Murkmaid and the Swamp Puppy (Part I)
~ There is one thing Tricia wants to know about the Okefenokee: Is it true that if you drink the water from the swamp, you’re cursed?
My fingers almost grazed the rooftop over our heads as I thrust my arm skyward. I wiggled them and wagged my hand to and fro in my seat at the back of the boat.
“Put your hand down, Tricia!” Mom hissed in my ear. Daddy gave a disapproving glance from her other side, though I wasn’t sure if it was directed at me for having a question or at Mom for talking. It was hard enough to hear the guide — I think his name was Matthew — talk over the slow, rattling churn of the engine, much less if anyone else was speaking at the same time.
I ignored my parents. Park ranger Matthew, a genial-looking guy in his fifties with leathery skin that indicated he’d seen plenty of sun before adopting the Crocodile Dundee-esque hat he now sported, made eye contact with me.
He extended an arm in my direction.
My own arm dropped to my side, and I opened my mouth to speak —
“Gator!”
All eyes and bodies on our tour boat jerked in the direction of the excited little boy whose older male relative (a dad or brother, maybe; not like I knew) had both hands firmly on the kid’s shoulders to keep him from launching headfirst into the mirror-like water. The boy pointed toward the shoreline.
Well. Maybe not a shoreline. I don’t know what they call the edges of all the floating islands that make up the peat bog we call the Okefenokee Swamp.
Whatever the word is, sure enough, a juvenile American alligator lay there, basking in the oppressive south-Georgia-in-July sun, nearly camouflaged between all the fingerlike cypress knees jutting up through the water. Cute little thing, I guess, if you’re into that.
Which, funnily enough, my cousin Coleman is, from a distance at least. He was on the aisle two seats over from me, his fancy DSLR camera in hand, aiming a telephoto lens toward the sunbathing reptile. Matthew had slowed our boat on approach; Coleman’s shutter clicking replaced the motor as background noise.
“Some folks call them ‘swamp puppies’ when they’re about that size,” Matthew was saying. The swamp puppy he gestured to was maybe three or four feet long, at least from the unsubmerged parts of it that I could see when he brought the boat slowly by.
“Can I have a swamp puppy as my graduation present?” I asked my parents. Neither dignified me with an answer.
Matthew sure talked a lot. Not in the Chatty Cathy way, but like he missed his calling as a history teacher or maybe some kind of naturalist. Everything he said had such substance and meaning that his love for the swamp was evident. To tell you the truth, I learned so much on that dang boat ride that I wasn’t that annoyed all the extra education had so far robbed me of any chance to ask my main question.
Aunt Lucky — so coined because tiny me really struggled with pronouncing “Lucy” — was taking notes in her lime green Moleskine, the clicking on-and-off of her pen a chorus harmony to Coleman’s camera. I couldn’t see her handwriting across the aisle, but I had a shrewd idea I knew her comments without even looking:
Alligators don’t usually go after people. They like smaller prey.
Water doesn’t sit and stagnate at the Okefenokee.
The black bears here don’t hibernate.
No one knows why the cypress have knees. Prehistoric defense mechanism?
And of course,
Spanish moss is neither Spanish nor moss.
Aunt Lucky was an ornithologist. This trip was her idea, though since Mom and Daddy hadn’t visited since their grade-school days, both were quick to sign us up. Mom suggested the boat tour. I was just along for the ride.
Mostly.
See, Coleman inherited every ounce of Aunt Lucky’s nature-obsessed observational skills and talents, as well as the ability to sit absolutely still on a bass boat or behind a hunting blind, waiting for the perfect shot. Of a camera angle, for the most part, though Coleman had an uncanny knack for being able to get deer and turkey with a crossbow. His wild-caught turkeys aren’t the tasty, Butterball kind though, so he doesn’t hunt ‘em much since none of us will eat ‘em.
“Too much bird for one growing boy,” Granna liked to say.
Granna, who was back home house-sitting for my parents and Aunt Lucky, would have loved it here. Not the boat ride so much, but the parts about being outside snaking through growthy trees and looking for gators. That’s where we all got our respective nature lover bites from, though the bug bit Aunt Lucky way harder than it did Mom. A prime example: While Aunt Lucky’s binoculars gazed over the reaching branches and rooting pitcher plants, Mom was next to me startling every time a floating stick got too close.
I snickered, wondering if she heard Matthew’s earlier point about gators being lazy and not hunting people.
Matthew turned our boat around a bend, still chatting nonstop. I’d be lost in a minute if I was told to navigate all these channels and crevasses between the “islands”, which apparently can form up and be destroyed and then the whole landscape changes. How Matthew knew it so well to be able to traverse its mysterious blackwaters with nary a glance at a map was beyond me. It was like he was the Okefenokee, a creature made of roots and moss out here masquerading as a Southern gentleman. He courted the intimacies of this vast expanse of waterway the same way men in old movies snuck dates away from chaperones. A glimpse of pure white was as much water lily as Victorian woman’s bare wrist. The brush of bromeliad a whisper of forbidden kiss. In our kinda outdated boat with its faded blue canvas cover, Matthew was writing a romance for us.
Our speed slowed to a stop and we looked to find ourselves surrounded by lily pads and tufts of floating earth on which carnivorous plants bloomed, maws agape as they waited patiently for some unlucky insect to land inside. Matthew began explaining what made this area a prairie. I was halfway zoned out, watching a dark gray cloud ominously make its way toward us.
“Look! A swamp puppy!” That same boy hollered and pointed. “An’ it’s swimmin’!”
“I think that’s more of a swamp dog,” Daddy muttered as the dinosaur descendent careened through the wetland prairie. Speedy thing, and a good few feet longer than the earlier gator.
I twisted in my seat to see this creature glide past. I could have sworn he looked at me. His quick paddling paused long enough for me to clock it, one curious eye meeting mine, and then he was off again toward the channel. It went so fast I might’ve imagined it.
A splash from the other end of the boat pulled my attention away from the retreating reptile. Of all things, Matthew had dunked a grocery store Tupperware container into the water and brought it back up. I blinked a couple times. The water wasn’t black at all, not like how it appeared when I looked at it head-on. Then, it was a stunning mirror, perfectly reflecting blue sky, green leaves, and my own golden-tanned white-girl face in its eerie dark depths. Matthew’s Tupperware wasn’t oozing anything dastardly and murky like I expected. The water he cupped in front of us couldn’t be called crystal clear (it was off-color like watered-down Coke), but it also wasn’t cloudy or dirty.
Matthew’s next lesson was on the Okefenokee being full of rainwater that flowed out into two rivers.
This was the moment I’d been waiting for. Before Mom could stop me, my hand shot into the air again.
“Yes ma’am?” Matthew acknowledged me.
I was breathless. “Is it true that if you drink the water from the swamp, you’re cursed?”
He gave me a quizzical look. “No ma’am, that’s a new one for me. I’m not familiar with any curses on our blackwater.” Then he chuckled. “Usually at this point of the tour, I’d take a sip myself.”
My eyes widened as he raised the Tupperware toward my family in a toast, then touched it to his lips.
“I still cannot believe you asked that ridiculous question,” Mom lectured me.
Our family campfire flickered. I chewed my hotdog, hardly tasting anything but the bite of mustard that reinforced the ire in Mom’s tone.
“I just wanted to know,” I mumbled through a fresh mouthful of Nathan’s All-Beef and Publix white buns. Swallow. “It’s not ridiculous. It’s urban legend.”
“Patricia Lane —” Mom began, but an owl hooted somewhere close and Aunt Lucky shushed her.
“Hear that?” she whispered excitedly. “Y’all keep your voices down in case it sounds again! Patty, reach back behind you on the table and hand me my tape recorder.”
(It wasn’t a tape recorder, and hadn’t been since the early 2000s, but old habits of naming things die hard in the South.)
Aunt Lucky pressed some buttons on her digital recorder and its little red light flashed on. She sat it down on the cooler next to her, mic side aimed in the direction of the owl. Mom and Daddy sat still for a few minutes, but they got restless quick and started making to head in and call it a night. Post-dusk cricket serenades and firefly shows aren’t really their thing. But I was more than content to sit out on the banks of the Okefenokee and listen to the sounds of what Matthew had called “the Land of the Trembling Earth”.
I gave my parents good-night hugs before they headed into the cabin. We kept calling it a camping trip, but it was more like glamping. The cabin was on a campground and RV park close to the swamp. Originally, Aunt Lucky wanted to really camp, which I gave a long thought to, but the moment she uttered the words “pit toilet”, I was out. I may love being outside almost as much as she does. However, I draw the line at lack of running water.
We hadn’t heard the owl again.
“I know as soon as I turn this dadgum thing off, the owl’ll hoot,” Aunt Lucky said, as if she’d read my thoughts.
“Maybe it knows we’re waiting,” Coleman remarked sagely.
I rolled my eyes at him across the fire. “Y’all wanna go see for ourselves if the water’s cursed?”
“Pretty sure the swamp closes at night,” Coleman said.
“Yeah, but it’s not like we saw a bunch of fences or anything,” I said smugly.
I wasn’t sure if I’d won or not, but the only sound for a minute was that of the crackling wood going up in smoke. I was sweating. It was a thousand degrees too hot out to have a fire going, but I liked the ambiance even if it meant I’d be taking another shower before bed.
A log stumbled into the fire pit and all three of us jumped.
“What is your fascination with this cursed water story, anyway?” Aunt Lucky asked once we caught our breaths. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’m with our tour guide; never even heard of it.”
I leaned forward, letting the campfire deepen the contrast between the shadows and curves of my face. “The story goes that one day, a long time ago, there was this girl who worked at a dairy. She got lost at night and took a wrong turn on her way home, and ended up wandering through the swamp. It was so hot out and she decided to drink some water. When the sun rose and she finally made her way back to the farm, she’d been changed.”
There was emphasis on how I said that last word.
“Changed how?” Coleman demanded, even though he knew.
“She wasn’t right in the head,” I explained. “Kept talking about the swamp and how what saved her was this old tree lady telling her to drink the water before she died of thirst. As time went on, the milkmaid started going back to the swamp and disappearing for longer and longer periods. Each time she returned, she was a little more different. Until one day, she didn’t come back at all. Legend says that she gave herself over to the swamp and let the Land of the Trembling Earth swallow her up.”
“Uh-huh,” Aunt Lucky said. “This is the most uncompelling ghost story I’ve ever heard. Who told you that?”
“A girl at school,” I admitted. “She’s from somewhere around here, originally. And it’s an urban legend, not a ghost story.”
Aunt Lucky let out a laugh. “Makes sense. In my opinion, that’s exactly the kind of story parents tell their kids to keep them from wandering down the road and actually getting lost out there.” She gestured to the road that led out of the campground and then was a two-mile straight shot to the Okefenokee.
“Maybe,” I allowed. “But we’ll never know unless we try!”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m going to bed, y’all. Have fun ghost hunting and watch out for those bears.”
My bottom jaw dropped. “Wait, what?! You’re not going to tell us no?”
She fished in her jeans pocket and tossed me a tag hanging from a skinny strand of elastic. “I’d already booked a tent spot before you and your mom nixed the primitive camping idea. Kept forgetting to try to get a refund, so they gave it to me at the visitor’s center today when we got there.”
Leave it to Aunt Lucky to bring us this good fortune!
“Thanks,” I whispered, my heart quickening with excitement. The flimsy camping pass felt like a fever dream coming true. “We’ll be careful!”
Coleman drove us as close as he dared. We pulled off the side of the road a good ways out still from the big visitor’s center that welcomed us fewer than twelve hours before. Though the camping pass now draped innocently from the rearview mirror, we weren’t sure we’d be able to make it into a parking lot space after dark. At least, not without alerting security. So, armed with flashlights, water bottles, and a fresh douse of mosquito spray each, my cousin and I set off into the swamp.
It was eerie. Something about wandering through the woods at night with only the starlight and moon, and no people for miles, combined with the constant rustle of leaves and bushes that let us know we definitely were not alone … it didn’t take long before I started to wonder if maybe we should just come back in the morning. It wasn’t like we had to be deep in those channels or anything. The same water flowed all through the refuge, and there were plenty of little waterways near the boat ramps that I could scoop some water from in the daylight without having to get in the swamp in the middle of the night.
Not wanting to be a chicken about my own plan, I chewed on this thought for a few more steps. I was about to tell Coleman when he spoke first.
“Hey Tricia, can we stop for a second?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I guess I should’ve done it before we left, but I didn’t want to wake your parents up and I can’t hold it any longer. I gotta take a leak.”
I groaned. “Seriously, Coleman?! This is a national wildlife refuge. You can’t just stop and pee here!”
“The bears do it. And what are you gonna do, stop me?” His flashlight beam bobbed lower, along with the sound of his zipper.
My hands covered my ears, and I started to hum to myself, drowning out stuff I didn’t want to hear. I must’ve hummed louder than I thought though, because the next thing I knew, Coleman was shoving me back toward the road and whisper-shrieking something about eyes.
“What the hell, Coleman!” I aimed my flashlight in his face so that he A) had to stop and hold a hand up and B) could catch his breath.
“I said I was in the middle of watering the plants and I looked down, and I saw eyes! Eyes right there, almost at my feet!” he wheezed.
“Fraidy-cat,” I goaded, as if five minutes ago I hadn’t been the one about to suggest turning back. “Finish peeing and I’ll take a damn look.”
My flashlight trailed the direction he’d first stood in. I wrinkled my nose in disgust as the light shone upon the fresh puddle in the forest. I kept scanning. Nothing.
Coleman zipped back up again, and I started to turn when another of those rustling sounds grabbed my attention. Too close. We froze.
“Probably a deer,” I said.
Both of us moved our flashlights in the direction of the noise. Coleman whimpered. My mouth went dry and tacky, suddenly tasting like spoiled buttermilk.
It was not a deer.
I knew I hadn’t imagined it when that swamp puppy caught my eye on the water.
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I don't have time (waaaa) to read this right now, but I'm bookmarking so I can come back. It looks like YA. Correct? And I can't believvvve how prolific you are.