The Year the Lights Came On (18 page)

“Couldn’t we wait in the car?” I begged.

“No,” Mother answered. “You can wait up at the house, but it’s best that we handle this, and we need to be goin’ on over. If Freeman’s daddy gets there before the sheriff, there may be some real trouble. Your daddy can stop all that.”

*

We waited for more than an hour before we saw our Mother’s 1938 Ford appear, sliding cautiously along the slippery red road, and as she stopped beneath the pecan tree in the front yard, we saw that she was alone.

“What happened?” I asked eagerly. “Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s with Sheriff Brownlee,” she said. “Freeman escaped over on Rakestraw Bridge Road.”

“He…?” Wesley exclaimed.

“Escaped,” Mother repeated. “We were followin’ them over to Edenville to see about postin’ a bond, and when Sheriff Brownlee slowed down to cross Rakestraw Bridge, Freeman jumped out and ran off in the swamp.”

“He got away?” I asked, amazed at Freeman’s boldness.

“I don’t know,” Mother said, slipping wearily into a chair. “When I left, Sheriff Brownlee and your daddy and Freeman’s daddy were after him.”

Wesley walked to the window and looked out in the direction of Black Pool Swamp. “They’ll never catch Freeman,” he predicted. “Freeman knows that swamp better’n all of them put together. He won’t come out until he wants to.”

“I don’t know, son,” Mother said. “Sheriff Brownlee was shootin’ his pistol off up in the air and yelling that he’d get the bloodhounds if Freeman didn’t come back, and you have to remember Freeman’s daddy knows that swamp pretty good, too.”

“Not like Freeman,” insisted Wesley.

“But the bloodhounds, they’d find him,” I said.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Wesley whispered. “Maybe not.”

*

They did not find Freeman that afternoon. At first darkness, my father told us, Sheriff Brownlee stood at the mouth of a logging road leading into Black Pool Swamp and yelled, “Hear me, boy. I’m comin’ back. I’m comin’ back, boy. And I’m takin’ you outa here. No man alive, white or black, ever got away from me, boy. You better give up.” Freeman had not answered Sheriff Brownlee’s threats and Brownlee had lost his temper. He emptied his pistol into the ground and screamed that he would return with a truck loaded with deputies carrying shotguns, and he would get bloodhounds trained to chew the legs off escaped criminals.

My father was tired and wet, but he was irritated that Sheriff Brownlee had threatened Freeman. “Man or boy, it don’t matter. All that’ll do is scare him more, make it harder to get him out.”

“What would Morgan do?” asked Mother. Morgan was my father’s brother, and he had been sheriff of Eden County for years before retiring to fish the Savannah River.

“He’d go into the swamp and stay until he found the boy,” my father said simply.

“By himself?” I asked. “Is that all, Daddy?”

“It’s just one boy.”

“But Freeman knows that swamp inside out.”

“It’d be a boy against a man, son. Don’t ever forget that.”

My father did not know Freeman. In Black Pool Swamp, Freeman was not a boy. He was an animal. No man could trap him.

“I don’t like it,” Mother fussed. “Freeman’s all alone in that swamp, and he’s got a sheriff firing off his pistol like crazy. That man’s no good. He never has been. No wonder there’s so much trouble in the county. He’s kin to Old Man Alfred Brownlee, and that’s the craziest man in Georgia. In fact, Old Man Alfred’s first wife was my first cousin on my daddy’s side, and she used to say that whole family didn’t have enough sense to get in out of the rain.”

“Mama, Freeman’s all right,” Wesley assured her. “Freeman’s fine. He’s been livin’ in that swamp all his life.”

“But it’s damp out tonight,” Mother protested.

“Freeman’s dry,” Wesley said. “He’s got more’n a dozen places to hide where it’s dry as bein’ at home.”

“There’s snakes in there,” Lynn whispered.

“Freeman raised most of them,” Wesley argued. “You not talking about the Okefenokee. There’s no alligators or nothin’ like that in there.”

“Not what Freeman says,” Lynn answered.

“Freeman would say anything about Black Pool Swamp, Lynn, and you know it. There’s nothin’ in there but some rabbits and beaver and squirrels,” Wesley replied dryly.

“And snakes,” Lynn added.

“Yeah, some snakes.”

Wesley knew Freeman well. Freeman had a dreamer’s pride in Black Pool Swamp. To Freeman, Black Pool Swamp made the Okefenokee seem like a mudhole. It angered him when people made fun of Black Pool and he had invented outrageous stories to enhance his position as the only real authority on those two hundred acres of dark, forbidding woods. He told of an albino bear, eight feet tall, whose shimmering white fur was streaked
with dried blood. He told of bobcats as huge and fierce as Asian tigers. He told of a killer wolf, a twenty-foot rattlesnake, a vicious wild boar with foot-long tusks, and he swore he knew the entrance to a secret underground cave where Indian warriors were buried. Occasionally, Freeman would present a bone from a decayed cow and tell us it was the remains of a careless human who refused his warnings about the dangers of Black Pool, or the Great Okeenoo-noo, as he called the swamp. Okeenoonoo, Freeman claimed, was an ancient Cherokee Indian word meaning Woods of Death.

The WPA had drained Black Pool Swamp in the mid-thirties and the signature of woeful, frightened men who had only their muscles and the promise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to believe in was still carved in crisscrossing drain ditches that found the banks of Beaverjam Creek. The ditches had become covered in a death mask of honeysuckle vines and swamp grass, drooping and rising out of the depressions where WPA men had shoveled for WPA wages. Industrious beavers had whittled stick dams out of small hardwoods and had laced the dams together near the creek. The dams had again clogged Black Pool Swamp and there were acres of barely moving surface water seeping over the rims of WPA ditches, covered in a death mask of honeysuckle vines and swamp grass.

To those who feared the woods, Black Pool Swamp was imposing and, in its way, evil. To Freeman and those of us who lived south of Banner’s Crossing, Black Pool was an endless wonder, a huge playground to be discovered with each eager excursion. We had hacked off fox grape vines to swing, yodeling Tarzan yells in the soprano voices of boys. We knew which ridges of heaped-up dirt to walk in the watery bottomland. We had learned to cross back and forth over Beaverjam Creek, balancing on the trunks of
fallen trees that had washed out of the banks of the creek in sudden flooding. We knew where to find the dens of red fox, where the giant canecutter rabbits played, where catfish or eel could be caught by grappling, and where the remains of several whiskey stills belonging to Freeman’s daddy could be located. Once, Wesley and I had even discovered one of Freeman’s man-made caves. It was a shallow hole running into the side of a steep hill overgrown with mountain laurel. Freeman had found a land flaw, a curious wash-out scooping into the hill, and he had carefully sculptured his cave out of hard clay and mountain laurel roots. It was a magnificent hiding place, a quiet, cool fortress protected from wind and rain by a natural upper lip that curled over the opening. It was not a large cave, but Freeman had obviously spent long, dreamy hours there. Wesley found some
Grit
newspapers and a cache of cured rabbit tobacco, and there was evidence that Freeman had experimented with building a small cooking fire. We did not tell Freeman about our discovery, but we began to respect his stories of caves and hiding places in the Great Okeenoonoo.

*

We ate supper in silence, listening for some new off-sound among the voices of Black Pool Swamp. Perhaps Freeman would speak to us in one of his animal tongues, and we would understand. He would tell us where he was, what he needed, how he felt.

An owl celebrated its confusion of sleep and rest and Wesley lifted his face toward the sound, straining to recognize Freeman’s playful imitation. The owl called again and Wesley relaxed. Unlike Laron Crook, Wesley knew the difference between Freeman and a bird. The owl was real, and would cry again and again, until Wesley slipped away and tied knots in the four corners of his bedsheet and then the owl would stop crying and bury its head underneath
its wings. I did not know why owls obeyed Wesley’s strong superstition, but they always did and we would silently marvel at this great power Wesley had. It was a spell not even Freeman could explain, though he declared that an owl, like the vampire, was Satan’s creature and tying knots in bedsheets strangled owls much in the same manner as flashing a cross in the face of a vampire stifled the gruesome urge for human blood. “It’s all the same,” Freeman had told us. “For every evil spell, there’s a good one. Ol’ Wesley just accidentally discovered one about owls.”

*

We were half listening to a radio comedy show when Dover arrived with Freeman’s parents.

“Go to the kitchen,” Mother told us, “and be quiet.” The grownups sat in the living room and talked in voices we could hear only as distortions. Occasionally, the low, grave tones of the men would be countered by the painful choking cough of Rachel Boyd. She had tuberculosis and her lungs had shriveled into small tender sores that bled a sickening red mucus when she could not control her coughing. Her illness had isolated Freeman, who could not wholly accept the wheezing, emaciated woman as his mother. To Freeman, his mother was someone vigorous, someone who had been warm to touch, whose skin had been flushed red with the vitality of Irish blood. He still loved this once-upon-a-time mother, this weakened substitute, but he was quietly horrified by the coolness of her gray coloring and the nauseating mucus odor of her breath. He had watched her suffer her incredible pain, watched as she lay motionless in bed fighting to conquer the spasms that were squeezing her lungs, and he had heard her mumbled, bewildered prayers for relief, incoherent prayers of half-promises and a beggar’s pleading. Freeman had
listened to the women of Emery speak of “poor Rachel Boyd,” and he knew what they meant: his mother had a terminal illness. In a vision that had eased into his dreams many times, Freeman knew she would die in early life, her lungs drowning in their own phlegm. Her lungs would die first and then the spillway of her throat would die, and then her brain and then her heart. Her heart would die last, wanting to live against terrible, predictable odds. Her heart would die of suffocation, pumping frantically, unreasonably, until it could no longer pump.

Freeman’s vision of his mother’s fate had been transferred to us, not by description, but by some mystic union we shared, and as we listened to Rachel Boyd choking in our home, I believed she longed for death, wished for death with selfish yearning.

“Louise, you hear her?” I asked, whispering.

Louise nodded. She moved to the side table where Mother kept drinking water in an enamel bucket, and she poured a dipper of water into a clean glass. “I better take this in there,” she said. “She’ll be needing it.”

Louise put the glass of water on a mahogany serving tray that Amy had given Mother for Christmas, and then carried it into the living room. Louise was the oldest daughter still living at home and she understood her responsibilities; she was part girl and part woman, part sister and part mother, and she had a gift for separating the roles.

“Is she dyin’?” asked Lynn when Louise returned.

“Hush,” commanded Louise. “She might hear.”

We sat and listened. We could hear the men talking and I knew Dover had become angry. His voice was tense and high-pitched, and I thought he must have been pacing because his voice changed
positions through the sheetrock wall. Occasionally, Dover would pause and there would be a deeper bass reply from my father or Freeman’s father.

“Dover’s all worked up,” I said to Wesley.

“Yeah,” Wesley replied.

“Wonder why he’s so mad?” Lynn whispered.

“Ssssssssssh,” Wesley said suddenly, whirling in his chair. Outside, Short Leg and Bullet barked. Wesley moved to the back door and opened it.

“What’s the matter?” Louise asked.

“Sssssssssh.”

Wesley stepped onto the back porch. He looked into the heavy, blank darkness. He whistled sharply and Short Leg and Bullet stopped barking.

“What’s the matter?” Louise repeated. “You hear somethin’?”

“Freeman,” Wesley said quietly. “It’s Freeman.”

At first I did not hear it. There was nothing but a low wind and the brushing sound of wet leaves against wet leaves.

“I don’t hear nothin’,” I said.

“Listen,” Wesley warned.

And then I heard it: a shrill, long whistle folding into the wind, riding an invisible sound wave and carrying the eerie message that Freeman was safe.

“It is,” I exclaimed. “That’s Freeman.”

“That’s nothing but the wind,” Louise said. “Nobody can whistle like that.”

“He’s got a cane flute,” Wesley explained. “That’s his cane flute.”

The flute whistle floated in again, clear and strong. Wesley
stepped outside and returned the call of the whippoorwill. There was a long silence and then a whippoorwill replied from somewhere in Black Pool Swamp.

“Maybe he knows his mama and daddy’s over here,” Lynn said.