VIII
FISHHEAD
It goes past the powers of my pen to try to describe Reelfoot Lake foryou so that you, reading this, will get the picture of it in your mindas I have it in mine. For Reelfoot Lake is like no other lake that Iknow anything about. It is an afterthought of Creation.
The rest of this continent was made and had dried in the sun forthousands of years--for millions of years for all I know--beforeReelfoot came to be. It's the newest big thing in nature on thishemisphere probably, for it was formed by the great earthquake of 1811,just a little more than a hundred years ago. That earthquake of 1811surely altered the face of the earth on the then far frontier of thiscountry. It changed the course of rivers, it converted hills into whatare now the sunk lands of three states, and it turned the solid groundto jelly and made it roll in waves like the sea. And in the midst ofthe retching of the land and the vomiting of the waters it depressed tovarying depths a section of the earth crust sixty miles long, taking itdown--trees, hills, hollows and all; and a crack broke through to theMississippi River so that for three days the river ran up stream,filling the hole.
The result was the largest lake south of the Ohio, lying mostly inTennessee, but extending up across what is now the Kentucky line, andtaking its name from a fancied resemblance in its outline to the splay,reeled foot of a cornfield negro. Niggerwool Swamp, not so far away, mayhave got its name from the same man who christened Reelfoot; at least soit sounds.
Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery. In places it isbottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress trees that wentdown when the earth sank still stand upright, so that if the sun shinesfrom the right quarter and the water is less muddy than common, a manpeering face downward into its depths sees, or thinks he sees, downbelow him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers,all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the greenlake slime. In still other places the lake is shallow for longstretches, no deeper than breast deep to a man, but dangerous because ofthe weed growths and the sunken drifts which entangle a swimmer's limbs.Its banks are mainly mud, its waters are muddied too, being a richcoffee color in the spring and a copperish yellow in the summer, and thetrees along its shore are mud colored clear up to their lower limbsafter the spring floods, when the dried sediment covers their trunkswith a thick, scrofulous-looking coat.
There are stretches of unbroken woodland around it and slashes where thecypress knees rise countlessly like headstones and footstones for thedead snags that rot in the soft ooze. There are deadenings with thelowland corn growing high and rank below and the bleached,fire-blackened girdled trees rising above, barren of leaf and limb.There are long, dismal flats where in the spring the clotted frog-spawnclings like patches of white mucus among the weed stalks and at nightthe turtles crawl out to lay clutches of perfectly round, white eggswith tough, rubbery shells in the sand. There are bayous leading off tonowhere and sloughs that wind aimlessly, like great, blind worms, tofinally join the big river that rolls its semi-liquid torrents a fewmiles to the westward.
So Reelfoot lies there, flat in the bottoms, freezing lightly in thewinter, steaming torridly in the summer, swollen in the spring when thewoods have turned a vivid green and the buffalo gnats by the million andthe billion fill the flooded hollows with their pestilential buzzing,and in the fall ringed about gloriously with all the colors which thefirst frost brings--gold of hickory, yellow-russet of sycamore, red ofdogwood and ash and purple-black of sweet-gum.
But the Reelfoot country has its uses. It is the best game and fishcountry, natural or artificial, that is left in the South today. Intheir appointed seasons the duck and the geese flock in, and evensemi-tropical birds, like the brown pelican and the Florida snake-bird,have been known to come there to nest. Pigs, gone back to wildness,range the ridges, each razor-backed drove captained by a gaunt, savage,slab-sided old boar. By night the bull frogs, inconceivably big andtremendously vocal, bellow under the banks.
It is a wonderful place for fish--bass and crappie and perch and thesnouted buffalo fish. How these edible sorts live to spawn and how theirspawn in turn live to spawn again is a marvel, seeing how many of thebig fish-eating cannibal fish there are in Reelfoot. Here, bigger thananywhere else, you find the garfish, all bones and appetite and hornyplates, with a snout like an alligator, the nearest link, naturalistssay, between the animal life of today and the animal life of theReptilian Period. The shovel-nose cat, really a deformed kind offreshwater sturgeon, with a great fan-shaped membranous plate juttingout from his nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet placeswith mighty splashing sounds, as though a horse had fallen into thewater. On every stranded log the huge snapping turtles lie on sunny daysin groups of four and six, baking their shells black in the sun, withtheir little snaky heads raised watchfully, ready to slip noiselesslyoff at the first sound of oars grating in the row-locks.
But the biggest of them all are the catfish. These are monstrouscreatures, these catfish of Reelfoot--scaleless, slick things, withcorpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins like javelins and long whiskersdangling from the sides of their cavernous heads. Six and seven feetlong they grow to be and to weigh two hundred pounds or more, and theyhave mouths wide enough to take in a man's foot or a man's fist andstrong enough to break any hook save the strongest and greedy enough toeat anything, living or dead or putrid, that the horny jaws can master.Oh, but they are wicked things, and they tell wicked tales of them downthere. They call them man-eaters and compare them, in certain of theirhabits, to sharks.
Fishhead was of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acornfits its cup. All his life he had lived on Reelfoot, always in the oneplace, at the mouth of a certain slough. He had been born there, of anegro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, andthe story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one ofthe big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideouslymarked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritableembodiment of nightmare. He had the body of a man--a short, stocky,sinewy body--but his face was as near to being the face of a great fishas any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect. Hisskull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have aforehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes weresmall and round with shallow, glazed, pale-yellow pupils, and they wereset wide apart in his head and they were unwinking and staring, like afish's eyes. His nose was no more than a pair of tiny slits in themiddle of the yellow mask. His mouth was the worst of all. It was theawful mouth of a catfish, lipless and almost inconceivably wide,stretching from side to side. Also when Fishhead became a man grown hislikeness to a fish increased, for the hair upon his face grew out intotwo tightly kinked, slender pendants that drooped down either side ofthe mouth like the beards of a fish.
If he had any other name than Fishhead, none excepting he knew it. AsFishhead he was known and as Fishhead he answered. Because he knew thewaters and the woods of Reelfoot better than any other man there, he wasvalued as a guide by the city men who came every year to hunt or fish;but there were few such jobs that Fishhead would take. Mainly he keptto himself, tending his corn patch, netting the lake, trapping a littleand in season pot hunting for the city markets. His neighbors,ague-bitten whites and malaria-proof negroes alike, left him to himself.Indeed for the most part they had a superstitious fear of him. So helived alone, with no kith nor kin, nor even a friend, shunning his kindand shunned by them.
His cabin stood just below the state line, where Mud Slough runs intothe lake. It was a shack of logs, the only human habitation for fourmiles up or down. Behind it the thick timber came shouldering right upto the edge of Fishhead's small truck patch, enclosing it in thick shadeexcept when the sun stood just overhead. He cooked his food in aprimitive fashion, outdoors, over a hole in the soggy earth or upon therusted red ruin of an old cook stove, and he drank the saffron water ofthe lake out of a dipper made of a gourd, faring and fending forhimself, a master hand at skiff and
net, competent with duck gun andfish spear, yet a creature of affliction and loneliness, part savage,almost amphibious, set apart from his fellows, silent and suspicious.
In front of his cabin jutted out a long fallen cottonwood trunk, lyinghalf in and half out of the water, its top side burnt by the sun andworn by the friction of Fishhead's bare feet until it showed countlesspatterns of tiny scrolled lines, its under side black and rotted andlapped at unceasingly by little waves like tiny licking tongues. Itsfarther end reached deep water. And it was a part of Fishhead, for nomatter how far his fishing and trapping might take him in the daytime,sunset would find him back there, his boat drawn up on the bank and heon the outer end of this log. From a distance men had seen him theremany times, sometimes squatted, motionless as the big turtles that wouldcrawl upon its dipping tip in his absence, sometimes erect and vigilantlike a creek crane, his misshapen yellow form outlined against theyellow sun, the yellow water, the yellow banks--all of them yellowtogether.
If the Reelfooters shunned Fishhead by day they feared him by night andavoided him as a plague, dreading even the chance of a casual meeting.For there were ugly stories about Fishhead--stories which all thenegroes and some of the whites believed. They said that a cry which hadbeen heard just before dusk and just after, skittering across thedarkened waters, was his calling cry to the big cats, and at his biddingthey came trooping in, and that in their company he swam in the lake onmoonlight nights, sporting with them, diving with them, even feedingwith them on what manner of unclean things they fed. The cry had beenheard many times, that much was certain, and it was certain also thatthe big fish were noticeably thick at the mouth of Fishhead's slough.No native Reelfooter, white or black, would willingly wet a leg or anarm there.
Here Fishhead had lived and here he was going to die. The Baxters weregoing to kill him, and this day in mid-summer was to be the time of thekilling. The two Baxters--Jake and Joel--were coming in their dugout todo it. This murder had been a long time in the making. The Baxters hadto brew their hate over a slow fire for months before it reached thepitch of action. They were poor whites, poor in everything--repute andworldly goods and standing--a pair of fever-ridden squatters who livedon whisky and tobacco when they could get it, and on fish and cornbreadwhen they couldn't.
The feud itself was of months' standing. Meeting Fishhead one day in thespring on the spindly scaffolding of the skiff landing at Walnut Log,and being themselves far overtaken in liquor and vainglorious with abogus alcoholic substitute for courage, the brothers had accused him,wantonly and without proof, of running their trot-line and stripping itof the hooked catch--an unforgivable sin among the water dwellers andthe shanty boaters of the South. Seeing that he bore this accusation insilence, only eyeing them steadfastly, they had been emboldened then toslap his face, whereupon he turned and gave them both the beating oftheir lives--bloodying their noses and bruising their lips with hardblows against their front teeth, and finally leaving them, mauled andprone, in the dirt. Moreover, in the onlookers a sense of theeverlasting fitness of things had triumphed over race prejudice andallowed them--two freeborn, sovereign whites--to be licked by a nigger.
Therefore, they were going to get the nigger. The whole thing had beenplanned out amply. They were going to kill him on his log at sundown.There would be no witnesses to see it, no retribution to follow afterit. The very ease of the undertaking made them forget even their inbornfear of the place of Fishhead's habitation.
For more than an hour now they had been coming from their shack across adeeply indented arm of the lake. Their dugout, fashioned by fire and adzand draw-knife from the bole of a gum tree, moved through the water asnoiselessly as a swimming mallard, leaving behind it a long, wavy trailon the stilled waters. Jake, the better oarsman sat flat in the stern ofthe round-bottomed craft, paddling with quick, splashless strokes. Joel,the better shot, was squatted forward. There was a heavy, rusted duckgun between his knees.
Though their spying upon the victim had made them certain sure he wouldnot be about the shore for hours, a doubled sense of caution led them tohug closely the weedy banks. They slid along the shore like shadows,moving so swiftly and in such silence that the watchful mud turtlesbarely turned their snaky heads as they passed. So, a full hour beforethe time, they came slipping around the mouth of the slough and made fora natural ambuscade which the mixed breed had left within a stone's jerkof his cabin to his own undoing.
Where the slough's flow joined deeper water a partly uprooted tree wasstretched, prone from shore, at the top still thick and green withleaves that drew nourishment from the earth in which the half-uncoveredroots yet held, and twined about with an exuberance of trumpet vines andwild fox-grapes. All about was a huddle of drift--last year'scornstalks, shreddy strips of bark, chunks of rotted weed, all theriffle and dunnage of a quiet eddy. Straight into this green clumpglided the dugout and swung, broadside on, against the protecting trunkof the tree, hidden from the inner side by the intervening curtains ofrank growth, just as the Baxters had intended it should be hidden, whendays before in their scouting they marked this masked place of waitingand included it, then and there, in the scope of their plans.
There had been no hitch or mishap. No one had been abroad in the lateafternoon to mark their movements--and in a little while Fishhead oughtto be due. Jake's woodman's eye followed the downward swing of the sunspeculatively. The shadows, thrown shoreward, lengthened and slitheredon the small ripples. The small noises of the day died out; the smallnoises of the coming night began to multiply. The green-bodied flieswent away and big mosquitoes, with speckled gray legs, came to take theplaces of the flies. The sleepy lake sucked at the mud banks with smallmouthing sounds as though it found the taste of the raw mud agreeable. Amonster crawfish, big as a chicken lobster, crawled out of the top ofhis dried mud chimney and perched himself there, an armored sentinel onthe watchtower. Bull bats began to flitter back and forth above the topsof the trees. A pudgy muskrat, swimming with head up, was moved to sidleoff briskly as he met a cotton-mouth moccasin snake, so fat and swollenwith summer poison that it looked almost like a legless lizard as itmoved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid s's.Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compactlittle swarm of midges hung, holding to a sort of kite-shaped formation.
A little more time passed and Fishhead came out of the woods at theback, walking swiftly, with a sack over his shoulder. For a few secondshis deformities showed in the clearing, then the black inside of thecabin swallowed him up. By now the sun was almost down. Only the red nubof it showed above the timber line across the lake, and the shadows layinland a long way. Out beyond, the big cats were stirring, and the greatsmacking sounds as their twisting bodies leaped clear and fell back inthe water came shoreward in a chorus.
But the two brothers in their green covert gave heed to nothing exceptthe one thing upon which their hearts were set and their nerves tensed.Joel gently shoved his gun-barrels across the log, cuddling the stock tohis shoulder and slipping two fingers caressingly back and forth uponthe triggers. Jake held the narrow dugout steady by a grip upon afox-grape tendril.
A little wait and then the finish came. Fishhead emerged from the cabindoor and came down the narrow footpath to the water and out upon thewater on his log. He was barefooted and bareheaded, his cotton shirtopen down the front to show his yellow neck and breast, his dungareetrousers held about his waist by a twisted tow string. His broad splayfeet, with the prehensile toes outspread, gripped the polished curve ofthe log as he moved along its swaying, dipping surface until he came toits outer end and stood there erect, his chest filling, his chinlessface lifted up and something of mastership and dominion in his poise.And then--his eye caught what another's eyes might have missed--theround, twin ends of the gun barrels, the fixed gleams of Joel's eyes,aimed at him through the green tracery.
In that swift passage of time, too swift almost to be measured byseconds, realization flashed all through him, and he threw his headstill higher a
nd opened wide his shapeless trap of a mouth, and outacross the lake he sent skittering and rolling his cry. And in his crywas the laugh of a loon, and the croaking bellow of a frog, and the bayof a hound, all the compounded night noises of the lake. And in it, too,was a farewell and a defiance and an appeal. The heavy roar of the duckgun came.
At twenty yards the double charge tore the throat out of him. He camedown, face forward, upon the log and clung there, his trunk twistingdistortedly, his legs twitching and kicking like the legs of a spearedfrog, his shoulders hunching and lifting spasmodically as the life ranout of him all in one swift coursing flow. His head canted up betweenthe heaving shoulders, his eyes looked full on the staring face of hismurderer, and then the blood came out of his mouth and Fishhead, indeath still as much fish as man, slid flopping, head first, off the endof the log and sank, face downward, slowly, his limbs all extended out.One after another a string of big bubbles came up to burst in the middleof a widening reddish stain on the coffee-colored water.
The brothers watched this, held by the horror of the thing they haddone, and the cranky dugout, tipped far over by the recoil of the gun,took water steadily across its gunwale; and now there was a suddenstroke from below upon its careening bottom and it went over and theywere in the lake. But shore was only twenty feet away, the trunk of theuprooted tree only five. Joel, still holding fast to his hot gun, madefor the log, gaining it with one stroke. He threw his free arm over itand clung there, treading water, as he shook his eyes free. Somethinggripped him--some great, sinewy, unseen thing gripped him fast by thethigh, crushing down on his flesh.
He uttered no cry, but his eyes popped out and his mouth set in a squareshape of agony, and his fingers gripped into the bark of the tree likegrapples. He was pulled down and down, by steady jerks, not rapidly butsteadily, so steadily, and as he went his fingernails tore four littlewhite strips in the tree bark. His mouth went under, next his poppingeyes, then his erect hair, and finally his clawing, clutching hand, andthat was the end of him.
Jake's fate was harder still, for he lived longer--long enough to seeJoel's finish. He saw it through the water that ran down his face, andwith a great surge of his whole body he literally flung himself acrossthe log and jerked his legs up high into the air to save them. He flunghimself too far, though, for his face and chest hit the water on the farside. And out of this water rose the head of a great fish, with thelake slime of years on its flat, black head, its whiskers bristling, itscorpsy eyes alight. Its horny jaws closed and clamped in the front ofJake's flannel shirt. His hand struck out wildly and was speared on apoisoned fin, and unlike Joel, he went from sight with a great yell anda whirling and a churning of the water that made the cornstalks circleon the edges of a small whirlpool.
But the whirlpool soon thinned away into widening rings of ripples andthe cornstalks quit circling and became still again, and only themultiplying night noises sounded about the mouth of the slough.
* * * * *
The bodies of all three came ashore on the same day near the same place.Except for the gaping gunshot wound where the neck met the chest,Fishhead's body was unmarked. But the bodies of the two Baxters were somarred and mauled that the Reelfooters buried them together on the bankwithout ever knowing which might be Jake's and which might be Joel's.