Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

“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.