PART WAY ACROSS the swamp, Davi Millard stopped and washed his hands and face in the clear water that trickled in a shallow stream under the log path. Every night when he stopped there on his way home from work, he could see how much smaller the stream had become since the evening before.
Two months before, when he started hewing logs for new cabin, the water rushed down the sandy course with enough force to carry small limbs and chunks of swamp-rotted logs. But since then, the winter rains had stopped and the swamp was once more a mire of soft, depth-less mud, harmless-looking in its covering of tangled vegetation. The green ferns and running vines that grew through the spring and summer covered the mire-holes with the appearance of solid earth.
Davi had lived all his life on the edge of the swamp and he knew almost instinctively how dangerous it was.
After treading his way carefully over the chained logs to the other side of the swamp, Davi began running the rest of the way home. It was no more than a mile from the swamp to old cabin, but the path was crooked and narrow as it wound through the thick growth of turpentine pines.
The moon was shining, and it was almost as bright as day in the woods. When he saw the clearing ahead, he ran faster.
The place was as still and quiet as the pine forest around it. There was not even a thin wisp of smoke coming from the chimney, and if he had not seen the place before, at night, he would have declared it was deserted.
Opening the front door noiselessly, Davi listened for a moment. Through the broken window shutter, a faint ray of moonlight entered the dark room and fell across the foot of the bed. Closing the door behind him, he went silently to the middle of the room. From there he could see the outlines of the table, the chairs, and the bed. In the gloom everything looked as if it were covered with a foot-thick coating of dust,
Davi went to the wood box and fumbled in the dark until he had found a pine lighter. He struck a match to it, the dripping pitch flared up instantly, then he tossed the blazing knot into the fireplace. When he turned around, the whole room was alive with yellow, flickering light. The table, chairs, and bed looked as bright as they were the day he brought them.
Jeanie sat up in bed nervously, the covers falling from her shoulders. Even before she could open her eyes, she was smiling at Davi. He crossed the room and watched her while she brushed the hair from her face.
“How long have you been asleep, Jeanie?” he asked her. She smiled at him, shaking her head.
“I guess I was a little late tonight, again,” he said, appealingly. “The moon came up just at sundown, and I kept on working awhile. I want to finish new cabin as quick as I can.”
Jeanie threw aside the covers and slid to the side of the bed, touching the chilly floor with the tips of her toes.
“I kept the fire going in the stove as long as I could,” she said, “but I was so sleepy I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I’m afraid your supper is cold now, Davi.”
He stood where he was, a grin leaping from the corners of his mouth to all his face, and watched her stand up. When Jeanie took the first step towards the kitchen, Davi picked her up with a sweep of his arms and carried her back to bed. He held her at the side of the bed for a moment; then, hugging her so tightly she could barely breathe, he kissed her on the mouth and dropped her on the bed. She caught her breath when she fell, and she felt as if she were dropping a dozen feet instead of only two.
“Don’t bother about my supper,” Davi said, laughing at her. “I’ll eat it cold.”
He left her and went to the kitchen and felt around in the darkness until he found the bread and potatoes. He brought back a cake of corn bread and a gourd-sized sweet potato and sat down on the side of the bed. Jeanie was wide awake by then.
“Is new cabin pretty near finished now, Davi?” she asked him. “I get awfully lonesome here all day long.”
“It’ll be ready to move into in about a week, or maybe less time than that,” he told her, nodding slowly. “As soon as I can get the floor laid, we’ll move in. The window shutters can wait till after we move. It’ll only take a couple of days to make those, anyway.”
The pine lighter in the fireplace flickered, blazed, and died down. The knot was almost burned up.
Davi carried the potato skins back to the kitchen. When he got back, he undressed quickly and got into bed.
They lay together for a long time not saying anything. Jeanie moved closer to his side several times, and Davi buried his face in her hair.
When he was almost asleep, Jeanie whispered something.
“I can’t hear you,” he said, turning his head a little.
“That meddlesome old Bony King came here again, today,” Jeanie said in a muffled whisper.
Davi turned over and raised himself on his elbow. He looked through the darkness into Jeanie’s face.
“What did he want?”
“I told him I didn’t want anything to do with him, no matter what he wanted.”
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t pay any attention to anything he said. I told him to go away and mind his own business, but he just laughed at me and stayed anyway.”
Davi sank down upon the pillow, jerking his elbow from under him.
“Maybe Bony thinks I’m getting ready to move off and leave you,” Davi said slowly, pausing between each word to draw his breath sharply. “Maybe he thinks I’m building new cabin over on the other side of the swamp for me and a new somebody.”
Jeanie snuggled under his arm, worming her head until her face was pressed tightly against his neck.
“I don’t care what he thinks,” she said, shivering. “I don’t want him coming here every day and sitting and looking at me all the afternoon. It upsets me so, I don’t know what to do sometimes. Today, I felt like picking up a stick and whaling him for all he was worth.”
Davi raised himself on both elbows and stared through the darkness of the room. Jeanie lay silently beside him. He did not say a word until Jeanie shivered again.
“The next time Bony comes here, tell him I said that if he don’t quit bothering you, I’ll tend to him all right, all right.”
“One of the things he says every time he comes is, don’t I feel sorry for myself because I married you instead of him?”
“What do you tell him to that, Jeanie?”
“I told him today that if I couldn’t be married to you, I wouldn’t be married to anybody else in the country.”
Davi put his arms around her and drew her tightly to him. Jeanie whimpered for a while, and then she lay quiet and still. Davi could feel her relax while her breathing became lighter. He pressed his lips against her cheek, closing his eyes.
It was long after midnight when Davi woke up with a sudden consciousness. He was wide awake in a second, wondering what had made him wake up like that. He listened, raising his head from the pillow, but he could hear nothing. Outside the room, the pine barrens extended mile after mile in all directions. Nobody lived closer than twelve miles, and the only sound Davi had ever heard there was the occasional muffled crash of a dead falling tree or the faraway whine of a bobcat. This time he could hear nothing at all.
After a while he lay down again, but he could not go back to sleep. He lay as still as he could so he would not wake Jeanie.
While he lay there, wondering how long it was until dawn, he began to wonder if Bony King had anything to do with his waking up in the middle of the night. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that Bony was the cause. He turned over and looked through the crack in the window shutter at the moonlit pines at the edge of the clearing beyond the garden.
For the past year Bony King had been trying to make trouble for him, but Davi had always thought it would die down when Bony saw he could not make Jeanie leave and go to live with him. Davi remembered then that every day for almost three weeks Jeanie had told him of Bony’s coming to old cabin while he was away building new cabin. Bony was a turpentine worker who lived in a shanty on the East Arm of Ogeechichobee Swamp. He had started out by telling Jeanie he was not going to stop trying to get her until she left Davi and came to live with him. Once when Davi was at the store near East Arm, Bony had told him the same thing. Davi had laughed it off then. But for the past few weeks, Bony had been coming to old cabin every day.
During the rest of the night Davi lay awake wondering what he could do about it. He could not move away from the swamp, because that was the only home he and Jeanie had.
Just before daybreak he got up and dressed without waking Jeanie. He went to the kitchen and ate some more of the cold corn bread and sweet potatoes. By then, the sun was coming up. He looked into the next room before leaving, and Jeanie was still asleep. He tiptoed out of the kitchen and started down the path for another day’s work on new cabin, three miles away.
Jeanie did not wake up until almost an hour later. She turned over, first, to see if Davi was awake, and when she found he was gone, she leaped out of bed and ran into the kitchen. When she had reached the front yard, she was awake enough to know that Davi had left and gone to work.
After cooking her breakfast and cleaning the house, she went out into the garden. It was then only in the middle of the morning, and she began digging at the weeds with the blunt-bladed hoe. The vegetables she and Davi had planted nearly a month before were up and thriving in the damp earth and warm sunshine. She dug and chopped with the dull hoe until there was not a single weed left in the first row.
Just before noon, she looked up and saw Bony King sitting on a pine stump at the end of the garden. He did not say a word when she looked at him for the first time, and she had no way of knowing how long he had been sitting on the stump watching her. Jeanie’s first thought was to drop the hoe and run into the kitchen. When she was just about to run, she happened to think that Bony would surely follow her now, no matter where she went. She decided quickly that the best thing to do was to stay where she was.
During the next half hour she did not glance even once in Bony’s direction. She knew he was still sitting on the stump, because she could see his shadow out of the corner of her eye, but she was determined not to look at him, if he stayed there all day.
Finally, she could bear it no longer. Bony had been sitting there for the past hour or more, whittling on a stick and smiling at her. Jeanie dropped the hoe and stared him full in the face.
“What do you want here again today, Bony King?” she cried at him, stamping her feet and beating her fists against her hips.
He did not say a word. He only smiled more broadly at her.
“I wish you would keep away from here and let me and Davi alone,” she said angrily. “We don’t like you one bit!”
“Davi don’t, but you do,” Bony said, shifting his crossed legs. “Now, ain’t that so, Jeanie?”
“That’s a whopping big old lie!” she cried. “You’re just trying to make it hard for me because I married Davi, and wouldn’t you!”
Bony brushed the shavings from his overalls.
“You ought to change over, Jeanie,” he said. “Now’s a pretty good time to do it, too. I’ve already got my new cabin built, and Davi hasn’t.”
“That’s another of your whopping old lies,” Jeanie said. “You even haven’t started to build one yourself, and you know it.”
“How do you know so much about what I do and what I don’t do?” he said.
“Davi tells me.”
“Davi didn’t tell you the truth about that, because I’m starting on mine already.”
Jeanie could not keep from answering him, even though she knew he was saying things like that just to make her talk to him.
“Davi’s got ours pretty near finished, and you haven’t even started on yours, Bony King.”
Bony got up and crossed the garden. He came down the row and stopped at the end of her hoe handle.
“It won’t be finished if Davi slips off the log path through the swamp, some night,” Bony said, nodding his head at her. “It’s pretty dangerous for a man to cross the swamp at night, anyway. If a cloud was to come up all of a quick one of these moonlight nights while a man was halfway through the swamp, he wouldn’t be able to see the rest of the way, especially on that slippery log path. If he was in a hurry, and tried to follow the log path out, he might slip off into one of those mire-holes that’s all covered over with pretty ferns and vines. I’ve seen it get so dark in the middle of the swamp that you couldn’t even follow your hand in front of you.”
Jeanie reached down to pick up the hoe, but Bony set his foot on the handle, and she could not lift it.
“That was no story I was trying to dress up for you,” he said, shaking his head at her. “That’s the truth.”
“Davi will take care of himself,” Jeanie said slowly.
“Not if he was to trip and fall off that chained-log path into a mire-hole, on a pitch-black night,” Bony said, swinging his head from side to side. “I’ve seen it happen before.”
Jeanie closed her eyes for a moment, promising herself to make Davi stop staying at new cabin after dark.
“Some folks won’t learn a lesson till it’s too late,” Bony told her.
He had already taken two or three steps toward her, and before she realized what was happening, he had taken another step and grabbed her. Jeanie tried to jerk away from him, but her dress was so old and worn she was afraid it would be torn if she tried to struggle with Bony. Bony put both arms around her and tried to kiss her.
“You wouldn’t try to do that if Davi was here,” Jeanie said.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he laughed. “What’s he got to do with it now?”
She pulled away from him, holding him off with her elbows stiff, and then she hit him as hard as she could. All he did was laugh at her.
“I like a girl with plenty of fight in her,” Bony said.
He caught her with both hands. Her dress tore like a sheet of newspaper. While she struggled to cover herself she realized how much strength was bound up in a man’s muscles.
“The more you fight, the more you’ll wear yourself out,” he told her, laughing at her while she tried to hold the torn dress together. The dress had been torn down her back to her waist, and she could feel the hot sun burning her bare body. “And more than that,” Bony said, “when you fight, it just naturally makes your dress rip more and more.”
Jeanie stepped closer to Bony. A moment later, she had pushed with all her strength, and he went tumbling backward. The last she saw of him then was when his feet went kicking into the air over his head. He had ruined nearly two whole rows of onions and cabbages.
Running with all her might, and holding her dress behind her, Jeanie reached the safety of the kitchen. She slammed the door shut and pushed the table against it.
Bony walked around the house several times like a dog circling a strange animal he was afraid to strike at. He looked in the windows, first at the front and then at the rear, but he did not try to open them. After a while, he sat down on a stump only half a dozen steps from the front door.
“I could get in if I wanted to,” he shouted at Jeanie. “I could smash open one of these windows with no trouble at all. That’s all I’d have to do to get in, if I wanted to. But I guess I’ll wait awhile.”
Jeanie huddled on the floor beside the bed, shivering and crying. Some time later, she thought she heard a sound of some kind outside the room. She crept on her hands and knees to the window and looked out through the broken shutter. Bony was walking slowly down the path toward the swamp. He did not look back.
With the strength she had left, she crawled back to the bed and fell across it. She cried until she lost consciousness.
It was completely dark when she woke up. Running to the window, she could see by the sky that the sun had set a long time before. Overhead were dark patches of clouds drifting toward the moon.
By then she was fully awake. She went to the door, and back to the window. She did not know how many times she went back and forth, looking. Each time she crossed the room she felt weaker. Then she fell on the floor sobbing and shivering, too weak to get to her knees.
At last Jeanie opened the door and looked searchingly into the moon-swept yard. There was still no sign of Davi out there. At first she ran in circles about the place, trying to make up her mind what to do. Then she turned down the path and ran with all her might toward the swamp. A few yards from the edge of the swamp, where the single log path began, she stopped suddenly. Before her lay the tangled swamp over which Davi had always carried her. She started slowly, testing each step of the footing on the slippery, barkless, chained logs. Before she had gone the length of the first log, she felt herself being lifted off her feet. She could not turn around, but she could feel the strange arms around her waist, and she knew then that it was Bony who had caught her up. She did not cry out when he lifted her off her feet and carried her back to the solid ground at the end of the log.
Bony put her down, turning her around to look into her face. He was smiling at her in the same way he had looked while sitting on the stump in the garden that afternoon.
“You’re up mighty late,” he said.
‘Where’s Davi?” Jeanie cried.
“Davi?” Bony repeated. “I was thinking the same thing myself only a little while ago. To tell the truth exactly, I don’t know where he’s at.”
“You do know, Bony! Where’s Davi?”
He held her more tightly, gripping his fingers around her arms.
“I’ve got an idea, but I wouldn’t swear to it,” he said. “The reason I wouldn’t swear to it is because I didn’t see it with my own eyes. It’s so dark in here every time a cloud passes under the moon that it’s hard to see your own hand in front of you.”
“You tell me where Davi is!” Jeanie cried, beating her hands against him.
“I’d say that maybe Davi started across the swamp and tripped up. It was mighty foolish of him to start across the swamp on a cloudy night. I’d be afraid of falling into one of those mire-holes, if it was me.”
Jeanie tore herself away from Bony. He ran after her, but she managed to slip out of his grasp, and she ran toward the swamp. Bony lost sight of her completely after half a dozen steps. He could hear the sounds she made, but it was almost impossible to tell the true direction they came from.
“Jeanie!” he shouted. “Jeanie! Come back here, you fool! You can’t cross the swamp! Come back here, Jeanie!”
Jeanie did not answer him, and he started treading his way along the first log of the path. He stopped when he found he could not see or feel his way any farther. He listened, and he could not hear anything of Jeanie. In desperation, he got down on his hands and knees and felt his way forward along the slippery logs. Every once in a while he stopped and called to Jeanie, listened for some sound of her, and felt in the mire-holes beside the path.
Towards morning, mud-caked and helpless, Bony reached the firm ground at the end of the path. He sat down to wait for daylight, wondering how long it would take to find some trace of Jeanie, or of Davi.
(First published in College Humor)