November on the Carolina coast is cold at night, a dark clear cold that kills the late mosquitoes.
Toward dusk, a black man slithered from a drainage ditch. He moved swiftly on his belly, writhing out across a greasy bog and vanishing into the sawgrass by the river. The grass stirred a moment and was still. A rail bird rattled nervously, and a hunting gull, drawn inland, cocked a bright, hard, yellow eye. Startled, it dropped a white spot on the brown waste of the bog and banked downwind.
Deep River is dark with piedmont silt and without depth or bottom. It bends its way to its wide delta like a great dead snake slung out across the tidewater, and in the summertime it smells. Alluvial ooze packed tight and rotting on its banks sucks into itself the river debris. Through the grasses near the rim, Traver could see the stranded tree limbs and the prow of the derelict skiff glimpsed earlier in the day.
It was near dark. Raising his eyes to the level of the grass, he listened a last time. Then he slid forward and, on his knees in the shallows, wrenched the buried skiff from its sheath of mud. It came with a thick sucking sound and the rank breath of its grave.
Traver knew without experiment that, upright, the skiff would fill immediately. He turned it turtle and waited one moment more, gaining his wind. It was high water, the first of the ebb. The tide and river would be with him. He shivered, moaning softly, though not yet afraid.
In the water, he kicked away from shore. An eddy curled him back upon the bank. He kicked away a second time, and caught the current. But the slimy hulk would not support his weight, and he coasted along beside it, one hand spread-fingered on the keel.
He moved downstream. Across the marsh, the lights switched back and forth like nighttime eyes, dancing in the blackness of the pines. The voices came vaguely on the shifting river air, and a new sound stirred him. He sank lower in the water, so that only his hand and half his face broke the low outline of the skiff.
Dey gone and put de hounds on dat man Traver.
He giggled, teeth chattering, and cursed.
The river dragged the capsized skiff across the coastal waterway, which parted the mainland from the inner marshes of the barrier islands. Though wisps of cloud at times obscured the moon, the night was clear. No longer able to see the lights, he was alone in the cold river, which widened now as it neared its mouth. He thrashed his legs for warmth, and cursed to restore his courage. Southeast, an arm of woods from Ocean Island reached across the outer marshes toward the bank. He wanted to go aground there and, fearful of drifting past it to the open sea, began to swim the skiff inshore. To keep himself company, he swore foully at the balky hulk, the cold, the river, the night world.
His voice wandered in the thin mist over the river, and startled by it, he had a cold premonition of his death. But an inshore current seized the skiff and swept it in beneath the bank. Nearing the piles of the abandoned landing, he forsook the skiff and struggled through the shallow water. He had to drag himself ashore. Crouched beneath the wharf, too weak to beat his arms, he listened to hoarse, painful breaths he could not stop. The skiff disappeared around the final bend, toward the booming where the seas broke on the bar.
Traver scraped coon oysters from the pilings and opened them with his knife. Since the clothes he wore were the property of the state, this knife was his sole possession. He had had it fifteen hours. The knife was long, with a spring blade, and when he had eaten, he cleaned it before replacing it in his pocket.
Then he rose, peering over the bank at the trees a hundred yards away. Though sure he was alone on Ocean Island, he disliked outlining himself against the river. He went forward in a low crouch, covert, quiet. He liked to think he was quiet as an animal.
In the shelter of the live oaks, for the first time since early morning, he stood straight. Stretching, he threw his shoulders back, legs spread in unconscious arrogance. Traver was a tall man and very strong, with the big hands and haunches of his race. His skin was the mud black of the coastal Gullah, and his left eye was obscured by scars which extended in cordy ridges toward the neat, tight ear. The scars seemed to have stretched the skin, which was taut and smooth, like a rubber mask. The expression of the mask was open, almost smiling, the boyish smile of a man enjoying himself without quite knowing why.
Most of the time, this smile was genuine. Traver liked to laugh and, though good-natured, he also liked to fight. He had been fighting since the day when, brought home to Raccoon Creek by a wayward mother, he was nicknamed Traveler.
His Daddy was a Travelin Man
Traveled away and left his Mam.
The name became Traver, and stayed with him. And he had traveled north, south, east, and west, in and out of work and jail. He could stay no longer in a job than out of trouble. He had worked on the railroad and the road gang and the big menhaden boats out of Hampton Roads, and everywhere he laughed like hell and finally fought. Every once in a while, half-drunk, he would come home. And his mother would tell him, You born with too much life in you, dass all, you like you daddy. And you headin straight fo’ trouble, big mule as you is.
The last time home he had fought the man who happened to marry his girl. The man had knifed him near the eye. Unable to catch him, Traver, still bleeding, had burned their cabin down and taken the willing girl away. The sheriff followed in his own good time. I got your old place on the road gang saved for you, the sheriff said. We ain’t had a good laugh since you left.
But now, a month later, he had escaped. He appeared with the knife in Raccoon Creek, but the man had moved away. The girl’s mother reported him, and he took to the woods, and kept on going out across Deep River Marsh. The tide was flooding when he saw the skiff, and he’d had to wait. He had scurried, crouched, scurried again, and once submerged, sliding beneath the surface like an alligator. The rasping voices had not picked up his trail in the green, broken scum, and they had passed.
I a big bull gator, he sang now, a tough-hide long-tail mean ol’ gator. Opening his open mouth a little more, he chortled soundlessly, still shivering. It growin cold, and dis gator ain’t no place to warm hisself. Well, I mean. Cold.
He moved inland through the trees, away from the dark river.
Ocean Island is long and large, spreading down some four miles from the delta, southwest toward Cape Romaine. The true land is a narrow spine supporting red cedar, cypress, yaupon, live oak, and the old-field pine, and here and there a scattering of small palmettos. There are low ridges and open groves and clearings, and a core of semitropic woods. Its south flank is salt marsh and ocean beach, and to the north, diked years ago above the tide, lies a vast brackish swamp. The swamp is grassy, like a green-and-golden flooded plain, its distances broken by lone, bony trees and hurricane dikes and sluice gates. Here, in a network of overgrown canals, the nut and widgeon grass grows in abandoned rice fields. Wildfowl winter in a diadem of reedy ponds, and coot and rail and gallinule, and predators.
In the swamp, the predators move ceaselessly.
He went to Snake-house. This was a sagging toolshed near the landing, so-called because in other times a worker had been bitten there, and died. In the dark, a sign, NO TRESPASSING, loomed white and new. The door was gone, but the dank interior gave shelter from the breeze. Traver stripped and wrung his clothes, then rubbed his body fiercely with his hands. He found an oily piece of old tarpaulin and, wrapping himself in it, dozed a little, fitful.
He had come to Ocean Island because here he could survive. As a boy he had labored on the rice fields and the dikes, and he knew the name and character of every pond and ditch and slough. He knew where to snare rabbits, stalk birds, ambush deer, and where the wild swine and cattle were which he might outwit and kill. On the salt shores there were razor clams and oysters, and mullet in the canals, if a fish trap could be rigged. He would not starve. He could eat raccoon and otter and, if necessary, he could eat them raw.
He could survive here, too, because he would not be caught. The island had been unused for years, even for gunning. If he was tracked to this forsaken place, he could always find shelter in the swamp. Hounds could not help them here, and the whites did not know the swamp as he did, how to move quickly in it without risking the deep potholes and soft muck. He could elude a wider search than the state would send into the swamp after a black man. For this was black man’s country, slow and silent, absorbing the white man’s inroads like a sponge. A white man loomed large on Ocean Island, but a black man was swallowed up in it, and disappeared.
IN THE NIGHT, he was awakened by the grunting of a hog. The grunt was nervous, and there was a skittish stamping of small cloven hooves. He smell me, Traver thought. Taking his knife, he glided to the doorway. Upwind, the hog came toward him on the island path. He crouched, prepared to ambush it, then stiffened.
Ol’ Hawg scairt. And he ain’t scairt of Traver.
Traver stooped for his shirt and pants and slipped outside. The hog snorted and wheeled, crashing off into the brush. Traver slid down a sandbank behind Snake-house and lay watching. He heard a rush of bait fish by the landing, the choked cry of a night heron behind him. A barred owl hooted and was answered. This was the hunting time.
The man had not seen Traver. He had stopped short at the crashing of the hog. Now he came on, down the soft sand path toward Snake-house. He was a tall, lean man with a rifle slung over one arm and a flashlight, unlit, in the other hand. His face was shadowed in the moonlight by his hat brim, turned down all the way around.
Traver opened the knife blade and lay still. He could not retreat now without being seen, and if he was seen, he was lost. He had no doubt that this man was his enemy, an enemy as natural as a raccoon to a frog, nor did it occur to him to curse his luck that an enemy was here at all. He was only relieved that he had heard in time. The rest no longer mattered. Traver was hardened to hunting and being hunted, and the endless adaptation to emergencies. He was intelligent and resourceful, and he was confident. Through the grasses, he gauged the stranger as he passed.
From the man’s belt, behind, hung a hatchet and a piece of rope. The rifle, carried loosely, was ready to be raised, and the unlit light was also ready. He was hunting. He crossed a patch of dry grass without a sound, and Traver nodded ruefully in respect.
Dat a poacher. Might be he jackin deer.
The man went on, down toward the landing. Stooping on the wharf, he peered beneath it. Traver, who had moved, could see him do this, and felt a tightening in his chest.
He see dem feetprints. He see white places where dem orster was. You a plain fool nigger, man.
The hunter returned, moving more quickly. Raising his rifle, he flicked his light into the Snake-house. Traver could see its gleam through the rotting tongue-and-groove.
Ain’t no deer in dar, Boss, ain’t no deer in dar.
He repressed a nervous giggle, sweating naked in the cold, and clutched his knife. Upwind, he could hear the hog again, rooting stupidly near the path. The white man turned, bent to one knee, and fired. Traver jumped. The report ricocheted across the grove as the hog kicked, squealing, and lay still.
Ol’ white folks, he kin shoot. Only why he shootin now and not before? He lookin to fool somebody, he makin pretend he doan know somebody here.
He know, all right. Ol’ white folks know.
The man dragged the hog into the trees and dressed it quickly, viciously, with the hatchet and a knife. Then he piled brush on the head and hooves and entrails and, rigging a sling with a length of rope, hoisted the carcass to his shoulder. He went away as silently as he had come, and Traver followed.
We stickin close as two peas, man. I got to know what you up to every minute, lest you come sneakin up behind me.
Traver, though uneasy, was excited, jubilant. It seemed to him that he had won some sort of skirmish, and he could scarcely wait to see what would happen next. But because he guessed where the man was going, he kept a safe distance behind. There was a clearing at Back-of-Ocean, and the old cabin of an abandoned shooting camp, and the only beach on the south side steep enough to bring a boat ashore. The poacher would have to have a boat, and he probably had a helper. Realizing this, Traver slowed, and put on his wet clothes.
He circled the clearing and came in from the far side, on his belly. There was kerosene light in the cabin window, and hanging from its eaves on the outside logs were moonlit amorphous carcasses. He made out deer and pig, and what could only be the quarters of a large wild bull. These cattle gone wild were the wariest creatures on the island, and this sign of the hunter’s skill gave him another start of uneasiness. Backing off again on hands and knees, he cut himself a rabbit club of the right weight. Waiting for dawn, he whittled it, and bound with vine and a piece of shirt two sharp stones to the heavy end. He was skillful with it, and the feel of it in his hand was reassuring.
It was growing light.
THE BOAT APPEARED at sunup. Traver heard it a long way off, prowling the channel between islands at the southeast end. Now it drummed along the delta, just inside the bar, and headed straight in for the beach. It was a small, makeshift shrimp boat with rust streaks and scaling gray-green paint. Before it grounded, the hunter came out and, hoisting two small deer onto his shoulders, went down to the shore.
The two men loaded quickly. Then they stood a moment talking, the one on the pale sand of the beach, the other a black silhouette on the bow against the red fireball of the sun.
The boatman, who must have been in town the night before, had probably confirmed whatever the hunter had noticed at the landing. Traver wondered if they would turn him in. He doubted it. In the prison denims, he could be shot on sight, and no questions asked—not that the hunter would require that excuse. He guessed that the latter had some right to be here, for otherwise, even in this lonely place, he would not occupy the cabin. He was probably a hired gamekeeper, poaching on the side. He would not want Traver here, and he would not want the sheriff nosing around the island either. He would want to take care of Traver by himself.
The man had come in and out of the cabin. He had the rifle in his hands, checking the action. His movements were calm and purposeful, and he gave Traver a good look at his face. It was a gaunt face, creased and hard, under heavy eyebrows, a shrewd face, curiously empty of emotion. Traver recognized that face, he had seen it all his life, throughout the South.
Ol’ Redneck kill me, do he get the chance. And he mean to get the chance.
The man went off in the direction of Snake-house, moving swiftly into the trees.
For the moment, considering his situation, Traver stayed right where he was. He watched the shrimp boat disappear along the delta. His mouth was dry, and he licked dew from the grass. Though the early sun had begun to warm him, he felt tired and stiff and very hungry, and this hunger encouraged him to loot the cabin.
Unreal in the morning mist, the trees were still. The Spanish moss hung everywhere, like silence. The man would go to Snake-house, to the landing, to pick up Traver’s trail, but it would not lead him far. Traver had stayed clear of the sand path, moving wherever possible on the needle ground beneath the pines. Still, if he meant to loot the cabin, he should hurry. And he was half-risen when a huge blue heron, sailing above the cedars into which the hunter had disappeared, flared off with a squawk and thrash of heavy wings.
Traver sank to his knees again, heart pounding.
That was close to bein you last worldly move. I mean, he layin fo’ you, man, and he like to cotched you. I mean, he smart, doan you forget it, nigger. He know what you doin even fore you does it.
Traver waited again. When his heart stopped pounding, he began to laugh, a long quiet laugh that shook his big body like crying, and caused him to press his mouth to the crook of his arm. And he was surprised when tears came to his eyes, and the laughter became sobbing. He was frightened, he knew, and at the same time, he was unbearably excited.
You just a big black mule, you just a fool and a mule and a alligator all wrap into one.
He went on laughing, knowing his delight was dangerous, and all the more elated because of that. And as he laughed, he hummed to himself, in hunger.
Faraway and gone am I toward dat Judgment Day,
Faraway and gone am I, ain’t no one gwine to stay,
Lay down dis haid, lay down dis load,
Gwine to take dat Heaven Road,
Faraway and gone am I toward dat Judgment Day.
In a while, far over toward the swamp, he heard the quack of startled black ducks, rising. When he saw their high circle over the trees, he got up on his haunches.
Could be dat a duck hawk, but most likely dat him. He over dar by Snake-house.
A string of ibis, drifting peacefully down the length of woods like bright white sheets of tissue, reassured him. Traver ran. In the open, he tensed for the rifle crack he could never have heard had it come, and zigzagged for the door. In less than a minute, he was back. He had a loaf of bread and matches, and was grinning wildly with excitement.
But now a fresh fear seized him. The hunter might return at any time, from any angle. If he did not hurry, he would no longer be able to maneuver without the terror of being seen. Traver stopped chewing, the stale bread dry in his mouth. Then he cut into the woods, loping in a low, bounding squat in the direction taken by the white man. At Graveyard-over-the-Bank, where once the cattle had been driven, penned, and slaughtered, he hid again. This place, a narrowing of the island, the man would sooner or later have to pass.
TRAVER STALKED HIM all that day. Toward noon, the hunter went back to the cabin. Traver could hear him rummage for the bread, and he wondered if, in taking it, he might only have endangered himself further by becoming, in the white man’s eyes, more troublesome. The man came out again and sat on the doorsill, eating. His face, still calm, was tighter, meaner, Traver thought. The rifle lay across his knees. Then he rose and went away into the woods, heading southwest toward Cottonmouth Dike, and Traver followed.
The man made frequent forays from the path, but he seemed to know that he would not surprise his quarry, that Traver was in all probability behind him, for though he moved stealthily out of habit, he made no real effort to conceal himself. Clearly, his plan was to lure Traver into a poor position, a narrow neck or sparsely wooded place where he might hope to turn and hunt him down. He set a series of ambushes, and now and then wheeled and doubled back along his trail. He was skillful and very quick, quick enough to frighten Traver, who several times was nearly trapped. Traver hung farther and farther behind, using his knowledge of the island to guess where the hunter would come and go, and never remaining directly behind, but quartering.
He was most afraid of the animals and birds, which, hunting and hunted, could betray his whereabouts at any time.
The white man was tireless, and this intensity frightened Traver, too. He seemed prepared to stalk forever, carrying his provisions in his pocket. When he ate, he did it in the open, pointedly, knowing that Traver could never relax enough to hunt, could only watch and starve.
By noon of the second day, Traver was desperate. When the man went west again, way over past Pig Root and Eagles Grave, Traver fled eastward to the landing and gorged on the coon oysters. Sated, he realized his mistake. He had a hundred yards of marsh to cross, back to the trees, and for all he knew, the hunter had doubled back again, and had a bead on him. He had done just what the man was waiting for him to do, he had lost the scent, and now any move he made might be the wrong one. He groaned at the thought of the vanished skiff—if only he’d gotten it ashore, and hidden it in the salt grass farther down. But now he was trapped, not only at the landing but on the island.
A bittern broke camouflage with a strangled squawk, causing Traver to spin around. In panic, he clambered up over the riverbank and ran back to the trees. The woods were silent. There came a faint cry of snow geese over the delta, and the sharp rattle of a kingfisher back in the slough. Downwind, wild cattle caught his scent and retreated noisily. Or was that the coming of the hunter? He pressed himself to the black earth, in aimless prayer. The silence grew, cut only by the wash of river wind in the old-field pine.
At dark, he fled into the marsh, and tried to rest in the reeds beneath a dike. Under the moon, much later, a raccoon picked its way along the bank, and he stunned it with his rabbit club. The coon played possum. When he crawled up to it, it whirled and bit him on the ankle. He struck it sharply with the stone end of the club, and it dragged itself into the reeds. He could not see it very well, and in a near frenzy of suppressed fear, he beat the dark shape savagely, long after it was dead. Panting, he sat and stared at the wet, matted mound of fur, the sharp teeth in the open, twisted mouth. He dared not light a fire with his stolen matches, and his gut was much too nervous to accept it raw. He left it where it lay and crept back to the woods and, in an agony of stealth, to Back-of-Ocean. He was overjoyed by the lamp in the cabin window.
He finally tuckered out, Traver told himself. The man done give ol’ Traver up. Traver too spry for him.
The idea restored his confidence a little, and he chuckled without heart. He was still hungry, and he had no idea what his next move should be. Remembering the white man’s face, he did not really believe he had given up the hunt, and this instinct was confirmed, at daybreak. The boat appeared again, and the white man met it, but he did not come out of the cabin. He stepped into the clearing from the yaupon on the other side. Traver had almost approached that way the night before. The light in the window had only been another trap.
Traver fought a wild desire to bolt. But he controlled himself, squeezing great fistfuls of earth between his fingers. He watched the hunter walk slowly to the beach and, resting his rifle butt on the silver roots of a hurricane tree, speak to the boatman. They were silent for a time, as if deciding something. Then the hunter shrugged, and shoved the boat from shore. It backed off with a grinding of worn gears. He returned to the cabin and came out of it a minute later. He had a cooked bone, and he pulled long strings of dry meat from it with his teeth. Traver stared at the lean yellow-brown of his face, the wrinkled neck, the faded khaki clothes and high cracked boots against the soft greens of the trees and the red cassina berries. He stared at the bone. The man tossed it out in front of him, then tramped it into the ground and lit a cigarette. Breathing smoke, he leaned against the cabin logs and gazed around the clearing. Traver caught the cigarette scent on the air, and stirred uncomfortably. The man flipped the butt into the air, and together they watched it burn away upon the ground. Then he shouldered the rifle and went back to the woods, and once more Traver followed.
Who huntin who heah? Traver tried to smile. Who huntin who?
The fear was deep in him now, like cold. He started at every snap and crackle and cry of bird, sniffing the air for scents, which could tell him nothing. There was only the stench of rotting vegetation, and the rank sweat of his fear. He crept along closer and closer to the ground, terrified lest he lose contact with the hunter. In his heart, he knew there was but one course open to him. He could not leave the island, and he could not be killed. Both prospects were unimaginable. But he could kill.
Man, you in de swamp now. It you or him, dass all.
But he could not make himself accept this. He supposed he could kill a black man if he had to, and a white man could kill him. But a black man did not kill a white man.
Man, it doan matter what de color is, it just doan matter now. You in de swamp, and de swamp a different world. Dey ain’t nobody left in dis heah world but you and him, and he figger dass too crowded. When ol’ Lo’d passed out de mens’s hearts, dis heah man hid behind de do’. A man like dis heah man, you let him run where he de law, and he kill you if you black or white or blue. He doan hate you and he doan feel sorry. You just a varmint dat got in de way, dass all.
But Traver doubted his own sense. Perhaps this man had nothing to hide, perhaps he was hunting legally, perhaps he would do no more than remove Traver from the island, or arrest him—how could he know that this man, given the chance, would shoot him down?
And yet he knew. He could smell it. He doubted his instinct because he hated what it told him, because he wanted to believe that this man also was afraid, that a man would not shoot another down without first calling out to him to surrender.
Man, he ain’t called, and he know you heah. He quiet as de grave. And you take it in you haid to call you’self, you fixin to get a bullet fo’ you answer.
AGAIN THAT MORNING, he was nearly ambushed. This time a rabbit gave the man away. For the first time, Traver lost his nerve entirely. He ran back east along the island and stole out on the marsh, crawling along the dike bank where he had killed the coon, persuading his pounding heart that food was his reason for coming. But he knew before he got there that the raccoon would be gone. Black vultures and an eagle rose in silence from the bank, and there was a flat track in the reeds where an alligator had come and gone, and there were blue crabs clinging upside down to the grass at the edge of the ditch. In the marsh, the weak and dead have a brief existence.
Traver was shifting his position when a bullet slapped into the mudbank by his head. Its whine he heard afterward, a swelling in his ears as he rolled into the water and clawed at the brittle stalks of cane across the ditch. A wind of teal wings, rising out of Dead Oak Pond, blurred his racket in the brake. He crossed a reedy flat and slid into a small pool twenty yards away. The echo of the shot diminished on the marsh, and silence settled, like a cloud across the sun.
Then fiddler crabs snapped faintly on the flat. Where he had passed, their yellow claws protruded, open, from the holes.
But he knew the man would come, and he tried to control the choked rasp of his breath. And the man came, picking his lean way along the dike, stopping to listen, coming on, as Traver himself had often done, tracking crippled ducks for the plantation gunners. Against the bright, high autumn sky, the hunter’s silhouette was huge.
Traver slipped the rabbit club from his belt.
The man had stopped just short of where Traver had lain. He squinted up and down the ditch. Though his face remained set, his right hand, wandering on the trigger guard and breech, betrayed his awareness that Traver might have a weapon.
He came a little farther, stopped again. He seemed on the point of calling out, but did not, as if afraid of intruding a human voice into this primeval silence. He bent and scratched his leg. Then, for a moment, scanning the far side of the dike, he turned his head.
Traver, straightening, tried to hurl the club, but it would not leave his hand. He ducked down and out of sight again. He told himself that the range had been too great, that the chance of a miss, however small, could not be taken. But he also knew he was desperate enough to have thrown it anyway, in agony, simply to bring an end to this suspense.
There was something else.
The man descended from the dike, on the far side. Almost immediately, he sank up to his knees, for there came a heavy, sucking sound as his boots pulled back. The man seemed to know that here, in the black resilience of the marsh, his quarry had him at a disadvantage, for he climbed back up onto the dike and took out a cigarette. This time, Traver thought he must call out, but he did not. Instead, he made his way back toward the woods.
Traver cursed him, close to tears. The hunter had only to watch from the trees at the end of the dike. Until dark, Traver was trapped. The hunter would sit down on a log and eat his food, while Traver lay in the cold pool and starved. The whole world was eating, hunting and eating and hunting again, in an endless cycle, while he starved. From where he lay, he could see a marsh hawk quartering wet meadows, and an eagle’s patient silhouette in a dead tree. Swaying grass betrayed a prowling otter, and on a mud flat near him, two jack snipe probed for worms. Soon, in that stretch of ditch that he could see, a young alligator surfaced.
Thank de Lo’d it you what stole my coon. Thank de Lo’d dis pool too shaller fo’ you daddy.
The alligator floated, facing him. Only its snout and eyes disturbed the surface, like tips of a submerged branch.
What you waitin on, Ugly? You waitin on ol’ Traver, man, you got to get in line.
The insects had found Traver, and he smeared black mud on his face and hands. Northeast, a vulture circled slowly down on something else.
Whole world waitin on poor Traver. Whole world hangin round to eat on Traver.
And though he said this to cheer himself, and even chuckled, the sense of the surrounding marsh weighed down on him, the solitude. Inert, half-buried, Traver mourned a blues.
Black river bottom, black river bottom
Nigger sinkin down to dat black river bottom
Ain’t comin home no mo’
Ol’ Devil layin at dat black river bottom
Black river bottom, black river bottom,
Waitin fo’ de nigger man los’ on de river
Dat ain’t comin home no mo’ …
At dark, inch by inch, circuitously, Traver came ashore. He knew now he must track the man and kill him. His nerves would not tolerate another day of fear, and he took courage from the recklessness of desperation.
Again the cabin was lit up, but this time he smelled coffee. The man’s shadow moved against the window, and the light died out. The man would be sitting in the dark, rifle pointed at the open door.
The hunt ended early the next morning.
TRAVER BELLIED ACROSS a clearing and slid down a steep bank which joined the high ground to the marsh. His feet were planted in the water at the end of Red Gate Ditch, and on his right was a muddy, rooted grove of yaupon known as Hog Crawl. The hunter was some distance to the eastward.
Traver had a length of dry, dead branch. He broke it sharply on his knee. The snap rang through the morning trees, and a hog grunted from somewhere in the Crawl. Then Traver waited, peering through the grass. He had his knife out, and his rabbit club. Lifting one foot from the water of the ditch, he kicked a foothold in the bank. Below him, the scum of algae closed its broken surface, leaving no trace of where the foot had been.
The man was coming. Traver could feel him, somewhere behind the black trunks of the trees. The final sun, which filtered through the woods from the ocean side, formed a strange red haze in the shrouds of Spanish moss.
Out of this the man appeared. One moment there was nothing and the next he was there, startling the eye like a copperhead camouflaged in fallen leaves. He moved toward Traver until he reached the middle of the clearing, just out of Traver’s range, facing the Hog Crawl. There he stood stiff as a deer and listened.
Traver listened too, absorbing every detail of the scene through every sense. The trap was his, he was the hunter now, on his own ground. The cardinal song had never seemed so liquid, the foliage so green, the smell of earth so strong.
The white man shifted, stepping a little closer. The hog snuffled again, back in the yaupon. Traver could just make it out beneath the branches, a brown-and-yellow brindle sow, caked with dry mud. Now it came forward, curious. It would see Traver before it saw the white man, and it would give him away.
Traver swallowed. The sow came toward him, red-eyed. The white man, immobile, waited for it also. When the sow saw Traver, it stopped, then backed away a little, then grunted and trotted off.
Traver flicked his gaze back to the man.
He was suspicious. Slowly the rifle swung around until it was pointed a few feet to Traver’s left.
He gwine kill me now. Even do I pray, O Lo’d, he gwine kill me now.
Traver was backing down the bank as the man moved forward. Beneath the turned-down brim, the eyes were fixed on the spot to Traver’s left. Traver flipped the butt of broken branch in the same direction. When the white man whirled upon the sound, Traver reared and hurled his club. He did not miss. It struck just as the shot went off.
Traver had rolled aside instinctively, but this same instinct drove him to his feet again and forward. The man lay still beside the rifle. The hand that had been groping for it fell back as Traver sprang. He pressed his knife blade to the white, unsunburned patch of throat beneath the grizzled chin.
Kill him. Kill him now.
But he did not. Gasping, he stared down at the face a foot from his. It was bleeding badly from the temple but was otherwise unchanged. Pinning the man’s arms with his knees, he pushed the eyelids open with his free hand. The eyes regarded him, unblinking, like the eyes of a wounded hawk.
“Wa’nt quite slick enough fo’ Traver, was you!” Traver panted. He roared hysterically in his relief, his laughter booming in the quiet grove. “You fall fo’ de oldes’ trick dey is, dass how smart you is, white folks!” He roared again into the silence. “Ol’ Traver toss de branch, ol’ white boy fooled, ol’ white boy cotch it in de haid! I mean! De oldes’ trick dey is!”
Traver glared down at him, triumphant. The man lay silent.
Traver ran the knife blade back and forth across the throat, leaving a thin red line. He forced his anger, disturbed by how swiftly his relief replaced it.
“You de one dat’s scairt now, ain’t you? Try to kill dis nigger what never done you harm! You doan know who you foolin with, white trash, you foolin with a man what’s mule and gator all wrap into one! And he gone kill you, what you think ’bout dat?”
The man watched him.
“Ain’t you nothing to say fore I kills you? You gone pray? Or is I done killed you already?” Uneasy astride the body of the white man, Traver rose to a squat and pricked him with his knife tip. “Doan you play possum with me, now! You ain’t foolin me no mo’, I gone kill you, man, you heah me?”
For the first time, Traver heard his own voice in the silence, and it startled him. He glanced around. The sun was bright red over the live oak trees, but quiet hung across the marsh like mist. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the white man with suspicion, but the other did not stir.
He dead, Traver thought, alarmed. I done killed him dead.
Avoiding the unblinking eyes, he picked up the rifle and stared at it, then he laid it like a burial fetish back into the grass. Now he stepped back, knife in hand, and prodded the body with his toe.
“Git up, now!” he cried, startling himself again. “You ain’t bad hurt, Cap’n, you just kinda dizzy, dass all. Us’ns is got to do some talkin, heah me now?”
But the body was still. A trail of saliva dribbled from the narrow mouth, and a fly lit on the grass near the bloody temple. Traver bent and crossed the arms upon the narrow chest.
“You fall fo’ de oldes’ trick in de world,” Traver mourned, and shook his head. “Dass what you done.” Badly frightened, he talked to comfort himself, glancing furtively around the clearing.
He started to back away, then bolted.
The man rolled over and up onto his knees, the rifle snatched toward his shoulder. He sighted without haste and fired. Then he reached for his hat and put it on, and turned the brim down all around.
Then he got up.
Traver was a powerful man and did not fall. He could still hear the echo and the clamor in the marsh, and he could not accept what was happening to him. He had never really believed it possible, and he did not believe it now. He dropped the knife and staggered, frowning, as the man walked toward him. The second bullet knocked him over backwards, down the bank, and when he came to rest, his head lay under water.
His instinct told him to wriggle a little further, to crawl away into the reeds. He could not move. He died.
1957