The River Is Home. Patrick D. Smith

      ONE

      A GENTLE BREEZE was blowing through the cypress trees, as Abner Corey sat on the stoop of his shack, mending fish traps. There had been a light rain that morning, and now the sun was sending long shafts of light into the swamp to draw the water up again. The drops of rain, clinging to the cypress boughs, glittered like thousands of diamonds in the air. The cries of wood ducks and cranes mingled with the chatter of squirrels and the incessant bellowing of frogs for more rain. Everything was full of activity but the Corey family. Abner’s wife, Glesa, was stretched out on the back stoop basking in the sun. The two boys, Jeff and Skeeter, were throwing knives into the bare plank floor, while Theresa, the only daughter, was helping Abner mend the fish traps. The traps were the most valuable possessions of the Coreys because they represented their only means of getting cash money.

      The Coreys had been living in the swamp for five years now. They had previously been sharecroppers, wandering to and from different parts of Mississippi and Louisiana year after year, getting what jobs they could and eating when they could, but always being without much of either. And then Abner had brought them to the Pearl River swamps of lower Mississippi to begin a new and strange life. They arrived with nothing and had to build their small shack with their bare hands. Abner had chosen a little clearing on a bayou several hundred yards from the muddy Pearl. The clearing was bounded by tall, moss-covered, cypress trees, mingled with magnolia and willow. From their clearing to the river lay long stretches of flat marsh grass, and behind the clearing was the almost impenetrable swamp. The swamp was joined by long, rolling hills covered with pine and scrub oak, but the only way to cross from the clearing to the hills was by boat through the murky swamp. Five miles down the river was a little settlement called Mill Town, and twenty miles to the north was Fort Henry. Once a week Abner and the boys would row to Mill Town and trade fish for money and supplies, and once a year they would go to Fort Henry to sell their winter trappings of hides. Fort Henry was a bustling port town on the steamboat route to Jackson, far to the north. Abner had promised the family if they ever got enough money he would take them on the steamboat to Jackson, but that time never seemed to come.

      Most of the Coreys’ time was spent on the river and in the swamp—Abner and the boys fishing, hunting, and trapping, while Glesa and the girl did the house chores and tended the small garden on the edge of the clearing. They grew a few onions, peas, and peppers, but their main diet usually consisted of fish, game, and the wild poke salat that grew along the clearing. They were planning this year to have pork, because Abner had traded for three hogs in Mill Town and had built a pen on the banks of the bayou.

      The Corey shack was built of drift lumber and cypress logs. The house had three rooms and no windows, and the roof was made of hand-hewn cypress shingles stuffed with moss. Two rooms of the house were used for sleeping, and the other for cooking and eating. There were two beds in one room and one in the other. The beds were made of cypress slats, and the mattresses were made of croaker sacks sewn together and stuffed with moss. Ma and Pa Corey slept in one room and the boys and Theresa in the other. The kitchen contained a bare plank table, a washstand, and a clay hearth in one corner for cooking. All the water for cooking and drinking came from the bayou. The Coreys used the banks of the bayou for their privy and bath.

      The oldest of the children was Jeff, who was nineteen. Theresa was fifteen and Skeeter thirteen. The Coreys had named their youngest boy Skeeter because he was born prematurely, and Pa Corey said that he was no bigger than a good-sized mosquito. Even now he was small and runty for his age, and did not have all that he should have had in the way of book-learning. Jeff was tall and skinny with short-cut, blond hair. Theresa was the most unusual of the Corey children. She was like a rose growing in a field of cabbage. She was an unusually beautiful girl with long, flaming-red hair, brown eyes, and a complexion as white as snow. It was strange that such a child could have the same blood as the haggard pair that had borne her. Ma Corey was a fat, sloppy-looking woman with straggly gray hair. Her teeth were stained brown from the long years of snuff dipping, and her skin was wrinkled and tanned from the long hours of working the fields before they came to the swamp to live. Pa Corey was built much the same as Jeff, tall and skinny, with short-cropped gray hair. Ma had always said that he could make more money hiring out as a scarecrow than he could any other way.

      Pa Corey would not go into the swamp with Jeff and Skeeter to set and run their animal traps. He was more afraid of snakes and alligators than he was of the devil himself. In the spring and summer, Jeff and Skeeter would go into the swamp to kill snakes and catch young ’gators, so they could sell the snakeskins and young ’gators in Mill town. In the winter they would trap for mink and otter. Pa Corey was a fearless man on the river and bayou, but nothing could induce him into the swamp. The boys had built a flat-bottomed skiff to use in the swamp and a rowboat for the river.

      As Pa Corey sat mending the traps, he often talked to himself, as he was doing now. “Dern gars,” he said, “don’t make nothin’ but trouble fer me. Wish the slimy devils would stay out’n my nets and traps! Jest like hangin’ a bull ’gator by the tail. I wish the good Lord would have a big fish fry in Heaven and use all the gars they is in the river. Pesky devils.”

      “Pa,” said Theresa, “why is it that the gars won’t stay in the traps like the catfish and the buffalo do?”

      “Well, hit seems that the Lord equipped the muddy bastards with saws on their heads jest so’es they could saw their way out of anything. I’ve heard they can cut clear through a cypress log, jest as easy as nothin’. I caught one on a trotline once, and even the niggers wouldn’t et him. They said he were a brother to the devil, and if’n you et him you would shore go below onced you was dead.”

      “Pa, Skeeter told me onced that he saw the devil up in the swamp one time. He said hit were jest afore dark and he come through a gap in the saw vines and there the devil set chewin’ on a big ole water moccasin. He said when the devil seed him there, he swollered the snake whole and run off through the swamp belchin’ smoke and bellowin’ like a bull. Do you reckon hit were so, Pa?”

      “Now don’t you pay no mind to what Skeeter says, you hear? He’s lible to come home one day sayin’ he seed two bull ’gators doin’ a dance in the top of a cypress tree.”

      “Jest the same, Pa,” Theresa said, “hit shore would scare me if’n I was to see somethin’ like that. That dern Skeeter jest ain’t skeered of nothin’, and I onced seen him ketch a live snake with his hands and pop its head clear off its body. Whut makes you so skeered of snakes, Pa?”

      “Now