“So do I,” said Cobbett. “But you mentioned certain plants in that mixture.”
“Well, for the most part there were smashed-up seeds of viper’s bugloss and some juice of campion, what the country folks call rattlesnake plant.”
Both of those growths had snake names to them, reflected Cobbett. “I think you might have mentioned to me why you wanted these books,” he said.
“Why mention it?” groaned Lamar, adjusting his spectacles. “You wouldn’t have believed me then. Anyway, I don’t see how this extra information will help. It doesn’t do more than prove things, more or less. Well, I’ve got errands to do.”
He walked out to the dock. Cobbett followed him.
“I’m paddling across and going down the trail to meet old Snave Dalbom,” Lamar announced. “This is his day to drive down to the county seat to wag back a weeks supplies. He lets me go with him to do my shopping.”
He got into the boat and began to cast off.
“Let me paddle you over,” offered Cobbett, but Lamar shook his head violently.
“I’ll paddle myself over and tie up the boat yonder,” he declared. “I’m not a-going to have you out on this lake, maybe getting yourself yanked overboard and down there where they can’t drag for you, like those three others who never came up.”
“How do you know I won’t go swimming?” Cobbett teased him.
“Because I don’t reckon your mother raised any such fool. Listen, just sit around here and take it easy. Snave and I will probably get a bite in town, so fix your own noon dinner and look for me back sometime before sundown. There’s some pretty good canned stuff in the house—help yourself. And maybe you can read the whole tariff on the Dakwa, figure out something to help us. But I’m leaving you here so you’ll stay here.”
He shoved out from the dock and paddled for the shore opposite.
Cobbett strolled back to the cabin, and around it. Clumps of cedar brush stood at the corner, and locusts hung above the old tin roof. The island itself was perhaps an acre in extent, with cleared ground behind the cabin. A well had been dug there. Lamar’s well-kept garden showed two rows of bright green cornstalks, the tops of potatoes and tomatoes and onions. Cobbett inspected the corn. At noon he might pick a couple of ears and boil them to eat with butter and salt and pepper. On the far side of the garden was the shore of the island, dropping abruptly to the water. Kneeling, Cobbett peered. He could see that the bottom was far down there, a depth of many feet. Below the clear surface he saw a shadowy patch, a drowned tree that once had grown there, that had been overwhelmed by the lake.
That crooning music, or the sense of it, seemed to hang over the gentle ripples.
He returned to the cabin and sat down with Mooney’s book. The index gave him several page references to the Dakwa and he looked them up, one by one. The Dakwa had been reported where the creek called Toco, and before that called the Dakwai, flowed into the Little Tennessee River. Again, it was supposed to lurk in a low-churned stretch of the French Broad River, six miles upstream from Hot Springs. There were legends. A hunter, said one, had been swallowed whole by a Dakwa and had fought his way out to safety, but his hair had been scalded from his head. Mooney’s notes referred to Jonah in the Bible, to the swallowing of an Ojibwa hero named Mawabosho. That reminded Cobbett of Longfellow’s poem, where the King of Fishes had swallowed Hiawatha.
But Hiawatha had escaped, and Jonah and Mawabosho had escaped. The devouring monster of the deep, whatever it might be, was not inescapable.
Again he studied the index. He could not find any references to the plants Lamar had mentioned, but there was a section called “Plant Lore.” He read it carefully:
. . . the cedar is held sacred above all other trees . . . the small green twigs are thrown upon the fire in certain ceremonies . . . as it is believed that the anisgina or malevolent ghosts cannot endure the smell . . .
Below that, a printed name jumped to his eye:
. . . the white seeds of the viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgara) were formerly used in many important ceremonies . . .
And, a paragraph or so beyond:
The campion (silene stellata) . . . the juice is held to be a sovereign remedy for snake bites . . .
He shut up the book with a snap and began to take off his clothes.
He searched a pair of bathing trunks out of his pack and put them on. Next, he explored Lamar’s tool chest. Among the things at the bottom he found a great cross-hilted hunting knife and drew it from its riveted sheath. The blade was fully a foot long, whetted sharp on both edges. Then he went out to the woodpile and chose a stafflike length of hickory, about five feet in length. There was plenty of fishing line in the cabin, and he lashed the knife to the end of the pole like a spearhead. From the shelf he took the bottle of ointment that had healed him so well and rubbed palmsful on himself from head to foot. Remembering the Indian warrior who had been swallowed and came out bald, he lathered the mixture into his dark, shaggy hair. He smeared more on the blade and the pole. When he was done, the bottle was two-thirds empty.
Finally he walked out with his makeshift spear. He paused at the corner of the cabin, gazing at what grew there.
Those cedar bushes. The anisgina or malevolent ghosts cannot endure the smell, Mooney had written, and Mooney, the scholarly friend of the Cherokees, must have known. Cobbett found a match and gathered a sheaf of dry twigs to make a fire. Then he plucked bunches of the dark green cedar leaves and heaped them on top of the blaze. Up rose a dull, vapory smoke. He stood in it, eyes and nose tingling from the fumes, until the fire burned down and the smoke thinned away.
Spear in hand, he paced around the cabin and past the garden and to the place where the margin shelved steeply down into the lake.
He gazed at the sunken tree, then across the lake. No motion there. He looked again at the tree. He could see enough of it to remember it, from times before Long Soak was dammed up. It was a squat oak, thick-stemmed, with sprawling roots driven in among rocks, twenty feet below him.
Yet again he looked out over the water. Still no sign upon it. He began to hum the tune he had heard before, the tune Lamar had forbidden him to pick on the banjo.
Humming, he heard the song outside himself, faint as a song in a dream. It made his skin creep.
From the deep shadowy bottom something came floating upward, straight toward where he knelt.
A woman, thought Cobbett at once, certainly a woman, certainly what the myth in Skinner’s book said, not terrible at all. He saw her streaming banner of dark hair, saw her round, lithe arms, her oval, wide-eyed face, and her plump breasts, her skin as smooth and as richly brown as some tropical fruit. Her eyes sought him, her red lips moved as though they sang. Closer she came. Her head with its soaking hair broke clear of the water. Her hand reached to him, both her hands. Those beautiful arms spread wide for him.
He felt light-headed. He almost leaned within the reach of the arms when she drew back and away, still on the surface. His homemade spear had drooped between them. Her short, straight nose twitched as though she would sneeze.
A moment, and then back she came, to the very brink. And changed suddenly. Her eyes spread into shadowed caverns, her mouth opened to show stockades of long, stale teeth. Her arms, round and lithe no longer, drove a taloned clutch at him.
He thrust with the spear, and again she slid swiftly back and away. Off balance, Cobbett fell floundering into the water.