PART TWO

THE SWAMP WITCH

5

They were smuggled into the swamp under cover of night.

August led them stoically through the dark, where they crisscrossed through the brush in narrow switchbacks, up to their knees in spongy soil. The chittering of nocturnal creatures rhapsodized on the soft wind that troubled the trees above, shrugging their signature of leaves against the silvery moon. Apart from that riddle of moonlight, the only illumination afforded to them against the night was August’s yellow lantern.

Until another light shined through the trees.

Meriday saw it in the distance, bobbing as if it were on the move: an orange flame.

“Mama,” she said. “Look.”

“Hush, child,” said Clementine, urging her forward. “You just keep following Mr. August and we’ll be there soon.”

“But there’s a light,” she insisted.

Jonah and Clementine froze and looked at August with the sudden wary coldness of distrust. “Is it the camp?”

August shook his head. “We are not yet close enough.”

“Have we been followed?”

Again, August rejected the idea. They could not have been followed, and what’s more, the light was ahead of them, not behind—it was deeper in the swamp than they.

“It’s there,” said Meriday, pointing. They all looked.

Jonah saw the concern on August’s face before he schooled himself. “Fox fire,” he explained.

Unsettled, the family was eager to get to the camp as soon as possible, but after another hour passed, they seemed to be going in circles—around the flame that now refused to move or disappear but hovered in the air, burning a hole in the world.

Several times, August tried his compass; each time he put it back in his pocket with a shake of his head. Compasses don’t work in the swamp, you see. They get confused. There is something strange in the magnetic field.

“Come,” said August. “The Lord will guide our way tonight.”

At last, after hours of slogging through near-impassable marsh, they made it. August left them to retrace his lonely steps while shadowed figures crept out warily to greet the newcomers.

That first night, Meriday could not sleep.

They were given beds of broom straw, surrounded by the log cabins of the settlement, some with raised floors and porches for when the floods soaked the higher ground. They would soon learn that nothing stays dry in the swamp; one must get used to being always damp. Meriday’s feet were still wet and sore from the trek, the straw rough on her back, and she felt lonesome and afraid of this new place with its foul stench and its unfamiliar denizens. She gazed up through the thicket of trees into the fractured moonlight and the stars beyond, listened to the sounds of critters roaming in the dark, and wondered if she would ever feel safe.

By and by, however, Meriday came to love the swamp.

What had, in those first grueling insufferable days, seemed a hellish isolated place filled with myriad dangers scarcely imagined by the girl, came to feel more and more like home. Each night the bleating of frogs and buzzing of nightly insects became more familiar, and she learned to navigate the flooded areas around their dry island, although her parents warned her never to stray far, and certainly not beyond the barrier of vegetation that grew densely around them, or into the surrounding marsh where footing was treacherous amid the slick snarl of roots and quicksand.