Читать книгу The Salvation of Miss Lucretia - Ted Dunagan - Страница 11

Chapter 4

Shackles and Chains

A moment after that smell came wafting through the air, we heard a bleat.

“That sounded like a goat!” Poudlum said quietly out of the corner of his mouth as we both sank to our knees to hide in the tall grass.

“Did you catch which direction it came from?” I asked softly.

“Had to come from the other side of the fence ’cause she lives over there on Mister Autrey’s land.”

“You think we’re close to her house?”

“Got to be. That had to be one of her goats, and the goat pen wouldn’t be far from where she lives. Let’s listen a little bit and see if we can hear any more sounds.

It wasn’t long before we heard the goat again, and then we heard the cackle of a chicken.

“It’s her place all right,” Poudlum said. “And the sounds are coming from over yonder on the other side of the fence.”

“I can’t see a house or anything,” I told Poudlum as I strained my eyes in that direction.

“We got to get closer,” he said. “Come on, let’s crawl through the fence and see if we can see anything on the other side of it.”

“Wait a minute, Poudlum! Don’t you think we ought to think about this a little? Maybe we should wait until after dark.”

“We won’t be able to see after dark, and we don’t want to use a torch.”

“Good point,” I replied. “But let’s move real slow and keep our spears handy.”

We went back through the fence on our bellies like two moles, squirming our way through the tangled vines until we came to the rusted fence itself.

“Looks like we’re going to have to stand up and climb over this old wire fence,” I said.

“Naw, we don’t,” Poudlum said as he reached into his hip pocket and slid out the broken hacksaw blade. “You hold the wire steady, and I’ll saw through it.”

It didn’t take long for the saw to cut through the rusty wire, and after we sawed through four strands we were able to bend it upwards and make a hole big enough for us to crawl through one at a time.

Once we got clear of the fence, we peeked up over the tall grass, but still couldn’t see anything. There was still the goat and chicken sounds though, and they were getting louder.

“Her house must be a little farther through the woods,” Poudlum said. “We gonna just have to keep crawling till we can see something. Maybe she got our dogs tied up and we can just take’ em back.”

“What about our rifles?”

“I would be willing to give up mine if I could just get Rip back.”

I supposed at some point I would be willing to make the same sacrifice, but not yet. “I want my rifle back, too,” I said. “Why don’t we just walk in there and confront her?”

Poudlum stopped crawling, looked over at me, and said, “Oh, Lord, we can’t do that!”

“Why not?”

“’Cause there is probably all kinds of voodoo traps all around her house. We got to go in real slow and careful.”

“What kind of traps?”

“Stuff like deep pits full of snakes that are covered over so people will fall in ’em, maybe some sharp sticks with poison on the tips, and who knows what else.”

I shivered at the thought of such things.

Poudlum continued, “What we need to do is get the dogs and get out of here as quick as we can. If we have to confront her we want to get as close as we can before she knows we’re here.”

“How come?”

“Cause that way she’ll think we got the mojo on her, and we can be gone before she gets over the surprise.”

After some more slow crawling we came upon the goat pen. It was constructed all of wood with crooked rails attached to the posts. Inside the rails was a small herd of goats.

“One of them must to had twins,” Poudlum whispered.

“Huh?”

“There’s a billy goat, four nanny goats and five kids,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” I said.

“She been milking them goats, too. See them milk bags?”

I did indeed and the thought of milk reminded me of how hungry I was.

“I ’spect Old Bill and Rip could smell us if we’re close enough to ’em,” I whispered.

“I bet she could, too,” Poudlum whispered back. “Lucky for us they ain’t no wind. Them dogs, if they here, would make a ruckus if they caught our scents. She probably would, too.”

“Maybe she already knows we’re here and is just laying a trap for us.”

“Guess that’s a chance we got to take if we want the dogs back,” Poudlum said.

“We need a plan, Poudlum. We can’t just keep on crawling around like blind folks.”

“If you got anything in mind, let’s hear it.”

I didn’t but I told him we ought to try to think of something. So we set to thinking while we lay there in the weeds next to the goat pen, and what we came up with was about the only sensible thing to do. It was pretty simple. What we planned to do was get close enough so we could see her house, and then wait until it got dark. After that we would wait until we saw some light, and hopefully some movement inside before we went any closer. Beyond that, we still didn’t have a plan.

“Ought to be good’n dark before long,” Poudlum said. “Let’s work our way around this goat pen and find her cabin.”

Giving the goats a wide berth, we crawled around the pen to the right, but after struggling for a good while, we found nothing but more of the forest.

“It must be the other way,” Poudlum said. “You think we ought to go back or just keep crawling?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe we ought to just keep circling.”

“We got to do something!” Poudlum urged. “Gonna be so dark we can’t see before long.”

We decided to keep circling, and we had just about got back to where we started from when we came upon a well-worn path.

“I bet this trail leads to her cabin,” Poudlum guessed. If we had gone the other way, we would’ve already found it. Now it’s just before being pitch black.”

“There’s still enough light to see how to get down this trail,” I said. “It has to lead to her cabin, ’cause this is probably the way she comes every morning to milk her goats. And I’ll bet this trail is trap-free, too.”

“Why you think that?” Poudlum asked.

“’Cause she would probably expect any company to come from the other side of her house, and not from back here where her goat pen is.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Poudlum warned. “Folks delving in voodoo think backwards sometime. This here trail is probably kind of like the edge of a giant spider web, and we fixing to get all tangled up in the web and Miss Lucretia gonna be the spider waiting to pounce on us.”

“You scaring me, Poudlum.”

“Scaring myself,” he said. “And on top of that I’m about to starve to death. All that food back at our camp and we didn’t even think to bring a biscuit.”

It felt good to get up off the ground, and as we stood up and gazed down the dim trail, one of the goats bleated again, causing us to jump with fright.

“We stay out here much longer I’m gonna have to milk one of the goats,” Poudlum said.

“Could you do that?” I asked.

“If I had to I reckon I could. It would be just like milking a cow probably, ’cept a little bitty one.

“That billy goat would probably butt us,” I said.

“You could hold him off with one of our spears while I done the milking.”

“What would we put the milk in?”

Poudlum thought for a minute before he came up with the solution. “I could pour what’s left of the water in my canteen into yours, and milk that goat into my empty one.”

Just as I realized we were so hungry we were seriously thinking about milking a goat in the dark, this wonderful and tantalizing smell came wafting up the forest trail. It took me by surprise and almost made my knees buckle. I heard Poudlum gasp, and I knew it wasn’t my imagination caused by hunger.

It was the smell of roasted meat and gravy, and it smelled like there might be some cornbread, too.

I don’t know at what point our stomachs took over our brains, but that’s exactly what happened. We dropped our spears and began stumbling down the path toward the source of the scents. The smell was like the Pied Piper, and we were the rats following it right to our slaughter. The farther we went the more enticing it became, and soon there was a light leading us to our destiny and destruction.

We seemed to be in a trance, and when we saw the light coming from the open door of the cabin, it served as our beacon to safety, comfort and food.

There was no one on the porch, and when we peeked inside the open door, we didn’t see anyone in there either. What we did see was a kerosene lamp lighting a table laid with what we sought. The sight and the smell of it bound us to that table with the steaming plates on it as surely as if we were a part of the table itself.

We didn’t say anything or even look at each other. Mesmerized, we stepped to the table and pulled out the stools in front of the plates of heaped food and proceeded to eat as happily as we would have if we had been at our own homes.

Little wisps of steam were still rising up off the goat stew, and the cornbread had a brown, crunchy-looking crust on it, which I knew would make a good scoop to sop up the gravy with. I had eaten mine and Poudlum’s mommas’ stew, and remembered them both tasting mighty fine, but as I chewed on my first bite, my taste buds told me this stew was from another league of cooking.

Plus, there was something, some unknown spice or herb I didn’t recognize, that lent it a woody flavor I had never tasted before.

The more I ate the heavier my head got, and by the time I had cleaned the plate, I glanced over at Poudlum and was shocked to see he had pushed his empty plate aside, and his head was resting on the table, with his eyes closed.

At that same moment, my own eyes began to blink involuntarily, and it seemed as if the weight of the world was on my eyelids, pressing them down to what I knew would be total blackness.

I willed myself to stand up, but whatever had a hold of me was much stronger than my will, and it was all I could do to push my plate aside so my face wouldn’t land in it. The last thing I heard was the clinking sound of my glass of goat milk as it overturned and hit my plate. The last thing I saw was the milk from the overturned glass. The little stream of spilled milk ran across the table and disappeared over the edge, along with my consciousness.

I came back to semi-reality several times, only faintly, and then I would sink back into nothingness. But I kept fighting, and the next time I woke up, I refused to sink back. I pinched myself, wiggled my toes, clenched and unclenched my fists, trying to get my blood flowing.

After realizing I was finally over the hump and would remain conscious, I turned my head to my left and saw Poudlum blinking his eyes.

“She put something in that goat stew,” he said in slurred words.

“Yeah, I could taste it,” I told him. “Let’s try to wake up.”

“I’m trying,” he murmured.

Looking around, I saw we were on the floor and the table where we had eaten the sleep-inducing goat stew was next to us.

“Let’s try to get up,” I said.

“Ain’t no use,” Poudlum responded.

“Why not?”

“She got us chained.”

I attempted to lift my feet and felt some kind of weight on them. When I looked down through blurred vision, I saw something rusty-looking on my ankle. Glancing over, I saw the same thing on Poudlum.

“Hey, Poudlum, what’s that on our feet?”

“They on our ankles. They manacles, like they used to put on slaves sometimes. I’ve heard tell of ’em, but I never seen ’em before.”

Still groggy, I asked, “How did they get there?”

“How you think? The voodoo queen put ’em on us.”

“We got to get out of here,” I said. But when I attempted to move I heard the rattle of heavy chains.

“We can’t, not in the shape we in,” Poudlum said. “Best to just rest till this stuff wears off.”

“What if she gives us some more? We may never get away from here?”

“Don’t eat or drink nothing,” he said. “Try to sleep. I got a plan.”

I closed my eyes and drifted off into nothingness again.

When I woke up again, my head was clear enough to know it was Thursday morning. What woke me up was a grinding sound real close to me. I was stiff and sore from sleeping on the hard floor, but I managed to turn toward the sound and saw it was coming from Poudlum’s broken hacksaw blade, which he was using to cut through a link of the chain attached to the shackle around his ankle. I noticed then that the other end of the chain was bolted to the floor with only about two feet of slack in it.

“Hey, Poudlum,” I said as I slid up into a sitting position and saw he had already cut through one side of a link of chain. He was halfway to his freedom.

“Hey, yourself,” he said. “I need you to get up and stand on this chain so it’ll quit wiggling around on me. Soon as I get through this link, I’ll cut you loose. These chains are old and rusty, and it ain’t too hard to cut through ’em.”

As I struggled to get up, I suddenly caught the smell of fresh-baked biscuits. My nose led my eyes to a big plate of them sitting within reach on the floor at our feet. There was another plate beside it with a Mason jar of blackberry jam and a spoon on it.

Poudlum followed my eyes and said, “It was all here when I woke up. Don’t touch it or you’ll probably be back in the same shape as we was last night.”

“What you think we ought to do when we get loose?”

“I think we ought to hightail it out of here and get back to Mister Autrey’s house. Him and Mister Curvin will know what to do.”

“But what about our dogs and our rifles?”

“We got to let ’em go for right now and go get some help. We done bit off more than we can chew.”

Poudlum was right, I surmised, and I stood up and put my foot on the chain to steady it so he could finish cutting it. But it was not to be, because at that moment the door burst open and a wild woman suddenly appeared before us.