Swamp Tales Page 8

It is hardly possible to describe Codfresh Lake to you; so that you guys sitting by the fire, breathing in the moist summery air, will get the picture of it in your head as I have it in mine.

  For Codfresh Lake is like no other body of water that I have ever seen. Some say it was created by the great hurricane of 1937. Others avow that it never was created at all, but is simply some sort of a cosmic joke. It is only called a lake because there is no word in English for what it really is.

  In the middle of Cape Cod sometime in the early 1900s; from Nantucket Sound Northwards, a salt river snaked its tidal way from Dennis Port towards Brewster, then veered sharply West in the direction of Provincetown - but it never got there.

  A rogue stream from Harwich, began a trip East at Long Pond and took on girth when it married a rivulet from Hinckley's Pond. The conjoined rivers had a baby when they ran through Seymour Pond, about three miles from Route six. The newly expanded raging fresh-water river set a course for Dennis Port - but it never got there.

  The Salt River rushed on to meet the Fresh River combination. The mingle of these entities did not bring forth a marriage of the headwaters; only an uneasy truce that created an odd body of water six miles long and a half mile wide. Divided into three sections; it consisted of a tiny sea of salt water two miles long on the East end; a small fresh-water lake of two miles in length on the West end; and in the middle, was a two mile area of unearthly water that the locals called 'The Brack'.

  The three sections of the Codfresh were as different in color as in composition. The salty part was a bright, inviting blue, while at the opposite end of the lake the freshwater section had a brownish/black hue. In the middle; the brack took on the gray pall of a World War Two battleship.

 

  Airplanes generally avoided Codfresh Lake. Some pilots reported feeling queasy as they flew over the motley waters. Other fliers said their engines sputtered as they crossed the Brack.

  Codfish were known to swim in the East and Trout basked near the Western shore; but in the middle it was said that strange fish existed; fish that were neither salt nor fresh; but simply 'Brackfish'.

  The six miles of land that was filled by the uneasy entrenchment of the salt and fresh rivers, had contained high points and low. It was both forested, and bare, as well as rocky and sandy.

  As it was being formed during the wrestling match of the rivers, the Codfresh waters took down trees, hills and hollows. The result was the largest lake on the island of Cape Cod, lying mostly in Harwich but partly in Dennis. Oddly enough, the shape of the lake mirrored the shape of Cape Cod! It looked like a flexed human arm.

  During the run of the raildroad, Codfresh Lake was accessible. The train tracks ran right by it. After train service was stopped in the 1940s, the body of water could only be reached on foot. The nearest paved road was more than three miles distant. That is the reason you guys never heard of it. Few tourists or even Summer residents have ever seen or heard of the lake.

  There was neither electricity nor municipal services in the area and very few homes. Codfresh Lake is, and has always been, a lake of mystery.

  In places it is bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the Pine trees that went down when the earth sank, still stand upright so that if the sun shines from the right quarter, and the water is less muddy than usual, a man, peering face downward into its depths, sees, or thinks he sees, down below him the bare top-limbs stretching up like the fingers of drowned men, all coated with the mud and green slime of many years.

  In still other places the lake is shallow for long stretches, no deeper than chest high, but dangerous because of the weed growths and the sunken drifts which entangle a swimmer's legs.

  The banks of Codfresh are mainly mud. Its West waters are also muddy, being a rich coffee color in the spring and a coppery yellow in the summer. The trees along its shore are mud colored too; right up to their lower limbs after the spring floods, when the dried sediment covers their trunks with a thick, scruffy-looking coat.

  There are stretches of unbroken forest around it, and runs where the rangy pines rise like tombstones above the dead trunks that rot in the soft ooze.

  There are long, dismal flats where in the Spring the Leopard Frog spawn cling like patches of white mucus among the weed-stalks, and at night the turtles crawl out to lay batches of perfectly round, white eggs with tough, rubbery shells in the sand.

  Codfresh lies there, flat in the bottoms, freezing over in the winter, steaming torridly in the summer, swollen in the spring when the woods have turned a vivid green and the flies and gnats by the millions fill the flooded hollows with their pestilential buzzing, and in the fall, ringed about gloriously with all the colors which the first frost brings - gold of Maple, yellow-russet of Oak, and Red of the Burning Bush.

  The countryside around Codfresh Lake is the best game and fish country, natural or artificial, that is left in Massachusetts, Connecticut or Rhode Island today.

  In their appointed seasons the duck and the geese flock in by the thousands. Snow white Swans glide on the fresh water to the West, while Seagulls patrol the East. Strange birds swim in "The Brack".

  Wild Turkeys range the ridges. By night the bullfrogs, inconceivably big and tremendously vocal, bellow under the banks.

  It is a wonderful place for fish - Fluke and Blues abound in the East and there are Trout and Bass in the West. Odd, crusty creatures swim in The Brack.

  On every stranded log the huge snapping turtles lie on sunny days in groups of four and six, baking their shells black in the sun, with their little snaky heads raised watchfully, ready to slip noiselessly off at the first sound of oars grating in the row-locks.

  But the biggest creatures in Codfresh Lake are the catfish in the Brack! Found only in the lake's gray waters, they are a kind of Catfish seen nowhere else. Their ferocity is unmatched by any fish or mammal save the Homo Sapiens.

  They are monstrous creatures, these catfish. The are scaleless, slick things, with dead eyes and poisonous fins, like javelins, and huge whiskers dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads.

  Three and four feet long they grow to be, and weigh 50 pounds or more, and they have mouths wide enough to take in a man's foot or a man's fist, and strong enough to break any hook save the strongest, and greedy enough to eat anything, living or dead or putrid, that the horny jaws can master.

  They are vile things, and the few locals who fish the Brack, tell wicked tales of them down there. They call them man-eaters, and compare them, in certain of their habits, to sharks.

  Jimmy Catfish was one of the few people who lived on the shores of Codfresh Lake. He had been born there to a fisherman and a Native-American woman. Both were long dead.

  Jim was deformed and the story that ran around Cape Cod was that his Mother had been frightened by one of the monster Catfish just before giving birth, so that's why the baby was born deformed. There was little support for one born 'different' back in the 1960's, the time of this story.

  Jimmy Catfish was considered a human monstrosity, the veritable embodiment of nightmare!

  He had the body of a man--a short, stocky sinewy body--but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish as any face could be and still have some trace of humanity.

  His skull sloped back so sharply that he could hardly be said to have a have a forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes were small and round with shallow, glazed, pale-yellow pupils, and they were set wide apart in his head, and they were unblinking and staring - like fish eyes. His nose was little more than two slits on an oily face. His mouth was the worst of all. It was the awful maw of a catfish, lipless and almost inconceivably wide, stretching from side to side.

  Most cruel of all, when Jimmy became a man, his likeness to a fish increased, for the hair
upon his face grew out into two tightly kinked slender pendants that drooped down either side of the mouth like the beards of a fish!

  He was often called simply "Catfish", and he answered to it. He knew the waters and the woods of the area better than any other man there; but he mainly kept to himself, tending his vegetable garden, netting the lake, and trapping a little. His neighbors left him to himself.

  Indeed, for the most part they had a superstitious fear of him. So he lived alone, with no friends or visitors.

  His cabin stood just at the merge of the Brack and the fresh-water. It was a shack of logs, the only human habitation for a few miles in any direction.

  Behind it the thick timber marched right up to the edge of his small garden, enclosing it in thick shade except when the sun stood just overhead.

  He cooked his food in a primitive fashion, outdoors, over a hole in the soggy earth or upon the rusted red ruin of an old cookstove, and he drank the brown water of the fresh lake out of a dipper made of a gourd, faring and fending for himself, a master hand at skiff and net, competent with duck gun and

  fish -spear, yet a creature of affliction and loneliness, part savage, almost amphibious, set apart from his fellows, silent and suspicious.

  In front of his cabin jutted out the trunk of a long fallen Maple, lying half in and half out of the water, its top side made sand colored by the sun and worn smooth by the friction of Jimmy's bare webbed feet until it showed countless patterns of tiny scrolled lines, its underside black and rotted, and lapped at unceasingly by little waves like tiny licking tongues.

  Its farther end reached deep water. And it was a part of Jimmy Catfish, for no matter how far his fishing and trapping might take him in the daytime, sunset would find him back there, his boat drawn up on the bank, and he on the other end of this log.

  From a distance men had seen him there many times, sometimes squatted as motionless as the big turtles that would crawl upon its dipping tip in his absence, sometimes erect and motionless, his misshapen form outlined against the yellow sun, the brown water, and the muddy banks.

 

  If the locals shunned Catfish by day; they feared him by night and avoided him as a plague, dreading even the chance of a casual meeting; for there were ugly stories about Jimmy.

 

  They said that a cry which had been heard just before dusk and just after, skittering across the darkened waters, was his calling cry to the big catfish, and at his bidding they came trooping in, and that in their company he swam in the Brack on moonlight nights - diving with them, even feeding with them on whatever manner of unclean things they fed.

  The cry had been heard many times, that much was certain, and it was certain also that the big fish were noticeably thick at the mouth of Catfish's slough (the wet muddy area near the fallen Maple log).

  Here Jimmy Catfish had lived, and here he was going to die. The Jamison brothers were going to kill him, and this day in late summer was to be the time of the killing.

  The two Jamisons, Jake and Joel, were coming in their dugout to do it!

  This murder had been a long time in the making. The Jamisons had to brew their hate over a slow fire for months before it reached the pitch of action.

  They were poor, jobless locals. Poor in everything; repute, and worldly goods and standing - a pair of fever-ridden squatters who lived on whiskey and tobacco when they could get it and on fish and cornbread when they couldn't.

  The feud itself was of months' standing. Meeting Catfish one day, in the spring on the spindly scaffolding of the skiff landing at Walnut Log, and being themselves far overtaken in liquor and with a bogus alcoholic substitute for courage, the brothers had accused him, wantonly and without proof, of running their trout-line and stripping it of the hooked catch--an unforgivable sin among Cape Cod fishermen.

  Seeing that he bore this accusation in silence, only eyeing them steadfastly, they had been emboldened then to slap his face, whereupon he turned and gave them both the beating of their lives - bloodying their noses and bruising their lips with hard blows against their front teeth, and finally leaving them, mauled and prone, in the dirt.

  The whole thing had been planned out amply. They were going to kill him on his log at sundown. There would be no witnesses to see it, no retribution to follow after it. The very ease of the undertaking made them forget even their inborn fear of Catfish's house.

  For more than an hour they had been coming from their shack across a deeply indented arm of the lake.

  Their dugout, fashioned by fire and axe and knife, moved through the water as noiselessly as a swimming mallard, leaving behind it a long, wavy trail on the stilled waters.

  Jake, the better oarsman, sat flat in the stern of the round-bottomed craft, paddling with quick, splashless strokes, Joel, the better shot, was squatted forward. There was a heavy, rusted duck gun between his knees.

  Though their spying upon the victim had made them certain he would not be about the shore for hours, a doubled sense of caution led them to hug closely to the weedy banks. They slid along the shore like shadows, moving so swiftly and in such silence that the watchful mud turtles barely turned their snaky heads as they passed.

  So, a full hour before the time, they came slipping around the mouth of the slough and made for a natural ambush point which Catfish had left within a stone's throw of his cabin.

  Where the slough's flow joined deeper water a partly uprooted tree was stretched, prone from shore, at the top still thick and green with leaves that drew nourishment from the earth in which the half uncovered roots yet held, and twined about with an exuberance of trumpet vines. All about was a huddle of drift--last year's cornstalks, shredded strips of bark, chunks of rotted weed, all the silt and refuse of a quiet eddy.

  Straight into this green clump glided the dugout and swung, broadside on, against the protecting trunk of the tree, hidden from the inner side by the intervening curtains of rank growth, just as the Jamisons had intended it should be hidden when days before in their scouting they marked this masked place of waiting and included it, then and there, in the scope of their plans.

  There had been no hitch or mishap. No one had been abroad in the late afternoon to mark their movements--and in a little while Catfish ought to be due. Jake's woodman's eye followed the downward swing of the sun speculatively.

  The shadows, thrown shoreward, lengthened and slithered on the small ripples. The small noises of the day died out; the small noises of the coming night began to multiply.

  The green-bodied flies went away and big mosquitoes with speckled gray legs, came to take the places of the flies.

  The sleepy lake sucked at the mud banks with small mouthing sounds, as though it found the taste of the raw mud agreeable.

  Bats began to flit back and forth, above the tops of the trees. A pudgy muskrat, swimming with head up, was moved to sidle off briskly as he met a water snake, so fat and swollen that it looked almost like a legless lizard as it moved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid S's. Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compact little swarm of 'biting' midges hung, holding to a sort of kite-shaped formation.

  A little more time passed and Catfish came out of the woods at the back, walking swiftly, with a sack over his shoulder.

  For a few seconds he stood in the clearing then the black inside of the cabin swallowed him up.

  By now the sun was almost down. Only the red nub of it showed above the timber line across the lake, and the shadows lay inland a long way. Out beyond, the big cats were stirring, and the great smacking sounds as their twisting bodies leaped clear and fell back in the water, came shoreward in a chorus.

  But the two brothers, in their green cover, gave heed to nothing except the one thing upon
which their hearts were set and their nerves tensed. Joel gently shoved his gun barrels across the log, cuddling the stock to his shoulder and slipping two fingers caressingly back and forth upon the triggers. Jake held the narrow dugout steady by a gripping a fist full of the trumpet vines.

  A little wait and then the finish came!

  Jimmy Catfish emerged from the cabin door and came down the narrow footpath to the water and out upon the water on his log.

  He was barefooted and bareheaded, his cotton shirt open down the front to show his neck and chest, his dungarees held about his waist by a twisted tow rope.

  His broad feet, with their webbed prehensile toes outspread, gripped the polished curve of the log as he moved along its swaying, dipping surface until he came to its outer end, and stood there erect, his chest filling, his chinless face lifted up, and something of the master and of dominion in his poise.

  And then--his eye caught what another's eyes might have missed - the round, twin ends of the gun barrels, the fixed gleam of Joel's eyes, aimed at him through the green! In that swift passage of time, too swift almost to be measured by seconds, realization flashed all through him, and he threw his head still higher and opened wide his shapeless trap of a mouth, and out across the lake he sent skittering and rolling his cry.

  And in his cry, was the laugh of a loon and the croaking bellow of a frog, and the bay of a hound, all the compounded night noises of the lake. And in it, too, was a farewell, and a defiance, and an appeal!

  The heavy roar of the duck gun overpowered all the other sounds on the lake!

  At twenty yards the double charge tore the throat out of Catfish. He came down, face forward, upon the log and clung there, his trunk twisting in spasms, his legs twitching and kicking like the legs of a speared frog; his shoulders hunching and lifting spasmodically as the life ran out of him all in one swift coursing flow.

  His head canted up between the heaving shoulders, his eyes looked full on the staring face of his murderer, and then the blood came out of his mouth, and Catfish, in death still as much fish as man, slid, flopping, head first, off the end of the log, and sank, face downward slowly, his limbs all extended out.

  One after another a string of big bubbles came up to burst in the middle of a widening reddish stain on the gray water.

  The brothers watched this, held by the horror of the thing they had done, and the cranky dugout, having been tipped far over by the recoil of the gun, took water steadily across its gunwale; and now there was a sudden stroke from below upon its careening bottom and it went over and they were in the lake.

  But shore was only twenty feet away, the trunk of the uprooted tree only five. Joel, still holding fast to his shot gun, made for the log, gaining it with one stroke. He threw his free arm over it and clung there, treading water, as he shook his eyes free.

  Something gripped him--some great, sinewy, unseen thing gripped him fast by the thigh, crushing down on his flesh!

  He uttered no cry, but his eyes popped out, and his mouth set in a square shape of agony, and his fingers gripped into the bark of the tree like grapples. He was pulled down and down, by steady jerks, not rapidly but steadily, so steadily, and as he went his fingernails tore four little white strips in the tree-bark. His mouth went under, next his popping eyes, then his erect hair, and finally his clawing, clutching hand, and that was the end of him.

  Jake's fate was harder still, for he lived longer--long enough to see Joel's finish. He saw it through the water that ran down his face, and with a great surge of his whole body, he literally flung himself across the log and jerked his legs up high into the air to save them. He flung himself too far, though, for his face and chest hit the water on the far side.

  And out of this water rose the head of a great fish, with the lake slime of years on its flat, black head, its whiskers bristling, its fixed eyes alight. Its boney jaws closed and clamped in the front of Jake's flannel shirt. His hand struck out wildly and was speared on a poisoned fin, and, unlike Joel, he went from sight with a great yell, and a whirling and churning of the water that made the cornstalks circle on the edges of a small whirlpool.

  But the whirlpool soon thinned away, into widening rings of ripples, and the corn stalks quit circling and became still again, and only the multiplying night noises sounded about the mouth of the slough.

  The bodies of all three came ashore on the same day near the same place. Except for the gaping gunshot wound where the neck met the chest, Jimmy Catfish's body was unmarked.

  But the bodies of the two Jamisons were so marred and mauled that the locals buried them together on the bank without ever knowing which might be Jake's and which might be Joel's.

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