“April’s legs is most too long fo’ de foreman of a big plantation like Blue Brook.”
“Wha’ you mean, son?”
“Dey kin tote him too far f’om home sometimes.”
“You mean April kin walk too far atter dark?”
“Yes, suh,” Uncle Bill sighed.
“Gawd is de one made ’em long. April ain’ had nothin’ to do wid dat. Gawd made you’ own not so short, Sherry. Don’ fo’git dat.”
Sherry said no more and Uncle Bill worked faster with his paddling.
The afternoon sun was a great red ball floating among thin smoky clouds. A light haze was creeping out from underneath the trees on the banks of the creeks. The shrill call of a cicada rose, swelled into quick breathless notes, faded away, then was taken up, answered by a mate. Yellow sunshine fell between lacy blue shadows cast by cypress trees. Dark green thickets crouched wet-footed, beside narrow winding paths of tide water.
The marshes were buried. All the sticky miry mud exposed by the morning was hidden. Through old flood-gates the rising water gurgled and bubbled into forsaken rice-fields. Grass, vines, trees, bushes rank, thorny and fetid, crowded and trampled one another, trying to gain a deeper, stronger foothold down in the broken dikes. Breeze gazed around him with long looks. As far as his eyes could see the earth was flooded. Wasted. Unsown. Abandoned.
Uncle Bill sighed. It made him sad to think how the tide had destroyed the work of years. At first it crept timidly in, hardly enough for its shallow trickling to show. But it grew bolder and stronger as it took back the rich land, acre by acre, until it owned them all. All!