Edge of Dark Water (18 page)

“We went out to California to pick oranges, and that wasn’t no good. Everyone in the whole damn world seemed to be there. You could work all day and not make enough to buy a sack of flour. We come back this direction for no good reason at all. It’s greener than Oklahoma, but there ain’t nothing here for nobody to do. We’re on our way somewhere else.”

“Where?” I said.

“Just somewhere else,” he said.

“You went on and told our life story anyhow,” the woman said to the old man.

“I reckon I did,” he said, slumping his shoulders. “Reckon I did. It was just all balled up inside me.”

“It got out,” she said, then looked at Jinx. “The boy. Can he walk?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“If we could get him here by the fire, I might could look at his hand. I’ve done some patching up in my time.”

“We can try and cart him over here,” I said.

“Jud and Boone here can help you, you need it,” she said. “We can give you a bite to eat.”

“We ain’t got that much to share,” Jud said. “Some beans is all, and not enough for any more mouths.”

“Hush, Jud,” the woman said. “We’ll make do, if we all just get a spoonful.”

Jud looked at the woman, then looked back at the fire. From experience, he knew he wasn’t going to win any kind of a battle over sharing beans, or much of anything else.

“There’s also another person,” I said. “My mother.”

“Bring them both here,” she said.

Jud nodded toward the can on the fire. “You ain’t got nothing to add to the fixings, do you?”

“No, sir,” I said. “Sorry. Everything we had is at the bottom of the river, except for a couple of nonfood items.”

“All right,” Jud said, and then sighed. “Let’s go see we can get this friend of yours. But I ought to tell you, I got a gun.”

To prove that, he pulled a pistol out of his coat pocket. It was a very small pistol. It had an over-and-under barrel that rattled a little in its groove. Most likely, he shot it at you, you’d have to lean into the gun to get hit—provided it didn’t explode in his face.

“We ain’t aiming to get shot,” Jinx said. They all looked at her kind of startled. She had been so quiet up until now they may have figured her for a deaf-mute.

“Ain’t no shooting going on,” Jud said.

He put the gun back in his coat, and we started out with them toward the river.

I
t was a real job, but we finally got Terry to the fire.

We sat there while the woman—who, we learned, was named Clementine—looked at Terry’s hand. By firelight it looked bad as bad could be. It was swollen big and had gone purple and there was some dark lines moving up the wrist toward the elbow. You could smell the wound, like meat going to rot.

The men both stared at Mama. I don’t think they meant to be rude, but it isn’t every day you see someone looked like her out in the woods wandering around. Even damp as a pissed-on hen, she was still something special, and I couldn’t help but envy her. I guess I looked all right, but there wasn’t any way I was ever going to look like her.

“What’s in them buckets?” said Jud.

We had carried our lard cans with us, and I was sitting on mine, and Jinx on hers.

“It’s a friend of ours got burned up in a fire in a house,” I said. I didn’t feel too bad telling that lie, as part of it was true.

“What?” said Boone.

“She was a big friend, and she’s packed in both buckets,” I said.

“You scooped her out of a fire?” Jud said.

“What was left of her.”

I got off the lard can and used my pocketknife to open it up. I put the knife away and took out the jar and showed it to them by holding it close to the fire. It was dark with ashes.

“What in hell are you doing with her burned up like that?” said Jud.

“We’re taking what’s left to her relatives, to let them decide where she ought to be buried. We figured we ought not just let her ashes lie around and dry out and get blown away by the wind.”

“That’s something,” Boone said, trying to wrap his head around that.

“I guess that’s the Christian thing to do,” Clementine said.

“You ought to have just kicked some dirt over that ash,” Boone said. “I don’t know it’s so Christian to carry her around in a bucket. That don’t seem right, keeping a woman in a bucket, even if she is dead and burned to ash.”

“How do you know what ash is hers and what ash is the house?” Jud said.

“I reckon God can sort that out,” I said.

This seemed to end any interest in the buckets, and Jinx didn’t have to open the other, cause if they had seen that money, desperate circumstances might have changed their character.

“It’s bad infected,” said Clementine after she had checked over Terry’s hand. “There ain’t nothing for it but to let some of the poison out. I can do it, but I can’t make no promises.”

“Then you better do it,” Jinx said. She was near Terry and she was looking at his hand lying across his chest.

“It’s going to wake him up, when I do what I got to do,” said Clementine, “and it’s going to hurt like the fires of hell for a moment, but if we can let the poison out, he’ll do better, at least until you can find a doctor.”

“My Clementine was a nurse,” said Jud.

“Not official,” she said. “I just helped the doctor out until this Depression come down. He called me a nurse, but all the training I got I picked up from doing. Jud, I’m going to need your knife.”

Jud gave her a large pocketknife, and Clementine opened it up and poked the blade in the fire and held it there. She held it there a long time. We sat and watched. When the blade started to glow red, she said, “He’s going to need holding down.”

Jinx got his arm, the one that didn’t have a hand on it the color of an eggplant, and held it down. Jud came and straddled Terry and sat on his legs. I got hold of his other arm, the one with the injured hand, and held it out on a rag Clementine had spread on the ground.

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.”