And instead of all those pictures of Brenda Sue, what slowly took their place in my mind was the single steady sight of the rain beating down into the water. That, and the thought of the creek, the whole long length of it, waiting for me up ahead. It did not add up to any sort of a pretty picture at all. The more I thought about it, the less and less pretty it seemed. If I still didn’t know just where the Big Star turned into the Little Star, I knew, from experience, that between the two of them, they made up an awful lot of creek.
The last thing I had ever figured on was rowing up it in the rain. But that was what I was doing, and the longer I did it, the longer the creek came to seem to be in my memory. Without the rain, the distance alone wouldn’t have bothered me too much, as the moon was better than a quarter-moon and was still rising early, and I could have rowed half the night by moonlight. But if the rain kept up until night came, then I didn’t know if I could keep on rowing or not. Even without the moon, with just stars, I think I could have done it, because all I would really have to see would be the trees sticking up against the stars on both the banks. It might have slowed me, up where the creek got narrow, but I believe I could have done it. With the rain, however, and no moon or stars at all, I believed it would be slow going at best. Or impossible. But the only thing I could do was wait and see. And in the meantime, row. So I rowed. And the rain kept coming down like it never meant to stop. It was monotonous.
After about an hour and a half of it, it was worse than that; it was a pain. My shirt kept sticking to my back and my arms and rubbing my neck where I had got it sunburned a little, so finally I took it off, and would have taken off my pants, too, as they were nothing but a bother to me, weighing me down with water, but I did not feel like stopping to change into my bathing suit in the middle of the creek, and in the rain at that, like some kind of a nut. I figured I must have looked crazy enough as it was, just rowing along in the rain, although finally I got tired of the way the water kept running down into my eyes and I stopped rowing long enough to look around in under the tarp in the front of the boat and find my baseball cap and put it on. Which probably didn’t do much to help make me look more normal, but it helped me to see anyhow. It’s a bright red cap and sort of glows; but how I looked, to be honest, hardly mattered to me.
What mattered to me most of all was time. It looked like time alone—not the creek or the rain—was the thing most apt to run out on me. While everything else stayed the same. The rain made the same steady hushed sort of splashing sound in the creek, and the oarlocks kept making the same little off-key squalling sound, like a blue jay trying to sing, and soaked as I was, even the crease on my new grey, stay-pressed jeans stayed neatly creased, a strange sight to see. While all I did was row, and watch the east bank of Big Star Creek go inching past me in the rain, and now and then look up in the sky for a sign of light I never saw, seeing only the sky, dark and unchanged, and the rain slanting down from it in long quick streaks, like silver strings, dragging more rain down behind it. The only good thing about it was that it was cool, and I could row along at least feeling clean.
For the rest, what I felt was mostly foolish. I had stayed too long with Brenda Sue, and I had known it all along. But I had done it. And now, I knew, what I had to do was to row and keep on rowing, rain or no rain, night coming up or not, stars or no stars, moon or no moon. There was nothing else to do. The creek was long and The Landing was up at the end of it, and there was nothing going to get me there but my two long arms and my bent back and Mr. Haywood’s boat. And without his cypress skiff, with nothing but a bunch of cans of food with half the labels soaked off, his newly painted white boat a good deal the worse for wear, and a number of holes poked in his tarp where we had fastened it to the oars for a tent—with all this, along with Jack’s broken wrist, it seemed the least I could do was to try and get to The Landing on time. So that Mr. Haywood wouldn’t have to just sit there and wait. For nothing. Just for me.
But even as I kept rowing along and the rain kept coming down and time moved along about as fast, it seemed, as the boat was moving slow, I could never quite get myself convinced that I was sorry about having stayed so long with Brenda Sue. I knew I should have been, but I wasn’t, not even when I had finally become convinced that the darkness up in the sky and the spreading hazy light along the water was not just a sign of more and harder rain, but a sign of evening, of the light easing out of the day and of night and darkness on the way. I felt foolish and worse, knowing that there couldn’t be any sensible way to row up a twisting creek at night in the rain, but knowing I would have to try it, even so. But I didn’t feel sorry about the time I had spent at Byrd’s landing. I couldn’t believe it had been wasted.
And I was willing to waste the whole night if I had to, just trying to find my way on up the creek by instinct alone, if sight and all else failed, or by lantern light, if I could find some dry matches and get the lantern lit. But I knew I would never back down and start complaining to myself about the time I had spent with Brenda Sue. Not even if I rowed all night in circles.
When you are watching the treetops against the sky, it can be surprising the way night can come and you still can see. At least you can see the treetops longer than you can see anything else. I found it out by watching. And slow as night comes, especially if you are watching for it, still, how fast it seems to come, too. Things just fade away, distant things first, like the sight of the creek up far ahead or back behind, then the details of things, so that the woods across the creek first blur and then look like a solid wall and then fade into the darkness of the creek, which has also gone dark, and all that is clear is the very tops of the trees, a kind of broken line running along against the sky, a little darker than the sky, and nearer, although now and then you can lose it, and then you look around and it is dark everywhere, and it is night, and you have never really seen it happen. But it has happened.
Anyhow, when night finally came, it came slow enough to fool me, and yet fast enough to catch me surprised. I hadn’t even lit my lantern. I had just kept rowing. And then it was dark, and the tops of the trees across the creek on the west bank seemed gone for good, and all I could see was the tops of the trees sticking up against the darkness of the sky close by, and I eased the boat in closer to the shore, wondering if this was as dark as the night was going to get or if I would lose the sight of these trees, too, and just end up lost, rowing along with nothing to go by at all except the feel of my oars dipping down in the water to prove I was still in the creek and going somewhere.
Then I noticed how the sounds can get loud on a creek at night, along with the less you can see. Right away, I started hearing sounds I hadn’t noticed before, or the same old sounds I had been hearing started sounding more individual and clear. Even the sound of the rain coming down into the water. It seemed I could hear it all up and down the creek, splashing down with the soft easy sound of echoes, and then fading off to a sound almost like a whisper, so that I would strain my ears to hear it from as far away as I could, as though just by listening I might be able to tell where the creek curved away, where it went to in the dark. And I heard the frogs and the other calling, singing sounds of things along the shore, and the noise they made rose up above the rain now and then and rang out across the air as clear as though the night was empty and still except for their singing. I could even hear things moving in the water, just the sound of something heavy, swirling the top of the water up ahead, or something making a kind of sucking sound, not a splash, not the clear slap of a fish that had jumped and slapped the water coming down, but the sound of something that had disappeared and had been big enough so that when it had sunk back down from the top of the creek it had sucked the water back down with it, loud enough to be heard. In fact, even with the rain, right after it was dark, I heard sounds from the creek that I had never heard before. It was alive with sounds. And if I couldn’t see the different things that made the sounds, I knew they were there, all right. And listening, just rowing along and wa
tching the tops of the trees and hearing the sounds that marked the shore, the frogs making all their different sounds along by the bank, and hearing the sounds out in the creek itself, the thought came to me that if I only knew how to do it, if I was only smart as an animal myself, by the sounds alone I might have been able to find my way up the creek without needing my eyes at all.
Then I ran the boat right into a bush. I had known I was close to the bank, but still, it startled me. It also knocked my cap off. How I did it I don’t know, but I felt the bush bend back against my head and then spring loose, and I felt my cap fly off, and I guessed at which way it must have gone and reached out and down into the water and pulled my cap back out, without ever having seen it. I couldn’t have been more surprised than if I had reached down and pulled out a fish, not seeing a thing. I sat there, hardly believing it, and then not knowing what else to do I wrung it out as best I could and put it back on my head.
It was funny how a little thing like that, losing my cap and then finding it again, could seem to give me a new kind of hope about the whole situation, as though things were not as much out of my control as they had almost come to seem to be. I still had my cap, anyhow; and I guess you might say that putting it back on and wearing it as wet as it was, silly as it might seem, somehow helped me to keep my head as well. I had drifted out from the bank, so I picked up the oars and started rowing easy, pulling more on the right oar than on the left, until I heard the boat go scratching along into the bushes on the bank again, only this time on purpose. Then I reached around in the dark until my hand caught ahold of a bunch of leaves and I felt around until I found the branch of the bush they were growing on, and I pulled the boat up close and held it there while I found the rope at the back of the boat and tied it fast, doing it more by feel than by sight. What I needed most of all was a light, and I did not want to be drifting around out in the creek while I crawled back in under the tarp and found the lantern and Jack’s tackle box with the matches in it and got the lantern lit if I could.
I was surprised at how dry it was where I had stored the blankets up under the front seat, which was where the lantern was, too, and the tackle box when I finally found it. It took me a while, though, crawling around on my hands and knees, holding the tarp up with my back, pushing cans and stuff out of my way along the bottom of the boat until I got to the front of it. But I got the lantern lit with the first match I used.
The light of that lantern lighting things up all around me down under the tarp was like a kind of miracle, the way it changed things. I had never thought that a simple lantern light could look so bright. Then I crawled back out into the back of the boat and held the lantern up and looked around and saw the rain still coming down and the leaves of the bushes wet and shiny along the shore close by, and then I untied the boat and set the lantern down on the back seat and rowed out into the creek again and headed back up it.
Right away, from the minute the east bank was out of sight, which it was with the first good hard pull on the oars, I could see that my problem was far from solved. All that my nice bright lantern did was to more or less blind me. It showed up the rain and a tiny circle of the creek around the boat, but that was all. Anywhere else that I tried to look, up into the sky or back toward the trees along the bank, or ahead of me or behind me, all I could see was a curtain of pitch-black night, as though all the lantern could do was light up a hole in the darkness, useless for showing me where I was, except to show me how deep and solid the rest of the darkness was around me.
Without the lantern, it hadn’t really seemed that dark. Now and then I had been able to see the trees against the sky at least. Yet for a while I kept trying to row along as though the light was a help, and it did make the night seem friendlier somehow, if nothing else. But it wasn’t long until I knew that, nice as the lantern light looked to me, it was making things worse than they had been before. I had to admit it. For all I knew, I might be rowing along straight for the west bank, or starting around in some stupid circle out in the middle of the creek. All I could actually see was the boat and some water. And what I needed to see was just about anything else.
I stopped rowing and let the boat drift while I looked at the lantern and then out at the darkness and tried to make up my mind what to do. I would lie if I said I wasn’t disappointed and discouraged, both. When the light from the lantern had first flared up, all my confidence had seemed to rise up with it. I believed that the worst of my troubles were over. Now it looked as though I was right back where I had been before, except that now I had gotten used to the light, even if it didn’t help. Yet for all the time I sat there thinking about it, I already knew that there was only one sensible thing for me to do, and finally I did it. I reached down and pressed the lever that lifts the lantern glass, and then I blew it out.
Then the dark was about as dark as I have ever known it to be. I could not see a thing. Not even my boat. All I could do was sit there blinking in the dark and wait to see if I was going to be able to see something again, anything again, or not. Then right off in front of the boat something swirled in the water so big and so close that it made the boat rock, and for one long minute or two after that I not only sat there feeling blind and lost and helpless, but scared as well.
It was the sound of a bullfrog, back off behind me, that helped to get me using my brains again. I knew what a bullfrog was, and I knew he would not be swimming around in the middle of the creek calling out to some other bullfrog, but would be somewhere back along the shore. The sound had come from behind me, so one of the creek banks would have to be there. And from the distance of the sound, it would put me, I figured, about where I would have guessed I was; out in the middle of the creek.
So I eased the boat around and then the bullfrog sent his deep, low lonesome call straight out from the darkness ahead of me, and I rowed toward the sound as though it might have been a bell that had been rung, a signal just for me. And as I rowed I noticed that I could see the boat again, at least, and when I looked up it seemed that the rain had slackened and that the sky was not as absolutely dark as it had been before; so I turned and looked and clearer to my sight than they had been since the night had started, I saw the tops of the trees along the east bank, standing out against the sky.
There was no doubt about it; the rain was slacking off, and I could see again, better than I had been able to see before. I swung the front of the boat around and headed up the creek, seeing the treetops clear against the sky beside me, not as bright as with a moon or even as bright as it might have been with stars, but being something I could see and something to go by finally. Then far across the creek on the other side I saw a light up ahead, and then another, and I knew where I was. With all my trouble, I had reached the last long stretch of landings that according to Jack was as good a place as any to say that here the Big Star had finally become the Little Star Creek.
The lights sure looked good to me, and it was a lonely feeling to see them drop from my sight as I stayed near the east bank and watched the trees against the sky and curved around a bend and was on my way up the Little Star, with the lights of the landings and the Big Star left behind. The rain had gone down to little more than a drizzle again, and the sky seemed to grow even lighter as I rowed, making it easier and easier for me, and I wondered how, with no stars or moon, the sky could show a kind of light now, even so. And then I remembered that up above the rain clouds there was not only blackness and night but stars and a moon. It was almost as though I could see it in my mind, the low-hanging rain clouds, thinning out now, with high up above them the stars and moon shining down and lighting them up from above. And that is what I see, I thought, the light that gets through.
The way I went rowing on up the creek after that, more and more sure of myself and noticing the light getting brighter all the time and the rain almost stopped, it seemed to me that I had finally won out against time and the creek, or that I was on my way to winning. The line of treetops against the sky was as easy to follo
w as a line drawn on a map, and if sometimes I had gotten into a bend before I noticed it and had run into some bushes, it was easy enough to back off and look up ahead and get my bearings again. All I had to do was to stay fairly close to the east bank of the creek and follow wherever it led me.
And that was what I did and it worked fine. Until I rounded a bend and began to notice that something seemed wrong. The line of treetops I was following still looked right, but the sharpness of the curve I had followed, and kept following, seemed strange, as though I should have remembered it, but couldn’t. So I kept my eyes on the treetops, but slowed down and kept rowing, until something really strange happened, and I stopped. I had noticed that the treetops I had been watching had stayed the same for quite a while, and they had never done a thing like that before. They were slow to change sometimes, but they changed. It was more or less the only sure way I could tell I was moving.
What was wrong was something I still didn’t know, but I hadn’t sat there for long without having figured out that I wasn’t moving and hadn’t been moving for quite some time. Then I reached in under the tarp and found the tackle box and got out the matches and crawled over the tarp to the front of the boat and leaned down and struck a match and looked down into mud. I stood there looking down at it until the match burned my fingers and went out. I had gone aground on a mud flat without even knowing it, just easing into it. And after that, I had been sitting there rowing away for nothing, going no place.
I crawled back over the tarp in the dark and sat down and looked up and waited for my eyes to get used to the darkness again, after the light of the match, and finally the line of trees came back into view, unchanged, each single treetop so familiar to me that I wondered why, with all the time I had spent looking at them, I had not bothered to do something bright about them, like give them names. I was disgusted with myself.
The Lost Skiff Page 19
