Days of Uncle Ernest - Chesapeake City and the World – Billy, Chapter 5

Days of Uncle Ernest - Chesapeake City and the World – Billy, Chapter 5

When Uncle Ernest slid off the swing with a grunt, I thought about the strange things I had found a couple of days earlier in the deep woods behind our farm. When I was a young kid, Nina, I had a great time playing in the small streams that meandered through those woods. The streams were terrific; most were narrow enough to jump over, although some areas were damned up into small ponds, which made fine living areas for frogs, turtles, skimmer spiders, and crayfish.

If you dug deeply enough into the perfectly round holes in the mud, you’d be sure to find a nice fat crayfish. Sometimes I would play war on the banks and along the streams with my friend, Junior. We would make bows out of small tree limbs and arrows out of stiff reeds from the swamp. We’d make quite a ruckus in those woods as we shouted, shot at each other, and claimed victory with loud cries of war.

Most of the time though, Nina, I would play alone in those streams under the vast canopy of ancient oaks, poplars, hickories, and beeches—whose leaves covered the banks with a thick, spongy carpet. Playing about, I’d be sure to run my face directly into a nasty spider web and have to back away and pull the threads out of my eyes, nose, and mouth. The spiders, mosquitoes, and other bugs were minor concerns though, because I loved the solitude and variety of those woods.

Better than anything else, Nina, I loved to catch frogs down there. I’d walk up to the stream and hear a sudden plop, and knew that I’d scared one from the bank or shore line. I’d watch the circle widen where he had landed and know that he’d come up somewhere on the other side. And, sure enough, after a while when he ran out of air, if I looked closely, I’d see those frog eyes and that frog nose emerge just where the water met the shore.

Then, if I was quiet enough and quick enough, I could catch him, play with him for a while, and then let him leap off my palm back into the stream. Once in a while I’d catch several large enough so that we could have frogs’ legs for supper. Have you ever seen them cooked, Nina? Well, if you ever do, be ready, because sometimes they’ll jump right at you out of the frying pan.

So, Nina, I know you're wondering what the strange things were that I found in those woods. Let me take you back to that long, lost day so many, many years ago. As I walked farther along into the deep woods, following the stream, I came upon a dammed area that had formed a fairly deep pond of about twenty feet in diameter. At one side of the pond I saw a strange sight. Several big brown barrels were lined up next to a series of circling, convoluted copper tubing. Under a vat of bubbling, foul-smelling liquid was a fire with smoke curling up through the beeches.

Soon, for some reason, I got the eerie feeling that someone was nearby. Then it happened, Nina. I heard a metallic “click” coming from behind the spreading, gray trunk of a beech. At the same time I saw the black barrel of a shotgun sticking out at a forty-five degree angle from behind the beech. Then I heard his gruff voice: “You’d best high-tail it out of here, boy. Git!” Instantly, when the voice stopped, the gun went off: “Ba-looom!”

Believe me, Nina, I got out of there in a hurry. As I ran, frantically, the shotgun pellets fell from the sky, hitting the leaves all around me like hail. Later, when I told Pop about it, he said, “Awww, you just stay away from there, Bobby; it’s just old Dave Herman’s boy, Herbert. He’s that hermit who lives in the woods across from McNatt’s farm; that’s his still you ran into.”

[To be continued Tuesday, 9/4/2012]