“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.