Alligator Bayou - Donna Jo Napoli [20]
“Wixsa. Every Tunica man knows how to joke, too.”
Joseph and Rosario would like each other.
We pass the afternoon making bowls. Joseph hums, but Frank Raymond talks a blue streak. He explains the clay came from the bottom of a stream. When we add handfuls of grit, he explains it’s crushed shells. Clams and mussels.
We press the heels of our hands into the clay, then rock it down and press again. That removes the air bubbles so that the clay won’t explode in the fire. We pinch the clay to shape it, pinch and smooth.
Cracks form in my bowl. Joseph gets a wooden bowl from his shack. He lines it with a fine net, sets my bowl in it, and goes back to working his own. I stare. Then I get it. I press my clay into the wooden bowl. The outer bowl gives the inner one shape. Now it’s easy to smooth out the cracks.
We wet our bowls and run the blunt, fat-lipped edge of a clam shell over the surface to smooth even more. Joseph eases my clay bowl out of the wooden one. I peel off the net. It leaves a nice crisscross design.
Then we decorate our bowls, using bits of antler to draw with. Frank Raymond hums with Joseph.
I add pear-shaped loops inside the diamonds of my crisscrosses. The loops look like pawpaw fruit. And I hum, too—that song Patricia taught me about picking up paw-paws.
Joseph sets the bowls on a wooden tray with a wet cloth draped on top.
“That’s so they can dry slowly,” says Frank Raymond. “Then he’ll bake them in a pit fire.”
I watch Frank Raymond and Joseph, and I understand why they’re friends. I understand why someone would go someplace to spend his last days making bowls.
Joseph didn’t come here to die, after all. He came to live. In beauty.
nine
Monday night the boys are waiting for us at the end of South Street.
“What’d you tell him?” asks Charles. “The tall one. Frank.”
He means Francesco. But I like it that he’s made the name sound American. I wish he’d do that to mine and not call me “Mr. Calo-whatever.” “I asked if we could go exploring.”
“Didn’t tell him it was a ’gator hunt?”
I shake my head.
Charles smiles in approval.
“That hairy bear?” says Rock. “He let you go that easy?”
“He belong in Alligator Bayou with them other bears,” says Ben.
The skin on my scalp tightens. “The bayou has bears?”
“You scared?” Charles slaps my shoulder lightly. “Don’t waste your energy. Bears hide. You need a bloodhound to hunt them down, like what the sheriff have for tracking criminals. We ain’t hardly never lucky enough to see them.”
“What y’all want to worry about…well.” Ben turns his back for a second and takes something from his pocket. Then he swirls around and goes, “Ahhh!” His mouth is open wide and full of cotton.
I stare.
Ben takes the cotton out of his mouth and laughs as though he’s the most hilarious person in the world.
“Cottonmouth snakes,” says Charles. “In the swamps. By the time you see them, you already bit. So you might as well not even look.”
“Snakes?” I say weakly.
“Can’t swing a cat without hitting one,” says Charles.
Rock gives a little shake of his shoulders. “I ain’t hardly afeared of nothing ’cept snakes.”
“But they better than snapping turtles,” says Ben. “A snake will at least kill you fast. But a giant turtle’ll take your foot off with a snap, then leave you to get eaten alive by whatever come along next.”
Cirone presses up beside me. “Are they pulling our leg?” he asks in Sicilian.
“They must be,” I say back in Sicilian. “Only crazy people would go into the swamps if it was that dangerous.” But my heart’s beating double time.
We walk. The boys keep joking, and I refuse to listen.
We pass a plantation. Rock points. “Them log cabins over there, see them? Slaves lived there before the War Between the States. Colored tenants live there now.” He bounces his finger in the air beyond them. “Kitchen house, barn, smokehouse, gristmill, ’nother barn, cotton house, cotton gin, overseer’s house, owner’s house, blacksmith’s shop. And the chapel.”
“Just about a complete village,” says Ben.
A few tenants of the rich owner are hoeing among the bushy green