Free Confederates by Thomas Keneally Page B

like a saw.
    â€˜What’s the matter with you, boy?’ Uncle Patrick wheezed in the middle of the third night.
    â€˜There ain’t nothing the matter with me, Uncle Patrick.’
    â€˜You wouldn’t goddam say so? Can’t you at least escort the lady to the riverbank? Or maybe go the whole hog and paddle her to her pappy’s place. If such a pleasant exercise is beyond your powers, then I pity your generation, boy, that’s all I say, I pity you all.’
    The next day he did what his uncle suggested. It was more than a mile to the river. The dug-out felt unwieldy to him but he made her let him paddle. Sometimes she grinned at him because of the unfamiliar way he plied the instrument. She guided him under trailing magnolia and amongst swamp oaks and forests of dead trees rising white-trunked out of the black water. Soon Usaph was lost in these dark reaches of swamp, but Ephephtha Corry seemed to know where they were. He surely hoped so, for the light was going.
    What sort of country is this? he asked himself as he steered the dugout. The frogs drum even in the fall. A great floppy rain-crow flew past, booming, and this ripe dark girl sat chortling at him from the bows of the canoe.
    â€˜Do you have gators up in the Valley?’ she asked him.
    â€˜We sure don’t. Do you have them hereabouts?’
    She pointed at a spot about a yard from his left elbow. ‘What did you take that for?’
    Well, as people do in books, he’d taken an alligator for a piece of swamp-rubbish, and he saw now it was a swamp monster there, shunting along on round about the same course as the dug-out.
    â€˜Don’t you fret. They all know me, them gators and all their tribe.’
    â€˜They know you ?’ he asked, staring at her, and fearful. A woman who believed that giant armoured swamp beasts knew and wouldn’t harm her was in some danger. He looked again at the dim gnarled back and was himself afraid. He didn’t tell her that, he didn’t want to break any charm she had been travelling under.
    â€˜They knew me,’ she said, ‘since I been four years old. We’s ancient enough friends, Mr Bumpass, them and me.’
    The surface of the water broke well off to the right of the dug-out and a big snaky head rose with a mud perch thrashing in its jaws. ‘Why, that’s my friend Jefferson. Ole Jeff is the king of the whole Combahee. Two axe-handles, he is, across the shoulders and that’s no lie. Why the niggers’re so scared on him, the story goes they feed a baby to him each full moon. Now that … I don’t know if it’s true.’ She called across the water. ‘You fancy juicy slave-baby, Ole Jeff?’
    But Ole Jefferson had vanished. He might well be under this dugout right now, Usaph thought.
    â€˜There,’ she said. She pointed to a sandspit. A sort of house was there, propped up on stilts above the water and the mud. It looked to Usaph like the unhealthiest place any man could choose to live. There was no light showing from it, its windows were shuttered.
    â€˜Oh Lordie,’ she said and looked at him with a real worried look on her face. ‘My daddy’s away.’
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜Why he’s off on some tide,’ she muttered. ‘Meeting them drum fish.’ She closed her eyes and shook her lovely head. ‘He’ll come back soon,’ she said, but it seemed she didn’t really expect it.
    â€˜I don’t know how to find my way back to Uncle Patrick’s,’ said Usaph.
    â€˜That’s jest it. You can’t. But he’ll be back soon to keep you company.’
    â€˜I’d be happy,’ he said, starting to go all sweaty with his daring, ‘with jest yourself for company.’
    â€˜Yes, well …’ she said, and as the dug-out kissed the sand just beneath the stilt-house, she frowned again. And Usaph wondered, why did Uncle Patrick send me if he knew there was