Clementine wrapped a rag around her hand and pulled the knife out of the fire. I seen a whiff of smoke come off the knife, and then she went straight to Terry’s hand and poked it into his wound. Terry screamed. When she poked that knife in his hand, the pus all bound up in it from finger to wrist leaped out of the cut and hit me in the face like it was coming from a hose. It was such a surprise I almost let go of his arm.
“You got to hold him,” Clementine said.
I pulled myself together, held him tight. She cut him again, and more pus come out, but not in quite the leap as before. It was dark stuff, and thick. Terry had quit screaming, but he was whimpering like a wet kitten.
Clementine laid the knife aside. She took up Terry’s hand and stroked it with her thumb, bringing more pus out of the cuts. This caused Terry to go back to making serious noise. She kept at it until the wound was flat. Already it was less dark, having let out a lot of its coloring through the cuts she had made.
“Boone,” Clementine said, “I’m going to have to have some of your shine.”
“How much?” Boone said.
“Whatever I need,” she said. “Now get it.”
Boone grumbled a bit, went over to one of the packs, tore it open. He come back with something small wrapped in cloth. Clementine opened the bundle. Inside of it was a little jar of what I suspected was homemade hooch. She unscrewed the jar lid and poured the stuff on Terry’s hand. It made him jump. She poured more of it, and he didn’t jump this time, but lay there breathing easy.
She lifted up the jar and took a swig of it. She offered us all a sip, but we turned it down, though I saw Mama lick her lips a little. That alcohol smell was the same you could smell in that cure-all, and I know it tempted her, but she shook her head.
Clementine set the shine down on the ground. Boone came over and put the lid on it and wrapped it up again and put it back in his bundle. Clementine bound up Terry’s hand gently with some torn white cloth.
Mama said, “Is he going to be better?”
“He could only have got worse,” Clementine said. “I think he will get better, but he won’t get well unless he gets to a doctor. He needs some real attention. He won’t get it out here from me. All this dirt and such. It’ll get in the wound, and there ain’t no way around it.”
“Thank you,” Mama said, and me and Jinx chimed in with the same words.
Jinx pulled a handkerchief out of her overalls and used it to wipe the pus off my face, and then she put the rag in the fire.
You’d think after that we’d have all lost our appetite, but we hadn’t. Jud had some empty cans in his pack, cans that had once had something or another in them but had lost their labeling. He gave me and Jinx one to share. They gave the older kids one to share, another for the mother and the little girl to have. In the end, everyone had a can or a can to share with someone else. None of those kids said a thing through all this, not to us or their family. They didn’t act like kids ought to. It was like all their juice had been let out, and it hurt me to see it.
We all ate our bit of beans, and when that was done, we went looking for dead wood to keep the fire going, even if it was a warm night. The fire gave a bit of light, and there was a comfort in it.
Everyone stretched out on the ground to rest. I tried to, but couldn’t. I was thinking about Skunk. Jinx came over close to me. She was thinking about Skunk, too. She leaned into my ear. “We ought to be ready if Skunk shows up.”
I showed her that I had my pocketknife open and by my side.
“You might as well try to poke a bull to death with a needle,” she said.
“At least maybe I can give him something to remember me by.”
“He won’t need those pokes,” she said. “He’ll have your hands to remember you by.”
It don’t seem natural to be that scared and still tired, but me not being able to sleep only lasted awhile, then I felt like I was falling from a high tree, floating down like a single pine straw. I all of a sudden couldn’t keep my eyes open, and when daylight come and I woke up with both my hands not chopped off, I breathed a sigh of relief.
I looked over at Jinx. She was sitting by the fire. She had her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. At first I thought she was awake, but then I saw she had fallen asleep that way.
I got up and walked off in the woods, and took care of some business, and then I walked down to the river. The water had calmed considerable, and looking out at it, I wished for our stolen raft.
I walked around down there, hungry for breakfast. I came up on the spot where we had thrown away the bags the buckets had been in. I thought maybe I ought to look through them again, to see if any of the dried meat had survived.
The meat in the bags stunk bad as Terry’s wound. I emptied the bags out on the ground, but there wasn’t nothing there of any use. I walked back the way we had before, and came to where the reverend was. He had buzzards on him and they had plucked away his eyes and torn at his nose and lips. I picked up a rock and threw it at them and shooed at them until they flew off.
I thought maybe I should tell the folks back at the fire, see if they could help me get him out of them rocks and bury him, but I also feared they might think we had killed him.
I don’t know why I did it, but I went and looked for a stout stick, and found one. I swam out to him, which was easier now that I had rested and the water wasn’t so angry. I climbed on the rocks to where I could touch him with the stick. He was near blue and had swollen up like a dog tick. I went to poking at him with that stick until he finally come loose and fell down in the water. The water picked him up, and the piece of the raft sticking through him made him float as easy as a paper boat; the water toted him along until he was out of sight. I sat on those rocks for a long time, just feeling the warm sun and looking in the direction he had gone. I didn’t know how to feel about what I had done, but somehow I couldn’t just let those buzzards at him, and I wasn’t able to haul him out of the rocks and onto shore.
I tossed the stick away, and when I felt up to it, swam back to shore. I walked back the way I had come. When I got to those two empty bags lying on the ground where me and Terry had left them, I looked down at them, and then a thing that had been in the back of my mind connected up with some other things, and in that moment I was sick to my stomach. I put my hands against a sappy pine and leaned into it and threw up on the bark.
I knew something in that moment just as sure as it had been explained to me by words coming out of someone’s mouth. It had been hung up in front of me clear as the sun, and I hadn’t understood it till right then.
It took a while, but when I got myself together, I decided it wasn’t the time to mention what I had figured out. I walked back to where the others were. And when I got there, everyone was up except Terry, who still looked like death warmed over.
“I was worried about you,” Mama said.
The little girl, who had yet to speak, surprised me when she said, “We been told not to run off. We’d done that, Daddy would have tanned our hide.”
“She ain’t no little girl,” Jud said. He was stirring the fire apart with a stick. “And she ain’t no business of ours. She can do what she wants. You hold your mouth, child.”
The little girl went silent and pouty. I tried to smile at her and cheer her up, but she wasn’t having any of that. She looked away and went about her business, which was helping her family get its goods together. She and her family had all their stuff bundled up and the fire out within minutes.
“We’re going to go now,” said Clementine, boosting a bundle over her shoulder. “We wish y’all well, but we got to go on our own. We don’t want to be rude, and not be good Christians, but there isn’t any more we can do for you. Got to take care of our own. I can only tell you what I already have. You need to get that young fellow to a doctor, or that hand and arm are going to go bad. May life turn around for you.”
“Same for you,” Mama said.
With that, Clementine,
who looked much older in daylight, like she had been wet down and beat out on rocks and hung up to dry in the noonday sun, nodded at us, and started out after her family, who had already began to walk away. We stayed where we was and watched them wander alongside the railroad tracks. It would stand to reason that that was the way we ought to go, too, but our problem was Terry. We would have to carry him, and we didn’t have a way to do that and be able to toss him on a train. The only thing left for us to do was figure out how to get that boat off the chain and get Terry into it and float down the river.
Terry had still to come around. I looked down at him, and even sick like he was, his face all sweaty, his hair wet with it, he was still a pretty boy. He and May Lynn were two of a type, and looked as if they would have belonged together. Jinx was sitting by him on the ground, staring down at him. The look on her face was soft and sweet, not something that was normal to Jinx. She often had a way of looking as if she had been carved out of licorice with a dull knife, but when she relaxed her face, she was very pretty and her eyes was like a doe’s. She reached out and pushed Terry’s damp hair back.
Mama got up and glanced after the family going along the railroad tracks. She took me aside and said, “I almost tore open their bundle last night to get at that liquor. I was fine until I smelled it last night, and then I was ready to have me some if I had to jump that poor woman and fight her for it, fight the whole bunch of them. And then I got hold of myself, but it wasn’t easy. It was like trying to pull a team of wild horses back to keep them from running over a cliff.”
Mama seemed to have horses on the brain. I said, “Longer you stay away from it, easier it’ll be.”
“I’m not so sure,” Mama said. “What about Terry?”
“I figure I got to get that boat loose,” I said. “We all get in it, it’ll be a tight fit, but I don’t think we got a choice. Why don’t you stay here with Terry, and me and Jinx will see what we can find?”
It was that problem about leaving them alone again, but it still seemed worse to drag him down to the boat and us turn out not to be able to work it loose. And there needed to be someone there with him.
Me and Jinx went down by the river looking again for a rock heavy enough that we might strike the padlock off the chain. Taking the boat was stealing again, and it made me to think if I wasn’t careful I could be a career criminal. Criminal business was steady work, and sometimes there was money in it, but there was that whole prison thing, too, and that didn’t appeal to me much. But bad times bred bad intentions, and right now surviving was more important than anything.
“You think Terry’s going to be okay?” Jinx asked me. We was prowling around near the shoreline, farther up from where we had looked before, trying to come across a solid enough rock. Most of them was weak and came apart after they had been tested with a few strikes to the ground.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it depends on if we can get him to a doctor.”
“He sure is pretty,” she said.
I stopped and looked at her. “He is, but how come you’re just now noticing it?”
“I’ve always noticed it,” she said. “I’d have to be blind not to. It’s just that…Well…”
“He’s white,” I said.
“Yeah. That kind of thing don’t work in these parts, and I know he’s my friend and all, but I sometimes think of him in ways I shouldn’t, him being sissy and all.”
“I didn’t know you was attached like that.”
“I didn’t neither until I thought he might die. I guess I figured since we were going out to California there might be a little different outlook there. That he might be interested if I cleaned myself up some and learned how to talk right.”
“You know he’s a sissy, right?”
“It ain’t nothing but dreaming nohow, and I wish I hadn’t told you.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve thought the same thing about him.”
“Yeah, but you ain’t colored,” she said.
“It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “He ain’t got the desire for neither of us. If he didn’t have the desire for May Lynn, he damn sure don’t have it for us.”
Jinx went quiet when I said that, and there wasn’t any more talking to her about it or anything else. She trudged along and made some space between us for a while, and we went back to searching for that rock we needed.
Finally we come across one that was heavy and solid, but easy enough for one person to handle if they meant business. Me and Jinx took turns carrying it back to the boat, and when we got there, I took the first crack at it by climbing in the boat and striking the lock. The boat moved when I struck it and the chain rattled, but the only thing I managed to do to the lock was scratch it up some.
“Let me have that goddamn rock,” Jinx said. She climbed in the boat as I climbed out. She picked it up and lifted it high above her head. Her mouth twisted up, and then she brought that rock down with a good lick. The padlock leaped open, as if on command.
“Now,” she said, “let’s go up there and get Terry.”
We left the loose padlock poking through the chain, got the paddles out of the boat, put them on shore, then went back to where Terry lay. We folded his bad arm across his chest. It had already swole up again, and there were red lines moving up to his elbow. I knew what that was. Blood poisoning.
I got his feet and Mama and Jinx got him under the shoulders. We struggled with him across the clearing and went into the woods, only banging his head into a tree a couple of times before we got down to the boat and managed to stretch him out in the bottom of it. Then we loosed the chain from the padlock, got in the boat, and pushed off.
I didn’t feel any real relief until we was out in the center of the river and the water was carrying us along. Jinx was in the back paddling, with Mama having to sit up so close to her they was near like one person. I was in the front, and I found I was hitting the water with the paddle hard, thinking on what I thought I knew now and feeling really angry about it and at the same time sad and confused. I knew there wasn’t no need dwelling on it, not right then, even though it was bothering me something furious. I wanted to tell someone, but didn’t know how. I guess I knew, too, that no matter how certain I felt about what I was thinking, it was just a guess.
Skunk was a bigger worry, and that’s where I put my mind and let it rest. I had come to think that he was in fact playing with us, and on more than one occasion when we was on land the hair on the back of my neck had stood up, and when I had turned there was nothing. I didn’t mention this to the others, because I didn’t know if there was something real to it or it was just me imagining.
My thought was if we could stay in the middle of the river all the way to Gladewater, providing I’d even know when we got there, we might have a chance. But there was another thing. I was bad hungry and my stomach was growling like a dog. It wasn’t until we come to a spot in the river where the shore was cleared of trees, and we could see a house set back a ways from the river with some chickens in the yard, that I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. Those darn chickens running around out there made me lick my lips.
I looked back at Jinx, and she didn’t say nothing, but it was like she knew what I was thinking, cause she just nodded at me. I paddled the boat toward land and she paddled with me. Me and Jinx and Mama tugged the boat on shore about halfway, and then I said, “Me and Jinx are gonna see we can get some food. Mama, you stay with Terry. Something goes wrong up there, or there’s a ruckus, or you even think you see Skunk, or if you don’t hear from us after too long, you push off and paddle like you’re rowing across the Jordan for the Promised Land.”
“Be careful,” she said, and with that me and Jinx started up to the house.
The place was on a rise in the land. The grass was tall in the yard and green, but not from any kind of cultivating; it was naturally that way. Some quail flew up as we come along, and there wasn’t no chickens after all. Me and Jinx was both surprised to see they was jus
t big water birds pecking around for bugs. They took to the air as we got closer to them. Off in the distance I could see an old pen with the slats broken down, a well that had a near-fallen-down board curbing, and an outhouse that had a slat missing on the side.
Me and Jinx talked stuff over as we went, and we come to the decision that the thing to do was just to be straight up about it, and depend on the kindness of strangers, ask them to give us something to eat. Right then I was so hungry I’d have settled for a fistful of raw beans.
Since Jinx was colored, she knew she had to linger back and let me do the talking, in case it turned out to be white folks who lived there. If they was colored, then she could come up and talk. It was best to start out expecting someone white, as they could get real upset about a colored on their stoop.
I stepped up to the door and knocked briskly and stepped back. There was stirring in the house, like a rat crawling out from under newspapers, and soon the door opened. Standing there was an old woman, thin as a broomstick and bent over like a horseshoe. She wore a long faded blue gingham dress and a filthy white bonnet with straps that was tied off under her chin. Some white hair had escaped out from under it in spots, and one greasy strand was stuck to her face; at first glance it looked like a scar. Her face itself was dark as old leather and had about as much charm as a stomped-in mud hole.
“Ma’am,” I said. “Me and this little girl would love to eat almost anything, if you got it to spare. We could gather some wood for you, jobs like that and such. We’re terrible hungry.”
I thought it best not to mention Mama and Terry just yet.
The old woman studied us. “How about dirt?” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Would you eat dirt?”
I glanced back at Jinx.
Jinx said, “We got to draw the line at dirt.”
“Then you ain’t that terrible hungry,” said the old woman. “You was hungry, you’d eat dirt.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Well, we want to thank you for your time and wish you a good day.”