Increasingly, Raisin was on the verge of open rebellion. He had become a target of attack at the Lab's Self-Criticism sessions. He was denounced by the Orderlies for various offenses and spent hours with the Psychologist Physician. Three times he was punished for disobedience, forced to spend the night hungry and alone locked inside "the Box," an old chicken shed at the edge of forty-foot pines; the sounds of the animals foraging in the darkness around him frightened him, and in the morning he was welcomed warmly back into the group and given a large breakfast. For days afterward he behaved himself, but it didn't last.
The only saving grace was that Skyler and Raisin and many of the other Jimminies had turned fifteen, and so their schooling stopped and instead they took on chores. Skyler was a goatherd. Every morning he rounded up a band of the scrawny animals from the barnyard, shepherded them to distant pastures and brought them back in the late afternoon when the sun was low in the sky. This brought him a taste of freedom.
Raisin was given the worst chores, but one of them had a hidden blessing. Once a week he was sent to collect honey from beehives in the woods — a job few others were brave enough to do — and these turned into occasions for celebration. He would abandon his honey jars and meet up with Skyler. Away from the Lab together, they could do whatever they wanted.
Sometimes when the two of them were alone in the woods, Raisin would have a seizure, and Skyler learned to care for him. As he lay thrashing about on the ground, Skyler would hold a stick in his mouth so that he wouldn't swallow his tongue. Afterward, Skyler would cradle his head and murmur gentle phrases to him as he came back to consciousness, surfacing from some dark depths, blank-minded and confused. They, of course, kept the fits a secret.
Way up in the northern forest, Skyler discovered a hidden meadow reached through a narrow passage in a ravine. It was hemmed in with boulders and trees, and, ringing it around with branches and underbrush, he turned it into a makeshift corral for the goats. By confining them inside, he was able to roam free. From then on, when he met with Raisin, their horizons expanded. For a few watchful hours at a time, they had the run of the wild area to the north. They explored the swamps and dense woods, running along the paths made by wild boar and deer. They gamboled in the fields and climbed trees so tall that they could see the whitecaps of the ocean. That such dangerous activities were proscribed made them that much more delicious.
On one particular spring day, when the outlying blanket of cordgrass waved in the ocean breeze and the loblolly pine smelled fresh of sap, something extraordinary happened to them.
With the goats securely tucked away in their enclosure and the honey jars already full, they were lying upon their backs in a field, when Raisin, a piece of straw sticking from his mouth like a cigarette, turned to Skyler and suddenly announced that he wanted to explore the western shore.
"But that's where the Gullah are," protested Skyler.
"That's the whole damn point," he replied, using the one profane word he had picked up from TV.
And before Skyler could think of an objection, Raisin was on his feet, off and running. Skyler kept up and followed, but he was at pains to keep up, running as fast as he could. They tore along a path toward the shore and then through a patch of swampland, sending the water splashing around them. Raisin lengthened his lead. Skyler saw his back receding ahead of him, zigzagging between the trees until he disappeared altogether. Then suddenly Skyler heard a sharp cry, followed by a long moan. He recognized it instantly — the onset of a seizure. By the time he caught up, Raisin was writhing on his back, his limbs jerking in spasms and his eyes turned up in the sockets.
Quickly, Skyler covered him with his own body and placed a stick between his teeth. He thrust his head to one side and held on with all his might, trying to deaden his weight to keep Raisin close to the ground, riding out the seizure like a wrestler pinning an opponent. Gradually, he felt the spasms subside and the body beneath him turn limp. But as he rolled off, something lashed his arm, thin and strong as a whip. For an instant, he imagined Raisin had sprouted a tail. Then he saw what it was, and as he leapt up and turned the body to one side, the snake was hanging there, its fangs embedded in the back of Raisin's leg. He got a branch and beat it until finally it released its hold and curled up. He smashed the head until it stopped moving and then ran back to Raisin.
"Don't move him, child!"
The command came over his left shoulder. He obeyed it instantly without even thinking about it. He was pushed aside, and a pair of coal black hands ripped Raisin's pants open, exposing a red welt and two tiny blackblue holes in the milky flesh. A knife came out, moving quickly to make four slits in a crosshatch. The elderly man with gray hair bent down, pursing his lips and sucking the wound with a slurping sound. He turned and spat out venom and sucked some more, and soon he was extracting mouthfuls of blood and expelling them upon the leaves of a berry bush. Raisin began to stir.
"Hold him still," the man directed, and Skyler did as he was told. The old man made deeper cuts and turned Raisin on his side so that he bled into the ground.
"Don't pay to take no chances," he said. "That'd be no ordinary snake. That's a water moccasin."
Soon, Raisin was awake, and Skyler was ordered to carry him. He did, and followed the large elderly man, who was dressed in a bulky blue sweatshirt and wide-bottomed blue pants. They went down the path until finally they came to a clearing and he could smell the mudflats. Ahead was a grove of cypress, and on the other side, a shack no bigger than a garage, made of shingles painted blue. As he carried Raisin inside, he looked to his left and saw an expanse of water coming right up to the grassy bank. There was an old wooden dock, and tied to it — Skyler's heart skipped a beat when he saw it — was a boat with an outboard motor.
"Put him down," the man said, gesturing to a sagging iron-frame bed covered with a quilt. Skyler was dying to ask all kinds of questions — he had never been inside such a place, with so many new and intriguing objects — but he kept silent as the old man bound up Skyler's wound and even sewed together his pants leg.
"No reason to go around talkin' about this," he said. "Those people you live with, they don't take to your talkin' to strangers. You go tellin' anyone, and you're going to have to deal with me — and I got my ways."
The man cast a hard glance at Skyler, who was sitting quietly in an overstuffed easy chair, and at that point the boy suddenly recognized him — one of the fishermen who brought their catch to the kitchen window of the Big House.
"We won't, I promise," he said.
"Damned right — we won't."
Raisin suddenly sat up in the bed, surprising both of them.
The old man took Skyler over to a window and pointed at the backyard, a jumble of long weeds and engine parts. To the rear was a tupelo maple, and from its branches hung more than a dozen round, shiny objects — hubcaps, Skyler later realized. They turned, glistening in the sunlight.
"I have my ways," said the old man. "You ever heard of juju?"
Skyler shook his head.
"Magic. You talk about this and it'll be the last talkin' you do. You'll just open your mouth and nothin' will come out."
Raisin, intrigued, asked his name.
"I don't go tellin' my name till I know the other 'ns."
They introduced themselves, awkwardly. They had never done that before.
"I'm Kuta."
"How come you're called that?" asked Raisin.
"How come you're called Raisin?"
"I don't know. It's just a nickname."
"Mine's more than a nickname. It's a story."