Tuesday Voice: Tadpole Creek

By Ed Rogers

[Editor's Apology: We have already inadvertently published the story that should have followed today's. If you wish to read the two stories in their intended order, there's a link to the second story at the bottom.]

To a young boy, Tadpole Creek could become a world unto itself—full of adventure from early morning until late at night. The creek ran through my grandparents’ farm and through my young life.
    A black family by the name of Gillum lived in a house on the farm.
    Herbert was about a year older than I was, and his brother Willie was a year younger.
    Mississippi may have been segregated in the fifties, but not on Tadpole Creek. There we were free from the confines of the outside world. Our world didn’t have color or discriminations. We ate, slept, played, and grew up thinking of each other as brothers.
    Together we explored the secrets of life, making up our own road map as we moved down life’s uncharted paths.
    We talked of girls and sex as only young boys who are still in the dark can do. We talked about far-off lands and the strangeness they held. We talked a lot about what we would do if we had a bunch of money. We learned to smoke on grape vines and rabbit tobacco. We learned to fight and to make up, and we were always looking for that next adventure.
    My uncle Sam Hill would come for a visit every summer. We looked forward to his visits, because Uncle Sam would bring enough cokes and food for everybody, including his two sons, my cousins Chuck and Steve. Chuck was about Willie’s age, and Steve was my age but had had brain damage at birth and remained with and IQ that never got out of fourteen—a smart fourteen, however.
    Uncle Sam would bring three or four 22 rifles, and we would all go down into the pasture and hunt birds and rabbits, then camp out on Tadpole Creek for the night.
    We would make a big fire and roast hotdogs, then sit around the fire while Herbert, Willie, and I told stories of all the scary things that we had seen or heard had happened along Tadpole Creek.

This one night, I guess we went a little too far. A creek bank on a moonless night can be scary enough without ghost stories. Anyway, about one in the morning Uncle Sam woke us up looking for Steve. Uncle Sam said, “He must have got up to use the bathroom and got lost.”
    So up and down the creek we looked, not knowing if Steve had hit his head and fallen into the water or was maybe lying out in the woods hurt.
    We looked for about an hour before Uncle Sam said for us to keep hollering for Steve while he went back to the house to call the police.
    Herbert said, “We should look over at Widow’s Bend—maybe Steve wandered off and headed up the creek instead of down.”
    “I ain’t going to no Widow’s Bend,” Willie said flatly. “That’s close to the Wullems house. They catch us there they shoot us and grind us into sausage.”
    “There ain’t much to them Wullem brothers,” I said. “I got into a fight with Bo Wullem at school last month. They don’t scare me. Come on, Herbert, I’ll go with you.” I didn’t mention how happy I was that the teacher had broken up the fight.
    Chuck and Willie were afraid to go, but they were more afraid of what would happen if we left them alone. The four of us set off up the creek, with only the starlight to light the path. Along the creek was a worn trail, which people walked in order to stick their cane fishing polls in the creek bank at night. Then in the morning they would come back and check to see if they had caught any fish.

With each frog or snake that escaped our onslaught and splashed back into the creek, a scream would rush out of Willie and Chuck. Herbert grew tired of telling them to keep quiet and wanted to run off and leave them in the woods. My uncle might not think it was so funny, us leaving his other son in the woods.
    A few hundred feet from Widow’s Bend, Herbert said, “Get down. Someone has a fire up ahead in the woods.”
    Sure enough, there was light from a fire about twenty yards back from the creek. Now, Tadpole was not a nice creek to camp on—for one thing, water moccasins were everywhere. The mosquitoes in the deep woods were horrifying, which was why we camped in the open pasture.
    These were either hardy souls or fools to be camping that far back in the woods, or they were people up to no good. Herbert and I moved ahead, but Chuck and Willie wanted nothing to do with the people. They waited by the creek bank and Herbert and I did our best impression of Indian warriors, and tried to move through the brush quietly.
    Soon we could hear two voices coming from around the fire. They were laughing, boisterous, and drunk. I said, “Maybe they’re coon hunting, Herbert.”
    In those days, it was a common thing for men to take a bottle and their dogs and head out into the woods for a night of hunting. Mississippi being a dry state, that whiskey was usually moonshine—a truth they kept from their wives. They would build a big fire and turn the dogs loose, and after that they would never move from that fire until the whiskey was gone.
    “No, we would have heard their dogs in the woods, if’n they were hunt’n,” Herbert whispered.
    Laying on our bellies and looking through the brush, we could see two men outlined by the fire. Upon recognizing the men, my breath caught in my throat. “My god, Herbert, that’s Red Walker and Sonny Wayne.”
    As my eyes adjusted to the firelight, I could make out the still on the other side of the fire. We had just walked upon two of the biggest bootleggers in Mississippi.
    “We better get out of here,” I said. “If they catch us, they’ll kill us for sure.” However, I was talking to an empty spot beside me. Herbert was already moving back through the brush—much faster than we had come.
    Then, from the dark depths of hell came a voice screaming, “Herbert, Eddy, Willie, Chuck, I found Steve! Where are you? Come on back! Steve’s okay!”
    The calling came from up the pasture, but in the quietness of the night, it sounded like Uncle Sam was right next to us. We knew Red and Sonny would think the same thing, so we forgot about being Indian warriors and ran. We could hear the cussing and the hysterical commotion that had erupted around the fire.
    Suddenly, two shotguns went off and the leaves on the trees over our heads began to make a snapping sound. We passed Willie and Chuck on the creek bank, and shouted only one word as we passed them: “Run!”
    The four of us made it back under the bridge and onto my grandparents’ farm. Safe on our side of the road, we fell down around the fire, and waited for Uncle Sam to make it to us. All those stories we had thought were so funny to be telling came back to haunt us.

We saw movement in every shadow. Each sound that rose from the dark, tree-covered banks of the creek produced pictures of Red and Sonny hell-bent on killing us. It was all we could do to keep from running back to the house. I think if one of us had made the move to run we all would have been gone. We weren’t sure that the bootleggers wouldn’t find us, but we hoped they were like vicious dogs, who are considerably meaner close to their own home.
    Steve had been gone for about an hour and a half, but it seemed a lot longer. We could see Uncle Sam’s flashlight coming down the pasture. As he approached, I felt a sense of doom come over me. If we told what we had seen, the bootleggers would be after us, and even worse, our families would stop letting us come to the creek.
    “The bootleggers have got to be our secret,” I said. “We looked everywhere for Steve, but couldn’t find him. We saw nothing or nobody. No bootleggers, no still—nothing!”
    Chuck was the only holdout. “I’m not going to lie to my daddy. He find out I lied to him, it will be worse.”
    “You rat on us, and you will pay,” I said. “We could have left you in the woods with those men tonight. Next time we just might do that! And if they catch us we’ll tell them where you’re hiding.”
    Herbert threatened, “Maybe we should throw him in the creek and let the snakes take care of him.”
    By then Chuck was almost in tears, but he had seen the light.
    As Uncle Sam got closer he began to holler at us, “It’s all right. You can stop looking. I’ve found Steve.”
    He told us how Steve had woken up on the hard ground and didn’t like it, and when he got up to take a pee, he decided to walk back to the house, where he went to bed. After all that drama, it was for nothing. However, Steve was safe and nobody had rushed out of the dark to kill us.
    Uncle Sam said he was going back to the house and Chuck said he was going back also.
    We each gave Chuck the evil eye before he left. He never did tell about the moonshiners.
    That left only Herbert, Willie, and me by the creek. The three Musketeers sat alone around the campfire once more. It was then the contest began to see who could convince the others that they hadn’t been scared.

Red Walker had married my cousin. I don’t think he ever did any work other than make whiskey all over Monroe County. Sonny was known as a mean SOB and someone a person shouldn’t mess with.
    Toward the end of the summer, the Federals raided the still. They caught Sonny and he did five years. Red got away. No one in the family heard from him after that. Or they said they hadn’t, at any rate.
    The three of us never went near Widow’s Bend after that night.

[This story was intended to precede “The mule ride,” which we inadvertently published on October 22. There are two more stories in the set, and “Tadpole in winter” will appear next week, on December 10.]
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Copyright © 2013 by Ed Rogers

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