Who you think dat could be?” Poudlum asked as he squinted his eyes down the road toward the approaching dust cloud.
“I don’t know, it could be anybody.”
“Might be yo’ Uncle Curvin. He said he might come back and check on us.”
We stood still in the road watching as the cloud of dust increased in size.
“What we gon do, jus’ stand here in de road and wait to see who it is?”
“No,” I told Poudlum. “I think we better get out of sight in case it’s somebody we don’t want to talk to.”
“Who in de world would we not be wantin’ to talk to?”
“It could be the sheriff, and I sure don’t want to talk to him.”
“How come?”
“I would just feel better if I could talk to Uncle Curvin before I talked to him, wouldn’t you?”
“Uh-huh, I think I would now dat you mentions it. We need a grown person we trust to be with us ’fore we tell what happened to us.”
Poudlum and I had minds that followed the same logic to reach a conclusion, that flowed in the same direction like creeks and rivers to reach the sea.
“That’s exactly what I think, Poudlum. Let’s move!”
The dust cloud grew larger and the approaching vehicle was just moments from rounding the bend, which would put us and the bridge in clear view of whoever occupied it.
“Come on!” I encouraged Poudlum as we grabbed our sacks and dived over the lip of the bank leading back down to the creek.
We slid, tumbled, and crawled until we were back to the curtain of ropes that hung down from the side of the bridge.
“I don’t want to go back under dat bridge,” Poudlum said, breathing hard.
“We got to,” I told him as I pulled him along, back into the dimness under the Iron Bridge, and sat there huddled on the creek bank as the vehicle above us began to rumble across it.
“Couldn’t be Mister Curvin ’cause he would’ve turned off the road fo’ he got to the bridge.”
“Yeah, but whoever it is has crossed the bridge now and we won’t have to—”
I stopped in mid-sentence when we heard the tires of the vehicle grind to a stop on the gravel just after it had crossed the bridge.
“Dey stopped!” Poudlum whispered as his eyes grew to the size of those of a startled doe.
“Yeah, I heard! Be quiet!”
“Why you reckon de did dat?” His voice hissed across the water.
“I don’t know! Hush!”
Someone from up above was saying something. “Back up, I think I saw something on that bridge,” a gruff voice said.
The boards of the bridge creaked again as the vehicle backed onto the center of the bridge and came to a halt. The engine went dead and a moment later the silence was broken by the sound of two car doors slamming, one after the other.
“Look at this,” the same voice said from up on the bridge.
Poudlum and I looked at each other and nodded, because we both recognized the voice of Sheriff Crowe. We had both dealt with him before. Back in the summer he had hounded Poudlum and his family when he was looking for an escaped black convict. I supposed he had done that because they were the only black folks who lived around Center Point.
The escaped convict had worked and lived at the sawmill before it was dismantled and taken away. His name was Jake.
Jake had been a real friend to both of us, a gentle sage whose only crime had been stealing food and taking it to poor, starving folks, kind of like Robin Hood.
Between him, Poudlum and me, we had exposed a bootlegger and made off with his ill-gotten gains, which we had used to help our families and to get Jake across the Tombigbee and gone for good.
Now, while we gazed upward and strained our ears, we heard the dreaded voice of the sheriff say to his deputy. “Look at this, here’s two hunks of knotted rope just laying here on the bridge. Where do you suppose they come from?”
“Could have fell off someone’s truck,” the deputy answered.
“I don’t think so. They look freshly used too. See how the ends are all frazzled, like somebody sawed them in two or something.”
“You want me to have a look around?” the deputy asked.
Poudlum whispered very softly, “Should have tossed dem knotted ropes in de creek.”
I nodded in agreement just before the sheriff answered the deputy’s question.
“We probably ought to look around a little. Maybe down there underneath the bridge. Why don’t you climb on down there and see what you can see?”
“You want me to climb down there and look under this bridge?” the deputy asked in an incredulous tone.
“That’s what I said,” the sheriff answered.
“But it’s real snaky down there, and besides, I got me on a clean uniform.”
“Do like you told, or you won’t be wearing a uniform at all,” the sheriff threatened. “I’ll look off the other side of the bridge and see if I see anything down the creek.”
Poudlum gripped my arm hard and said with a stammered whisper, “We—we—we trapped down under here!”
The sounds of the deputy gingerly picking his way down the bank drifted towards us, and I knew I had to make a decision, so I did.
I leaned close to Poudlum’s ear and whispered, “It’s all right, I know a hiding place.”
My brother Fred had discovered it and shown it to me. And at the time he had made me promise not to ever reveal it to another living soul. But I knew he would release me from that promise if he knew the situation Poudlum and I were in.
When the old bridge had been replaced with the new Iron Bridge, some of the beams of the old bridge had tumbled halfway down the bank under the bridge and had been abandoned there. The beams were solid heart-of-pine, almost as hard as stone and would probably turn into petrified wood eventually.
The unique thing was that they had fallen together to form a bunker, which was hidden when you climbed up into it. No weeds or anything grew inside because the abutment of the new bridge blocked the sunlight from reaching it.
When we quietly scampered inside of it, Poudlum cast his eyes about and whispered, “Dis is some kind of neat place. It’s high up above de creek and under the edge of de bottom of de bridge where can’t nobody see you.”
“Shhh,” I cautioned as the deputy came crashing underneath the bridge.
“See anything?” the sheriff called down from above.
“I see the creek,” he sarcastically yelled back.
From above him Poudlum and I eased our heads up over the edge of the top beam and peeked down from our hiding place and watched as he poked around. We watched as he cupped his hand to his mouth and yelled up to the sheriff, “I don’t see nothing down here, sheriff.”
“All right,” the sheriff answered. “Come on back up.”
We sat still and quiet for awhile until we heard the car doors slam, the engine start and then the fading sound of the car as it headed on up the road.
“Dey gone!” Poudlum said as he exhaled a long breath.
“Yeah, that was a close one.”
“I likes dis place,” Poudlum said as he explored around inside the secret hiding place.
“I thought you didn’t like being under the bridge.”
“I don’t, but I do like to be in a safe place when danger is around, ’specially if it’s a neat place like dis. We could camp out in here.”
“Well, you can’t never tell anybody about it because it’s supposed to be a secret.”
“Who found it?”
“Fred found it and made me cross my heart and promise not to ever show it to anybody.”
“He knows I wouldn’t tell,” Poudlum said. “Besides, I figure he would’ve done de same thing if he had been in yo’ shoes.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Let’s get back up on the road.”
When we were back up on Center Point Road, we were once again undecided about what to do.
“We could still just go back and finish our fishing weekend like we never had no visitors,” Poudlum said.
“We can’t fish any more. They took our knives, remember?”
“Dat’s right, we couldn’t clean no fish even if we caught some.”
“We could just camp out and not fish, but those greedy bank robbers only left us enough to eat for tonight. We would be starving in the morning.”
“All right,” Poudlum agreed. “Let’s head toward home. We can be there before dinner time.”
The only sound besides our footsteps in the dirt was the rustling of the last few leaves as they fell from the oaks, hickories, and other hardwood trees along the road. An occasional green area appeared where there was a patch of pines or cedar trees.
“What y’all been studying in school?” Poudlum asked.
“We been learning all kinds of stuff. Math, science, history, literature, and stuff like that.”
“Us too. What yo’ favorite one is?”
“I don’t really like any of them, but if I had to pick one out I guess it would have to be the literature. It’s fun to read some of the stuff. How about y’all?”
“We doing about de same stuff,” Poudlum said. “But, you know, it seems like to me it would make a lot mo sense if we all did it in the same school ’stead of separate ones, don’t you think?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer Poudlum, so I just agreed with him and kept on walking. But I resolved myself to ponder the real answer to his question.
The Center Point Road Baptist Church came into view as we rounded the curve.
“Dere’s yo’ church up ahead,” Poudlum.
“Yeah, that’s where I usually spend every Sunday morning, no matter what.”
“Any of yo’ family buried in that graveyard next to it?”
There was a large cemetery on the left side of the church. “Yeah, I got a lot of uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents buried in it. You know how many dead people are buried in it?”
“How many?”
“All of ’em,” I told him.
We laughed together and had almost passed the cemetery when I had a thought. “Poudlum, my granddaddy wrote a poem about dying and it’s on his tombstone. You want to let’s go read it?”
“Uh-huh. Long as it’s daylight. I’ll go in a cemetery, but you ain’t gonna catch me in one after dark.”
“Come on then,” I told him. “You’ll like it.”
There was a fence around the graveyard, but the gate was never locked. Folks liked to bring in flowers on special occasions and put them on tombstones.
On this occasion, someone had left a bundle of wild purple violets on my granddaddy’s grave.
We stood in front of his big tombstone and Poudlum read the poem out loud:
Where has my youth flown to
On the relentless wings of time
It left me abruptly and without warning
Taking with it the sweet taste of wine
The wind-filled sails seemed so slow
Yet they raced across the decades
Until the wonderful ports of call
All became memories within my gaze
Only yesterday I was a young soldier
Fearing no evil or the shadow of death
And the winds of war left me still alive
But the winds of time have given me no rest
Though the blustery winds have blown me far
From the endless journey I once imagined
At last they took me to a valley of green and gold
Where I shall begin again and never grow old
“Dat’s a beautiful poem,” Poudlum said. “Was he yo’ momma’s daddy or yo’ daddy’s daddy?”
“My momma’s. We called him Pa Will. His name was William Murphy. His daddy was Jim Murphy and Jim’s daddy was Tim Murphy, who came over here all the way from Ireland in 1821.”
“Good Lawd,” Poudlum exclaimed. “Dat was way over a hundred years ago. I ’spect my great-great-granddaddy was still chained up then.”
“What you mean, chained up?”
“All us colored folks be slaves back den.”
“Yeah, I forgot about that. But y’all ain’t slaves no more, Poudlum.”
“It’s true don’t nobody own us no more, but you and me, we still can’t do a lot of things together.”
As far as I was concerned, I would have loved to have shared a school classroom with Poudlum. Even though we were different, we were a lot alike. We were both the youngest child in our respective families and we would both be twelve years old this month. My birthday was the seventeenth and his was the sixteenth, making him one day older than me, a fact about which he never ceased to remind me.
I had been called a “nigger lover” because of our friendship, but that didn’t bother me.
As we were closing the gate to the cemetery, Uncle Curvin’s old truck came skidding up to a halt next to the fence.
He leaned out the window and said, “I was on my way to the Cypress Hole when I seen you boys up here. Looks like y’all done cut your fishing trip short.”
While we were loading our sacks on the back of the truck, Poudlum leaned over and whispered, “We got to be careful ’bout what we say to anybody.”
“What you mean?” I asked.
“We don’t want to mention dat riddle Frank told us, ’cause I think dem bank robbers left all dat money somewhere back yonder in de Satilfa Creek.”