No matter what kind of turmoil is going on around a human being, they eventually reach a point of exhaustion whereby they collapse into a deep sleep. That’s what happened to Poudlum and me on the rushing river while we were hung up in a downed tree a couple of hours before dawn.
The dim light of a foggy dawn was upon us when I felt movement. At first I thought we had broken loose and were floating further on down the river. But then the sound of our boat crunching onto solid ground brought me to full awareness.
I bolted up from the bottom of the boat the same time as Poudlum, and what we saw just about scared us half to death.
There was a dim figure on the bank of the river, who had pulled us up on the shore using our tethering rope, and he was tying the rope to one of the protruding roots of the fallen tree we had crashed into.
He raised up and said in a gravelly voice, “Looks like you boys got caught in that there storm. Y’all are mighty fortunate to have got tangled up and caught up in this big old tree.”
I rubbed my tired eyes, got them focused and saw a face which I couldn’t tell if it was a dingy and dirty white one or a colored one, but from the way he talked I suspected he was white.
“You boys come on up to the house and get yourself dried out,” he said. “My name is Silas. Who might y’all be?”
I struggled to shake the grogginess from my mind before I said, “I’m Ted and this is Poudlum. We were fishing up the river and the current caught us up and landed us in this tree.”
“That’s what I figured,” Silas said. “Why don’t y’all grab all your stuff and follow me?”
We did like he said and after a short walk we came upon a shanty with a saggy porch and a leaning rock chimney on the side of it. When he saw us hesitating he said, “I got a fire going and it’s good and dry inside.”
He climbed the rickety steps to the porch and opened a door constructed of three wide boards going up and down and held together by two short boards nailed across them, one at the top and one at the bottom.
“Make haste, boys,” Silas said as he held the door open. “It’s damp and chilly out here.”
We reluctantly followed him inside and he closed the door behind us and dropped the wooden latch with a soft thud.
There was a kerosene lamp burning on a bare table in the middle of the room, which gave off a little more light than the foggy early morning had outside, and I could see that Silas had on a pair of faded and dingy overalls with one gallus hooked over his shoulder and the other one hanging loose, with no shirt on underneath. That’s when I saw for sure he was a white man as the lamplight reflected off his pale white shoulders.
Across the room there was a good fire going in a sooty limestone fireplace, and in spite of the shabbiness and stale smell of the room, it was warm and inviting.
“You boys been on the river all night?” Silas asked as he removed his shapeless and sweat-stained felt hat, which revealed long but thin and stringy hair hanging down to his neck.
His short beard was patchy surrounding his thin-lipped face, framed by bushy eyebrows and a big flat nose, which looked like it had been smashed in a few times.
“Y’all just put your stuff on the table,” he said. “Take your blankets and just curl up on the floor next to the fire and get yourselves some shuteye. I figure y’all have to be plum tuckered out. The river ought to be going down enough by late today so y’all can paddle back up to where you come from. By the way, where did y’all come from?”
“Up at Coffeeville,” I said without thinking.
While Silas was adding some logs to the fire Poudlum leaned close and whispered, “Shouldn’t have told him that.”
“I know,” I whispered back.
“I don’t think I like Silas or this place,” Poudlum whispered again.
“Might not hurt to just rest a while,” I told him.
Suddenly Silas raised up from the fire and said, “What y’all whispering about?”
“Nothing,” I responded. “Just talking about how lucky we are you stumbled upon us.”
“You right about that, son. How long y’all been asleep in that boat before I come upon y’all?”
“Two or three hours I reckon,” I told him.
“Guess y’all mighty tuckered out. Well, go on and lay yourselves down and I’ll wake y’all up by noon and we’ll have us a bite to eat. Then we’ll see what the river looks like and if it’s calmed down enough for y’all to paddle on back toward Coffeeville. That’s a mighty far piece and take y’all two or three days paddling hard.”
I didn’t feel real good about it, and I could tell Poudlum didn’t either by the way he was casting his eyes around the shadowy room. But our fatigue got the best of us and we stretched our blankets out on the floor and rolled up inside them.
The sound and warmth of the fire was like food and drink to a starving person and it immediately took its toll on me. I looked across and saw Poudlum’s eyes were flickering in unison with the flames in the fireplace.
In that paralyzing state between wakefulness and sleep I let my eyes give the room one last survey. Silas was rummaging around at something on his cot against the far wall. That’s when I noticed there was another cot beyond his and it looked like there was a big lump on it, and just before I succumbed to slumber, I thought I saw the lump move.
The fire had died down when I woke up and I could see that sometime during our long nap Poudlum and me had cast our blankets aside. As I raised up on one elbow I heard something bumping and clanking behind me. Poudlum was still asleep when I rolled over to what was making the racket.
Once I did I immediately wished I hadn’t, because the sight that met my eyes was enough to scare a body clean out of his wits. Little goosebumps popped up all over me and I could feel the fine hairs on the back of my neck standing erect.
The bump I had seen on the cot past the one Silas used early this morning was alive and he was emptying our sack of food-stores out onto the little table, making a heap of noise as he sorted the beans, sardines, and little cans of sausage.
But it wasn’t his taking possession of our food supply that scared me, it was the shape of him. He was a short man with little short legs and little short hairy arms, and he was also very fat and the perfect shape of a goblin if I had had to dream one up.
His matted hair splayed out in all directions reminding me of a big black grease spot on a wooden kitchen floor. He must have sensed I was watching him, for suddenly he stopped all movement, then jerked around to face me.
I just about jumped out of my skin when he did that and I saw his big bug eyes, which reminded me of a giant frog, and on top of that they were crossed and I couldn’t tell if he was really looking at me or off toward the other side of the room.
His belly stood out like a pot leg on a wood stove and above it decayed and snaggled teeth protruded from his open mouth, and I thought to myself this was just about the most unattractive human being I had ever beheld.
About that time I heard Poudlum rousing up behind me. When he sat up and observed the goblin, in his state of fear he said, “It appears the Good Lawd has done forsaken us and let us float down the river to hell!”
The goblin didn’t seem to hear him and spoke for the first time. “I see y’all done woke up.”
It shocked me that he could actually utter words and it took me a moment before I could muster up the courage to respond, but I finally stuttered, “We-we-we have. Uh, where is Silas?”
“He be out taking care of bidness,” the goblin replied.
“What kind of business?” I asked.
“The kind of bidness that ain’t no bidness of yourn,” he responded.
Poudlum finally got the courage to speak and said, “Well, who in the world are you?”
“I be Dudley, Silas’s brother. He takes care of me.”
That’s when I realized Dudley did not have all of his faculties and was actually a child in his mind while in years he appeared to be middle-aged.
That’s when Poudlum poked me and whispered, “We need to get on out of here.”
We stood up and I told Dudley, “We appreciate y’all’s hospitality, and now we need to be getting on back up the river.”
“Uh-uh,” Dudley grunted.
“Huh?” I asked. “What’s that you said?”
“Silas say for y’all to wait till he comes back.”
“But we got a long way to go and we need to get to our boat,” I told him.
“Silas be gone in y’all’s boat.”
“He took our boat?!” Poudlum exclaimed.
“Uh-huh. His boat got sunk in that storm what just ended.”
“Dudley,” I said. “Where do you think Silas went in our boat?”
“Told you, he taking care of his bidness.”
With that said, Dudley whipped out a knife with a big shiny blade from his boot, and Poudlum and I shrank back in fear. But he simply took it and stabbed it into a can of our beans and carved the lid off. Then he licked the blade and turned it on a can of sardines as he said, “I’m fixing to partake of some of this grub y’all brought. You boys want to join me?”
I was starving and I figured Poudlum was too, but I knew I had rather eat dirt than dine with Dudley. Poudlum confirmed my suspicion when he made a gagging sound from behind me.
“Uh, you go ahead, Dudley. We had something earlier on the boat,” I lied.
It wasn’t a pleasant sight watching Dudley gobble up our food. After he finished and let out a huge belch, I asked him, “Say, Dudley, do you think it would be all right if we step out on the porch and see what the weather is like?”
“Naw,” he said. “Silas say for me to keep y’all inside.”
“I believe we’re being held captive!” Poudlum whispered.
“You think we ought to make a dash for the door?”
“I ’spect not ’cause he might whip out that big blade if we did,” Poudlum said.
While Dudley was carving open a can of sausage I whispered to Poudlum, “Let’s just play along and something will open up for us.”
In a little while after Dudley had stuffed himself on our food we noticed he was nodding off while seated at the table.
I signaled to Poudlum and he began to creep along the wall to the right and I did the same to the left. Our plan was to circle around Dudley and dart out the front door.
We were almost there when he leapt up and darted over to block the front door quicker than a water bug.
He stood there, back to the door, knife in hand and said, “I done told y’all Silas said not to let you out the front door.”
We both froze and I knew we had to think fast if we wanted to outwit a halfwit. My eyes searched the room and lighted on a door at the back of the room. I figured it must be the back door leading out of the shack.
“How about that back door, Dudley?” I said. “Silas didn’t say we couldn’t go out it, did he?”
A bewildered look came over his face for a moment, then he said, “Naw, he never said that.”
“Then how about we go out that door over there,” I said, pointing.
“I reckon it’ll be all right,” Dudley said with a befuddled look on his poor face. “He didn’t say nothing about y’all not doing that.”
“Then we just gonna walk over there and ease out that door and you can have all that food we brought, okay, Dudley?”
“I reckon that’ll be all right,” he told me with a blank look.
“Ain’t no need for that knife, Dudley,” I told him. “Just put it away and save it to open all those cans of food we brought you.”
We were highly relieved when he slid the blade back into his boot and said, “Y’all really gonna leave all this food here?”
“That’s right, Dudley. You can have it all for yourself. We’ll just go out that back door and be on our way. And tell Silas he can have our boat to take care of his business in.”
While I was talking Poudlum and I were slowly edging along the wall towards what we thought was the back door.
“How y’all gonna get back up the river without your boat?” Dudley asked.
“We’ll walk through the woods over to Highway 84 and then just follow it to the ferry landing in Coffeeville”
I was just making something up to pacify Dudley, but when I heard what I had said it did sound like it could be a plan.
We were getting real close to that back door. A few more steps and I had my hand on the latch.
“You ready?” I mouthed to Poudlum.
When he nodded I lifted the latch and flung the door open.
What shocked me was just before we darted through it, Dudley came speeding across the room, like the darting of a snake’s head just before the bite, hit us both in the back and drove us through what turned out to be the door to a back room instead of to the outside.
We crashed to the wooden floor and got splinters in our hands when we used them to break our fall.
Before we could look around the door slammed shut and we heard the latch fall into place.
I had to agree with Poudlum when he said, “I do believe we done been outwitted by a halfwit.”