Jeff stood by his wife’s grave with tears forming in his eyes. Over and over, he read the inscription on the headstone’s smooth granite surface glistening in the October sun. “Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Ireland. February 1938 - 15 June 2011. Beloved Wife and Friend. Now with the Angels in Heaven.” Before she married Jeff, Lizzie’s last name was Hudson. She was a descendant of one of the revolutionary figures who settled the area and was now at rest among her ancestors in the Hudson Family Cemetery. Deeply depressed, Jeff welcomed the day his body would lay beside his wife. The sooner, the better as far as he was concerned. He felt that since the passing of Lizzie over a year ago his life was meaningless. Their life-long relationship wiped out in a careless moment by her caretaker. He was hard on himself for letting it happen, but he was more disturbed by the circumstances, and especially the “little bitch” responsible for her death. His deranged determination to avenge the death of his Lizzie was about to set into motion a series of events, that would send vibrations through the county.
Jeff weaved his way through the still of the cemetery’s graves to his green 1993 Ford pickup. He pulled onto the highway and drove west. Within 10 minutes he came to Snyder’s Crossroads and turned south on the road known as Low Country Highway. The highway got its name because it meandered along the eastern side of the Salkehatchie River. At this distance from the ocean, some 75 miles, the river was a series of low-lying thickets and small tributary streams that formed the headwaters of the larger river. Everyone around knew the river as the “Salketcher.” The name like many customs “hereabouts,” was passed down from the early settlers who carved out a living in and around the unforgiving swamp.
Jeff headed home about 10 miles south. He passed Scuffletown Road on the left and then the site of his old grammar school on the right. The school building had long since, been demolished, but it would take more than a wrecking ball to erase the good memories formed here. Jeff’s thoughts were dispatched to more pleasant times as he passed the site. In the first grade, he sat behind the innocent young girl with double pigtails. After their first day at school, Lizzie’s mother asked her how she liked school. She replied that she loved the teacher, but there was this boy, Jeff, who sat behind her and kept playing with her pigtails until the teacher scowled him. He must have replayed the event a million times in his mind. In their good times, he and his wife laughed hysterically as they told the story time after time.
After about 15 minutes, he passed Black Creek Run and then turned off to the west on a small side road leading to his house. The grass between the two ruts riffled beneath the vehicle as he slowly moved along the unmaintained road. About a mile beyond the house was the river where he kept his boat tied up to the base of an ancient cypress tree. Just to the south, the Saltketcher merged with the larger Combahee River before it flowed into the Atlantic. As Jeff pulled into the driveway, Jake, his red hound let out a horrendous bark signaling the return of his master.
Jake had a wide repertoire of barks. The dog’s personality dictated a different bark on almost any occasion. There was one for people he recognized, another for strangers, and yet another for small animals such as squirrels, ‘coons, and ‘possums that occasionally frequented the property. Jake was a great deer dog, and like all good deer dogs had three distinct sounds when on the trail. Each bark carried a distinctive message to the hunter. The first was a yap-yap about every 10 seconds, which echoed through the woods when the dog was searching for a deer trail. When he found a trail and followed it, the howl would turn into a more frequent yap-yap-yap, until the deer was finally killed, whereupon his barking would become frantic. Over the years, Jeff had become accustomed to the different sounds and understood Jake’s barks better than he did most people talking.
As Jeff got out of his pickup, Jake approached him with a friendly sniff to his leg and a rapidly wagging tail. The pickup’s cooling engine gave off a smell of burnt oil as Jeff and Jake walked past it to climb the five open wooden steps to the front porch. As wind shuffled through the low hanging leaves on the gigantic live oak trees shading the porch, Jeff sat down on the familiar cowhide seat of his rocker. Jake reclined near him on a well-worn croaker sack, with his head between his outstretched paws, he soon closed his eyes. It wasn’t long before Jeff’s chin nodded to his chest: A perfect Norman Rockwell portrait of a man and his dog in dreamland. A placid scene that could that could probably be seen any place outside the big cities of the south.