CONGO MAGIC
The thing that started Jibby talking was a feather. Right between his
knees when he sat down was a crow’s tail feather, and he picked it up
and it reminded him of something, because everything always did remind
Jibby of something. He stuck it up in the ground.
“What did you do that for?” I asked him.
He looked at the feather.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it reminded me of the time I was on
the Congo River.”
“What about the Congo River does an old crow’s feather remind you of?” I
asked him.
“Well, magic,” Jibby said. “A black feather is one of the things the
natives use for bad magic. They use a black feather when they want to
spoil an enemy’s plans. They stick a black feather in the ground like
this, and then they make a ring of other stuff around it and put magic
things in the circle.”
He showed me how they did it. He broke up some twigs and made a circle
around the feather, and then he felt in his pocket for things to put in
the circle. First he found his knife, and he held it in the cup of his
two hands and said something like:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
Only, of course, I can’t remember what it was he did say. Then he put
his knife inside the magic circle, and took out a box of safety matches
and said:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
Then he put the matches in the magic circle, and dug into his pocket
again, and all he could find was three or four nails and a couple of
screw eyes big enough to run a tiller rope through. He chanted:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
So into the magic circle went the nails and the screw eyes, and he
looked around and picked up the map Uncle Beeswax had made, and he
chanted over that and put that in the magic circle. Then he held out his
hands over the whole business and began some more nonsense-chanting,
starting low and getting louder, and I sort of got the idea and began to
chant with him, and there we both were, slapping our knees and chanting
away like lunatics:
“Keeko! Keeko!
Keeko, muk-muk, keeko!
Chuck-a-wah! Chuck-a-wah!
Chuck-a-wah chang cho chee!”
And over and over again. And then, all of a sudden, somebody was
standing behind us. I nearly jumped out of my skin, I was so frightened
at first. I thought maybe our magic had really raised an evil spirit or
something, and then I saw it was Cawley Romer. And I hadn’t been so far
wrong, either, for Cawl Romer is one of the meanest fellows that ever
comes to our island. Only one is meaner, and that is his brother Hen.
They are great big bullies.
[Illustration: SLAPPING OUR KNEES AND CHANTING AWAY LIKE LUNATICS]
“What are you doing?” Cawl Romer asked in that rough way a bully asks
things.
“Magic,” I said, as meek as Moses. “Jibby was showing me how the Congo
natives do magic.”
Cawl Romer was looking at the magic circle, and all at once he pushed
his foot over it and knocked down the feather and scattered the twigs
and things.
“I’ll magic your magic for you!” he said in his mean way, but he kept
his foot down and I saw why. He had it on top of the map Jibby had put
in the magic circle. He bent down and took the map from under his foot.
He turned it one way and another way and looked at it, but he couldn’t
make anything out of it, Uncle Beeswax had done it so roughly and in
such a hurry.
“I know what this is,” he said. “I know why you’ve got baskets and this
rake and this axe here. You know where a grape tree is.”
“It’s none of your business if we do,” I said, sulky-like, because I
knew what Cawl Romer would be up to next.
“Is that so!” he said. “Well, I’ll show you mighty soon whether it is my
business or not. I saw Old Beeswax chin with you, and I saw him go
rowing off up the river. A grape tree belongs to the man that gets it. I
just mean to clean this one out before....”
“Keeko! Keeko!
Keeko muk-muk keeko!”
chanted Jibby Jones.
He paid no attention to Cawl Romer at all, seemed like. He had stuck up
the feather again and made his twig circle and was chanting as if
nothing had happened.
“You listen to me,” Cawl Romer said, pushing Jibby in the back with his
foot. “Do you know where this grape tree is?”
Jibby looked up at him as solemn as an owl.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with my nose!” he said. “I did know
where that tree was; it was directly in front of my nose. That’s how I
was going to it--I was going to follow my nose. But now my nose won’t
point. It’s too bad!”
“Well, I’ll attend to that,” said Cawl Romer. “You’re going to show me
where that tree is, nose or no nose, or you’ll be sorry you ever came to
this island. And you, too, George. You know me! Now, you listen! I’m
going up to my cottage and get Hen and some baskets, and you sit right
here and don’t move! Understand that? If you’re not here, I’ll skin you
and eat you when I do catch you.”
Then he went away, and he took the map with him. Jibby sat where he was
until Cawl Romer was out of sight and then he jumped up like a flash.
“Hasten!” he said. “Hasten!”
I did not know what he was up to.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“Magic,” he said. “Congo magic, Georgie.”
He went to his skiff and took out the bait pail and chucked it and we
pulled the skiff out of the water and turned it upside down. Then he
took the two big screw eyes. He started one into the bottom of the skiff
by hitting it with a rock and then screwed it all the way in, and then
he put in the other the same way. One was nearer the bow and the other
nearer the stern. Then we swung the skiff around so the stern was
shoreward and the bow toward the river and Jibby did a thing that seemed
almost crazy. He untied the end of his trot-line from the tree and
slipped the end through the two screw eyes in the keel of the skiff and
tied the end of the trot-line to a tough root near the edge of the
river. Then we heaved the skiff over and pushed it out into the water so
the stern just rested on shore, and went back and sat down. I began to
see what he was up to. He had the skiff strung on the trot-line, under
water. Those Romer bullies would row across the river but when they got
just so far they would come to the end of the trot-line, where it was
tied to the big anchor stone, and there the skiff would stop. I
chuckled.
“Scratch a bully and you find a coward,” Jibby said. “My Grandfather
Parmenter used to say that, and he was a wise man. He had a nose like
mine. Scratch a bully and find a coward.”
“That’s all right enough,” I said, “but what are you going to gain by
it? We could run away and they couldn’t find us, and then we could tell
our fathers and they wouldn’t let the Romers hurt us.”
“And they have the map,” said Jibby. “If they look at it close enough,
they can understand it. They’ll see Wampus and Skippy and Tad by the
sycamore and know that is the big dot, and they’ll know the cross on the
map is the grape tree. They’ll have it cleaned out before Uncle Beeswax
can get here. And I like Uncle Beeswax. He’s my friend. He trusted us
with the map. I’m going to save those grapes for him.”
Well, Cawl Romer and his brother Hen came back and they acted mean and
rough. They chucked our axe and our rake into Jibby’s skiff as if they
didn’t care what damage they did, and they threw in their baskets and
left ours on the shore. Then they made me get into the bow seat and they
took the oars, and they made Jibby push off and hop into the stern seat.
“And no talk out of you!” Cawl said.
“Keeko!” Jibby said.
“Keeko muk-muk,
Chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
“That’s magic,” Cawl Romer told Hen, sneering-like. Then he said to
Jibby: “You can’t fool me! That’s no Congo magic talk. I don’t believe
you ever saw the Congo. That’s more like some old Chinese laundry talk
or Flatfoot Indian.”
Well, it didn’t seem like much of a place for magic to work, even if
there was such a thing. Miles and miles of blue sky, and the sun
shining, and the big river rushing along, and we just plain boys, and
the two Romers just everyday big bullies. Hen and Cawl pulled at the
oars and sweated, too, for it is no easy job to row across the river
there. You have to row more than half upstream or the current will carry
you half a mile below where you want to go by the time you get across.
And they were in a hurry, too. Uncle Beeswax was liable to come rowing
down the river any time, and he was no sort of man to mix in with when
he thought he had a fair right to a bee tree or a grape tree. Even big
bullies like the Romers would steer clear of him then; all they wanted
was to get across the river and clean up the wild grapes before Uncle
Beeswax came, and all Jibby wanted was to hold them back long enough for
Uncle Beeswax to show up. So Jibby chanted again.
“Keeko! Keeko!
Chuck-a-muck-a-mayo!
Chip-la, chip-la, chuck chang cho!”
he chanted, or something like that, and he took the tip of his nose in
his fingers and wiggled it back and forth.
“Stop that!” Hen Romer said, as cross as a bear. “Don’t you put any
magic on us!”
“Aw, pshaw!” Cawl Romer said. “Don’t worry about him; he can’t magic a
sick cat.”
But just the same he began to frown a little.
“What’s the matter with this boat?” he said. “I wouldn’t have this boat
for a gift. I never knew a boat to pull as hard as this boat pulls.”
I knew what was the matter. The screw eyes on the bottom of the skiff
had come to Jibby’s hook-lines on his trot-line and were dragging them
along the trot-line the way Uncle Beeswax had said a big fish might.
“Row, why don’t you?” Cawl shouted over his shoulder at Hen.
“I am rowing as hard as I can,” Hen shouted back. “Row some yourself and
don’t make me do it all.”
Every stroke they took the screw eyes gathered up another hook-line and
added it to those they were already dragging. The Romers panted and
puffed and pulled until their eyes stuck out an inch, almost, but they
could just barely make the skiff move.
“Plenty keeko!” Jibby said, and stopped chanting.
“Pull, why don’t you?” Cawl shouted at Hen again.
They did pull, too. Out there in the middle of the river, with the
current rushing the water past the skiff and the skiff pointed halfway
upstream and the shores a good distance away, no one can tell whether a
skiff is moving much or not. Those two Romers buckled down hard and
strained every muscle and did their level best. They got madder and
madder and scolded each other, and the boat hardly moved an inch at a
stroke. They kept looking over their shoulders at the Buffalo Island
shore and simply humped their backs, but the shore did not seem to come
any nearer. They rowed harder than I ever saw any one row outside of a
race. They made the oars bend. Then they came to the end of the
trot-line, where it dipped down to the big anchor rock and the boat did
not move at all. And, away up the river, I saw a black speck that I was
pretty sure must be Uncle Beeswax rowing down.
Cawl Romer rested on his oars a minute.
“What does this mean, Jones?” he asked Jibby, and he was mighty mad.
“You can’t fool me. There is no such thing as magic. What’s the matter
with this boat?”
“It don’t seem to go, somehow,” Jibby said.
“He’s put a spell on it, that’s what he’s done,” Hen Romer said. “You
can’t fool _me_! I never saw a boat yet that I couldn’t row _some_. He’s
magicked us, Cawl.”
Cawl took up his oars and began to row, but he looked worried.
“I don’t believe in magic,” he said, but he did not say it as if he
meant it. “How could he put a spell on a boat? He couldn’t do it.”
“I don’t know what a fellow with a nose like that can do,” Hen said, and
he said it as if he did mean it. “I didn’t like his looks the first time
I saw him, and I told you so. I said to keep away from him. And don’t
you try to tell me there isn’t magic. You just remember Uncle Harris and
the colored conjure woman!”
Well, I didn’t know what he meant by his Uncle Harris and the conjure
woman, but I guess Cawl did, for he looked uneasy.
“You be still!” he said. Then he turned to me. “Did he put magic on this
boat?” he asked.
“How do I know?” I asked. “He was doing something with a feather and
some sticks--that’s all I know.”
“Well, he’s magicked us!” Cawl said all of a sudden, dropping his oars.
“That’s what he’s done; he’s put a spell on us.”
He picked up one oar and felt the depth of the river and could not touch
bottom on any side. So Hen stopped rowing. As soon as they both stopped
rowing, the boat sagged around with the current and the pull on the
trot-line was heavy. I looked up the river and saw Uncle Beeswax was
rowing for us and was near enough to hear us. I yelled to him and waved
my arms. Hen and Cawl had seen him, too. They made a last effort and
took up their oars and rowed hard, but it was no use. Uncle Beeswax bore
down on us and came alongside and grasped the gunwale of our skiff. The
Romers stopped rowing, too, and that put the full weight of both skiffs,
with the whole current behind them, on the trot-line and she parted as
easy as you would break a rotten thread.
“What’s the matter?” Uncle Beeswax asked.
The skiffs were floating down-river as easy as you please.
“Nothing,” Jibby said. “These Romers wanted to come along and the skiff
did not want them to.”
“Neither do I; I don’t like ’em, hoof nor hide,” said Uncle Beeswax, who
was plain-spoken enough when he wanted to be.
“Wampus and Tad and Skippy are waiting by the sycamore,” Jibby said.
“Maybe you’d better go on and get the grapes, Uncle Beeswax, and we’ll
see if we can row this skiff home. It may be willing to go across the
river one way if it isn’t willing to go the other.”
The two Romers scowled a lot at this, but they took to the oars. They
did not bother to row us back to our mud cove. They rowed across the
easiest way, and that landed us down near the end of Birch Island, and
they got out there. They did not say a word. As long as we could see
them, as we rowed back across the river to the sycamore tree, they were
standing there talking to each other--trying to make up their minds
whether they believed in magic or not, I guess.
Well, Uncle Beeswax got his wild grapes and, after we got home, Jibby
reeled in his trot-line. He had lost most of his hooks, but he did not
mind that; he had kept the Romers from doing Uncle Beeswax out of his
grapes.
“Jibby,” Wampus asked, when I had told him and Skippy and Tad about the
screw eyes and the trot-line and all, “how on earth did you ever think
of putting the screw eyes in the keel of the skiff and running the
trot-line through them?”
“Well, I’ll explain it,” Jibby Jones said. “I had the screw eyes....”
“Yes.”
“And I had the trot-line....”
“Yes.”
“And I had the skiff....”
“Yes.”
“Well, what else could anybody do with a couple of screw eyes and a
trot-line and a skiff?” Jibby asked. “I couldn’t think of anything else
to do with them, so I did that. But I’m sorry for one thing.
“The feather,” Jibby said. “That crow feather was wasted. I couldn’t
think of any way to use it. I tried, but I couldn’t.”