Sweet Song (8 page)

Rest was limited to moments of heavy breathing, bent over, with hands on knees and back bowed by the weight of exhaustion.

Leon’s feet were cut and bruised. His knees weak. His mouth frothed and felt thick with saliva.

Late in the afternoon, less than a mile from the river, Big Leon sat down.

“What are you doing?” Leon burst out between breaths.

“Restin’.”

“The dogs. We’re almost there.”

“ Cain’t leave,” Big Leon said.

Leon understood. It was his wrong the men were chasing down, not his father’s. Yet he knew that Big Leon would be beaten and his responsibilities reduced. All for helping his son.

Leon kneeled next to his father. He bent over and hugged the big man across his broad shoulders. He smelled Big Leon’s sweet breath and felt its heat on his cheek. “I love you, Pa.”

“I’ll slow ‘em down. I’ll give up. You have-ta crawl to the river. Be sure not to shake the bushes as you goes.”

“What will they do?”

“Nothin’ much,” Big Leon said while he stood up. “Now go.”

With that, Big Leon ran from the underbrush and into the muck as though the river lay fifty feet from them in the opposite direction. He ran with his hands waving in the air as though trying to frighten away a mountain lion. But he had something in his hand that Leon had not noticed before. The sun glinted off the metal.

Leon stood in silence. From somewhere he couldn’t see, he heard a shot, then two. His father fell. Leon crawled out to him.

Before Leon reached his father, the setting sun broke below distant clouds, producing a flash of color over the area.

Big Leon’s eyes were open when Leon reached his side. They stared up at him.

Leon waited for the sound of the dogs to break from the hollow confinement of the lowland trees and underbrush, and into the broad expanse of clearing.

Leon wiped mud from his hands.

He reached over and closed his father’s eyes, then stroked his bloody face one last time. The sound of pursuers increased as they stepped into the clearing.

Leon heard a familiar voice call the dogs back. “Slow down,” the voice told the men. “Easy does it from here.”

Leon held onto the burlap sack Big Leon had handed him, and scuttled across the ground on all fours, careful not to make the bushes quake. His hand landed on the revolver that Big Leon had waved around. He brought the gun around and shot repeatedly through the tall weeds in the direction of the voices. He didn’t wait another second. He crawled as fast as he could toward the river. There were two things that he would never know: Did his father run into the line of fire on purpose? Did Fred Carpenter slow down his pursuit to give Leon time to get away?

A
fter shoving a felled tree into the river, Leon spent the most frightening hours he had ever known, death-gripped to the floating tree. He could not swim, and before long the tree floated mid-river with no way for Leon to get to shore. He had dropped the gun into the sack, which he held perched atop the root system he gripped, shaking more from fear than the cool water.

A bare branch weighted the trunk and kept it from rolling completely over. The roots created hand grips near the thickest part helping Leon keep his shoulders and head out of the water. He could not see into the cloud-filled night. His nose, so close to the tree, smelled dirt, rotting wood, and the clean scent of river water. His arms ached, but when he tried to swing his legs up and onto the tree, it rolled in the water. Once his head entered the water. After that, he tried not to move at all. When the river currents turned the tree, Leon whispered a cry into the darkness. He feared for his life and mourned his father’s death alternately. To this point, his life had been spared. As though angels were watching over him, he had escaped the harsh beatings some of the others got, he had been let loose of his cage of ignorance, and now had his life and freedom provided. But at what cost? The life of one father and the humility of the other? And now, was he to drown in the river?

Hours turned seamlessly and silently. Summer nights are the shortest of the year, yet to Leon, an eternity of darkness plodded by. He imagined that he traveled through Hell to pay for his sins and, as the Bible says, the sins of his fathers. If he were protected by angels he would be redeemed by the light at the end of his journey.

As he drifted, subtle sounds of the river became more acute. He heard the difference between lapping and flowing, indicating when the edges of the river slipped onto a stony beach rather than an embankment. When the river narrowed, current flow increased and the whooshing became louder. As the river widened again, a soft and distant quiet fell over him. At one point in the night, he heard insects chattering. He was close to shore, but wasn’t positive how close. He could feel the woods bearing down on him. For a moment, he let his legs stretch down, toes pointed, hoping to feel bottom. The tree shifted. He pulled up and gripped tightly, his muscles clenched around the roots, his fingers locked into place.

The hell he lived broke open, a crack in the sky, a haze over the water. Leon’s legs felt numb when he moved them. He shivered. His teeth chattered. He turned his head. The opposite shore lay closer than he had thought. His ears had betrayed him. Still, the distance was great.
The river would claim him before he could struggle his way over.

Ahead of him the river narrowed and turned. Leon knew from tossing twigs into the creek that the log would work its way into the faster, deeper section of river. They were already floating into the current.

There could be felled trees there too, and an embankment, which would make it difficult for him to climb to shore. The trough made from the stronger current could pull him under. Yet, the tree he held to would most likely slam into the bank.

He had few choices. The water pitched him and the log. It rolled and turned, unstable in the rough current. The tree turned to meet the water’s flow pattern. He held to the wrong side of the trunk. The opposite side would slam into the bank and he couldn’t reach over the log far enough to secure a grip on any hanging branches. His heart pounded. He took a deep breath and plunged into the water, banging his head on the underside of the log. Seconds later he
emerged on the opposite side. The current shoved against him like a childhood bully. He reached for his burlap sack and stretched as far out of the water as possible. He shifted his body near the bend between the tree roots and its trunk hoping to protect his head from getting smashed. He got ready for action.

The current quickened. Leon threw his burlap sack over his head toward shore. He lost his grip. The roots rolled. Underbrush hung over the embankment into the river. If he gripped the wrong bush, it would tear loose. He would plunge into the undercurrent and be gone.

He waited. Surveyed. Could he choose fast enough? He reached out, grasped, and held tight. Held on for life.

With one fist full of grass and dirt, and the other gripped to a thin pine branch, Leon let the log scrape past him. The roots poked his face and chest before the tree twisted from the bank and slid downstream. The grass in his one fist gave way, but the pine branch held tight.

Leon thanked the river for giving him up. He clamored, hand-over-hand, up the branch and crawled into the woods, away from the river noise. Away from its smell.

Under a grove of pines, Leon sat upright and rubbed his legs and feet until they tingled with new life. He shivered in the shade of the trees. After a moment, he lay back flat against the soft needles and listened to the whisper of wind. He let the sound of the river fall into the background, let it disappear into the recesses of his mind, a memory no longer worth his focus. He slept until his shivering body woke him.

Leon sat up and closed his arms around his shoulders. His skin had dried, but his clothes remained damp, drawing in the cold from the shade. The air felt balmy. He stood for the first time since shoving the tree into the river the night before. He stamped the ground trying out his legs, then bent down and stepped out from under the hanging branches. As he moved his body warmed.

As much as he wanted nothing to do with the river for a while, Leon headed straight for it. When he broke into the sun, the warmth helped to lighten his step. He walked upriver, searching for and
finding his sack resting in the thick branches of a small mulberry bush, sun-struck with golden light.

He retrieved the sack and sat down a short distance from the riverbank. He untied the knot at the top and poured the contents onto his lap. There was bread and jerky and the book he kept under his cot. A knife glistened in the sun, as did the gun Big Leon had been carrying. And there was one other item. A hat. The hat he had spit into. The hat he had claimed. It was now his.

Leon placed the damp hat onto his head. He cradled the wrinkled pages of the book in his arms and cried. After a while he pulled the hat off. He straightened the brim and brushed loose shreds of burlap from its surface, then placed it on his head once again. He took a deep breath, stuffed all but a chunk of bread back into the drying sack, and stood. The sun had nearly finished its job of drying his clothes. He bit into the bread and walked east.

Wooded areas along the river came and went as the ground pitched slightly along it. The river was his road and his life for now. There were fish if he could find a way to catch them. There was water to drink. Even so, he kept his distance, the constant sound of its flowing always in the background. He kept his distance, too, from the wagon paths that followed the river.

That night, the sky cleared to partly cloudy. Leon knew how to make a fire having done so in the coldest mornings in the shack. He cleared a spot, collected dried grass from the river’s edge and dried twigs from the ground. He rubbed a sharp stick between his hands, causing enough friction to light the dried grass. By the time the sky blackened and the moon rose, he had a small fire, but no food to cook.

He reached into his sack and pulled out one of the last two pieces of jerky. He sat cross-legged before the fire enjoying its peaceful crackling. The moon peeked from between clouds, a crescent shaped messenger of God.

Leon sighed. He felt alone. His mind wandered. He thought of Martha and smiled. He thought of Hillary and his groin shifted. He laughed out loud, the echo coming back to him from inside the woods, a quieter version of his own laugh. Leon felt lucky to be alive, and that gave him something to build upon.

After eating, his stomach still not satisfied, Leon piled some thicker pieces of wood onto his fire, curled next to its heat, and waited for sleep to come for the second time that day. He woke once in the chilly night, crying out to Big Leon, then slept until the morning sun woke him.

He ate the last of his bread and jerky, rocked slowly to a song he had heard once, and waited for his body to warm before he stepped into the new day.

At the edge of the woods, fog obscured both the tops of the trees and the ground. The middle sections were blurred. River fog slipped into the field but burned off quickly in the hot sun.

Leon headed to the river for a drink. He splashed his face with water and rubbed the cool liquid into the back of his neck before heading downstream. He stayed close to the river hoping to find calm areas where he could catch a fish to eat for supper. But after high noon passed, Leon felt too weak to plow through the underbrush along the river. He had yet to find a place where he could walk into the water, a place where fish might rest. The ker-plop of a trout or pike breaking the surface to swallow a bug was the only thing that gave him hope.

Late in the day, after pulling away from the riverbank overrun with underbrush, Leon stumbled by a stand of blackberry bushes that stretched thirty feet along the river’s edge. He ran to the area chasing several deer into the woods. They stopped and Leon pulled the pistol out, already tasting meat. He pulled the trigger and it clicked. No bullets. He picked berries and shoved them into his mouth as quickly as he could. Most were fat with juice and stained his fingers, lips, and chin. He ate until he felt full. He circled the area where he thought the deer had gone, unsure of what he might do if he found them. By early evening, Leon, thinking only of his hunger and a juicy breakfast, decided he could spend the night near the blackberry bushes.

He gathered wood and started a fire once again. Before sitting next to the fire he picked a shirt-full of berries and laid them next to him, plunking several into his mouth from time to time, humming a blackberry song. “Juicy and sweet, somethin’ to eat,/ makin’ my belly full.”

By nightfall, his stomach ached. He couldn’t sleep. He marched to the riverbank where he had a miserable case of diarrhea. He moaned in pain, stumbled back to his fire and laid flat on the ground next to the flames. He arose twice more that night making two more trips to the river’s edge. By morning he felt empty and exhausted. The skin around his anus had blistered. He hobbled uncomfortably to the river where he cleaned up, then waited to dry. The sting reminded him of the blackberries. He was hungrier now than he had been the day before.

He walked slower. The sun beat hotter. He took the blackberries with him, but ate them more sparingly until he fell to another bout of diarrhea, at which time he dumped the remainder of the berries onto the ground. He longed for a piece of meat.