Animal Crackers

"Get away from the fire," one of the guards barked.

Mary moved to the east window and pressed her forehead against the pane, looking out into the blackness of the late winter morning.

"Get away from the window!" another guard snarled.

Such were her days for several weeks.

In his official report, Captain Fleming blamed the fire on a kerosene lamp explosion. The lamp exploded alright, but Fleming and some of the guards were in the barracks, drunk, harassing the convicts when it fell.

Their favorite form of harassment involved gambling. The guards forced the convicts to play Poker with the Captain. If the Captain won, the convicts had to work Sunday; if the Captain lost, the guards beat the convicts.

On the night of the fire two of the drunk guards got into a fight and fell over the lamp, which spilled its fuel catching several of the blankets on fire. The fire got out of control and an entire squad of convicts perished as they screamed and begged to be unchained. Some even begged the guards to amputate their feet. The drunk guards laughed at them, and taunted them, and ignored them.

After the blaze no real investigation was made. The coroner's jury did not visit the scene and accepted the Captain's explanation that an accidental explosion of a lamp ignited the building.

Hiram Fleming, whipping boss at the camp, was the principal witness for the state. Fleming testified that he saw someone enter the barracks immediately before the fire, heard two heavy blows and saw the flames shoot up. Then he watched the man flee from the room and run out of the camp. His testimony didn't explain where the guard was, and no one asked.

The women's barracks also burned to the ground, but one bird had flown the camp.

Mary walked through the pine forest all night, following the Moon's descent to the west. At dawn she came to the river, waded across, and stopped to rest. When it was light enough, she saw Reuben, the kitchen woodcutter, asleep on the ground, partially concealed in some kudzu vines. Reuben was a friendly, docile youth, and Mary took a seat on the ground near him and waited.

The morning sunlight lay like lace beneath the palms and pines and stunted oaks. The black moist earth smelled of leaf mold. Wild yellow cannas and blue iris bloomed.

Reuben awoke when sunlight poked its finger through the foliage and touched a patch of skin on his face. The appearance of Mary startled him. They agreed to travel together until they came to civilization. Beyond this he refused to disclose his destination, if he even had one.

"No offense Miss Mary, but you don't need to know dat, case you gets caught," he said.

As they walked, she told him her story and he told his.

Reuben didn't know his age, but when he was a child he was arrested for stealing a mule.

"Dey say I was bout four years old and too small to ride it," he said.

He was not large enough to mount the animal and was leading it off by the halter when he was caught. The court convicted him of horse theft and sentenced him to twenty years in prison.

"Dey warden at duh prison didn't know what to do wiff me, but he finally invented a task I could do. He put two bricks at each end of duh prison yard, gimme two mo uf em, and told me to carry dem to one uf deh piles, lay dem down, pick up deh udder two, and tote em back to deh first pile, back and foth all day long, always totin' two bricks. An he whipped me when I broke a brick or didn't stack em like he wanted. I grew up toting bricks, and wore out fo' sets of bricks befo' he got me some real work," he said.

"My God! How long have you been in prison?" Mary asked.

"I figger 'bout seventeen years an' some months," he said.

"So, you're twenty-one years old?"

"I supposn' I am."

Reuben talked of his life at various camps. Some mined phosphate rock, some grew crops, some built roads. He had been around the circuit.

They walked through the woods until late in the day when they found a spot to stop for the night; Reuben built a fire, using a knife and matches he stole from the camp kitchen.

When the fire was blazing, he stirred the coals, adding a log of live oak, and spat into the fire. As the fire snapped and hissed and popped, Reuben told her about this wilderness.

"Dis h'yar wilderness is a nest ob outlaws. Dey is some good people h'yar but deh most uf dem is escaped convicts, army deserters, an people hidin' from deh law. An deh law don't come into deh woods cause the Crackers will kill em," he said.

The words no sooner left his mouth when a rifle cracked and Reuben fell over dead, shot through the head with twitching body, fluttering eyelids, mouth gaping, and blood flowing over his chin.

Mary screamed.

Two men materialized out of the night; Mary guessed they were the Crackers Reuben had spoke of. Each of the men seemed shy, suspicious, and ill conditioned, being anything but pleased to see a woman. They looked sickly pallid, having a curious, waxy tissue peculiar to Crackers. Their gaunt frames were covered with yellow flesh, barely, and were scantily concealed beneath clumsily patched shirts and ragged pants. Their fuzzy hair was matted, and their wiry beards were tangled corkscrews. Their eyes had the same vacant, stupid expressions Mary had seen on fish.

Mary was thirsty, hungry, and tired. She expected to be shot, too. She tried to make conversation with the men, tried to learn why they killed Reuben, but they responded in laconic grunts that disclosed nothing. With expressions of vague dreariness, they looked away from her, as an animal does when you attempt to examine its eyes. But they were not indifferent to her remarks; on the contrary, they were keenly curious to know who and what she was, though they hid their feelings beneath their masks of stolid reserve and unfriendly boorishness. They listened to her story as impassively as a cow might have done, and when she finished, they aimed their rifles at her and nonchalantly pointed towards the south.

As Reuben tried to explain to her, these outlaw people lived simply and crudely. They were feral whites. A log-hut with a dirt floor and a skin bed in the corner was par for their homes. The wilderness furnished them with almost everything they needed except gunpowder and lead-shot and a few other essentials. Most of them traded moonshine for what they needed.

They hid their stills in the swamps and forests, and regarded all officers in general, and United States marshals in particular, as their enemies. They hated anybody and everybody connected with the law, and would not hesitate a moment to shoot lawmen. And it was impossible for strangers to penetrate the bewildering maze of woods and undergrowth that hid them.

The narrow sandy trail they walked was a silver ribbon in the moonlight. Where the palmettos were thickest they heard, once, the faint whirr of a rattler, and stood motionless for a long time.

After an hour of trekking through the woods, Mary heard a dog bark and the light crackling of leaves close by. Turning round, she saw two women approaching. The Crackers paid no attention to them, and Mary assumed the women were family members. For an instant the women stared at Mary; then, looking forward, and in Indian file, the women walked towards a crude log hut. Mary and the men followed. At the clearing Mary saw a third woman with two small children.

The woman tended the fire and the children. Mary thought the children looked filthy and worm infested. One woman looked as if she had died and didn't yet know it.

"May I have a drink of water, please?" Mary asked one of the women. The group looked at each other, and the smaller of the women left, carrying a pail. Soon she returned, placed the pail on the ground, and helped herself, drinking from a can that supplied the place of glasses; then the large woman drank a copious draught. Mary waited her turn. The water was warm, brackish, and turbid, as though the pail contained milk. Mary held her breath and gulped the water down.

The crude hut was enclosed on three sides by logs chinked with clay; the front was open. There was no furniture or hearth. The split-log floor was covered with pine needles and a fire blazed in front of the open side. An iron pot filled with water and potatoes sat atop the fire.

When the potatoes were cooked, they gave Mary one to eat and directed her to find a place in the pine straw to sleep. She tried to grasp the Crackers' intentions, but was ignored and gently shoved toward the hut by one of the men.

Lying on the pine straw, she listened to the frogs in the swamp. Once she heard the wail of a harmonica drifting across the woods on the breeze. She fell asleep listening to the acorns from the live oak fall on the roof, sounding like fingers opening a latch.

When Mary awoke, she walked outside and watched the tiny woman plowing. The woman drove a small horse and small plough. The plough handles pulled at her armpits and her shoulders jerked at every roughness so that her feet flew up behind her.

Mary watched as she reached the other side of the clearing and turned the corner with the horse and plow. And as she watched, the plough point caught a root and bucked. The girl plunged forward in a somersault. But she arose, brushed the dirt from her face with her arm, and took up the plough lines again.

The woman's husband or brother lay on the sand in the sun, his hat over his eyes, dozing, while the little woman plowed. About noon the older man, named Amos, left the clearing. The younger man was 'Billy,' and the women were 'Zelda,' "Charity,' and 'Wilma.'

Zelda was heavy, large, deep-voiced, and big breasted. Her hair grew thick and low, black and shiny like gall-berries. Dark down covered her upper lip and her large arms. Her teeth were white in her dark face.

Wilma was the mother of the children.

Mary studied the women and decided it was easy to distinguish women who did field work from those who didn't. The women who helped their men plow, hoe, cultivate, and harvest, were gaunt and lean as abused horses.

At mid afternoon a man driving a buggy pulled into the clearing.

"Where's your uncle?" he said to Charity.

Charity said nothing.

"Your uncle's at the still, ain't he?"

She remained mute. The other women collected close to her. One of the children suckled Wilma's emaciated tit with its dirt- encrusted mouth.

"I'm the man buying that cane syrup of his. My name is Parker. That syrup that makes a man feel so prime." He winked at her.

She said politely, "That so?"

A silence fell in which the squirrels could be heard barking in the woods.

"Well, I'm mighty sorry to miss him; I had business with him."

The women looked at each other. It would be a pity to lose trade for Amos. The stranger seemed all right. Zelda believed him to be the man of whom Amos had spoken. Parker was the name, all right. She wanted to tell him to go down the road to Palmetto Landing and to halloo across the river. She was unable to do it as caution dammed the words in her mouth.

At last she said, "If you was to care to state your business now? If you was to say what-all you wants o' Amos, mite be I could find him and tell him."

He said bluntly, "Yes, I'll state my business. Tell Amos to put a barrel of whiskey on the boat when she comes down Wednesday. Here's some tags to use. See, Florida Cane Syrup, addressed to the Dixie Sweetheart Sugar Company at Jacksonville. Tell him to put one on the barrel and to send a barrel every Wednesday until I tell him different."

"Mite be a good idee to smear some rale syrup around the edge o' the barrel-head, like the juice were leakin' a leetle," Zelda said.

Parker climbed aboard his buggy, then studied Zelda for a moment, "I don't care what he does to the barrel-head, as long as the barrel gets on the boat." Then he rode away.

Billy hung around the clearing to watch Mary.

Amos returned to the camp at sunset when the low tangled growth of oak and pine and palmetto fell black and silent. The sky was a mass of stars, close and bright.

A bright night made little change in the clearing. Where the sunlight was tawny, the moonlight was silver. Sunlight or moonlight or the incandescence of stars washed thinly through the live oaks and pines.

The potatoes were boiled, distributed, and the people sat around talking.

"Down the road," said Zelda to Mary, "there's a man and woman livin' in a cabin, and they gits drunk and she beats him awful. But they ain't married, and we be." There was a world of pride in her voice.

Is that so?" Mary exclaimed.

"True as the Bible," he replied solemnly and changed the subject.

"Damn them pigs! They comes ever' day a fillin' they bellies with my old mash and gets hog drunk. Any fool could back-track 'em to the still."

Amos told them of a commotion at the creek near his still. Half a dozen wild pigs splashed about the swamp, throwing muck, and rattling palmetto fronds, colliding violently and falling in a pile when they smelled him. They were drunk. He shouted and lunged at them. They staggered to their feet and ran sideways and backwards, their ears flopping over blood-shot eyes. He shewed them back across the creek and they escaped, grunting into the woods.

But Amos lied; he hadn't been at the still, he went to the prison camp to see if there was reward money for Mary. Fleming offered Amos twenty dollars to bring her back to the camp or kill her. Mary overheard Amos talking with Billy making a plan.

Later in the evening a dense fog settled over the clearing. Before bed Mary asked permission to use the latrine. Amos ordered Charity to escort Mary into the woods and watch her.

Charity and Mary walked to the usual spot. Alone and unseen, Mary distracted Charity and slammed the woman's head into a tree trunk, and fled into the fog.

Mary ran in the direction of where Amos and Billy captured her. In a while she looked behind her and saw the faint, diffuse glow of torches, then ran faster to stay ahead of the men.

There are places in this wilderness treacherous to tread upon, places that invite sure and solid foothold, but open like traps on a scaffold, then close over the victim. The ooze beneath is filled with skeletons of unwary animals. To tread there is to risk vanishing forever.

The region is thick with palm trees, growing on little hammocks that rise above the stagnant water, festooned with slender parasitic creepers, which keep up a constant, strange motion no matter how still the day, and have a talent for reaching out and catching the trespasser. Huge, fan-like palmetto leaves, interlacing overhead, darken the ground even at midday, and millions of water-weeds tangle in Gordian confusion in the gloomy reaches underneath. Rotting tree trunks obstruct passage everywhere, and the stench is fearful.

Bloated cotton mouth moccasins slide through the ooze; poisonous insects envelope the head like smoke; and fat spiders, spotted red and black, and poisonous as serpents, move about their gossamer threads. Now and then alligators float across the black-green slime.

Amos knew, as Mary did not, that she was on the trail to an abandoned house swallowed whole by the jungle long ago. Amos knew the woods intimately since childhood. Blacks avoided it, as did superstitious Crackers, fearing ghosts. It was an abandoned sugar plantation the Navy plundered during the war. They removed what wasn't on fire, and left the rest to rot. Kudzu vines concealed the ruins.

When Mary reached the ruins, she pushed through the vines looking for a place to hide and rest. Discovering the house, she felt her way along the walls to an entry and a door, then ascended the steps, opened the door, and went inside. Feeling her way in the dark, she located a wall and felt her way to a staircase, moving cautiously up the stairs, feeling for missing or rotted steps.

Reaching the upper floor, she found a bedroom above the front entry. The glass panes were obscured with mildew and dirt, one pane was shattered. The room smelled dank and musty. She stood by the window and waited.

"They'll be here soon," a familiar voice spoke from the gloom.

Mary twisted around to see Satan with the queer face and phosphorescing eyes, then turned back to the window. Amos and Billy soon appeared, carrying torches.

She walked past the creature and went downstairs, feeling her way carefully down the decrepit stairs.

Billy pulled his pistol from his pants and cocked it. Both men entered the old house with their torches burning brightly, and moved slowly through the foyer to the dining room.

Almost immediately, Mary stepped out of the darkness, bludgeoning Billy with an old brick and throwing ashes in Amos' face. She grabbed Billy's pistol when she stepped on it, shooting Amos in the face before he had a chance to lift his rifle and aim. Their fallen torches ignited the carpet.

Mary pulled the bodies away from the flames and stripped them. Billy gave up a pair of trousers, brogans, and ten dollars in silver. Amos furnished a flannel shirt, coat, and forty dollars in green-backs. It was enough money to get her somewhere. She dressed, tossed her striped shift into the fire, shot the men again, for good measure, and left the house to find her way in the dark. Amos's dog, "Spot" was outside, patiently waiting. Mary walked past him and he followed.

Moving through the woods, saw-palmetto barbs cut at her hands flesh, and the undergrowth was a twisted treachery. When the sun rose she headed west, toward the coast.

The refuse of old fires littered the sand with matted limbs, plus stumps, and logs, all bound together with thorny vines. Chameleons and lizards gamboled round the trunks of the trees, and distended their green throats until they became scarlet, as if in elfish mockery of her. On every side dark pine trees grew, varied now and then by little copses of oaks, where fires or the axe had made a small clearing. A starling, inky black, screamed from the woods.

When Mary reached the river she saw that the landing was on the other side, and she'd have to swim to it. She contemplated the obstacle. But to turn back from a swim of fifty yards in smooth water was absurd. She removed her clothes, bound them up with the shoes, raised the bundle above her head, and waded into the river through the maidenhead cane. Spot followed.

The bearded tops of the cane obscured her view, the submerged vegetation felt like squishy snakes beneath her feet. Her relief was immediate when she rolled comfortably into a swimming posture upon the open water, and struck out for the other bank. The water was deliciously warm, and a pleasant change from the rasping, nervous touch of the grass. She swam with a leisurely sweep of her arms.

The water had a sparkle of salt in it, not enough to flavor, but quite enough to give it brilliance and transparency. She could see the bottom six or eight feet below, with its pure white sand; and now and again the surface was broken into bright prismatic ripples, till she imagined she was floating on a sea of pearls.

Then Spot barked! And the blood curdled in her heart.

"Alligators!"

There were two of them; one far to her right, but nearer the bank to which she was swimming; the other between her and the bank she had left. She was unnerved.

She struck out, madly and furiously, without sense or discretion, but was checked and recalled to her senses by one dreadful fact: the dog was out-swimming her. Now she knew that one of them must be sacrificed for the other, and a woman with any self-control easily out swims a dog.

She soon saw the effect of it when she passed the dog, who turned in toward her, with a whine, swimming dogfully in her wake. The dog's nose or paw touched Mary briefly, and as she looked over her shoulder to check on Spot, one of the gators grabbed the dog.