brothers, bareheaded, turned their backs upon their friends and went
away. Slowly they passed out through the doorway into the darkness of
the stair landing, and the members of the Gideon K. Irons Camp were all
up on their feet.
"Mind that top step, Abner!" they heard the younger man say. "Wait! I'll
help you down."
That was all that was heard, except a scuffling sound of uncertainly
placed feet, growing fainter and fainter as the two brothers passed down
the long stairs of Kamleiter's Hall and out into the night--that was
all, unless you would care to take cognizance of a subdued little chorus
such as might be produced by twelve or thirteen elderly men snuffling in
a large bare room. As commandant of the Camp it was fitting, perhaps,
that Judge Priest should speak first.
"The trouble with this here Camp is jest this," he said: "it's got a lot
of snifflin' old fools in it that don't know no better than to bust out
cryin' when they oughter be happy!" And then, as if to show how deeply
he felt the shame of such weakness on the part of others, Judge Priest
blew his nose with great violence, and for a space of minutes
industriously mopped at his indignant eyes with an enormous pocket
handkerchief.
* * * * *
In accordance with a rule, Jeff Poindexter waited up for his employer.
Jeff expected him by nine-thirty at the latest; but it was actually
getting along toward ten-thirty before Jeff, who had been dozing lightly
in the dim-lit hall, oblivious to the fanged attentions of some large
mosquitoes, roused suddenly as he heard the sound of a rambling but
familiar step clunking along the wooden sidewalk of Clay Street. The
latch on the front gate clicked, and as Jeff poked his nose out of the
front door he heard, down the aisle of trees that bordered the gravel
walk, the voice of his master uplifted in solitary song.
In the matter of song the judge had a peculiarity. It made no difference
what the words might be or the theme--he sang every song and all songs
to a fine, high, tuneless little tune of his own. At this moment Judge
Priest, as Jeff gathered, was showing a wide range of selection. One
second he was announcing that his name it was Joe Bowers and he was all
the way from Pike, and the next he was stating, for the benefit of all
who might care to hear these details, that they--presumably certain
horses--were bound to run all night--bound to run all day; so you could
bet on the bobtailed nag and he'd bet on the bay. Nearer to the porch
steps it boastingly transpired that somebody had jumped aboard the
telegraf and steered her by the triggers, whereat the lightnin' flew and
'lectrified and killed ten thousand niggers! But even so general a
catastrophe could not weigh down the singer's spirits. As he put a
fumbling foot upon the lowermost step of the porch, he threw his head
far back and shrilly issued the following blanket invitation to ladies
resident in a far-away district:
_Oh, Bowery gals, won't you come out tonight?
Won't you come out tonight?
Oh, Bowery gals, won't you come out tonight,
And dance by the light of the moon?
I danced with a gal with a hole in her stockin';
And her heel it kep' a-rockin'--kep' a-rockin'!
She was the purtiest gal in the room!_
Jeff pulled the front door wide open. The song stopped and Judge Priest
stood in the opening, teetering a little on his heels. His face was all
a blushing pinky glow.
"Evenin', jedge!" greeted Jeff. "You're late, suh!"
"Jeff," said Judge Priest slowly, "it's a beautiful evenin'."
Amazed, Jeff stared at him. As a matter of fact, the drizzle of the
afternoon had changed, soon after dark, to a steady downpour. The
judge's limpened hat brim dripped raindrops and his shoulders were
sopping wet, but Jeff had yet to knowingly and wilfully contradict a
prominent white citizen.
"Yas, suh!" he said, half affirmatively, half questioningly. "Is it?"
"It is so!" said Judge Priest. "Every star in the sky shines like a
diamond! Jeff, it's the most beautiful evenin' I ever remember!"
VIII
FISHHEAD
It goes past the powers of my pen to try to describe Reelfoot Lake for
you so that you, reading this, will get the picture of it in your mind
as I have it in mine. For Reelfoot Lake is like no other lake that I
know anything about. It is an afterthought of Creation.
The rest of this continent was made and had dried in the sun for
thousands of years--for millions of years for all I know--before
Reelfoot came to be. It's the newest big thing in nature on this
hemisphere probably, for it was formed by the great earthquake of 1811,
just a little more than a hundred years ago. That earthquake of 1811
surely altered the face of the earth on the then far frontier of this
country. It changed the course of rivers, it converted hills into what
are now the sunk lands of three states, and it turned the solid ground
to jelly and made it roll in waves like the sea. And in the midst of
the retching of the land and the vomiting of the waters it depressed to
varying depths a section of the earth crust sixty miles long, taking it
down--trees, hills, hollows and all; and a crack broke through to the
Mississippi River so that for three days the river ran up stream,
filling the hole.
The result was the largest lake south of the Ohio, lying mostly in
Tennessee, but extending up across what is now the Kentucky line, and
taking its name from a fancied resemblance in its outline to the splay,
reeled foot of a cornfield negro. Niggerwool Swamp, not so far away, may
have got its name from the same man who christened Reelfoot; at least so
it sounds.
Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery. In places it is
bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress trees that went
down when the earth sank still stand upright, so that if the sun shines
from the right quarter and the water is less muddy than common, a man
peering face downward into its depths sees, or thinks he sees, down
below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers,
all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green
lake slime. In still other places the lake is shallow for long
stretches, no deeper than breast deep to a man, but dangerous because of
the weed growths and the sunken drifts which entangle a swimmer's limbs.
Its banks are mainly mud, its waters are muddied too, being a rich
coffee color in the spring and a copperish yellow in the summer, and the
trees along its shore are mud colored clear up to their lower limbs
after the spring floods, when the dried sediment covers their trunks
with a thick, scrofulous-looking coat.
There are stretches of unbroken woodland around it and slashes where the
cypress knees rise countlessly like headstones and footstones for the
dead snags that rot in the soft ooze. There are deadenings with the
lowland corn growing high and rank below and the bleached,
fire-blackened girdled trees rising above, barren of leaf and limb.
There are long, dismal flats where in the spring the clotted frog-spawn
clings like patches of white mucus among the weed stalks and at night
the turtles crawl out to lay clutches of perfectly round, white eggs
with tough, rubbery shells in the sand. There are bayous leading off to
nowhere and sloughs that wind aimlessly, like great, blind worms, to
finally join the big river that rolls its semi-liquid torrents a few
miles to the westward.
So Reelfoot lies there, flat in the bottoms, freezing lightly in the
winter, steaming torridly in the summer, swollen in the spring when the
woods have turned a vivid green and the buffalo gnats by the million and
the billion fill the flooded hollows with their pestilential buzzing,
and in the fall ringed about gloriously with all the colors which the
first frost brings--gold of hickory, yellow-russet of sycamore, red of
dogwood and ash and purple-black of sweet-gum.
But the Reelfoot country has its uses. It is the best game and fish
country, natural or artificial, that is left in the South today. In
their appointed seasons the duck and the geese flock in, and even
semi-tropical birds, like the brown pelican and the Florida snake-bird,
have been known to come there to nest. Pigs, gone back to wildness,
range the ridges, each razor-backed drove captained by a gaunt, savage,
slab-sided old boar. By night the bull frogs, inconceivably big and
tremendously vocal, bellow under the banks.
It is a wonderful place for fish--bass and crappie and perch and the
snouted buffalo fish. How these edible sorts live to spawn and how their
spawn in turn live to spawn again is a marvel, seeing how many of the
big fish-eating cannibal fish there are in Reelfoot. Here, bigger than
anywhere else, you find the garfish, all bones and appetite and horny
plates, with a snout like an alligator, the nearest link, naturalists
say, between the animal life of today and the animal life of the
Reptilian Period. The shovel-nose cat, really a deformed kind of
freshwater sturgeon, with a great fan-shaped membranous plate jutting
out from his nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet places
with mighty splashing sounds, as though a horse had fallen into the
water. On every stranded log the huge snapping turtles lie on sunny days
in groups of four and six, baking their shells black in the sun, with
their little snaky heads raised watchfully, ready to slip noiselessly
off at the first sound of oars grating in the row-locks.
But the biggest of them all are the catfish. These are monstrous
creatures, these catfish of Reelfoot--scaleless, slick things, with
corpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins like javelins and long whiskers
dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads. Six and seven feet
long they grow to be and to weigh two hundred pounds or more, and they
have mouths wide enough to take in a man's foot or a man's fist and
strong enough to break any hook save the strongest and greedy enough to
eat anything, living or dead or putrid, that the horny jaws can master.
Oh, but they are wicked things, and they tell wicked tales of them down
there. They call them man-eaters and compare them, in certain of their
habits, to sharks.
Fishhead was of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn
fits its cup. All his life he had lived on Reelfoot, always in the one
place, at the mouth of a certain slough. He had been born there, of a
negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and
the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of
the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously
marked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritable
embodiment of nightmare. He had the body of a man--a short, stocky,
sinewy body--but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish
as any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect. His
skull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have a
forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes were
small and round with shallow, glazed, pale-yellow pupils, and they were
set wide apart in his head and they were unwinking and staring, like a
fish's eyes. His nose was no more than a pair of tiny slits in the
middle of the yellow mask. His mouth was the worst of all. It was the
awful mouth of a catfish, lipless and almost inconceivably wide,
stretching from side to side. Also when Fishhead became a man grown his
likeness to a fish increased, for the hair upon his face grew out into
two tightly kinked, slender pendants that drooped down either side of
the mouth like the beards of a fish.
If he had any other name than Fishhead, none excepting he knew it. As
Fishhead he was known and as Fishhead he answered. Because he knew the
waters and the woods of Reelfoot better than any other man there, he was
valued as a guide by the city men who came every year to hunt or fish;
but there were few such jobs that Fishhead would take. Mainly he kept
to himself, tending his corn patch, netting the lake, trapping a little
and in season pot hunting for the city markets. His neighbors,
ague-bitten whites and malaria-proof negroes alike, left him to himself.
Indeed for the most part they had a superstitious fear of him. So he
lived alone, with no kith nor kin, nor even a friend, shunning his kind
and shunned by them.
His cabin stood just below the state line, where Mud Slough runs into
the lake. It was a shack of logs, the only human habitation for four
miles up or down. Behind it the thick timber came shouldering right up
to the edge of Fishhead's small truck patch, enclosing it in thick shade
except when the sun stood just overhead. He cooked his food in a
primitive fashion, outdoors, over a hole in the soggy earth or upon the
rusted red ruin of an old cook stove, and he drank the saffron water of
the lake out of a dipper made of a gourd, faring and fending for
himself, a master hand at skiff and net, competent with duck gun and
fish spear, yet a creature of affliction and loneliness, part savage,
almost amphibious, set apart from his fellows, silent and suspicious.
In front of his cabin jutted out a long fallen cottonwood trunk, lying
half in and half out of the water, its top side burnt by the sun and
worn by the friction of Fishhead's bare feet until it showed countless
patterns of tiny scrolled lines, its under side black and rotted and
lapped at unceasingly by little waves like tiny licking tongues. Its
farther end reached deep water. And it was a part of Fishhead, for no
matter how far his fishing and trapping might take him in the daytime,
sunset would find him back there, his boat drawn up on the bank and he
on the outer end of this log. From a distance men had seen him there
many times, sometimes squatted, motionless as the big turtles that would
crawl upon its dipping tip in his absence, sometimes erect and vigilant
like a creek crane, his misshapen yellow form outlined against the
yellow sun, the yellow water, the yellow banks--all of them yellow
together.
If the Reelfooters shunned Fishhead by day they feared him by night and
avoided him as a plague, dreading even the chance of a casual meeting.
For there were ugly stories about Fishhead--stories which all the
negroes and some of the whites believed. They said that a cry which had
been heard just before dusk and just after, skittering across the
darkened waters, was his calling cry to the big cats, and at his bidding
they came trooping in, and that in their company he swam in the lake on
moonlight nights, sporting with them, diving with them, even feeding
with them on what manner of unclean things they fed. The cry had been
heard many times, that much was certain, and it was certain also that
the big fish were noticeably thick at the mouth of Fishhead's slough.
No native Reelfooter, white or black, would willingly wet a leg or an
arm there.
Here Fishhead had lived and here he was going to die. The Baxters were
going to kill him, and this day in mid-summer was to be the time of the
killing. The two Baxters--Jake and Joel--were coming in their dugout to
do it. This murder had been a long time in the making. The Baxters had
to brew their hate over a slow fire for months before it reached the
pitch of action. They were poor whites, poor in everything--repute and
worldly goods and standing--a pair of fever-ridden squatters who lived
on whisky and tobacco when they could get it, and on fish and cornbread
when they couldn't.
The feud itself was of months' standing. Meeting Fishhead one day in the
spring on the spindly scaffolding of the skiff landing at Walnut Log,
and being themselves far overtaken in liquor and vainglorious with a
bogus alcoholic substitute for courage, the brothers had accused him,
wantonly and without proof, of running their trot-line and stripping it
of the hooked catch--an unforgivable sin among the water dwellers and
the shanty boaters of the South. Seeing that he bore this accusation in
silence, only eyeing them steadfastly, they had been emboldened then to
slap his face, whereupon he turned and gave them both the beating of
their lives--bloodying their noses and bruising their lips with hard
blows against their front teeth, and finally leaving them, mauled and
prone, in the dirt. Moreover, in the onlookers a sense of the
everlasting fitness of things had triumphed over race prejudice and
allowed them--two freeborn, sovereign whites--to be licked by a nigger.
Therefore, they were going to get the nigger. The whole thing had been
planned out amply. They were going to kill him on his log at sundown.
There would be no witnesses to see it, no retribution to follow after
it. The very ease of the undertaking made them forget even their inborn
fear of the place of Fishhead's habitation.
For more than an hour now they had been coming from their shack across a
deeply indented arm of the lake. Their dugout, fashioned by fire and adz
and draw-knife from the bole of a gum tree, moved through the water as
noiselessly as a swimming mallard, leaving behind it a long, wavy trail
on the stilled waters. Jake, the better oarsman sat flat in the stern of
the round-bottomed craft, paddling with quick, splashless strokes. Joel,
the better shot, was squatted forward. There was a heavy, rusted duck
gun between his knees.
Though their spying upon the victim had made them certain sure he would
not be about the shore for hours, a doubled sense of caution led them to
hug closely the weedy banks. They slid along the shore like shadows,
moving so swiftly and in such silence that the watchful mud turtles
barely turned their snaky heads as they passed. So, a full hour before
the time, they came slipping around the mouth of the slough and made for
a natural ambuscade which the mixed breed had left within a stone's jerk
of his cabin to his own undoing.
Where the slough's flow joined deeper water a partly uprooted tree was
stretched, prone from shore, at the top still thick and green with
leaves that drew nourishment from the earth in which the half-uncovered
roots yet held, and twined about with an exuberance of trumpet vines and
wild fox-grapes. All about was a huddle of drift--last year's
cornstalks, shreddy strips of bark, chunks of rotted weed, all the
riffle and dunnage of a quiet eddy. Straight into this green clump
glided the dugout and swung, broadside on, against the protecting trunk
of the tree, hidden from the inner side by the intervening curtains of
rank growth, just as the Baxters had intended it should be hidden, when
days before in their scouting they marked this masked place of waiting
and included it, then and there, in the scope of their plans.
There had been no hitch or mishap. No one had been abroad in the late
afternoon to mark their movements--and in a little while Fishhead ought
to be due. Jake's woodman's eye followed the downward swing of the sun
speculatively. The shadows, thrown shoreward, lengthened and slithered
on the small ripples. The small noises of the day died out; the small
noises of the coming night began to multiply. The green-bodied flies
went away and big mosquitoes, with speckled gray legs, came to take the
places of the flies. The sleepy lake sucked at the mud banks with small
mouthing sounds as though it found the taste of the raw mud agreeable. A
monster crawfish, big as a chicken lobster, crawled out of the top of
his dried mud chimney and perched himself there, an armored sentinel on
the watchtower. Bull bats began to flitter back and forth above the tops
of the trees. A pudgy muskrat, swimming with head up, was moved to sidle
off briskly as he met a cotton-mouth moccasin snake, so fat and swollen
with summer poison that it looked almost like a legless lizard as it
moved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid s's.
Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compact
little swarm of midges hung, holding to a sort of kite-shaped formation.
A little more time passed and Fishhead came out of the woods at the
back, walking swiftly, with a sack over his shoulder. For a few seconds
his deformities showed in the clearing, then the black inside of the
cabin swallowed him up. By now the sun was almost down. Only the red nub
of it showed above the timber line across the lake, and the shadows lay
inland a long way. Out beyond, the big cats were stirring, and the great
smacking sounds as their twisting bodies leaped clear and fell back in
the water came shoreward in a chorus.
But the two brothers in their green covert gave heed to nothing except
the one thing upon which their hearts were set and their nerves tensed.
Joel gently shoved his gun-barrels across the log, cuddling the stock to
his shoulder and slipping two fingers caressingly back and forth upon
the triggers. Jake held the narrow dugout steady by a grip upon a
fox-grape tendril.
A little wait and then the finish came. Fishhead emerged from the cabin
door and came down the narrow footpath to the water and out upon the
water on his log. He was barefooted and bareheaded, his cotton shirt
open down the front to show his yellow neck and breast, his dungaree
trousers held about his waist by a twisted tow string. His broad splay
feet, with the prehensile toes outspread, gripped the polished curve of
the log as he moved along its swaying, dipping surface until he came to
its outer end and stood there erect, his chest filling, his chinless
face lifted up and something of mastership and dominion in his poise.
And then--his eye caught what another's eyes might have missed--the
round, twin ends of the gun barrels, the fixed gleams of Joel's eyes,
aimed at him through the green tracery.
In that swift passage of time, too swift almost to be measured by
seconds, realization flashed all through him, and he threw his head
still higher and opened wide his shapeless trap of a mouth, and out
across the lake he sent skittering and rolling his cry. And in his cry
was the laugh of a loon, and the croaking bellow of a frog, and the bay
of a hound, all the compounded night noises of the lake. And in it, too,
was a farewell and a defiance and an appeal. The heavy roar of the duck
gun came.
At twenty yards the double charge tore the throat out of him. He came
down, face forward, upon the log and clung there, his trunk twisting
distortedly, his legs twitching and kicking like the legs of a speared
frog, his shoulders hunching and lifting spasmodically as the life ran
out of him all in one swift coursing flow. His head canted up between
the heaving shoulders, his eyes looked full on the staring face of his
murderer, and then the blood came out of his mouth and Fishhead, in
death still as much fish as man, slid flopping, head first, off the end
of the log and sank, face downward, slowly, his limbs all extended out.
One after another a string of big bubbles came up to burst in the middle
of a widening reddish stain on the coffee-colored water.
The brothers watched this, held by the horror of the thing they had
done, and the cranky dugout, tipped far over by the recoil of the gun,
took water steadily across its gunwale; and now there was a sudden
stroke from below upon its careening bottom and it went over and they
were in the lake. But shore was only twenty feet away, the trunk of the
uprooted tree only five. Joel, still holding fast to his hot gun, made
for the log, gaining it with one stroke. He threw his free arm over it
and clung there, treading water, as he shook his eyes free. Something
gripped him--some great, sinewy, unseen thing gripped him fast by the
thigh, crushing down on his flesh.
He uttered no cry, but his eyes popped out and his mouth set in a square
shape of agony, and his fingers gripped into the bark of the tree like
grapples. He was pulled down and down, by steady jerks, not rapidly but
steadily, so steadily, and as he went his fingernails tore four little
white strips in the tree bark. His mouth went under, next his popping
eyes, then his erect hair, and finally his clawing, clutching hand, and
that was the end of him.