It was such a bright night we could see the river good as day. We could make out sandbars and easily pole around them. We could see the spaces between trees clearly, and the moonlight lay on the tops of them like some kind of fuzzy halo. Slats of soft shadow fell over the water as if they was window blinds. Even the sticklike heads of turtles poking out of the water was easy to see.
After we had gone a ways, the river became straight and wide, and we saw a deer swimming across it wearing a rack of antlers on its head big enough to hang a rich man’s winter coats and a couple of hats.
Mama sat in the middle of the raft with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them while the rest of us poled. The box holding May Lynn was near her, and she had her head turned, looking at it, knowing what it was, I guess, though we hadn’t actually pointed it out as May Lynn’s resting place.
She wasn’t doing nothing to help, and we didn’t expect her to. Hell, we hadn’t planned on her going, so it was hard to have expectations. And what we all knew from just looking at her was she was weak and sick and could have been wrestled to the ground by a playful kitten. I was even afraid harsh language might knock her out.
I don’t know exactly how long we poled along like that, but we seemed to be making good time, and Terry said he figured we was five to seven days away from Gladewater, depending on circumstances and how hard we worked at it.
After a long while I began to feel hungry and in need of sleep because it had been one busy day, but I didn’t want to be the first to call out, and didn’t have to. We come to a place where the river went pretty thin, and Terry said, “Look over there.”
What there was to see was a little pool off the straight of the river. You had to be in just the right spot to see it. Too soon and all you saw was a big overhanging cypress and some droopy willows, and if you looked too late, you was past it. It was a shiny pool and didn’t look stagnant or mossy. It was a pretty good size, about twice the size of the raft. The water flowed into that place, turned around, and flowed out, keeping the spot clean and fresh, and from the dark of the water I figured it was deep, too.
“Go there,” Terry said.
Me and Jinx poled in that direction. It was a hard turn in that fast water, but we poled hard enough we got some speed up, and the raft glided into that little pool and bumped up against the shore.
I held my pole to the bank to keep us from floating back, and Terry took a hammer and nails from his bag. He drove a couple of long nails, darn near spikes, into the front of the raft, then got a rope out of the bag, uncoiled it, wrapped it around the nails, and bent them over a bit of the rope with the hammer. He tied off the rope to the roots of the cypress-those roots being considerable and sticking out from the bank for some ten feet, coiling down and around like fat snakes twisting into the water.
“We didn’t go too far before we holed up,” I said.
“I believe we have a good start,” Terry said. “And they don’t know how we’re making our run for it. Except maybe they’ll think by boat, since we stole your daddy’s. It’s missing, they might figure we’re going that way, but my first guess is they’re going to think the bus, and they’ll go to the bus station in Gladewater. That we caught a ride with someone. But we won’t be there, and they won’t know when to expect us.”
“He ain’t my daddy,” I said.
“What?” Terry said.
“Ain’t my daddy’s boat, cause he ain’t my daddy,” I said.
“No,” Mama said. “No, he isn’t. And Don, he’s pretty much a quitter. Something doesn’t work out immediately for him, he’ll leave out. That’s been my experience in more ways than one.”
I tried not to mentally count the ways, but I said, “Why he fishes with poison, ’lectricity, and dynamite is because it takes the waiting and trouble out of things.”
“It doesn’t matter, we have to rest, and it’s better that we don’t wear ourselves thin right at first,” Terry said. “We’re most likely better off traveling by day than night, even if we can be seen. The moon will be less bright tomorrow night, and even less so as we go. We’re more probable to end up getting wedged up on something or turning the whole thing over when we can’t see. During the day, we can journey more rapidly, even if we can be observed more easily.”
None of us argued. We were tuckered out.
Terry had stuffed a couple of blankets in his bag, and Mama had thought to do the same, and so had Jinx. They were all thin blankets, but there wasn’t much need for them on a nice night like it was. The boards that had been nailed over the logs were nice and smooth from years of people walking on them, so it was easy to stretch out and cover ourselves and get comfortable. Mama chose the middle of the raft, and I ended up close to her. She was warm, and she put her arm around me. The crickets sawed and the frogs bleated and the wind blew and the mosquitoes took a night off; the water beneath the raft rocked lightly.
“He didn’t want to be the kind of man he is,” Mama said in my ear.
“What?”
She was talking soft, and though Jinx and Terry might could have heard her, I’m sure they couldn’t have understood her.
“Don. I think he got broken early on, like me, only he was broken more. He came from a family that inherited much and his father turned it into less. The beatings he got took a toll, and, like me, he never thought he was worth anything. My family sure didn’t know what to do with me. It wasn’t that we didn’t get along, it’s that they seemed to be somewhere else even when I was there. I never told you much about them, my mother and father.”
“You said they died of smallpox,” I said.
“Yes. They did. But before they died, they might as well have been dead. Me and Don was the same to you. We didn’t do you any good, that’s for sure, but you haven’t become like us, and I’m not sure why.”
“I reckon you did your best,” I said. “But you still get to choose how you want to act and go, don’t you?”
“You do. But not everyone chooses well.”
“That’s on them,” I said.
“I know. I wear my mistakes like a coat, only it’s heavier,” Mama said.
“You did what you could, I guess.”
“I did what I could do, but it wasn’t much. I want to do better now. Don isn’t just a man without hope anymore. He’s a man without heart. I can stand one, but I can’t stand the other. Between what went on between us, him hitting me, there were moments that were very nice. Then it would start over. I got so I lived for the in-betweens.”
“What you said about Daddy-I mean Don-being a quitter,” I said. “You believe that?”
“I do,” she said. “But I been wrong before. Maybe he has more juice in him than I suspect. I know this, though: Gene isn’t a quitter, and neither is his pal Cletus, and certainly not Constable Sy. Neither will quit when he thinks he can get something for free, or when he thinks he can manage some kind of bargain in his favor. Those two will work themselves to death to get a free thing, and do nothing for something they can have for honest work. They’ll chase this money till they get it, or there’s no way for them to have it. I’m certain of that. I have known them as long as I’ve known your daddy, and I know that much about them. Somewhere inside Don I used to think there was a good man pressed flat. I thought he might blow up to size again at some point, but he didn’t. He wasn’t always bad to me, honey. There were times when he was good.”
“You said that,” I said. “It doesn’t comfort much.”
“It’s just those times got farther and farther apart, and I think he’s been flat so long he’s going to stay that way. What makes me proud of you is that you didn’t let either of us mash you down. You spring right back, and you got hopes. I used to have hopes, and I’m trying to remember what that’s like, and I’m trying to make sure you keep yours.”
“I’m trying,” I said. “But he was always bad to me, and wanted to be as bad as he could.”
“I guess I knew that.”
“Why didn’t you do something?”
“Because I didn’t have the spirit.”
This wasn’t a very satisfying answer, but I knew it was the best I was going to get. I decided I had to start with her this very night, and call it a new beginning. She touched my hand, and then was quiet. I snuggled in close. I felt like a sad old dog that had finally been petted.
During the night, we all awoke to Mama on the edge of the raft. She was lying on her belly with her head hanging over, puking. When she got what was in her out in the river, I got her back to the center of the raft and covered her and hugged her close, but she trembled like she was cold, which didn’t make no sense, as it was a warm night.
“I’m needing the cure-all,” Mama said. “That’s what’s happening. I didn’t bring any of it with me. I should have cut it back, not quit cold turkey. I’m so sick. I thought I heard God calling to me, but it was a whip-poor-will. I dreamed about that black horse again, and I saw the white one, but it was running in front of me, too fast to catch.”
“You’ll catch it in time,” I said.
She trembled for a while, but finally got still, and me and her both slept.
We was all up with the sun. Mama felt considerably better, and with the light I felt happier about our possibilities.
Mama, like Terry, had come well prepared. She had some hot-water cornbread patties in a bucket in her bag, and she gave us all a couple of them, and we drank water from a canteen Terry brought. It seemed the best cornbread I had ever eaten and the sweetest water I had ever drunk. Mama, I noticed, drank a little water but ate nothing.
After untying, we poled back onto the river and started out again. It was good water and the river was straight. We went along right smart-like and didn’t have to do anything much until the raft started to drift to one side or the other, then we’d have to push off hard to get back to where the water was swift and straight again. But with the current like it was, and the raft well built, we stayed mostly in the middle and kept making good time. It was hard sometimes to even feel like we was moving. Might not have known that was the case if I hadn’t looked toward shore and seen trees and such go by.
About the time the cornbread began to wear off and the sun was starting to get high and turn hot, we heard singing. It was sweet and it was loud, and there was a choir full of it.
“It’s as if angels have come down from heaven,” Terry said.
“Yeah,” Jinx said. “Or a bunch of people singing.”
It was pretty, though, like the songs was dancing over the water. As we drifted on, the singing grew louder. We finally came in sight of where it was coming from. A bunch of white people gathered on the edge of the river. Many were near the bank, but the rest went up a little slope of grass that at the peak was yellow with sunlight. A lot of the people were dressed up-at least, they was as well dressed as they got in East Texas-and down by the water was a barefoot man wearing black pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was waving around a big black book. A man dressed about the same way was standing beside him with his head down, the way a dog will do when you’re scolding it.
But it wasn’t a scolding. I realized what it was when I figured it was Sunday. I had sort of lost count of the days, but now I knew what day it was because of what I was seeing. It was a bunch of Baptists and they was attending a baptism. I knew because I had seen it before. It had been done to me, but I was so young I didn’t really remember much about it.
Someone was about to get dunked in the river. Way the Baptists saw it, that dunk in the river made sure you was going to heaven, even if before or later you knew a cow in the biblical sense or set fire to a crib with the baby in it. Once you was dunked and a preacher said words over you, heaven was assured and Saint Peter was already brushing off your seat and stringing your harp. Since most everyone in these parts was a Baptist, the fields and the prisons being full of them, it seemed like a pretty good deal.
As we cruised by, we saw the singers lift their heads to look at us. The children waved. Some of them got smacked by their folks on account of it. The preacher, his light hair shiny as gold in the sun, dragged the man standing next to him out into the water. The tails of their shirts floated up.
Passing them, we looked back and seen the man holding his nose, falling back into the preacher’s arms, being lowered down.
Mama, who had turned around to watch it all, said, “He has been baptized.”
“Like us, he can pretty much commit any crime he likes and he’ll be redeemed,” I said.
“Hush,” she said. “It isn’t exactly like that.”
We sailed on past the church folk.
The water was brisk because of all the recent rain, and the river bent a lot, and sometimes when it bent and became narrow, the raft would turn so that the rear end became the front end, and there was no fighting it with our poles because it was so deep. We switched to paddles, but it was like trying to use ice cream sticks to get the job done.
Eventually, we come around a twist in the river and the raft started going around and around and finally it twirled down a little offshoot. All we could do was just keep our places and hope we didn’t tip. It turned shallow, though, and it got so we could use our poles again. In time we was able to push ourselves up against the shore. I jumped off and tied the raft to an oak.
Finished, I sat down on the ground. After I’d been on the water for that long, the earth felt funny underneath my butt, like I had been on a merry-go-round and had gone too fast and had been thrown off.
Everyone got off the boat and sat down. Mama dug around in her bag and came up with more cold cornbread and water. The cornbread was still good and the water still tasted sweet. Even Mama ate this time.
When we finished eating, none of us was eager to get back on the raft, though there wasn’t a discussion about it. We just sat there thinking to ourselves, and not saying anything. Terry took a clean white cloth sack from his goods and opened the box with May Lynn in it, poured the ashes into the bag, and tied it off.
Mama said, “Is that…her?”
“Yep,” I said.
Terry stored the bag and we all went back to sitting and not talking. Then as we sat, we was startled by a voice.
“What are you doing here?”
I leaped to my feet, along with everyone else but Mama, who once she got seated was slow to move.
It was a man standing on the rise above us. He had the sun at his back, so all we could make out was a dark human shape. It was like the light behind him was coming out of him, shooting into the sky.
“Did you build your raft?” the shape asked.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I said did you build your raft?”
“We kind of borrowed it,” I said.
“It looks like that raft upriver,” the shape said. “The one tied out to a stump.”
“It does look a lot like it,” Terry said.
“They practically twins,” Jinx said.
“I’m pretty sure that’s the same raft,” the voice said, and the man moved down the slope toward us. As he did, with the hill at his back, and the sun hanging more above than behind him now, we got a chance to check him over good.
He was tall and thin with that kind of yellow hair that when it grays just looks more blond; the sunlight showed us that his hair had started to do just that, around the temples and at the front. There didn’t seem to be any oil in it, and it had most likely been slicked back wet with water and had sun dried. The wind moved it around on his head like old corn shucks.
He was wearing a white shirt and black pants muddy at the bottom, and some worn shoes that folded over on the sides. He was maybe in his forties and nice-looking. He smiled and showed us he had all his teeth. In my world, finding someone with all their teeth, both ears, and their nose on straight by the time they reached forty was as rare as finding a watermelon in a hen’s nest. Mama was an exception, and of course all three of us kids, but we still had a pretty good hike to go before we made forty, if we did, and Mama was still a few years off of it herself, though she treated her teeth well and was good about keeping herself washed and her few clothes clean.
As he came down the hill he kept smiling. He wasn’t a big fellow, and I figured after what I had seen Jinx do when she was mad, if he got to be a bother, we could just sic her on him with a boat paddle.
When he was down close, he turned his head and looked at Mama. It was like a fire lit up behind his eyes. I looked at her, too. She looked very pretty that morning. Like a goddess on a trip, recovering from an illness. Her long, dark hair was glossy in the sun, her face white as oats. Her head was turned up to look, and except for her sad eyes, she seemed much younger than her thirty-something years. I always knew she was pretty, but in that moment I realized she was beautiful, and I knew then why Don had wanted her, why my father had loved her. I wished I was as pretty as she was.
“We took the raft cause we had to,” Mama said.
“I’m not in the judging business,” the man said. “I think too many people are judged. Though I have to say, ‘Thou shall not steal.’”
“Ain’t nothing says ‘Thou shall not borrow,’’ Jinx said.
The man smiled, and all of a sudden I knew what I should have known right off when I seen what he was wearing and his muddy pants bottoms. He was the preacher that had done the baptism.
He came down closer, and when he did, I eased over close to a pretty good-sized rock that was by the water, measured in my head if I could throw it fast enough and hard enough to bean him a good one on the noggin, if things called for it. But he didn’t show any need for that. He came down smiling and stood by the water and put a hand to his chin and gave our raft a real good once-over.
“It’s hard to steer, isn’t it?” he said.
“A little,” Terry said.
“More than a little,” Jinx said. “It’s as ornery as a Shetland pony.”
“Oh, those Shetlands bite,” the preacher said. “I can tell you that.”
“It’s a raft,” Terry said. “Not a pony.”
“Yes,” the preacher said, “but the young girl and myself were speaking metaphorically.”
“Got that, Terry?” Jinx said. “That’s how we was speaking.”
“I understand that,” Terry said. “But I’m not speaking metaphorically.”
The man turned his smile on Mama. “Are all these but the little colored girl your family?”
“Only Sue Ellen,” she said, and nodded in my direction. “The others are friends of my daughter.”
“And friends of yours?” he asked.
“I suppose they are,” Mama said. “Yes. They’re friends of mine.”
“Well, now, I suppose if they are friends of a lady lovely as yourself, then they should be friends of mine. I’m Reverend Jack Joy. The last name is real. I didn’t make that up for religious reasons, though I certainly see myself as a man of joy, eager to raise a joyful noise in the name of the Lord.”
“I’m Helen Wilson,” Mama said, “and that’s my daughter, Sue Ellen, and the colored girl is Jinx and the young man is Terry.”
“No last names for you two?” he said, smiling at them, which is a thing he did plenty of.
“First names are fine,” Terry said.
I realized then that Mama might have been a little too eager to share, us being fugitives and all.
“It’s turning off a hot day,” Reverend Joy said. “Would you like to come up to my house and have some tea? One of my flock, not a half hour ago, brought me a block of ice that she carried in her car all the way from Marvel Creek, about half of it melting into the floorboard before she got to me. And she brought a platter of fried chicken. Ice and chicken are all laid out in the icebox. If there’s enough ice, I might could churn some ice cream, though I can’t make promises there.”
“What you doing down by the river, then, if you got all that up there?” Jinx said.
“I wasn’t hungry yet, and I came to see if the water was up. I was thinking about a little fishing later, and I wanted to see how the water was.”
“How is it?” I asked.
“High. Come on up and have something. It’s a good reason to get away from the river and the sun for a while. I didn’t really want to fish all that bad anyhow.”
“We just ate,” I said.
“Just the tea, then,” he said.
“We got to be on our way,” I said.
“I understand you being cautious,” Reverend Joy said, “you people not knowing me. But I’ve been a reverend in these parts here for two years, and so far, I haven’t shot or eaten anybody.”
“It is turning off hot,” Mama said, smoothing her hair. “I could have a glass of tea, and hold something to eat in abeyance. Maybe that ice cream.”
I looked at Mama, surprised. She was flirting. I had never seen her do it, but I had seen May Lynn go at it, and she was a master, so I recognized it for what it was. Still, Mama doing it was as strange to me as if I had looked into the mirror and discovered for the first time that I was actually a hippopotamus wearing a derby hat.
“Good, then,” Reverend Joy said. “I’ll just lead the way.”
“We can’t leave the raft,” I said.
“Sure you can,” Reverend Joy said. “It’s tied off good. And after we have some refreshment, I’ve got a bit of lumber and such, and I think we can make you a rudder. You’re going to go down the river, a rudder would make it a whole lot easier to control your craft. Way I figure, the current, which is strong there, pulled you right off the main river. After you have something cold, maybe a bite to eat, you can set right off again.”
Except for Mama, we were hesitating. She, on the other hand, had gotten up and was starting to move toward the hill. Reverend Joy took note of it and quickly took her arm and led the way up. I don’t know what he said to her as they walked away, but she thought it was funny. She giggled. I hadn’t heard her do that in a long time. Actually, I hadn’t never heard her do it quite like that, way a schoolgirl will do when she’s playing some kind of game or the other.
When Mama and the Reverend Joy was a little ahead of us, I said to Jinx and Terry, “I’m not sure I like this.”
“He might know we’re on the run and is gonna turn us in,” Jinx said.
“I doubt our pursuers have spread the word,” Terry said. “They want to keep that money quiet. But he might have a car, and with him attracted to your mama, he may be generous enough to give us a ride to Gladewater and we won’t need the raft. Come on, let’s not let your mama out of our sight.”
We gathered up our stuff, including the money and May Lynn’s ashes, and followed Reverend Joy and Mama up and over the hill.