UNCLE MARVIN WAS worried. He got up from the log and walked toward the river.
“I don’t like the looks of it, boys,” he said, whipping off his hat and wiping his forehead.
The houseboat was drifting downstream at about three miles an hour, and a man in a straw hat and sleeveless undershirt was trying to pole it inshore. The man was wearing cotton pants that had faded from dark brown to light tan.
“It looks bad,” Uncle Marvin said, turning to Jim and me. “I don’t like the looks of it one whit.”
“Maybe they are lost, Uncle Marvin,” Jim said. “Maybe they’ll just stop to find out where they are, and then go on away again.”
“I don’t believe it, son,” he said, shaking his head and wiping the perspiration from his face. “It looks downright bad to me. That kind of a houseboat never has been out for no good since I can remember.”
On a short clothesline that stretched along the starboard side, six or seven pieces of clothing hung waving in the breeze.
“It looks awful bad, son,” he said again, looking down at me. We walked across the mud flat to the river and waited to see what the houseboat was going to do. Uncle Marvin took out his plug and cut off a chew of tobacco with his jackknife. The boat was swinging inshore, and the man with the pole was trying to beach it before the current cut in and carried them back to mid-channel. There was a power launch lying on its side near the stern, and on the launch was a towline that had been used for upstream going.
When the houseboat was two or three lengths from the shore, Uncle Marvin shouted at the man poling it.
“What’s your name, and what do you want here?” he said gruffly, trying to scare the man away from the island.
Instead of answering, the man tossed a rope to us. Jim picked it up and started pulling, but Uncle Marvin told him to drop it. Jim dropped it, and the middle of the rope sank into the yellow water.
“What did you throw my rope in for?” the man on the houseboat shouted. ‘What’s the matter with you?”
Uncle Marvin spat some tobacco juice and glared right back at him. The houseboat was ready to run on the beach.
“My name’s Graham,” the man said. “What’s yours?”
“None of your business,” Uncle Marvin shouted. “Get that raft away from here.”
The houseboat began to beach. Graham dropped the pole on the deck and ran and jumped on the mud flat. He called to somebody inside while he was pulling the rope out of the water.
The stern swung around in the backwash of the current, and Jim grabbed my arm and pointed at the dim lettering on the boat. It said Mary Jane, and under that was St. Louis.
While we stood watching the man pull in the rope, two girls came out on the deck and looked at us. They were very young. Neither of them looked to be over eighteen or nineteen. When they saw Uncle Marvin, they waved at him and began picking up the boxes and bundles to carry off.
“You can’t land that shantyboat on this island,” Uncle Marvin said threateningly. “It won’t do you no good to unload that stuff, because you’ll only have to carry it all back again. No shantyboat’s going to tie up on this island.”
One of the girls leaned over the rail and looked at Uncle Marvin.
“Do you own this island, Captain?” she asked him.
Uncle Marvin was no river captain. He did not even look like one. He was the kind of man you could see plowing cotton on the steep hillsides beyond Reelfoot Lake. Uncle Marvin glanced at Jim and me for a moment, kicking at a gnarled root on the ground, and looked at the girl again.
“No,” he said, pretending to be angry with her. “I don’t own it, and I wouldn’t claim ownership of anything on the Mississippi, this side of the bluffs.”
The other girl came to the rail and leaned over, smiling at Uncle Marvin.
“Hiding out, Captain?” she asked.
Uncle Marvin acted as though he would have had something to say to her if Jim and I had not been there to overhear him. He shook his head at the girl.
Graham began carrying off the boxes and bundles. Both Jim and I wished to help him so we would have a chance to go on board the houseboat, but we knew Uncle Marvin would never let us do that. The boat had been beached on the mud flat, and Graham had tied it up, knotting the rope around a young cypress tree.
When he had finished, he came over to us and held out his hand to Uncle Marvin. Uncle Marvin looked at Graham’s hand, but he would not shake with him.
“My name’s Harry Graham,” he said. “I’m from up the river at Caruthersville. What’s your name?”
“Hutchins,” Uncle Marvin said, looking him straight in the eyes, “and I ain’t hiding out.”
The two girls, the dark one and the light one, were carrying their stuff across the island to the other side where the slough was. The island was only two or three hundred feet wide, but it was nearly half a mile long. It had been a sandbar to begin with, but it was already crowded with trees and bushes. The Mississippi was on the western side, and on the eastern side there was a slough that looked bottomless. The bluffs of the Tennessee shore were only half a mile in that direction.
“We’re just on a little trip over the week end,” Graham said. “The girls thought they would like to come down the river and camp out on an island for a couple of days.”
“Which one is your wife?” Uncle Marvin asked him.
Graham looked at Uncle Marvin a little surprised for a minute. After that he laughed a little, and began kicking the ground with the toe of his shoe.
“I didn’t quite catch what you said,” he told Uncle Marvin.
“I said, which one is your wife?”
‘Well, to tell the truth, neither of them. They’re just good friends of mine, and we thought it would be a nice trip down the river and back for a couple of days. That’s how it is.”
“They’re old enough to get married,” Uncle Marvin told him, nodding at the girls.
“Maybe so,” Graham said. “Come on over and I’ll introduce you to them. They’re Evansville girls, both of them. I used to work in Indiana, and I met them up there. That’s where I got this houseboat, I already had the launch.”
Uncle Marvin looked at the lettering on the Mary Jane, spelling out St. Louis to himself.
“Just a little fun for the week end,” Graham said, smiling. “The girls like the river.”
Uncle Marvin looked at Jim and me, jerking his head to one side and trying to tell us to go away. We walked down to the edge of the water where the Mary Jane was tied up, but we could still hear what they were saying. After a while, Uncle Marvin shook hands with Graham and started along up the shore towards our skiff.
“Come on, son, you and Milt,” he said. “It’s time to look at that taut line again.”
We caught up with Uncle Marvin, and all of us got into the skiff, and Jim and I set the oarlocks. Uncle Marvin turned around so he could watch the people behind us on the island. Graham was carrying the heavy boxes to a clearing, and the two girls were unrolling the bundles and spreading them on the ground to air.
Jim and I rowed to the mouth of the creek and pulled alongside the taut line. Uncle Marvin got out his box of bait and began lifting the hooks and taking off catfish. Every time he found a hook with a catch, he took the cat off, spat over his left shoulder, and dropped it into the bucket and put on a new bait.
There was not much of a catch on the line that morning. After we had rowed across, almost to the current in the middle of the creek mouth, where the outward end of the line had been fastened to a cypress in the water, Uncle Marvin threw the rest of the bait overboard and told us to turn around and row back to Maud Island.
Uncle Marvin was a preacher. Sometimes he preached in the school-house near home, and sometimes he preached in a dwelling. He had never been ordained, and he had never studied for the ministry, and he was not a member of any church. However, he believed in preaching, and he never let his lack of training stop him from delivering a sermon when ever a likely chance offered itself. Back home on the mainland, people called him Preacher Marvin, not so much for the fact that he was a preacher, but because he looked like one. That was one reason why he had begun preaching at the start. People had got into the habit of calling him Preacher Marvin, and before he was forty he had taken up the ministry as a calling. He had never been much of a farmer, anyway — a lot of people said that.
Our camp on Maud Island was the only one on the river for ten or fifteen miles. The island was only half a mile from shore, where we lived in Tennessee, and Uncle Marvin brought us out to spend the week end five or six times during the summer. When we went back and forth between the mainland and the island, we had to make a wide circle, nearly two miles out of the way, in order to keep clear of the slough. The slough was a mass of yellow mud, rotting trees, and whatever drift happened to get caught in it. It was almost impossible to get through it, either on foot or in a flat-bottomed boat, and we kept away from it as far as possible. Sometimes mules and cows started out in it from the mainland to reach the island, but they never got very far before they dropped out of sight. The slough sucked them down and closed over them like quicksand.
Maud Island was a fine place to camp, though. It was the highest ground along the river for ten or fifteen miles, and there was hardly any danger of its being flooded when the high water covered everything else within sight. When the river rose to forty feet, however, the island, like everything else in all directions, was covered with water from the Tennessee bluffs to the Missouri highlands, seven or eight miles apart.
When we got back from baiting the taut line, Uncle Marvin told us to build a good fire while he was cleaning the catch of catfish and cutting them up for frying. Jim went off after an armful of driftwood while I was blowing the coals in the campfire. Jim brought the wood and built the fire, and I watched the pail of water hanging over it until Uncle Marvin was ready to make the coffee.
In the middle of the afternoon Uncle Marvin woke up from his midday nap and said it was too hot to sleep any longer. We sat around for ten or fifteen minutes, nobody saying much, and after a while Uncle Marvin got up and said he thought he would walk over to the other camp and see how the people from Caruthersville, or Evansville, or wherever they came from, were getting along.
Jim and I were up and ready to go along, but he shook his head and told us to stay there. We could not help feeling that there was something unusual about that, because Uncle Marvin had always taken us with him no matter where he went when we were camping on the island. When Jim said something about going along, Uncle Marvin got excited and told us to do as he said, or we would find ourselves being sorry.
“You boys stay here and take it easy,” he said. “I’ve got to find out what kind of people they are before we start in to mix with them. They’re from up the river, and there’s no telling what they’re like till I get to know them. You boys just stay here and take it easy till I get back.”
After he had gone, we got up and picked our way through the dry underbrush toward the other camp. Jim kept urging me to hurry so we would not miss seeing anything, but I was afraid we would make so much noise Uncle Marvin would hear us and run back and catch us looking.
“Uncle Marvin didn’t tell them he’s a preacher,” Jim said. “Those girls think he’s a river captain, and I’ll bet he wants them to keep on thinking so.”
“He doesn’t look like a river captain. He looks like a preacher. Those girls were just saying that for fun.”
“The dark one acted like she’s foolish about Uncle Marvin,” Jim said. “I could tell.”
“That’s Jean,” I said.
“How do you know what their names are?”
“Didn’t you hear Graham talking to them when they were carrying their stuff off that houseboat?”
“Maybe he did,” Jim said.
“He called that one Jean, and the light one Marge.”
Jim bent down and looked through the bushes.
“Uncle Marvin’s not mad at them now for coming here to camp,” he said.
“How can you tell he’s not?” I asked Jim.
“I can tell by the way he’s acting up now.”
“He told Graham to get the houseboat away from here, didn’t he?”
“Sure he did then,” Jim whispered, “but that was before those two girls came outside and leaned over the railing and talked to him. After he saw them a while he didn’t try to stop Graham from landing, did he?”
We had crawled as close as we dared go, and fifty feet away we could see everything that was going on in Graham’s camp. When Uncle Marvin walked up, Graham was sitting against the trunk of a cypress trying to untangle a fishing line, and the two girls were lying in hammocks that had been hung up between trees. We could not see either of them very well then, because the sides of the hammocks hid them, but the sun was shining down into the clearing and it was easy to see them when they moved or raised their arms.
Five or six cases of drinks were stacked up against one of the trees where the hammocks were, and several bottles had already been opened and tossed aside empty. Graham had a bottle of beer beside him on the ground, and every once in a while he stopped tussling with the tangled fishing line and grabbed the bottle and took several swallows from it. The dark girl, Jean, had a bottle in her hand, half full, and Marge was juggling an empty bottle in the air over her head. Everybody looked as if he was having the best time of his life.
None of them saw Uncle Marvin when he got to the clearing. Graham was busy fooling with the tangled fishing line, and Uncle Marvin stopped and looked at all three of them for almost a minute before he was noticed.
“I’ll bet Uncle Marvin takes a bottle,” Jim said. “What do you bet?”
“Preachers don’t drink beer, do they?”
“Uncle Marvin will, I’ll bet anything,” Jim said. “You know Uncle Marvin.”
Just then Graham raised his head from the line and saw Uncle Marvin standing not ten feet away. Graham jumped up and said something to Uncle Marvin. It was funny to watch them, because Uncle Marvin was not looking at Graham at all. His head was turned in the other direction all the time, and he was looking where the girls lay stretched out in the hammocks. He could not take his eyes off them long enough to glance at Graham. Graham kept on saying something, but Uncle Marvin acted as though he was on the other side of the river beyond earshot.
Jean and Marge pulled the sides of the hammocks over them, but they could not make Uncle Marvin stop looking at them. He started to grin, but he turned red in the face instead.
Graham picked up a bottle and offered it to Uncle Marvin. He took it without even looking at it once, and held it out in front of him as if he did not know he had it in his hand. When Graham saw that he was not making any effort to open it, he took it and put the cap between his teeth and popped it off as easily as he could have done it with a bottle opener.
The beer began to foam then, and Uncle Marvin shoved the neck of the bottle into his mouth and turned it upside down. The foam that had run out on his hand before he could get the bottle into his mouth was dripping down his shirt front and making a dark streak on the blue cloth.
Jean leaned out of her hammock and reached to the ground for another bottle. She popped off the cap with a bottle opener and lay down again.
“Did you see that, Milt?” Jim whispered, squeezing my arm. He whistled a little between his teeth.
“I saw a lot!” I said.
“I didn’t know girls ever did like that where everybody could see them,” he said.
“They’re from up the river,” I told him. “Graham said they were from Evansville.”
“That don’t make any difference,” Jim said, shaking his head. “They’re girls, aren’t they? Well, whoever saw girls lie in hammocks naked like that? I know I never did before!”
“I sure never saw any like those before, either,” I told him.
Uncle Marvin had gone to the tree at the foot of one of the hammocks, and he was standing there, leaning against it a little, with the empty bottle in his hand, and looking straight at them.
Graham was trying to talk to him, but Uncle Marvin would not pay attention to what Graham was trying to say. Jean had turned loose the sides of the hammock, and Marge, too, and they were laughing and trying to make Uncle Marvin say something. Uncle Marvin’s mouth was hanging open, but his face was not red any more.
“Why doesn’t he tell them he’s a preacher?” I asked Jim, nudging him with my elbow.
“Maybe he will after a while,” Jim said, standing on his toes and trying to see better through the undergrowth.
“It looks to me like he’s not going to tell them,” I said. “It wouldn’t make any difference, anyway, because Uncle Marvin isn’t a real preacher. He only preaches when he feels like doing it.”
“That doesn’t make any difference,” Jim said.
“Why doesn’t it?”
“It just doesn’t, that’s why.”
“But he calls himself a preacher, just the same.”
“He doesn’t have to be a preacher now if he doesn’t want to be one. If he told them he was a preacher, they’d all jump up and run and hide from him.”
Uncle Marvin was still standing against the tree looking at the dark girl, and Graham was a little to one side of him, looking as if he didn’t know what to do next.
Presently Uncle Marvin jerked himself erect and turned his head in all directions listening for sounds. He looked towards us, but he could not see us. Jim got down on his hands and knees to be out of sight, and I got behind him.
The three others were laughing and talking, but not Uncle Marvin. He looked at them a while longer, and then he reached down to the top case against the cypress and lifted out another bottle. Graham reached to open it for him, but Uncle Marvin bit his teeth over the cap and popped it off. The beer began to foam right away, but before much of it could run out, Uncle Marvin had turned it up and was drinking it down.
When the bottle was empty, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took three or four steps towards the dark girl in the hammock. Jean kicked her feet into the air and pulled the sides of the hammock around her. The other girl sat up to watch Uncle Marvin.
All at once he stopped and looked towards our camp on the other side of the island. There was not a sound anywhere, except the sucking sound in the slough that went on all the time, and the sharp slap of water against the sides of the houseboat. He listened for another moment, cocking his head like a dog getting ready to jump a rabbit, and broke into a run, headed for our camp. Jim and I just barely got there before Uncle Marvin. We were both puffing and blowing after running so fast, but Uncle Marvin was blowing even harder and he did not notice how short our breath was. He stopped and looked down at the dead fire for a while before he spoke to us.
“Get ready to go home, son, you and Jim,” he said. “We’ve got to leave right now.”
He started throwing our stuff into a pile and stamping out the ashes at the same time. He turned around and spat some tobacco juice on the live coals and grabbed up an armful of stuff. He did not wait for us to help him, but started for our skiff on the mud flat right away with a big load of stuff in both arms. Jim and I had to hurry to catch up with him so he would not forget and leave us behind.
He took the oars from us and shoved off without waiting for us to do it for him. When we were out of the mouth of the creek, he took his hat off and threw it on the bottom of the skiff and bent over the oars harder than ever. Jim and I could not do a thing to help, because there were only two oars and he would not turn either one of them loose.
Nobody said a thing while we were rowing around the slough. When we got within a hundred feet of shore, Uncle Marvin started throwing our stuff into a heap in the stern. We had no more than dragged bottom on shore when he picked up the whole lot and threw the stuff on the dried mud. The pans and buckets rolled in every direction.
Both of us were scared to say a word to Uncle Marvin because he had never acted like that before. We stood still and watched him while he shoved off into the river and turned the skiff around and headed around the slough. We were scared to death for a while, because we had never seen anybody cut across so close to the slough. He knew where he was all the time, but he did not seem to care how many chances he took of being sucked down into the slough. The last we saw of him was when he went out of sight around Maud Island.
We picked up our things and started running with them towards home. All the way there we were in too much of a hurry to say anything to each other. It was about a mile and a half home, and upgrade every step of the way, but we ran the whole distance, carrying our heavy stuff on our backs.
When we reached the front gate, Aunt Sophie ran out on the porch to meet us. She had seen us running up the road from the river, and she was surprised to see us back home so soon. When we left with Uncle Marvin early that morning, we thought we were going to stay a week on Maud Island. Aunt Sophie looked down the road to see if she could see anything of Uncle Marvin.
Jim dropped his load of stuff and sank down on the porch steps panting and blowing.
“Where’s your Uncle Marvin, Milton?” Aunt Sophie asked us, standing above me and looking down at us with her hands on her hips. “Where’s Marvin Hutchins?”
I shook my head the first thing, because I did not know what to say,
“Where’s your Uncle Marvin, James?” she asked Jim.
Jim looked at me, and then down again at the steps. He tried to keep Aunt Sophie’s eyes from looking straight into his.
Aunt Sophie came between us and shook Jim by the shoulder. She shook him until his hair tumbled over his face, and his teeth rattled until they sounded as if they were loose in his mouth.
“Where is your Uncle Marvin, Milton?” she demanded, coming to me and shaking me worse than she had Jim. “Answer me this minute, Milton!”
When I saw how close she was to me, I jumped up and ran out into the yard out of her reach. I knew how hard she could shake when she wanted to. It was lots worse than getting a whipping with a peach-tree switch.
“Has that good-for-nothing scamp gone and taken up with a shantyboat wench again?” she said, running back and forth between Jim and me.
I had never heard Aunt Sophie talk like that before, and I was so scared I could not make myself say a word. I had never heard her call Uncle Marvin anything like that before, either. As a rule she never paid much attention to him, except when she wanted him to chop some stovewood, or something like that.
Jim sat up and looked at Aunt Sophie. I could see that he was getting ready to say something about the way she talked about Uncle Marvin. Jim was always taking up for him whenever Aunt Sophie started in on him.
Jim opened his mouth to say something, but the words never came out.
“One of you is going to answer me!” Aunt Sophie said. “I’ll give you one more chance to talk, Milton.”
“He didn’t say where he was going or what he was going to do, Aunt Sophie. Honest, he didn’t!”
“Milton Hutchins!” she said, stamping her foot.
“Honest, Aunt Sophie!” I said. “Maybe he went off somewhere to preach.”
“Preach, my foot!” she cried, jamming her hands on her hips. “Preach! If that good-for-nothing scalawag preached half as many sermons as he makes out like he does, he’d have the whole country saved for God long before now! Preach! Huh! Preach, my foot! That’s his excuse for going off from home whenever he gets the notion to cut-up-jack, but he never fools me. And I can make a mighty good guess where he is this very minute, too. He’s gone chasing off after some shantyboat wench! Preach, my foot!”
Jim looked at me, and I looked at Jim. To save our life we could not see how Aunt Sophie had found out about the two girls from Evansville on Maud Island.
Aunt Sophie jammed her hands on her hips a little harder and motioned to us with her head. We followed her into the house.
“We’re going to have a house cleaning around this place,” she said. “James, you bring the brooms. Milton, you go start a fire under the washpot in the back yard and heat it full of water. When you get it going good, come in here and sweep down the cobwebs off the ceilings.”
Aunt Sophie went from room to room, slamming doors behind her. She began ripping curtains down from the windows and pulling the rugs from the floor. A little later we could hear the swish of her broom, and presently a dense cloud of dust began blowing through the windows.
(First published in the Brooklyn Eagle)