59: The sun rose higher . . .
Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy,” Chapter 13 concludes
The sun rose higher, the heat and light grew stronger. I began to feel lightheaded and dizzy.
“Whew!” cried Raskol. “It’s too hot to keep this up. Let’s take a break. We’ll pull the boat out over there.”
He headed for the bank. I was too hot and tired and sick to answer him or to help push the boat ahead.
When the boat was out of the water, Raskol looked me over with some concern. “Peter,” he said, “you don’t look right. Lie down on the bank here and put your feet in the water. Rest for a while. I’m going to look for a place to buy some lunch. You rest and cool off for a while.”
I heard him walk off through the woods. After the sound of his footsteps had passed away, woodsy sounds—birds and locusts and the river—rushed in around me. The river water, flowing along the banks, burbled. It was a soft and cool and soothing sound, as pleasant as a chuckle. Every once in a while I’d catch another sound from the river, at a higher pitch, more like a giggle than a chuckle. While I lay there listening, the giggles seemed to increase in number and to draw nearer to me. Curious to know what caused these sounds, I thought of sitting up and opening my eyes, but I did not, partly because the heat still pressed me to the ground like an enormous hand, and partly because the thought struck me that it would be amusing first to make a good guess about the origin of the sounds, and then open my eyes to see whether my guess was correct. This I did. I decided that the sound probably came from the random collisions of a number of small wooden objects, such as twigs, spools, or billiard balls, that had entered the river somewhere upstream and were washing past me now.
I sat up and opened my eyes. The giggling sounds were coming from a dozen or so beautiful young girls who were bathing in the river. Their clothes lay in piles on the opposite bank, but they had made their way across the river, and they stood in the clear water only a short distance from me. In my memory, they are all lovely, but you know how it is in a situation like that—the surprise at seeing them there when I opened my eyes, the sunlight playing over them through the leaves, their wide eyes, my fatigue and dizziness, may have made some of them a little lovelier then than they would ever be again. One of them, however, has always been as beautiful as she seemed that day. She was the only one that I recognized; she was the dark-haired girl about my age, who had been lying on the deck of a lean blue sloop, stretching her legs out, turning her face to the sun, dozing, dreaming, going nowhere, on the day that Raskol and I decided to journey up the Bolotomy.
She—or perhaps it was another of the girls—reached out toward me and took my hand. She pulled me, tugging me toward the water. Soon they were all tugging at me and urging me to come into the water with them, and I decided that I would. It would be cool. It would refresh and relax me. It would probably be just what I needed.
From behind me came the sound of crashing footsteps. The girls looked up with alarm. They scrambled for the opposite bank, clambered out of the river, snatched up their clothes and disappeared into the woods. The dark-haired one paused for a moment, I think, just a moment, before she too slipped out of sight. Raskol burst from the bushes. He had woven leaves and branches into his hair as camouflage, and he was holding the machete in his teeth.
“Raskol,” I said. “You won’t believe what—”
He said something.
“I can’t understand you when you talk with a machete in your mouth,” I said.
He took the machete out of his mouth. “We’re almost there!” he shouted. He was grinning with delight.
“Almost there?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Our journey is nearly over.”
I looked upriver. The Bolotomy disappeared into a mass of greenery.
“But I thought it would take much longer,” I said. I was smiling, because I didn’t want Raskol to know that I was disappointed. I had planned for three days and two nights, but in my heart I had been hoping that it would take us four days and three nights, and that for one night and day we’d have to live off the land.
[to be continued on Wednesday, August 4, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can catch up by visiting the archive.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” the first two novellas in Little Follies.
Hello there, Readers! It’s Candilee Manning, Kraft’s irrepressible publicist!
Become a subscriber! You’ll get exclusive access to Mark Dorset’s entertaining and enlightening annotations to the Personal History. His additions and anecdotes enrich the chapters and take you behind the scenes to the writing of the work.