Miss Lena told me you had already started down de road. I been walking real fast and running some to catch up wid you.”
I was so happy to see Poudlum that I didn’t care about the details of his tardiness; I was just pleased that he was finally with me.
“What you got in your sack besides a syrup bucket full of biscuits?”
“I got some fishing line, some hooks, and some corks.”
“That don’t sound heavy at all. Mine’s about to cut through my shoulder. Would you carry it a while for me and I’ll carry yours?”
“Shore I will,” Poudlum said as he shouldered my sack. “Lawd, what you gots in it, rocks?”
We stopped to rest again a ways on down the road, secured our bags in some tall weeds, climbed down a steep bank, and drank our fill from a spring we knew about. The water was cool, crystal clear, and sweet to the taste as it came bubbling up out of the ground. It was only about two inches deep, and as I lay on my belly I could see sunlight reflecting gold glints off the sand beneath the water.
We rested for a while before we got back on the road, anxious to begin our adventure on the creek. But we hadn’t gone far before Poudlum began asking questions.
“Dis fishing hole we heading for, de Cypress Hole, colored folks ain’t usually allowed to fish at it. Why you think dat is?”
That was a perplexing question and I wasn’t sure how to answer it, but after a little thought I told Poudlum, “I think it’s ’cause they ’fraid y’all would catch all the fish in it.” I knew it wasn’t the real answer, but I didn’t know how to say the real reason without hurting his feelings. I think he knew the real reason, but I could tell he appreciated my answer as the way I felt, because he grinned and said, “Why you ’spect it’s called de Cypress Hole?”
“Probably ’cause there’s a lot of cypress trees around it.”
“De water deep in it?”
“There’s a big deep place right below the shoals, which is the Cypress Hole. That’s where we’ll fish.”
“What’s a shoal?”
“Uh, that’s a place in a stream where the water is running over a lot of rocks. We can walk across the creek on those rocks. That’s what we’ll do when we set out our trot line.”
“What kinda fish you think we gonna catch?”
“Catfish and perch, that’s all there is in there.”
“What we gon use for bait?”
“We’ll catch some crickets and grasshoppers when we get there. Plus there’s some dead pine trees we can get grub worms out of. I brought a little empty pint jar we can put them in.”
“What if you fished without no bait?”
“You mean just throw an empty fish hook in the water?
“Uh-huh.”
“Wouldn’t nothing happen, Poudlum. Why, that would be kind of like licking a clean plate.”
There was a little swampy area about a quarter of a mile before we got to the Satilfa where a big stand of bamboo grew. We stopped there and cut us some fishing poles. We cut four in case we happened to break one, plus we planned to use some of the joints in the bamboo to make whistles out of later while we sat around the fire.
I used the small blade of my pocketknife to cut the poles down because I wanted to keep the big blade sharp to clean the fish with.
Once we had cut the tops off and stripped the poles clean, Poudlum carried them and his sack while I took my turn carrying my heavier sack.
A little further up the road I knew the Satilfa Creek Bridge would come into sight just around the next curve.
When we rounded that curve we both stopped and stared for a moment because there was a vehicle in the road up ahead.
I squinted my eyes and recognized my Uncle Curvin’s old pickup truck. It had a jack under the front of it with the truck lifted up off the ground. My uncle had had a flat tire.
At that moment he appeared from around the back of the truck rolling his spare tire. He wasn’t having an easy time because my uncle was crippled from a war wound.
“Dat looks like yo’ Uncle Curvin up ahead,” Poudlum said.
“Yeah, that’s him. Looks like he got a flat.”
“He look like he so skinny it would take two of him just to make a shadow.”
“Yeah, he’s skinny all right,” I said. “He’s also crippled. Let’s go give him a hand.”
My uncle was mighty proud to see us. We loosened the lug nuts on his flat tire, replaced it with his spare and jacked his truck down for him.
“Thank you, boys,” he said. “Y’all heading for the Cypress Hole to do some fishing?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him. “We gonna camp out and fish for a couple of nights. Where you coming from?”
“I been up to Grove Hill, and, Lord have mercy, boys, a terrible thing happened there this morning, with me right slap dab in the middle of it!”
Chapter Four
Poudlum and I both thought a lot of my Uncle Curvin. We had picked cotton for him back during the summer and he had always been mighty good to us. We also admired him because he had fought in World War One all the way over in Europe and got himself shot in the leg, which crippled him but did entitle him to a small disability check that came in the mail each month from the government.
He looked the same as always, wearing his old brown slouch hat with sweat stains on it, a blue, long-sleeved work shirt, and a pair of overalls. Beneath his hat, his face was all caved in because he didn’t have any teeth.
“What in the world happened up there, Uncle Curvin?” I asked.
“I went up there to cash my check at the bank and all heck broke loose while Mrs. Vinny was counting out my money. She was telling me how she wanted to buy a bushel of sweet taters when all of a sudden she stopped talking and her eyes got big as saucers. I could tell she was looking at something behind me, so I turned around. You boys won’t never believe what I was looking at!”
“We might, if you would just tell us. What was it?” I asked.
“Scared me worsen I been scared since I was in the war. Came might near wetting my pants on myself. I been shaking like a leaf in a windstorm ever since.”
“Shore sound like it wuz something real bad,” Poudlum said.
“Yeah, maybe we’ll find out what it was one of these days,” I said with a sideways glance toward Poudlum, but my words were directed toward my uncle to let him know we were getting a
