On The Marsh

Molly doesn’t paddle to well. I learned at Boy Scout camp how to do it
right, and she can’t paddle to save her life. I’d tell her right now if I
could, but I can’t; we’re at least 2 miles from home or maybe three. The
tidal marsh is a beautiful place to spend the afternoon with water birds
soaring through the air and the tall grass swaying above your head.
I’ve never been out here past sun down though. I got real close once when I met
Marty late after dinner. He had found an old National Geographic Magazine
with a lot of pictures of naked Amazon women in it and he wanted to show
me some place where no one could catch us. He was the ministers son so if
anybody caught wind of this he’d probably end up getting quite a whipping
from his dad , so we took the boat out to look at it on the little spit of
sound that was just beyond my back door. It was the first time I had ever
seen a bare-chested woman and it was oddly enthralling. I couldn’t imagine
why anybody had wasted their time to write words. Just the sight alone was
worth the price of the magazine. It was all fun until my mother started
screaming at me from the back porch to get my ‘sorry ass’ back to the
house before she ‘beat the shit out’ of me. Marty winced. I hated when she
talked like that. We paddled quickly back to the house and Marty slipped
out towards his place through the gardenia hedge. I got a terrible
whipping that night and I cried in my room until the tears coated my
cheeks with a salty crust.
If I made Molly so mad she wouldn’t paddle, we’d never get home before dark and I’d get a whipping again that I wouldn’t soon forget. I better not call her out on it right now.
“Molly, why don’t we pull over there for a minute, you must be tired by
now!” I spotted a nice sliver of sand where we could get out for a while.

“O.K., I’m starting to get tired any way.” She always whines. I hate it.

As soon as our canoe was pulled onto the little beach, I laid down in the
bottom of the boat to look up at the sky and watch the clouds go by.
Molly did the same thing. She was a tom boy and most of the other girls
hated her. I liked it because when all my friends where called home, I
still had her around.

I pulled a piece of cordgrass and broke off the dirty end and put it in
my mouth to chew on for a while. I refocused on the sky. As the sun set,
it began to paint them red, orange and yellow. It looked as if the world
had been bombed to pieces. The soft gentle clouds that look like sheep by
day, look evil and hellish in the evening. I loved it. In my mind I
could create stories for hours about these clouds. “Mr. Eisenhower must
have been drunk and called Mr. Krushchev on the phone and called his wife
a floozy” I thought to my self. It was possible. Mr. Eisenhower probably
likes to have a few and when you drink anything can happen. Look at
Johnny Parker’s Mom who shot his dad dead when she came home drunk to
find her husband naked in bed with another woman. If Johnny’s mom can
shoot her dad, I’m sure Mr. Eisenhower can call up Mr. Krushchev drunk
and tell him his wife is a floozy. The neuclear attack I’m watching is
just Mr. Kruschev’s retaliation. You never call a man’s wife a floozy,
especially a Russian man.
‘Bobby, Can we go home yet? It’s getting late and I don’t want mama to
yell at us.’ She started in with the whining again, interrupting my
doomsday daydream.
‘It’s not that late.’ I call back to her from the opposite side of the
boat. ‘Besides, she’s playing bridge over at Aunt Martha’s and she won’t
be home late anyways.’ I had an answer for everything. I’m just smart
like that.
I decided it was time to create a diversion so that Molly would forget
where we were.
“Let’s look for pirate treasure!” I exclaimed. A brilliant idea if I ever
had one. “Blackbeard used to come around here and I’m sure one of his
goons must have dropped at least a golden coin around here. I high
tailed it for the tall cordgrass.
“Bobby, DON’T go in there, there’s snakes that could kill you with out
thinking’ twice about it!” She sounded like Dad now.
“Don’t be ridiculous, c’mon before we loose the sun!” Full force I ran
into the grass towards what looked like the edge of the marsh. There were
tall trees there and the ground wasn’t as sloppy. I didn’t need to turn
around to see if Molly was coming, I could hear her mucking through the
mud behind me.
It was a cool day so we both where wearing jeans and thank God for that,
or else our legs would have been scratched to smithereens. It was fun
running through the grass. Every now and then I’d stumble on a bit of
uneven ground and a couple times Molly fell over. I turned around and
looked at Molly.
“You look like you’ve shit in your hands!” I was hysterical laughing. If
I didn’t know that she’d been running through the mud, I would have
thought she pulled the most sloppy turd from her butt and smooshed it
between her fingers.
“Don’t cuss like that. I’ll tell Daddy.” Again with the whining. This
time she had something over me. Dad hated swearwords (even though Mom
used them all the time) and he’d give it to my on the can if he knew I
had said the word shit.
“Don’t be silly, when we find our first couple of doubloons you’ll forget
all about the mud on you. We’ll be so rich, we can buy a pirate ship!”

I loved pirates and Molly did too. The prospect of discovering a great
trove of treasury some dirty nasty pirate buried was exciting to us both.
We ran and we ran until we both wheezed and gasped at the thick stinky
air. We were well beyond the edge of the marsh and onto dry land now.
Nobody in sight and no signs that anybody had been here in a long time.
Just the spot for treasure hunting. You never did find good loot in a
place that people where always pawing at.
There was still enough of the sun in the sky and I figured we had at
least another hour or so before it would be dark so we went on further
into the wooded area. We kept our eyes wide open; we didn’t want to miss
any clues at all. We kept running until we came to another marshy area
like the one we came from.
“Are we going to go in there?” Molly asked kind of excitedly. She was in
the thick of it now. The idea of pirate treasure excited her!
“Na, we must be on an Island Mol. Just the place a pirate would keep his
loot”. I tried to sound as scientific and smart as possible. “Lets go
back into the thicker part of the woods where the trees are closer
together and the brush is higher.”
Back we went and we searched and we searched. Roaming around old Cypress
trees, we picked up dead braches to look under them. Nothing. No sign of
anything worth pursuing. We found an old rubber balloon that must have
been let go by some little kid. I laughed to my self when I thought of
him screaming as it soared up to heaven after he let it go. Now it washed
up on this island. I poked it with a stick and looked up into the sky.
“This mustn’t be the island where he put it.” It was silly to think he
would have put it here.
“Do you smell that?” Molly was taking in great snorts of air through her
piggy nose.
“Smell what?” I asked
“It smells like burning. Like smoldering wet wood burning” She stated
snorting in a few more cups of air.
“I sort of do now that you say it sis.” She was right, there was a faint
burning smell. I’d hate to think that the island was on fire and that we
may be stuck here to meet our fiery deaths. Or perhaps my nuclear
doomsday idea wasn’t so far fetched after all.
“Lets see if we can find where it’s coming from!” I started to take in
whole lungfuls of air to try to find the spot where the smell was coming
from. It was rich and earthy and I loved it. We wandered a bit more. The
smell was getting stronger. The sun was slipping down the sky and it was
slowly getting darker out, but I kept roaming towards the smell. Molly
must have been interested too; she wasn’t moaning.
We had wandered around the little place for more then a half hour and our
legs were about to give out from all the pits we kept stepping in. All of
a sudden I could see smoke curling up through the lacy canopy the pine
trees made against the sky.
“Look!” Molly shouted low in her voice.
“It looks like a camp fire!” I whispered back to her.
Something mysterious about this little fire made us both whisper, as if
someone was going to hear us. We inched in close and soon enough, we were
not more then a dozen yards from a small but sound looking little fire.
“Did you see something move Bobby? Did you see it!” She was getting more
and more excited by the second.
“No, are you sure it wasn’t a critter?” I was sure that if something was
really there, I would have seen it first!
“There it goes again.” She was right, next to the fire was a balled up
mess of a person hunched under a couple of old burlap sacks. Behind him
was a shelter of sorts made from broken branches and garbage. It blended
into the woods almost perfectly.
“Lets get closer.” Molly said, her eyes were lit like a jack-o-lantern.
We crept up until we could touch the man with an extend arm. He was
surely, and he had a great white beard that covered his face.
“It’s a hermit” I mouthed to Molly who was getting so close to the man
that she could almost kiss him on the cheek. I walked over to look into
the shelter he had made. A lot of garbage was in there. He must have
picked the garbage and used what he could find to put in his home. An old
tire must have served as a seat, an old tin Coca-Cola sign was laid
across another tire. It must have been his table. How could somebody live
like this. Molly was interested to, she seem to be almost to the point of
tears as she looked at the poor old man hunched beneath the sacks. It
was scary as hell to be so close to a strange and a strange who ‘didn’t
look savory’ to put it in Grampa’s own words. What did he eat? What did
he do all day? Could he read? Had he ever been in a car. A million
questions went through my mind like racecars. I poked some of his things
with a stick, an old tin can, a bag that was filled with a bunch of
useless junk. Molly just stood there and stared at him pitifully. I
jingled the bag and a whole mess of cans must have banged each other. The
noise was deafening. The old hermit jerked up and his face smacked
against Molly’s. She let out a loud shriek and he grabbed her pony tail
and cupped his dirty grimy hands over her plump mouth.
In a moment of panic I picked up a large rock that sat around the fire
pit. “Don’t eat my sister!” I screamed at the old man. He turned to me
and as he did I launched the rock at his wind eaten face. “Don’t you dare
eat her!” I was screaming at him like I’ve never screamed before. As the
words echoed through the marsh, the rock hit him square between the eyes
and a stream of blood dribbled down his face and was sopped up by his
dirty beard. Molly ran towards me with tears in her eyes. She was
frightened to death and her heart was beating like a humming bird.
“Don’t you eat her you freak!” I was still screaming. I had never been so
scared in all my life and I couldn’t imagine how Molly felt. I put my arm
around her and she pushed it away in anger and picked up another rock.
She walked over to him where he laid on the ground and stared into his
eyes and threw the rock down at his poor old face with all her might
“NO!” I screamed at her, but the damage was done. The top part of his
face was all caved in and bloody and she burst into tears. I picked up a
stick near by and went to poke him to see if by some chance he was ok.
She had done a good job on the poor hermit. As I poked his chest, the
last breaths of life filled his lungs and in another moment, his chest
stayed motionless. The tears began to well up in my eyes. We had killed a
man that night. The minister told us that murderers go straight to hell
and tonight Molly and I had committed one of the greatest sins of all.
We killed this poor old hobo with no family or friends. We killed this
God Damned nasty creature. His blood was on our hands and we could never
for get it.
“Bobby, what do we do?” She was balling now. Like she was at a funeral.
Like she balled when Grandma died. We didn’t even know this man and she
was only crying because she killed him.
“Shut up you stupid BITCH!” I couldn’t believe I spoke to her like that.
I heard my friend Ralph’s Dad call his mom that in a fit of rage and then
hit her. I couldn’t hit Molly though. She was to sweet. I took her hand
and we ran away from the scene. Could we run so fast as to leave behind
that horrid memory? No, the sadness that filled the Hermits eyes as he
clung to life were burned into our brains like brands on cattle.
We got back to the little spit of beach in no time to where the whole
evening began. Where I had thought about clouds, about treasure, and about
pirates. Now my mind was littered with murder and sin. We looked
frantically for the boat but it was no where in sight. I mustn’t have
pulled it in all the way. “God Damn it!” If I was going to hell now , a
little swearing couldn’t hurt.
“We’ve got to run back through the marsh!” I screamed at Molly. She was
still whimpering and she did nothing but follow my every command.
We ran and we ran until we thought we couldn’t run anymore. We ran for
what seemed hours. Through the much and the water. We were drenched head
to toe and covered with mud. In a half hours time where were back to our
property line. Our house loomed over us like a temple that was to sacred
to enter. As we ran up the steps to the porch, I glanced back to where
the boat was supposed to be put after we were done with it. The spot was
naked and tomorrow when Mama and Dad looked out the window in the kitchen
they would see that it’s missing. Then I would have to explain to them
how we took it out to the marsh and ended up killing a man. A poor
defenseless hermit. The tears welled up in my eyes and I kicked off my
muddy shoes and peeled off the muddy clothes and ran up the stairs to my
room where I laid on my soft bed and cried. I assume Molly did the same,
I could hear a deep whimper out of her every few minutes. What had we
done? What had we done?
The next morning I awoke and I was drenched in bright morning sunlight.
Had this whole terror been a dream? Had my sister and I taken a mans
life? I couldn’t have, it was all a bad dream.
I wandered down stair to the kitchen where I hoped to see Moma in her
robe reading the paper. She wasn’t there. Her mug was in the sink and the
paper was in the garbage bin. I glanced at the clock and it was 10:30. I
had slept in a lot. The back porch door was open and a flash of horror
washed over me. She had seen the boat was missing. I ran to the door
expecting to see her cursing over the naked spot where the boat was
supposed to lay. To my amazement it was still there. The stupid red canoe
was upside down over the dead patch of grass where it was supposed to be.
It was a dream and happiness gushed into my soul. It had been a dream. A
terrible dream. A nightmare. I walked down the steps to where I could see
Mama bending over a basket of wet laundry. She was hanging it to dry. The
gentle coastal breeze blew through her thin hair and it was beautiful.
“Good morning mama!” I called to her and smiled!
“Good morning precious!” She called back and waved. She pulled the hair
back behind her ear.

“Are you kids alright? How did Molly get all cut up?” She sounded very
concerned.
“We where in the canoe on the marsh. Nothing happened.” I was sure this
was the truth. Nothing had happened.
“Then how did all these blood stains get all over Mollys pants?” She was
very persistent. “She must have been cut really bad.”
The horror of it all came back to me. There had been no dream, no bad
nightmare. It was all as real as real could be. The blood wasn’t Molly’s.
We hadn’t just gone canoing. We accidentally killed a poor defenseless
man last night. We woke him up and threw rocks at him until he left this
Earth. Once again the great sadness washed over me like hot lava and it
didn’t leave me for a long while. How did the boat get back to the house?
We walked through the marsh. The muddy clothes I was in was proof.
“Marty’s dad found the boat floating in a cove behind there house and
brought it over this morning. How did you lose the boat. Thank God that
blessed man found it for you. I’d give you a spankin’ but whats the use.“
She shook out a pair of bloomers and pinned it to the long long. Next to
my sisters bloodied pants. Somehow, my tracks where covered. Be it God or
Luck, my parents wouldn’t have to find out unless we told them. My sister
and I were able to keep the secret for many years but we still mourn that
man to this day.