The next day was getaway day for the drovers. The cattle was all sold and traded and drove to the loading yards to wait for the ships that would take them to the Continent, and drovers was in the city doing their best to spend their money before they had to go home.
The cattle camp was afire with talk of the feechie attack. Not everybody believed it was feechies, of course, but that didn’t matter. For our purposes, only a few had to believe.
The story of the feechie attack would fan out from Middenmarsh to every corner of Corenwald. Already the story had grown. There were drovers claimed they had actually seen feechies at the edge of the firelight, with knives clenched in their teeth and a mean look in their eyes. One drover said he heard two feechies arguing over whether they ought to start murdering civilizers right then or wait for a better chance.
If you want to get a rumor started amongst a crowd, all you really got to do is point them in the right direction. They’ll do most of the work for you. True, you can’t control exactly what the rumor’s going to be, but that wasn’t the most important part for Floyd and me. We just needed folks to start talking about feechiefolks. As long as there was feechie talk, me and Floyd could figure out a way to work it.
The Bluemoss boys—Aster and Wiley and them—come by to say goodbye on their way out of camp.
Arch shook his head when he shook Floyd’s hand. “I thought you was pulling my leg when you started that feechie talk back on the drove road,” he said. “All that business about feechiefolk getting more active. I reckon you was proven right.”
“I reckon so,” Floyd said. “But being right aint no comfort if it means we’re all of us in danger.”
“You said you spent some time with the feechiefolks,” Aster said. “You reckon there’s any way you could talk to them? Tell them we don’t mean them any harm?”
Floyd shook his head. “That was a long time ago I was in the Feechiefen,” he said. “I don’t know if the same feechies is in charge as was then. Can’t say for sure they’d pay me any mind even if they are still in charge.” He stood there quiet for a minute. “No, I reckon the best I can do now is warn folks to be ready.”
Everybody nodded kind of solemn, and Floyd went on, “The last thing we need is a feechie panic. That won’t do anybody any good.” He was a sly one, that Floyd. “Still, we’d better get the word out. You should probably tell folks around Bluemoss to be on the watch for feechiefolks.”
“Not just Bluemoss,” Basel said, “everybody we meet on the way to Bluemoss.”
Floyd shrugged. “Whatever you think is best, boys. I trust your judgment.”
We shook hands all around and said we hoped we’d meet again someday under better circumstances. I shook Wiley’s hand a little longer than the others. We could have been friends if I lived a different kind of life, and now that he was leaving, I felt lower than a snakebelly for tricking him. But I reckoned it was necessary. That’s what I told myself as he trundled off, like seven hundred other drovers headed to every corner of Corenwald.
It did make me smile to think that by noon the loafers in front of the stores in Ryelan and Bonifay and Cypress Bald would be talking about the strange arrows that had sailed into the cattle camp outside Middenmarsh. And by bedtime, farmers as far away as Bayberry and Greenside and Turkey Run would be telling their wives about the feechie business they had heard tell of.
As the camp cleared out, Floyd sent me and Buttermilk into town in the wagon to pick up a few supplies. It’s an exciting thing to go into a city. For a long while, Floyd and me had been working the villages—sleepy places where we was the biggest excitement going. But in Middenmarsh, you could have two circuses and a house fire going on the same street, and I don’t reckon anybody would give it a second thought. Folks was going back and forth with their wagons and handcarts like so many ants in a ant pile—selling this, buying that.
“The freshest oysters! I tell you truly! They spent last night in the Eechihoolie!”
Clank! Clank! “Get your knives sharpened!” Clankety-clank! “Get your pots and pans repaired!”
“A flower for your lady! It’s only proper! A big bouquet for one small copper!”
I don’t reckon Middenmarsh was quite as loud as the stock market when it was full of forty thousand cows, but it didn’t miss it by much. And since it was getaway day, the place was full of drovers, so it didn’t feel all that different from the stock market in any case.
With their pouches full of coin, the drovers was feeling pretty biggety. Seemed like there was a knot of them on every other street corner, knocking hats off the city men that walked past and otherwise making a nuisance of theirselves. Every inn and pub in the city was fairly busting with drovers—drovers bulging in, drovers bulging out. I seen one bulge right out the window, hind first.
But if they was bold with the city folks, the drovers give the sailors a pretty wide berth. I reckon your average drover could handle your average sailor with no particular trouble. The problem is the pirates. And on the streets of Middenmarsh, you can’t always tell the regular sailors from the pirates.
Between the drovers and merchants and sailors and pirates and city folks, me and Buttermilk was so jostled and crowded that we just about couldn’t get our wagon through the streets to do our errands.
And when I finally made it to the general store, I couldn’t get through the door for all the loafers. Oh, wasn’t they excited? The topic of the day was feechiefolks, so I decided to stay out on the porch for a while and listen. Mostly the old boys was talking about how they didn’t believe for a minute that there was any feechiefolks in them woods. But that didn’t keep them from having some pretty well-developed theories.
“If there was such thing as feechies,” one old boy with a white beard was saying, “I’d say the thing to do is drain the swamps.”
“So they can come live with us in the uplands?” another feller answered back. “If there was such thing as feechies, that is.”
A feller in a wool cap spoke up. “I reckon they’re feeling crowded, what with all the immigration from the Continent. No wonder they’re feeling skittish … I mean if they was real, I wouldn’t blame them for feeling skittish.”
“I heard there was hill feechies involved in the attack. You boys ever heard of hill feechies?”
Another old boy tipped back his chair and took on a knowing air, like he was a perfesser sailing into a lecture. “Sure,” he said. “You got your hill feechies, your marsh feechies, your swamp feechies, your dune feechies …”
“And what’s the difference?” somebody asked.
The perfesser wasn’t ready for that. “Uh, well … you see … some live in the hills, some live in the marsh, some live behind the sand dunes at the beach …”
I went into the store to buy my provisions, and even in there it was all feechie talk. The place was jammed with people stocking up in case the feechies laid siege to Middenmarsh. Nobody said that’s what they were doing, but I aint ever seen city folks buy so many fifty-pound bags of rice and dried beans. You’d have thought they was all trappers or sailors. There was barely enough provision left for Floyd and me.
Every store I went in, it was feechie talk all over. Mostly “I don’t believe a bit of it” talk, but they were talking, weren’t they?
It cheered me right up. I was still thinking on it when me and Buttermilk drove past the Crown Theater. Underneath the big sign, I seen a pretty black-haired girl looking at the posters. It was Barbary, Doctor Hazel’s daughter from the youth-and-beauty scam.
She fetched a sigh and looked so wistful and lonesome that I thought I was going to bust out crying right there in the wagon seat. She didn’t have any of the sass she showed in the youth-and-beauty routine.
It made me feel funny to see so much sadness in such a pretty gal. An ugly feller like me—well, why wouldn’t I be lonesome? Nobody wants to be around somebody as ugly as me. But how could such a likely gal as Barbary ever be lonesome? Or sad?
I felt like my heart was stretching out toward Barbary, trying to get out of my chest. To feel somebody else’s sadness made me feel my own like it was the first time I ever felt it. Before I knew what I was doing, I said sort of softly, “Barbary?”
She didn’t hear me, but just saying her name out loud give me courage, and I said a little louder, “Barbary?” and a little louder still, “Barbary?”
Barbary turned around, and when she saw me and my wagon, she yelped, and then her eyes got hard and mean. She looked to her left and right to be sure she could get away if she needed to.
I waved my hands in front of me as if to say, “I don’t mean you no harm,” but she kept looking at me real angrified. “Barbary,” I said, “it’s me, Grady. Don’t you remember me?”
“No, I don’t remember you,” she said. “How did you know my name?”
“We’ve known each other since we was little,” I said. “Since you and your daddy was selling liver pills and I was doing the feechie act with Floyd. Grady? Remember?”
She give me a squint. “You’re the Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp.”
“That’s right. Now you remember.”
“I never seen you without your feechie costume.”
“That’s why you didn’t recognize me,” I said.
Barbary give me a sizing-up look. “I believe you’re even uglier when you aint covered in mud.”
There aint much a feller can say to that, so I just said, “You sure grew up pretty.”
Barbary give me a smirk. “So I’ve heard.”
She could smirk as much as she wanted. I remembered the sadness, the lonesomeness in her face when she thought nobody was looking. It give me gumption to keep talking to her instead of running off or crumpling under her mean look.
“You need a ride back to the cattle camp?” I asked her.
“No, I don’t,” she answered. “I got here afoot, and I reckon I can get back afoot without any help from you.”
“Why you talking so mean to me, Barbary? I aint done anything to you but try to be friendly.”
She squinted even harder at me. It looked like she was about to say something mean when one of three passing sailors interrupted her.
“Say, pretty lady, is this ugly boy bothering you?”
She turned her squint on the sailor. “Mind your own!” she spat at him.
The sailor started back, and that made his buddies laugh, and that made him mad. “Say, gal,” he said, “there aint no cause for you to treat me that way. I was just asking if this ugly feller was bothering you.”
“That ugly feller is a old friend,” Barbary said. “So shove off, sailor!”
The other two sailors thought that was the funniest thing they had ever heard. “Hoy, aint she the sporty one,” one of the sailors said.
“Sporty and pretty!” said the other one. “Give us a kiss, sporty gal.”
He stretched out his arms like he was going to hug her, and didn’t she light him up? She rared back and punched him right in the nose. He ended up on the ground holding his nose, and the others backed away a step, but only for a second. They closed in on Barbary, one grabbing her left arm, the other one grabbing her right.
I don’t know what they aimed to do to her, but I didn’t figure on finding out. I sailed off the wagon seat and onto the head and shoulders of one of the sailors just like I used to do in the old feechie act. Barbary went to scratching and gouging and flailing like a young tornado.
Me and Barbary both made a good showing, but we was outnumbered and outmuscled. We couldn’t hold them off for long unless we got some help.
Thankfully there was a group of five drovers not very far off, and they seen the trouble. “Hey,” I heard one of them say, “them sailors is fighting Dr. Hazel’s mama!”
They run to our rescue directly. “That aint how you treat a old lady!” one of them hollered. “That woman’s eighty-two years old!”
The rumpus was on, and it was a beautiful one. It didn’t take long for the drovers to get things in hand, and as soon as Barbary and me seen a chance to clatter off, we took it. We jumped on the wagon seat and set Buttermilk clip-clopping away from them neighborhoods as brisk as he would do it.
The sailors and the drovers being fully occupied with one another and poor old Buttermilk not being the most energetic horse ever to pull a wagon, we slowed to a walk once we was well away from the trouble.
Barbary didn’t say anything for a long time. I thought maybe she was still aggravated with me. But her eyes didn’t look as snappish as they had. After a little while she looked at me and said, “Thank you.”
I believe it was the sweetest thing anybody ever said to me. If Floyd had ever told me “thank you” in my life, I didn’t remember it. I didn’t quite know what to say back. I looked down at my feet; I couldn’t bear to look at somebody as pretty as Barbary square in the face.
She said it again: “Thank you.”
“Don’t think one thing about it,” I said. “I was going this way anyway, and it’s no trouble to me. Thank Buttermilk. He’s the one pulling the extra weight.”
Soon as I said it, I thought maybe that wasn’t the right thing to say. But Barbary just laughed—not mean and mocking, but friendly. If you ever stood by a little stream in the hills and heard it chuckling over the rocks, that’s what Barbary sounded like when she laughed. Oh, it was something sweet to hear.
“I didn’t mean thank you for the ride,” she said, still laughing. “I mean thank you for rescuing me.”
“Rescuing you?” Now I was laughing. “You was doing a pretty good job of rescuing your own self. If that old boy has a scrap of skin left on his face or an eyeball left in his head, it aint your fault.”
“I didn’t have any choice but to fight,” Barbary said. “But you chose to fight. You fought for me even after I was so awful to you. It was brave.”
“Aww,” I said, “it’s what anybody would have done. You would have done the same for me.”
Barbary laughed again. “Jump on a pirate’s head? No, Grady, I don’t think so.”
“Pirates? Who said they was pirates? I thought they was just regular sailors.”
“Aint you the baby,” Barbary said, but she didn’t say it mean. “If you’re going to be on the streets of Middenmarsh, you’d better learn to know a pirate when you see one. You saw their tattoos.”
“The octopus on their forearms?”
“That’s a pirate sign.”
My heart sunk down past my stomach and landed in my britches somewhere. I thought I was going to fall out of the wagon seat. Me. Fighting pirates.
Barbary reached out a hand and put it on my arm. “You’re a good friend, Grady.”
Me. A good friend.
“I aint had much practice at it,” I said. “At friendship.”
Barbary smiled at me. “You must be a natural then.”
Then, as sudden as can be, I went to crying like a baby. I dropped the reins and hoo-hooed into my hands. I couldn’t even say what I was crying about. I was so embarrassed I wanted to climb in the wagon box and hide from Barbary. I was afraid she was going to be sorry for acting friendly to a crybaby. But she just sat there beside me on the wagon seat. Didn’t say anything or do anything. Just sat there.
Except for Short Fronie, Barbary was the first person in this world who ever paid enough attention to say something true about me. Floyd only ever told me what he wanted me to hear, whatever worked in with his plans. But Barbary had looked at me and told me something I didn’t know about myself. She had given me a name: friend.
And she was right. I was a born friend. And yet I had spent my whole life without a friend in this world. It was a sadness I had never let myself feel. Now that I felt it, I was afraid it was going to ruin me.
Barbary took the reins and turned Buttermilk out into the grass beside the road. “Let’s sit under that tree yonder,” she said. “I aint ready to go back to Pap yet, and you aint in any shape to go back to Floyd either.”
So there we set under a live oak, with its big arms spread wide and curving down low to the ground while I tried to get everything back in a pile.
When I finally dried up, I figured I’d get the attention off me, so I asked Barbary, “What were you doing in front of that theater?”
A little of the old snappishness come back. “Can’t a gal stand in front of a theater?”
“Stand where you want to stand,” I said. “But you didn’t have the look of somebody just passing the time.”
Now the snappishness went away again and Barbary went to hoo-hooing. “I was made for the stage,” she said—but she was sobbing, so it come out more like, “I was ma-ha-ha-hade for the sta-ha-ha-hage. I want to be an actress.” She flopped out on the ground, real dramatic, and cried some more with her face down on her arms.
Oh, it was sad to see that pretty gal so upset and hurting. I said, “You are an actress, Barbary. The best I ever seen. In that youth-and-beauty act, you even had me believing you was eighty-two years old!”
Barbary raised up her head from her arms and give me a sharp look. “I aint talking about that kind of acting, Grady. I aint talking about tricking poor, ignerent people into buying tonics and pills they don’t need.”
She stood up and clasped her hands over her heart just like a real actress and lifted up her chin like some kind of princess. “I want to do work that exalts my audience,” she said. “I want to awaken them to possibilities they never knew existed—to open doors in their souls that have been locked up tight.” Her shoulders was throwed back, her jaw was set, her eyes was shining, and she looked so intent at a spot just above my head that I turned around to see if she was talking to somebody who had snuck up behind me.
“That sounds fine,” I said. “Real fine.” But she had lost me about the time she begun exalting her audience. I had done a good bit of acting my own self, but in my experience, the less exalted the audience, the better. And Floyd and me had opened plenty of pocketbooks with our acting, but opening doors in folkses souls—that was a new one on me. But, like I told Barbary, it did sound fine.
Barbary dropped her speechifying pose and looked me square in the face. “My mother is an actress. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You’ve probably heard of her. Caldonia. Does that name ring a bell?”
I shook my head. “But I aint much of a theatergoer.”
“She’s played all the great roles. Althea the Warrior Queen. Oona from Chester’s Redress. She was still a girl, no older than I am now, when she first played the Ferry-Keeper’s Daughter.”
“Is that right?” I said, but I didn’t know anything about Althea or Oona or the Ferry-Keeper’s Daughter either one.
“That’s right.” Barbary seemed mighty proud.
“Your mama,” I said. “Where is she now?”
Barbary’s face clouded up. “I don’t know. She aint been around since I was too little to remember. Every town and village we go to, I look for her though. I look at the theater to see if her name is on the sign outside. I scan every crowd to see if she’s come to our show.”
“You know what she looks like?”
“Pap says I look just like her.”
I thought on that a minute. I wondered what that would be like, to know that somewhere in this world there’s somebody who looks just like me, even if I don’t know where they are. I wonder: would it make me feel less lonesome? Or would it only make the lonesomeness worse?
“How about you?” Barbary asked. “Do you have a mama?”
I shook my head. “Nor a pap either.”
Barbary looked surprised. “Floyd aint your pap?”
“Law, no!” I said. I shivered. “At least he says he aint. I sure hope he aint.”
Barbary laughed. “You don’t like Floyd?”
“Aint much to like about Floyd.”
“Aint much to like about my pap either,” Barbary said. “But I love him anyway. You love Floyd?”
I thought on that one. “I reckon. A feller’s got to love somebody, don’t he?”
“I don’t know about that. I’ve known plenty of folks didn’t love anybody but theirselves.”
“All right then,” I said. “I’ve got to love somebody. And I got nobody but Floyd.” That was a hard thing to think about. I got nobody but Floyd.
“If Floyd aint your pap, where’d you come from?” Barbary asked.
“You, friend, have asked the big question of my life. Where did I come from? There was a time when I was convinced that I was a genuine feechie from the Feechiefen Swamp. That’s what Floyd told me when I was little and we was doing the feechie act. Aint that something?”
Barbary smiled. “That surely is something.”
“Turns out I’m just ugly.” I looked over at Barbary, half hoping she’d tell me I wasn’t that ugly. She didn’t. “From the Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp to plain old ugly orphan boy. That is some comedown, Barbary. I aint over it yet.”
“We’ve all had our disappointments,” Barbary said.