East is East

Jeff Jr. was sitting cross-legged on one of the flotation cushions. He leaned forward, that alert look he got when he was practicing or doing his homework settling into his eyes and the incipient furrows of his brow. “It’s because the peat rises in mats and trees grow on them and stuff and then when you try to walk on it you fall through—like Mom yesterday. It was so funny. It was like”—his tone had begun in the adenoidal reaches of exasperation, but now he was enjoying himself, riding the pleasure of his own authority—“like all these little trees were attacking her or something.”

Jeff brought him back. “Right, Jeffie: and what is peat?”

“Um, it’s like coal, right?”

Jeff wasn’t too sure himself, though he’d devoured every guidebook available on the Okefenokee, but then the lesson had gone far enough anyway and the story was waiting. “Right,” he said. “It’s important to know because of what happened to Billy Bowlegs after one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of this region. Anyway, this was about in 1820, I think, and Billy Bowlegs was chased into the swamp with about thirty braves after raiding a settler’s cabin. He hated the whites with a passion, even though he wasn’t a fullblooded Indian—legend had it that his father was a white man, a criminal who escaped from a lynching party and got himself lost in the swamp …”

It was then that the first wind-whipped spatters of rain began to tap at the groundcloth and Jeff paused to mentally congratulate himself for having thought to secure the bottom too. There was a flash of lightning followed by a deep peal of thunder and the whole family looked round them, surprised to see that dusk had crept up on them. Jeff wanted a cigarette, but he’d given up smoking—it was unhealthy, and both he and Julie agreed that it set a bad example for Jeff Jr.—so he took out a pack of sugarless gum and offered it round instead.

“That last one was close,” Julie said, the glow of the fire playing off her smooth dependable features. She looked good, tough, a pioneer woman who’d fight off the Indians with one hand and burp babies with the other. “Good thing you thought to hang the groundcloth. You think I should put up the tent—I mean with this roof and all?”

He was wise, fatherly, firm. “No,” he said, “we’ll be all right.” “What about the story, Dad?”

“Yeah. Well. It was a stormy night like this one and Billy Bowlegs and his men smeared their faces with mud on Billy’s Island and then poled their dugouts to the edge of the swamp. There was a white family there, settlers, who’d just come from, from—from New York—”

“Aw, come on, Dad—you’re making it up.”

“No, no: I read it. Really. Anyway, there were three of them, husband, wife and son—a boy about your age, Jeffie—and they had a dog and some cattle, a mule, I think. Farmers. They’d drained a couple of acres and were trying to grow cotton and tobacco in the rich soil underneath. They’d been there a couple of months, I think it was—they hadn’t even been able to get a house up. All they had was a lean-to, on a platform like this, a roof, but the sides were open—”

“Dad.”

Jeff ignored the interruption. He had him now, he knew it. He gave Julie a furtive wink. “Billy Bowlegs told his men to take the woman and leave the men for dead. But the rain was coming down so hard one of the Indians slipped and fell and the musket went off, just as the rest of them were coming out of the bushes with a whoop. ’Run!’ the father shouted, and all of a sudden there were tomahawks and arrows everywhere, but the son and mother took off and the father fired his gun to give them a headstart and then he ran too. But you know what?”

Jeff Jr. was leaning so far forward he had to prop himself up on his elbows. “What?” he said in a kind of gasp.

“They ran right out onto a peat island that had torn loose in the storm and suddenly it was like they were running in a dream, going as fast as they could and getting nowhere, and there was Billy Bowlegs, his face streaked with mud. the tomahawk raised over his head—”

At that moment a gust of wind tore loose the binding of the groundcloth and it collapsed, dousing them with a wild oceanic spray. Suddenly it was pouring, whipping in through the opening and gushing through the colander of the roof. In the confusion, Jeff sprang to his feet and shot a glance out back of the platform, while Julie and Jeff Jr. howled and scrambled for their rain slickers, and what he saw there froze him in place. A figure had materialized from the gloom, and it wasn’t the acrobatic alligator and it wasn’t the bear they’d missed either. Bowlegged, tattered, smeared with mud and filth, it was the figure of Billy Bowlegs himself.