It got along to about five o’clock, and Bony said we had better go home. He was always the first to want to go home. He told Swatty that Swatty would be late going for his cow if he didn’t start right away, but Swatty said he didn’t care if the old cow never got home. He said it wouldn’t hurt the old cow to wait a while, anyway. So we started to paddle around the eddy again, and that time we got almost too far out, I guess, and the end of the timber stuck out beyond the eddy into the swift water.
“Back her up! Quick!” Swatty yelled, and we both tried to back her with our board paddles, but it was too late. The swift water caught her on the side and swung her right out into the current. Gee, but she went! Right away she was half a block away from Bony and I began to cry, for there was no telling where she’d stop. You couldn’t expect her to stop this side of St. Louis or New Orleans. So I began to cry, and I stooped down and hung onto the timber with both arms. It was all I could think of to do. But Swatty let on he wasn’t scared at all. He tried to paddle toward shore, but there was so v much driftwood and stuff floating that he couldn’t do it.
“Aw, shut up! Don’t be a cry-baby!” he yelled at me. “This ain’t nothing. Grab your paddle, and we’ll paddle out to the Tow Head and we’ll be all right.”
The Tow Head is the big island in the river below town, but more to this side of the river than to the other side. It is shaped like a horseshoe, with the two ends down-stream. Me and Swatty knew it pretty well because sometimes we used to row down there. It was all trees except a strip of sand on each side, and in low water there used to be a sandbar below it. It looked like a good idea to get to the Tow Head if we could; but I was afraid to sit up so I just stayed the way I was. But Swatty paddled like a good fellow. I guess the current helped him some. In low water there are two channels, one on each side of the Tow Head, but when the river is on a rampage it don’t care anything about channels – it just goes. But it kind of bends below town and I guess that helped Swatty.
He kept yelling at me not to be a ‘fraid-cat and to paddle, but I didn’t dare. So he paddled, and pretty soon I saw he was going to hit the Tow Head all right. That made me feel better and I kind of raised up on my hands and stopped crying, but when I looked I was scared worse than ever. It looked as if the Tow Head was coming up-stream like a big packet at full tilt. It didn’t look as if we were floating down to it, but as if it was tearing up-stream toward us, and it was coming lickety-split. At its nose, where the water hit it, the river reared up in a big yellow wave, like the bow wave of a ship, and was cut into foam and spray where it hit the trees and then rushed away on either side like mad. So I saw Swatty had made a mistake in trying to land on the Tow Head.
There wasn’t really any Tow Head to land on. The river was way up in the branches of the trees, and I guess the water was ten feet deep all over the Tow Head, or deeper, and rushing through the trees like it was crazy. But we didn’t have time to think much about it. We just had time to be scared, and to see the old Tow Head come rushing and foaming at us, and then it sort of nabbed us, like a cat nabs a mouse. It was all a big swosh of water noises and a big swosh of tree branches being slashed by the water, and then me and Swatty was splashed all over, and the bridge timber banged into two trees and stuck. Swatty went off the timber like a stone out of a nigger-shooter, but I hung on. I’ve got a black and blue spot inside my leg yet, where it hit the edge of the timber. Right away the water began to surge over the timber like a giant pushing against me, and I saw I couldn’t hang on there very long, so I reached up and grabbed a branch of one of the trees and hoisted myself up and got up in the tree. And there was Swatty! He wasn’t in my tree, but he was in the tree next below mine.
“Garsh!” he said, and that was all he said right then. So I began to cry. It would make anybody cry to be there, up in a tree, with the whole Mississippi River rushing along under him, so near he could stick his toes down into it. It’s an awful thing to think about. You can sit in a tree and look at a creek run under you and you don’t care, but when the Mississippi is on a tear it is different. It’s the biggest and strongest thing in the world, and there was all of it rushing along right under us, and the tree sort of waving back and forth.
So I cried.
“Aw, shut up!” Swatty said. “What are you crying about?”
Well, I guess we were in a pretty bad fix – worse than we thought we were. No boat there ever was could get at us where we were. No boat could come at that Tow Head the way we did and last a minute, because it would smash against the trees. And even if anybody knew where we were they couldn’t get to us. Even if the strongest men in town tried to row a boat up-stream from below the Tow Head they couldn’t get to us, because they couldn’t row among the trees on it. So I cried.
“Shut up!” Swatty yelled at me. “Ain’t it bad enough without you bellering?”
So there we were.
When Bony saw us go out into the river he sat on his timber with his mouth open, and he couldn’t even holler – he was so scared – and then he just paddled for shore and jumped off his timber and ran. He didn’t know where he was running – he was just running away from there. He was scared stiff. When he come to, he was halfway home, and blubbering and panting, and then he sat down on a horse block and didn’t know what to do. He thought we were drowned, sure. So he thought the best thing to do would be to not say anything about it. He was afraid. First he thought he would go home and act as if he had been at school and just stayed out playing a while, and not do anything else about it and let folks find out anyway they could; and then he thought that Mrs. Schwartz would miss Swatty when it was time to fetch the cow, and that she would come over to his house to see if Swatty was there, and he didn’t know what else. So he thought he would go over to Swatty’s house first and sort of keep Mrs. Schwartz from doing anything like that. So he went. He forgot he was in his bare feet, or that he had ever had shoes and stockings.
When he got to Swatty’s house Mrs. Schwartz was on the front terrace in her calico dress and with a birch switch in her hand, looking for Swatty, because Swatty knew what time the cow ought to be fetched home. Bony went up to the steps.
“Do you want me to fetch the cow home, Mrs. Schwartz?” he asked.
“What for should you fetch the cow home?” said Mrs. Schwartz, as angry as could be.
“I thought maybe Swatty was late, and I didn’t want to keep you waiting,” he said.
“For why should you think he was late?” Mrs. Schwartz asked. She always talked in a funny way, because she was German.
“I thought maybe he was playing down at the river,” said Bony. “Lots of boys were playing down there to-day.”
“So!” said Mrs. Schwartz. “And he sends you home to get his cow, yes? He could get his own cows. I wait for him.”
So then Bony didn’t know what to say. He stood around. And after a while he said:
“Maybe he won’t come home to get the cows.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Schwartz. “Maybe he’s drowned,” said Bony. “Maybe him and Georgie went down to the river and – and – ”
So then he began to cry, and the first thing anybody knew he had me and Swatty drowned and our bodies floating down to St. Louis or New Orleans, and Mrs. Schwartz wringing her hands and hollering for Herb. So Herb come out on the porch, and Bony told him me and Swatty had floated away on a bridge timber and got drowned, and Herb got Mr. Schwartz out of the house, and then he come over to my house to tell my father, and my father and mother and Fan and all the Schwartzes and a lot of neighbors all went running down to the levee, and took the Bony Highlander with them to show them where we had got drowned from. So that was why Bony didn’t go home, and why he got licked when he did get home.
By that time it wasn’t dark but it was getting dark. Me and Swatty just hung onto our trees, and that was all we could do; but all our folks and most everybody in town got down to the levee, because Tim Mulligan at the waterworks pump-house blew the alarm whistle. The firemen all came, too, with their hose carts and ladder trucks, but most of the folks just went around saying it was too bad, but that it was hopeless. Even the mayor said it was hopeless.