The raft lay at Otter Landing under the fog of early morning. It was tethered at both ends. The river current swirled under it and it tugged at its moorings. The ten thirty-foot sections, joined flexibly, stirred and rippled like the vertebrae of a great snake. The fog filled the river from bank to bank; only the palmettos shook their heads free from its chill dankness. Ramrod was waiting at the edge of the water. He sat motionless on his heels, his arms between his legs, his hands resting ape-like on the ground.
Lant saw him from the last bend of the hammock trail. The low-hanging mist rested over the man's head and the white hair was dissolved in it. The outline of the crib-raft showed beyond. The boy hurried his pace. He laid his hand on Ramrod's shoulder. The old man started and brought his gaze to him from a far distance.
They moved to the raft without speaking. Most of the supplies had been loaded the evening before. Lant placed the last box in the rowboat tied for towing behind the last section. He unfastened the line that held the end of the raft in to the bank. Ramrod loosed the line that held the first section and jumped quickly to the oar-bench. Lant walked the three hundred feet of raft to the head and pushed his jam-hook against a cypress at the water's edge. The head swung slowly away from the bank. A quiver of movement passed from one section to another; the wing pieces swung, pair by pair. Ramrod bent to the sweep. The current took the raft and delivered it into the long grip of the river. Lant shivered with delight.
In the fog the movement was scarcely perceptible. The boy thought anxiously that they had started too early. The sun had been about to break over the scrub as he had left the house. Now he saw that inch by inch the fog lifted. The water rushed visibly past the shore. The river was straight for several hundred yards. When they reached the first curve, the banks were clear of mist for a foot in height. Ramrod swung the thirty-foot ash pole on its pivot and the head of the raft took the bend neatly. The sections followed docilely. Within the cribs the great cypress logs lay loosely penned, pinned only at the heads.
Ramrod dropped to the oar-bench and motioned Lant beside him. He placed the boy's hands on the long sweep; held his vast ones over them. Lant felt the river lick at the tip of the pole. Ahead, the fog seemed impenetrable. It lifted just ahead of them, then closed again behind. The river, deep and swift and narrow, wound tortuously. It flowed to the north, but curved sometimes east, sometimes west, and straightened out again. As it turned towards the east, shafts of sunlight split the fog. The mist rolled on itself; billowed and disintegrated. The thin morning sun broke through, tearing the last shreds from the river-pinks and asters. It lay in warm bands across the boy's shoulders, chilled by the November dawn.
He was amazed at Ramrod's silence. The old man had been feverishly garrulous through the weeks in which they raised logs from mud and creek-beds and made up the raft. He had sometimes let go of the windlass rope when a log was half hoisted, waving his hands to tell some mad grievance. Now he sat in an oblivious peace, his pale eyes calm and watchful. He hummed a little in a whining minor.
Lant knew the river by heart for a few miles below his own landing. Shingle Landing, Mud-Bottom Springs, Saw-Grass, Indian Bluff, where he had found the old 45-70 bullet, as big as his thumb, from the Indian wars—he passed them as he would pass folk he knew. Today their faces were a little strange, as though they showed an unsuspected lack of friendliness. The steep east bank was a wall to be avoided, and every bend a menace. Where the river current whirled under low-hanging boughs, or rushed against the shore before it took itself about a curve, the raft too whirled and rushed. Where the sweep was insufficient to steer, Lant used the jam-hook to keep the head out of the wood.
Ramrod had prepared the boy for passing the Lady Slipper. The turn was sharper than a right angle, and as they approached, the river debris that floated with them picked up speed. If the raft were not snubbed, it would pile up at the turn. Lant's heart pounded. He walked the raft back to the rowboat, untied it, passed along the side of the raft and received from Ramrod one end of a long rope. He rowed to the convex bank to the east and as the head of the raft drew opposite, made half a dozen turns of the rope about a stout cypress. The rope tightened and sang. The cypress quivered. The raft-head swung slowly around the bend. Lant released the rope slowly, lying back against it as it slipped through his hands. The sections rounded the bend.
"Just like a ol' snake movin'," he thought.
The current returned from it frenzied rush against the far bank and settled again into its steady four miles an hour. The raft swayed a little and settled with it. Ramrod pulled in the trailing rope-end. Lant caught up in the rowboat, fastened it to the rear and boarded the raft. Ramrod nodded. The boy felt strong and experienced.
He remarked wisely, "The Lady Slipper's a perfeck scoundrel."
The sun was high. The river was red and gold and bronze, for the sweet gums and hickories and maples were in full autumn colour. The cypress needles had turned to the deep-red of Lant's hair. The river water, stained by cypress and magnolia, dissolved the colour in its clear brownness. Scarlet berries were thick on the swamp laurel. They were reflected in the calmer water along the shore, as though they grew staunchly below the surface.
Towards Hog-Thief Creek the river straightened for a distance. The sun was directly overhead. Ramrod put the sweep in the boy's hands. He had only to flutter it now and then, as a fish-eagle soaring lifts one wing. The man stretched his arms and legs. He went back to the supplies and brought forward a tin lard pail Piety had packed with ready-cooked food. He set it on the boy's knees and took the sweep from him. Lant opened the pail and took out biscuits and cornbread from the top. Underneath were fried squirrel and white bacon. To one side was a bottle of Abner Lantry's new cane syrup. Ramrod watched the bucket a little cross-eyed, like a hungry dog. He hitched close on the oar-bench. Lant divided the food in equal portions. They ate while the raft drifted, handling itself. There was more than they could eat in the one meal. Lant left his uneaten share in the bucket. Ramrod turned pieces of squirrel meat over in his hands, and put them regretfully in his pockets. They dipped river water in their hands and drank deeply. The water was cold and had a clean taste of brown leaves.
The stream broadened to nearly three hundred feet. A few rare white oaks grew close to the water's edge. The raft passed close and Lant could see the large acorns. The afternoon sun was strong. It moulded the jimson-weed into towers of red and gold. The next time Lant rowed to shore to snub the rafthead, woodbine trailed across him as he passed under overhanging ash saplings. Their touch was reassuring. The vines were as they had always been. The banks were unchanged, after all. The job of snubbing went smoothly and the raft took the bend like a string of well-handled horses. The boy lost the feeling of uneasiness that had struck him in the chill morning. The river was safe and he could handle it.
Ramrod gave him the sweep on every straight reach. Towards sunset the bends grew frequent and the man took over the steering again. Lant drew his long legs into the circle of his arms. He was suddenly exhausted. He closed his eyes for a moment.
He wakened with the river lapping under him, the tethered raft rocking gently. Ramrod had tied it up around a curve where the current was deflected and slow. The rear was moored on the near side of the bend and the head on the far. The sections made two sides of a triangle around the bend. The sun was gone and the river lay in shadow. The bank beside him was black. Live-oaks and magnolias in a patch of hammock loomed monstrous. He looked up. Ramrod stood over him, his hands hanging at his sides. Lant sat up sharply.
He asked, "What we stopped for? I thought you figgered we'd drift both night and day."
The man said, "You 'bout divv out. I been pushin' you. You belong to west. We dest camp tonight."
Lant frowned. He was ashamed of going to sleep.
Ramrod said, "You dot to det used to this. You young." He waved one hand at Lant's long legs. "You gwowin'."
He pushed his hand through his tufted white hair. His eyes stared across the dark water. He shook his head, trying to clear it of its confusion. He reached across his madness into a far past. He groped in a torment of remembering.
"I been a boy," he said.
The raft was under way before sunrise. There was less fog than the morning before. The weather was turning warmer. The river past Orange Springs Ferry was not so familiar. It turned sharply here and flowed almost due east along the north boundary of the scrub. Ramrod pointed out trails to the water's edge that the boy had not known existed. Black Hawk Cut-off, the Needle's Eye and the Galloping Reaches—these began to be strange.
The south bank flattened. There was more swamp and less hammock. The river-pinks grew in dense masses, piled as high as small trees. There were fewer live-oaks and maples; more bulrushes and willows. At Turkey-foot Landing a child in a ragged dress watched them pass. They lifted their hands to her and called "Hey!" but she put half her hand in her mouth and did not answer. Rounding the next bend Lant looked back. She stood without moving, gazing after them from under shaggy hair.
The days went faster for the boy because the north bank was new. They drifted day and night. He took turns with Ramrod at napping in the day-time. The weather turned warm, the current slowed, the river was sun-shot and sleepy. The afternoons were hot. Blue-johns flapped languidly ahead and vultures did not stir from their roosts. The river edge was a bronze mirror.
There came a time in mid-afternoon when all life seemed suspended. The river flowed interminably but as though without advance. The boy thought that he had been always in this still, liquid place. There was no change. There was no memory and no imagining. The young male restlessness that had begun to stir along his bones was quiet. If Piety and Cleve and Kezzy were really persons, instead of names, they lay drowned behind him. Nothing existed but the brown, clear water, flowing in one spot forever. Ramrod sat hunched at the oar-bench; lunatic, insensate; silent at the sweep. The water lettuce whirled slowly around and around, like dancers waltzing in their sleep. Lant watched until he drowsed with it; around and around and around.
In the night-time he was sharply aware of movement. Ramrod insisted that the river current was faster at night. They had waited for full moon for the trip and the river was as plain as by day. Lant liked the swirling progress in the moonlight between the dark banks. He felt the same drowsy excitement as when he played his grandfather's banjo. He could see water-turkeys and limpkins roosting high in the cypresses. Wood-ducks lifted from the coves with a wild rush of wings and herons, disturbed at their slumber, flew ahead of the raft, snow-white in the silver brightness. Owls quavered from the shore. He breathed sparingly, listening to the river sucking at the raft, smelling the rank sweetness of the swamps.
On the straight reaches Ramrod seemed to nap at the oar-bench, rousing instinctively when the head of the raft swung too close to shore. Lant lay on his back, his arms under his head, the soles of his bare feet against the smoothness of cypress, and watched the stars and the sailing moon. The trees, the clumps of tall tufted river-grass, the shadowy banks, went by in the night like things remembered in a dream. The river flowed, a dream between dreams, and they were all one, the boy and the river and the banks.
He was conscious of lying immobile, borne resistlessly between two motions. The river moved under him and the sky slipped over him. Out of the sky appeared the sun and the moon, the stars and the wind, and they had something to do with the earth. They made day and night and they made feed-time, when the deer and rabbits stirred at the swamp edge, the fish jumped in the river and the owls hooted in the hammock. These things, he thought, were concerned with the earth even when they were invisible.
Dead River and the Narrows; the Blue Boar and the Blue Sow; Bill Blount's Honey and Turpentine Creek; the raft passed them in the moonlight. They went by the old Riverside Landing by daylight. Looking up the shallow bank, Lant saw pine saplings massed against the sky. He recognised the east scrub, where he and Cleve and Red and Black had run down the wild cat. He wondered if Red would keep everybody out of the yard while he was away. The dogs were showing their age. Even Black, he thought, was getting cranky.
The familiar points of the scrub's boundaries were increasingly strange from the river; the Winding Blades, the Devil's Salad Patch; Davenport, the last landing on the river; he would scarcely have known them. The sun was setting. The palms reached up tousled heads and caught the glow, red-gold among their fronds. The spider lilies were ivory washed with thin gold. Red hibiscus and the wild Blazing Star flamed richly. Almost without warning the river ended. Beyond, the broad St. John's moved sluggishly northward to the sea, and there were pale orchid water hyacinths on both sides of the raft.
They tied up to wait for daylight and cooked supper on shore. In the darkness before moonrise there came sounds from a camp of Negro fishermen, a mile away across the greater river. The blacks were singing. Lant thought that he had never heard such sweetness; dark and rich and flowing, like the river through the swamp. In the morning they picked up a tow-boat for the thirty miles down the St. John's to the lumber mills at Palatka.