Lant poled the rowboat by a short-cut to the river. Even in the bright November morning the way was gloomy, overhung with writhing black rattan. The ash and palms and cypress reared directly from the swamp water, their bases knotted in a torment of escape. Where a bar of sun-light came through the dense foliage, Lant pointed out to Ardis a water moccasin on a log. It was in the act of swallowing a frog. The frog was croaking lustily. The girl watched big-eyed, shrinking a little to the far side of the boat.
Piety said, laughing, "Listen to him squall and beller!"
"The frog's too big for the moccasin," Lant said. "He cain't git him swallered nor he cain't turn him loose."
He tried to pry out the frog with the end of an oar, but the pair slid under the water. The sunlight was blinding on the river as they swung into the current from the creek. Swamp laurel and holly leaves glistened in the sun.
Piety said, "I love the river, but I don't pertickler love the swamp. Hit's like travellin' thu Hell to git to Heaven."
Lant paddled down-stream with one oar, sitting in the stern seat of the rowboat. The muscles of his long arms were tough and stringy. Up or down the swift current, it made no difference to him. His mother sat contentedly hunched over in the bow. Ardis sat between.
"You figger you'll go to Hell, Ardis?" he asked.
She laughed. "I never thought about it."
"Since all the laws come in," he said, "I reckon we'll all go. And won't the ol' devil have a picnic when all us folks gits there! He'll have a pure fish-fry."
Piety chuckled from the bow, her chin in her hands.
The best bream holes were in back-waters of the river, around sunken logs and fallen tree-tops; or where the creeks flowed out between lily pads to join the current. They fished with tiny hooks and bonnet worms and long bamboo poles, for the smaller the bream, the better to the taste of the big bass. They caught a baker's dozen of red-breasts, from two to five inches long, put them in a bucket of fresh water to keep them alive, and turned back into the broadest of the creeks for Lant to set his lines.
He turned the boat over to Piety to paddle and directed her to places along the bank where ash saplings grew thickly. He drew up here and there and cut half a dozen, fifteen feet long and an inch or two in thickness. These he interspersed along the creek edge on the shady side, driving each sapling firmly into the muck so that it leaned over a dark pool. He measured heavy twine to reach from the top of the sapling to the surface of the creek water. On the end of the twine he noosed two heavy hooks, one hook put through the back of a live bream. The bream swam in a semi-circle, his backbone a fan reaching just out of the water. He made a tempting bass bait.
Ardis said, "This is lots of fun."
They paddled up and down the creek visiting the lines in turn. Sometimes they had no more than turned their backs on a freshly baited line when they heard a bass strike. He made a wild commotion. Sometimes he broke loose and got away, hooks, bream and all. When he was hooked, he thrashed on the line so that the ash sapling bent and swayed. Lant did not return to his first line when he heard a strike behind him. Piety said, "You better go back," but he was intent on the line ahead. When he made his round again, he found a ten-pound bass dead on the line. Its sides were slashed as though a jagged knife had hacked at them. A small alligator had sampled the meat.
Lant said, "He better git back in his winter quarters. I'll come up with him one o' these nights."
Several small bass were ambitious and hooked themselves. These Lant removed carefully, so as not to tear their mouths or gill them, and dropped them in the creek to swim away. He talked to them as he worked at the hook.
"You git you some size 'fore you come messin' up with me.
He took over the paddling again. He shot the boat up and down the creek with strong strokes. His lank body doubled up over the paddle. Sometimes he sent the boat under a tangle of briers, and Piety in the bow protested his roughness.
"I got to git there," he said. "What kin I do?"
"You kin pull up a leetle shorter," she complained.
When the boat passed near Sunday Bluff she turned excitedly.
"I smell male hog!" she cried out.
"Oh, your ol' male hog. You won't never see him agin."
Ardis looked from one to the other. The older woman's vehemence puzzled her.
She asked, "What's the matter?"
Piety lamented her lost hogs at a moment's notice. "Why, half-breed Tine has been hog-stealin' around here the past two yare. Between him and the 'gators, you cain't raise you no hogs for market. We're doin' good to git down our own meat."
Lant said, "I'm about to catch up with the Half-breed. If I comes up on him tomorrer mornin', I'll cut his throat from ear to ear before night-fall."
Piety said, "You better not go on that-a-way. You'll find yourself in trouble. The law's gittin' mighty troublesome."
Lant said, "The law cain't do nothin' to you for lookin' out for your prop'ty. The law looks out for folkses' prop'ty."
Piety said, "Don't you go countin' on the law. Hit ain't on the side o' the pore man."
They had been a little late in getting out the set lines. Lant had tried to reach the creek at south moon over, but the moon was an hour past the meridian when they began to work the lines. The catch was only four fish. They were the true big-mouthed bass, and they weighed from four to ten pounds apiece. Lant took down his lines but left the saplings for another time. He paddled down the creek to his landing while Piety untied the hooks and put them carefully away.
Lant tied the rowboat to a small cypress. Ardis put her hand on the tree to steady herself.
He called anxiously, "Look out for that red cypress gum. It'll purely blister your skin."
Piety said, "Hit's a hide-raiser, all right, but they says it'll cure the cancer."
At the foot of the hammock Lant stopped.
He said, "Ma, you go on. I'll go up the trail a ways and cut us a swamp cabbage for dinner."
She took the string of fish from him.
"You want Ardis should go with you?" she asked.
"I thought I'd show her them two big hickories."
"They're somethin' to see, all right," she agreed.
She started up the ledge, her thin shoulders stooped, her stick-like legs pushing against the slope. She turned.
"Don't cut the cabbage too close to the swamp, for it'll be bitter."
Lant and Ardis went along the trail together. He carried his light axe over one shoulder. His gait, disjointed and awkward in a square-dance, fitted itself to the rough path like a stream flowing over stones. He was dark and vital, like the hammock and the swamp. Something stirred across the girl, as though a strong breeze blew suddenly across a shallow pond. When she stumbled in her thin shoes, she caught at him and then left her arm in his.
She asked, "Lant, how do you make your living?"
He thought, "I'll take her to the outfit."
He imagined her sitting on the platform under the sweet-gums, her hair as bright as the copper of the pot, while he explained the workings of the still.
She added, "Father and Cousin Bill were asking me."
He stiffened. He checked himself from blurting out, "It's none of their damn business." He thought, "I been at it a year and a half, and Bill Mersey ain't on to what I'm doing yet? And him snooping around asking questions all the time."
He said casually, "Oh, winter-times I trap, and summer-times I 'gator. I farm and I hunt and I raft and do all sich as that. I made a right smart piece o' money oncet, sendin' black haw roots to a drug comp'ny. They paid twenty cents a pound."
She said, "You must have sold almost every different kind of thing there is in the scrub to sell."
"I've done sold live rattlesnakes," he admitted. He forgot his anger at Bill Mersey and warmed to the subject of rattlesnakes.
"The last I caught," he told her, "Cleve and me come up on a pair in the south-east fence corner. I stayed with 'em whilst Cleve goed to the house and fetched back a barrel and sack and fish-poles with loops on 'em. We stepped plenty lively gittin' 'em looped and the barrel over 'em and them in it. But we got four dollars apiece for them."
"Is that a good price?"
"Mighty good. You cain't git that money now. The snake-man to Eureka ain't payin' but fifty cents a foot. I'll not hunt 'em for that."
He held a wild grape vine aside for her.
"The risk's worth somethin'," he told her, "the same as the snake."
He was astonished that she knew none of the trees of the hammock except the magnolia and the holly. He pointed them out and described their peculiarities, so that she would surely know them again. Red bay and sweet bay, sweet gum and iron-wood—She followed his finger with her grave eyes. He stopped in his tracks and looked at her.
"What's wild mulberry good for?" he asked her sternly.
"Why—I suppose the birds eat the fruit."
"They ain't no finer wood in the world for oar-lock blocks," he informed her solemnly.
Every tree fitted into his life. Its beauty and its purpose were joined together, so that the most beautiful trees to him were those with the greatest use. For the slim white ash trees he felt a tenderness, gauging their probable length in terms of strands for firing in the furnace of his still. Near the Twin Sinks he led her up the ledge to the two giant hickories. He walked around and around them, warming to their straightness and good grain.
"They's hundreds o' feet o' timber in each o' them hickories," he said proudly. "I don't aim to cut 'em lest I got it to do. Trees like that is scarce."
She tipped her head back and stared submissively at the tops, where the leaves hung golden against the blue translucent sky.
Below the hickories again, where the hammock merged with swamp, he cut a low-growing palmetto. He trimmed down the ivory cylinder that was the heart of the palm and cut a shaving from the lower end, where the fan-like sections fitted intricately together. They tasted it. It was crisp and sweet, like chestnuts.
"That's a swamp cabbage that's fitten," he decided.
He dropped it on a clean palmetto frond and laid the axe beside it. He began to scratch himself thoughtfully.
"The red-bugs and ticks is gittin' into me," he said. "You set and rest whilst I dig the boogers out."
He rolled up his sleeves to the shoulder and investigated the length of each arm. He came to her where she sat with her back against a magnolia and showed her the microscopic mites and ticks. She could not make them out on his brown arm until he traced their movement with the tip of his pocket-knife.
"Them things gives me the devil," he said. "They don't bother Ma nary a mite."
He sat beside her and pulled up his trousers and bent to the same business about his ankles, bare of socks above his shoe-tops.
"I reckon I got 'em all 'fore they got too deep buried. If I ain't, I'll know it tonight."
He turned to her.
"They gittin' into you?"
"I don't feel anything. I got red bugs at a picnic at Orange Springs once, but I don't feel anything now."
"Lemme see."
He turned her arm, bare under short sleeves, to the sunlight sifting through the magnolia.
"God A'mighty, you 'bout covered. That's one thing I got agin hammock."
He bent earnestly and picked at her arm with his knife-point. He drew his hand against the skin and examined it closely again.
"Reckon I got 'em routed on that un. Gimme 'tother arm."
He leaned across her and picked with a complete absorption in his work, turning her arm this way and that. Suddenly he was weak and a little sick. The white flesh had changed under his touch. It was electric. It was soft, so soft it frightened him. A hot wave passed through him, and then he was cold. It was like malaria, but more terrifying. He wanted to look at her but he was afraid to lift his head. He dropped his pocket-knife and turned his head and rested his face against her throat. Her pulse beat rapidly, like a bird's. He held his breath. Slowly, as though a magnolia petal drifted down to him, she laid her check on his and he felt her eyelids flutter there like moth-wings.
There was no more hammock, no more swamp. Nothing existed that had ever been before. There was only a soft pulsing under his lips and a magnolia petal against his cheek. It came to him like a revelation that he would kiss her. Her lips were cool and remote, as though he pressed a guava against his mouth. Then he was flooded with warmth. Her lips were warm, and all the torment that sometimes possessed him pushed against her mouth, like a man beating against a closed door.
He said, "Ardis honey, you so sweet."
She put the back of her hand across her lips.
She said, "I'm afraid."
The torment left him, and he was half-sick because he had frightened her. Her hands were cold and he rubbed them until the tips of the fingers were pink again. The sun stood at its zenith, but a chill November wind crossed the swamp and moved up the hammock ledge, rattling the thick leaves of the magnolia.
She said, "Let's go back."
He lifted her to her feet and picked up his axe and the white shaft of palm-heart. He wanted to take her hand, or put his free arm around her, but he walked stiffly beside her, looking ahead. After a while she put her arm through his and rubbed her face against his sleeve.
He said, "Honey, I jest ain't goin' to put my arm around you 'til you say so."
She said, "I say so."
They laughed and walked close together along the trail and through the hammock and across the clearing. Piety looked at them curiously.
She said, "Hit's too late to cook the cabbage for dinner, if you're takin' Ardis home soon like you said. Dinner's on the table."
In the early afternoon Lant rowed Ardis down the river to Iola Landing. He let the boat drift and she sat on the floor between his knees and leaned against him. The sun was warm and the river was brown velvet flecked with gold. When he drew her body closer and brushed his face across her hair and felt her throat with his fingers, a sharp sadness struck him. In the spring he had seen a red-bird singing from a wild plum tree white with bloom. The bird had almost instantly flown away, because the moment was too beautiful to endure.