XVI
Congo Magic
The thing that started Jibby talking was a feather. Right between his knees when he sat down was a crow’s tail feather, and he picked it up and it reminded him of something, because everything always did remind Jibby of something. He stuck it up in the ground.
“What did you do that for?” I asked him.
He looked at the feather.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it reminded me of the time I was on the Congo River.”
“What about the Congo River does an old crow’s feather remind you of?” I asked him.
“Well, magic,” Jibby said. “A black feather is one of the things the natives use for bad magic. They use a black feather when they want to spoil an enemy’s plans. They stick a black feather in the ground like this, and then they make a ring of other stuff around it and put magic things in the circle.”
He showed me how they did it. He broke up some twigs and made a circle around the feather, and then he felt in his pocket for things to put in the circle. First he found his knife, and he held it in the cup of his two hands and said something like:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
Only, of course, I can’t remember what it was he did say. Then he put his knife inside the magic circle, and took out a box of safety matches and said:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
Then he put the matches in the magic circle, and dug into his pocket again, and all he could find was three or four nails and a couple of screw eyes big enough to run a tiller rope through. He chanted:
“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
So into the magic circle went the nails and the screw eyes, and he looked around and picked up the map Uncle Beeswax had made, and he chanted over that and put that in the magic circle. Then he held out his hands over the whole business and began some more nonsense-chanting, starting low and getting louder, and I sort of got the idea and began to chant with him, and there we both were, slapping our knees and chanting away like lunatics:
“Keeko! Keeko!
Keeko, muk-muk, keeko!
Chuck-a-wah! Chuck-a-wah!
Chuck-a-wah chang cho chee!”
And over and over again. And then, all of a sudden, somebody was standing behind us. I nearly jumped out of my skin, I was so frightened at first. I thought maybe our magic had really raised an evil spirit or something, and then I saw it was Cawley Romer. And I hadn’t been so far wrong, either, for Cawl Romer is one of the meanest fellows that ever comes to our island. Only one is meaner, and that is his brother Hen. They are great big bullies.
“What are you doing?” Cawl Romer asked in that rough way a bully asks things.
“Magic,” I said, as meek as Moses. “Jibby was showing me how the Congo natives do magic.”
Cawl Romer was looking at the magic circle, and all at once he pushed his foot over it and knocked down the feather and scattered the twigs and things.
“I’ll magic your magic for you!” he said in his mean way, but he kept his foot down and I saw why. He had it on top of the map Jibby had put in the magic circle. He bent down and took the map from under his foot. He turned it one way and another way and looked at it, but he couldn’t make anything out of it, Uncle Beeswax had done it so roughly and in such a hurry.
“I know what this is,” he said. “I know why you’ve got baskets and this rake and this axe here. You know where a grape tree is.”
“It’s none of your business if we do,” I said, sulky-like, because I knew what Cawl Romer would be up to next.
“Is that so!” he said. “Well, I’ll show you mighty soon whether it is my business or not. I saw Old Beeswax chin with you, and I saw him go rowing off up the river. A grape tree belongs to the man that gets it. I just mean to clean this one out before. …”
“Keeko! Keeko!
Keeko muk-muk keeko!”
chanted Jibby Jones.
He paid no attention to Cawl Romer at all, seemed like. He had stuck up the feather again and made his twig circle and was chanting as if nothing had happened.
“You listen to me,” Cawl Romer said, pushing Jibby in the back with his foot. “Do you know where this grape tree is?”
Jibby looked up at him as solemn as an owl.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with my nose!” he said. “I did know where that tree was; it was directly in front of my nose. That’s how I was going to it—I was going to follow my nose. But now my nose won’t point. It’s too bad!”
“Well, I’ll attend to that,” said Cawl Romer. “You’re going to show me where that tree is, nose or no nose, or you’ll be sorry you ever came to this island. And you, too, George. You know me! Now, you listen! I’m going up to my cottage and get Hen and some baskets, and you sit right here and don’t move! Understand that? If you’re not here, I’ll skin you and eat you when I do catch you.”
Then he went away, and he took the map with him. Jibby sat where he was until Cawl Romer was out of sight and then he jumped up like a flash.
“Hasten!” he said. “Hasten!”
I did not know what he was up to.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“Magic,” he said. “Congo magic, Georgie.”
He went to his skiff and took out the bait pail and chucked it and we pulled the skiff out of the water and turned it upside down. Then he took the two big screw eyes. He started one into the bottom of the skiff by hitting it with a rock and then screwed it all the way in, and then he put in the other the same way. One was nearer the bow and the other nearer the stern. Then we swung the skiff around so the stern was shoreward and the bow toward the river and Jibby did a thing that seemed almost crazy. He untied the end of his trotline from the tree and slipped the end through the two screw eyes in the keel of the skiff and tied the end of the trotline to a tough root near the edge of the river. Then we heaved the skiff over and pushed it out into the water so the stern just rested on shore, and went back and sat down. I began to see what he was up to. He had the skiff strung on the trotline, under water. Those Romer bullies would row across the river but when they got just so far they would come to the end of the trotline, where it was tied to the big anchor stone, and there the skiff would stop. I chuckled.
“Scratch a bully and you find a coward,” Jibby said. “My Grandfather Parmenter used to say that, and he was a wise man. He had a nose like mine. Scratch a bully and find a coward.”
“That’s all right enough,” I said, “but what are you going to gain by it? We could run away and they couldn’t find us, and then we could tell our fathers and they wouldn’t let the Romers hurt us.”
“And they have the map,” said Jibby. “If they look at it close enough, they can understand it. They’ll see Wampus and Skippy and Tad by the sycamore and know that is the big dot, and they’ll know the cross on the map is the grape tree. They’ll have it cleaned out before Uncle Beeswax can get here. And I like Uncle Beeswax. He’s my friend. He trusted us with the map. I’m going to save those grapes for him.”
Well, Cawl Romer and his brother Hen came back and they acted mean and rough. They chucked our axe and our rake into Jibby’s skiff as if they didn’t care what damage they did, and they threw in their baskets and left ours on the shore. Then they made me get into the bow seat and they took the oars, and they made Jibby push off and hop into the stern seat.
“And no talk out of you!” Cawl said.
“Keeko!” Jibby said.
“Keeko muk-muk,
Chuck-a-wah chang cho!”
“That’s magic,” Cawl Romer told Hen, sneering-like. Then he said to Jibby: “You can’t fool me! That’s no Congo magic talk. I don’t believe you ever saw the Congo. That’s more like some old Chinese laundry talk or Flatfoot Indian.”
Well, it didn’t seem like much of a place for magic to work, even if there was such a thing. Miles and miles of blue sky, and the sun shining, and the big river rushing along, and we just plain boys, and the two Romers just everyday big bullies. Hen and Cawl pulled at the oars and sweated, too, for it is no easy job to row across the river there. You have to row more than half upstream or the current will carry you half a mile below where you want to go by the time you get across. And they were in a hurry, too. Uncle Beeswax was liable to come rowing down the river any time, and he was no sort of man to mix in with when he thought he had a fair right to a bee tree or a grape tree. Even big bullies like the Romers would steer clear of him then; all they wanted was to get across the river and clean up the wild grapes before Uncle Beeswax came, and all Jibby wanted was to hold them back long enough for Uncle Beeswax to show up. So Jibby chanted again.
“Keeko! Keeko!
Chuck-a-muck-a-mayo!
Chip-la, chip-la, chuck chang cho!”
he chanted, or something like that, and he took the tip of his nose in his fingers and wiggled it back and forth.
“Stop that!” Hen Romer said, as cross as a bear. “Don’t you put any magic on us!”
“Aw, pshaw!” Cawl Romer said. “Don’t worry about him; he can’t magic a sick cat.”
But just the same he began to frown a little.
“What’s the matter with this boat?” he said. “I wouldn’t have this boat for a gift. I never knew a boat to pull as hard as this boat pulls.”
I knew what was the matter. The screw eyes on the bottom of the skiff had come to Jibby’s hook-lines on his trotline and were dragging them along the trotline the way Uncle Beeswax had said a big fish might.
“Row, why don’t you?” Cawl shouted over his shoulder at Hen.
“I am rowing as hard as I can,” Hen shouted back. “Row some yourself and don’t make me do it all.”
Every stroke they took the screw eyes gathered up another hook-line and added it to those they were already dragging. The Romers panted and puffed and pulled until their eyes stuck out an inch, almost, but they could just barely make the skiff move.
“Plenty keeko!” Jibby said, and stopped chanting.
“Pull, why don’t you?” Cawl shouted at Hen again.
They did pull, too. Out there in the middle of the river, with the current rushing the water past the skiff and the skiff pointed halfway upstream and the shores a good distance away, no one can tell whether a skiff is moving much or not. Those two Romers buckled down hard and strained every muscle and did their level best. They got madder and madder and scolded each other, and the boat hardly moved an inch at a stroke. They kept looking over their shoulders at the Buffalo Island shore and simply humped their backs, but the shore did not seem to come any nearer. They rowed harder than I ever saw anyone row outside of a race. They made the oars bend. Then they came to the end of the trotline, where it dipped down to the big anchor rock and the boat did not move at all. And, away up the river, I saw a black speck that I was pretty sure must be Uncle Beeswax rowing down.
Cawl Romer rested on his oars a minute.
“What does this mean, Jones?” he asked Jibby, and he was mighty mad. “You can’t fool me. There is no such thing as magic. What’s the matter with this boat?”
“It don’t seem to go, somehow,” Jibby said.
“He’s put a spell on it, that’s what he’s done,” Hen Romer said. “You can’t fool me! I never saw a boat yet that I couldn’t row some. He’s magicked us, Cawl.”
Cawl took up his oars and began to row, but he looked worried.
“I don’t believe in magic,” he said, but he did not say it as if he meant it. “How could he put a spell on a boat? He couldn’t do it.”
“I don’t know what a fellow with a nose like that can do,” Hen said, and he said it as if he did mean it. “I didn’t like his looks the first time I saw him, and I told you so. I said to keep away from him. And don’t you try to tell me there isn’t magic. You just remember Uncle Harris and the colored conjure woman!”
Well, I didn’t know what he meant by his Uncle Harris and the conjure woman, but I guess Cawl did, for he looked uneasy.
“You be still!” he said. Then he turned to me. “Did he put magic on this boat?” he asked.
“How do I know?” I asked. “He was doing something with a feather and some sticks—that’s all I know.”
“Well, he’s magicked us!” Cawl said all of a sudden, dropping his oars. “That’s what he’s done; he’s put a spell on us.”
He picked up one oar and felt the depth of the river and could not touch bottom on any side. So Hen stopped rowing. As soon as they both stopped rowing, the boat sagged around with the current and the pull on the trotline was heavy. I looked up the river and saw Uncle Beeswax was rowing for us and was near enough to hear us. I yelled to him and waved my arms. Hen and Cawl had seen him, too. They made a last effort and took up their oars and rowed hard, but it was no use. Uncle Beeswax bore down on us and came alongside and grasped the gunwale of our skiff. The Romers stopped rowing, too, and that put the full weight of both skiffs, with the whole current behind them, on the trotline and she parted as easy as you would break a rotten thread.
“What’s the matter?” Uncle Beeswax asked.
The skiffs were floating downriver as easy as you please.
“Nothing,” Jibby said. “These Romers wanted to come along and the skiff did not want them to.”
“Neither do I; I don’t like ’em, hoof nor hide,” said Uncle Beeswax, who was plainspoken enough when he wanted to be.
“Wampus and Tad and Skippy are waiting by the sycamore,” Jibby said. “Maybe you’d better go on and get the grapes, Uncle Beeswax, and we’ll see if we can row this skiff home. It may be willing to go across the river one way if it isn’t willing to go the other.”
The two Romers scowled a lot at this, but they took to the oars. They did not bother to row us back to our mud cove. They rowed across the easiest way, and that landed us down near the end of Birch Island, and they got out there. They did not say a word. As long as we could see them, as we rowed back across the river to the sycamore tree, they were standing there talking to each other—trying to make up their minds whether they believed in magic or not, I guess.
Well, Uncle Beeswax got his wild grapes and, after we got home, Jibby reeled in his trotline. He had lost most of his hooks, but he did not mind that; he had kept the Romers from doing Uncle Beeswax out of his grapes.
“Jibby,” Wampus asked, when I had told him and Skippy and Tad about the screw eyes and the trotline and all, “how on earth did you ever think of putting the screw eyes in the keel of the skiff and running the trotline through them?”
“Well, I’ll explain it,” Jibby Jones said. “I had the screw eyes. …”
“Yes.”
“And I had the trotline. …”
“Yes.”
“And I had the skiff. …”
“Yes.”
“Well, what else could anybody do with a couple of screw eyes and a trotline and a skiff?” Jibby asked. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do with them, so I did that. But I’m sorry for one thing.
“The feather,” Jibby said. “That crow feather was wasted. I couldn’t think of any way to use it. I tried, but I couldn’t.”