the creek.
Puck sat down hard, his mouth agape in wonder.
On the other side, the small animal disappeared in the thick brush. Why hadn’t Puck thought of that? He looked at his sharp claws. Didn’t he have the equipment for climbing trees? He growled a little and scratched the air. He sat up straight and licked his right shoulder.
He looked after the now vanished squirrel. He looked into the branches of the trees. He looked to the other side of the creek. There, there on the other side, was where he needed to be.
• • •
Grandmother knew where she needed to be too: anywhere but this jar, the birthday jar. A thousand birthdays had gone by, a thousand years in her solitary chamber. She opened her cotton white mouth and yawned. Ssssoooooonnnn, she hissed, my time will come.
88
IT WAS MIDDAY when Gar Face finally awoke. The sun was burning its way through the treetops and eating away at his cheeks. He blinked. It had been years since he had been outside in the full daylight. He wasn’t used to it, and his eyes ached when he opened them.
He rubbed his face. It was on fire! His hands, too. He looked at the backs of them. They were covered in lumps and bumps. All morning long, since he had passed out on the bank of the Bayou Tartine, mosquitoes had made a feast of his hands and face. And then the blazing sun had baked his sallow skin to a bright, ugly red. He pulled himself up and walked to the water’s edge. He dipped his hands into the coolness of it and splashed his face.
The water smelled old, as if it had sat in this fetid bayou for a million years, and it had. This old bayou, this Bayou Tartine. At the bottom sat the Alligator King, sound asleep.
Gar Face winced at his burning face. Then he drew himself up and walked through the forest, along a path that only he knew to walk, a path that skimmed the edges of the shifting sands. He walked toward the tilting hous
e. He listened for the dog to howl, but he didn’t hear it. Stupid dog. What good was a hound that didn’t howl?
As he entered the litter-strewn yard, from the corner of his eye he saw something slip beneath the porch. Fool dog can’t even keep rats out of the yard, he thought. He stepped onto the porch and rested his rifle on the railing. He tugged on the chain to see if the old dog was still alive. Sure enough, Ranger dragged himself out and sat down; he licked his sore leg, the one that still bore the bullet. Gar Face looked at him. The hound looked the same way he felt—tattered and scarred. He reached into the bag that sat on the porch and threw a few nuggets of cheap dog food into the hound’s bowl.
Then he walked inside and fell onto his cot. But just before he drifted off, he realized: the animal, the one that had slipped underneath the porch, that was no rat. That was a cat. Ahh, he thought.
Bait.
89
THE PINEY WOODS is home to an abundance of trappers, including the carnivorous pitcher plants whose inviting throats are lined with a sweet, sticky syrup for catching damselflies and other bugs. Spiders, of course, are the royalty of the trapping set with their treacherous webs.
Ask a tree, and it will tell you about any number of traps. The steel traps of hunters, the steel jaws of gators, the vicious jaws of the water moccasins.
From the Underneath, Sabine watched. At last she could rest. The man had returned, and he had actually fed Ranger. She tucked her feet beneath her and closed her eyes. How could she know that a trap was being set?
• • •
A tree’s memory is long, very long. So is Grandmother Moccasin’s. But her memory of the outside world only went up to the moment she was trapped in the jar. She had no recollection of the events that transpired while she lay entombed in her underground chamber. How could she?
90
THERE ARE MANY things Grandmother doesn’t know, alone in her underground prison. She doesn’t know what happened to Hawk Man.
Spent from his struggle with Grandmother Moccasin, he was racked with pain from the wound in his leg where Grandmother’s tail had slashed the skin, burning from the venom running through his body, the thick and awful poison that coursed through his veins.
There was all of that. Any other man might lie atop the water of the creek and let it carry him, broken, all the way to the great river to the south, the wide and silver Sabine, and then down to the warm and welcoming Gulf of Mexico, carry him down down down to the bottom of the deep blue sea.
But Hawk Man was no ordinary man. No. His blood was the blood of the great birds of enchantment, of Garuda and Thoth, the old bird gods of India and Egypt, full of the ancient magic. So he waited, waited in pain with his open wound and the toxic poison, each breath an agony, each movement an ache that shot through his entire body. He waited and waited for his daughter to return, his body too sick to go after her. He kept his human form because he, unlike Night Song, knew that once he donned his avian shape he could never return as a human.
He would stay in his human skin for his daughter. So he waited beside the creek, this creek. And while he waited, the villagers brought food to him, bowls of corn and berries and cooked rabbit and even roasted bison. They sat beside him and sang to him. The gentle and loving Caddo, those people who had welcomed him and his family into their tribe. They watched him. They waited with him.
Here, beside this creek, this old and rambling creek.
But they were not the only ones. The birds, too, the peregrines and robins, the jackdaws and vireos. They perched in the branches all around. They circled the sky above him. They nestled in the trees closest to him. They knew that if he stayed in his human skin, the poison would soon kill him.
Brother! Don your feathers, fly away.
Each day he grew weaker, but he refused to listen to their calls.
Step out of your human skin. Fly, brother, fly!
What about his daughter? Where was she? He began to cough and choke. The poison was filling up his lungs, his chest, his throat.
Come with us! cried the blue jays, the wrens, the kinglets, the bobolinks.
Fly! called the wood ducks, the cranes, the great blue herons.
He turned his back. He closed his eyes. His daughter. He had to wait for her. He gasped for air. His leg throbbed. The pain racked every inch of him. “My daughter,” he cried.
And then, in the fading light, he heard a whirring sound, a soft chirring, the beating of tiny wings. “Come,” he heard, “your time has come.” He looked up, and there in the golden sunlight was the hummingbird. He smiled, and when he did, she brushed his chin with her wing.
When the villagers came to him next, bearing food and friendship, in the place where their brother had lain for so many days, along the side of the creek, all they found were feathers, feathers that shone copper in the bright rays of the sun. And this is how the creek earned its name, Full of Sorrow for the Little Girl. And over time, that long name was changed until it became the one it is now, still full of tears, the Little Sorrowful, running toward the sea.
91
AND WHAT BECAME of the daughter, the one who glimmered? According to the reports of trees, of acacias and birches and tallows, the daughter of Hawk Man and Night Song was lost. For days she had walked, but the ground got harder and the trees more sparse. She had grown up with the sun in patches, filtered through the thick branches of the nannyberries, the water oaks, the maples. Now there was too much sun, and it burned her glimmering skin. The sky she knew was a sky that was broken into pieces, small snatches that peeked between the needles of the tall and whispering pines, but here, in this open place, the sky was enormous and empty.
Beneath her, the ground was solid, and tall grasses surrounded her, bent and bowed in the wind. The forest had always protected her from wind. Here, she was buffeted by it, surrounded by it. Here in this grassy meadow. This meadow full of air.
The air. Ahh, the air. She had never felt so much air surround her at one time. Such softness. Such tenderness. All this air.
Some say that a grassy meadow resembles the sea, that the grass rolls in the wind the way that water rolls into waves. They say that if you close your eyes, you can feel the Earth rock to and fro, back and forth, as though you were on a boat.
For a small girl all by herself, it didn’t matter whether she was lost at sea or lost in a meadow. A lost girl is lonely, lonely without her mother, a mother who sang to her every night, lonely without her father, lost in his torments. A girl who has gone to look for her grandmother, a grandmother she has never met. This girl. This mistaken girl. This small glimmering girl all alone in a faraway meadow.
She looked at the blowy grass and the bright blue sky. The enormity of her situation settled on her like a mist. She looked at the world all around, and all at once she knew that she would never see her mother again.
How did she know this? How do any of us know these things? It could be that somehow, if we stand still long enough, we can actually hear the trees and understand their messages. It could be that the light from the sun slips down at a certain slant so as to fill us in. Maybe it’s just that love has its own way of informing us when loss is at hand.
The daughter of Night Song and Hawk Man knew, and right then she felt so small, so tiny, as though she were the smallest creature on the planet.
Any other girl in this situation might curl up in a tight ball and weep and weep and weep. But not this girl, descendant of the sealfolk, the mermen, the sirens.
The blood of the water folk was not the only enchanted blood that ran through her veins. She was also the child of Hawk Man, son of the bird people. And here in this meadow, surrounded by so much air, enwrapped by so much sky, she lifted her arms toward the clouds. Her skin, radiant in the sun’s light, flashed all the colors of the rainbow. Suddenly the sky filled up with birds, a host of swallows and martins and painted buntings, of boat-tailed grackles and red-cockaded woodpeckers, bobwhites and mockingbirds. A million different birds, calling in their mill
ion different voices.
Daughter, they cried. Step out of your human skin.
They dipped and swirled in the air above her, and as they did, brilliant-colored feathers grew in her hair and covered her arms and neck and body, a rainbow of feathers. And all at once, in a flash of light, she flew away, flew so fast it seemed the air swallowed her right up.
• • •
Trapped in her jar, Grandmother felt a wave of longing rush through her. Would she ever see the goldy sun? Or her friend the alligator? Would she ever know the feel of wind and rain and the silver moon against her skin? Skin. For a thousand years, the only skin she had touched was her own. Dry and brittle. Skin. She would trade her own skin to hear Night Song’s lullaby one more time, to see her granddaughter glimmer in the light of the sun. She slashed her tail against the curve of the jar. Her skin ached.
92
IN THE SOLEMN Underneath, Sabine went about her regular routine. She did not know that Gar Face was aware of her, or that he was making plans that included her. Over the next couple of days, he resumed his normal pattern, leaving the house at dusk and returning in the early morning. She did not know that after he had spotted her, he had gone inside the house and wiped a clear space in the dust on the grimy window. There he peered through it long enough to see her slip out from under the house on her daily hunt. Then he looked at Ranger beside his empty food bowl. “Stupid dog,” he sneered. “Let the cat feed you.”
He rubbed the windowpane with the cuff of his shirt. Then he rubbed his face with his rough fingers. He was eaten up, as they say, from his mosquito bites and sunburn, his skin swollen and sore.
But he was eaten up by more than insect bites and sunburn. The ache in his face and the top of his hands was nothing compared to the gnawing in his gut, the one that ate at him from the inside.