Nassawadox

Patrick woke up by the shores of the Dismal Swamp. He had a raging headache and his stick was missing, his favorite stick. He tried looking around for it but every time he moved his head side to side, the pain got worse. His vision was blurry. He closed his eyes and felt around for his stick. “How pathetic I must look”, he thought, as his wrinkled pink hands felt around in the muddy clay, feeling for his stick. He came up empty, and rather than open his eyes and look around, he laid back down and tried to set his mind straight.

His breathing calmed, but his face felt hot. The sun was rising and it was getting warmer, which may have also intensified the odor coming from the Dismal Swamp, or maybe it’s just that he hadn’t noticed it earlier. It was a mix of dead fish, rotting plants and sulfur. He did, however, detect a sweetness contained somewhere in that foul wind, the smell of drying tobacco leaves perhaps.

He might have fallen asleep again, he wasn’t sure but he eventually rose up and opened his eyes just in time to see a swallowtail butterfly perched on his knee before it flittered off. The sight of the beautiful creature gave him a feeling of comfort that eased the pain and discomfort he felt lying at the edge of the Dismal Swamp. He felt something beneath his butt and noticed that that too was causing him discomfort. Must be some clams, he thought, as he felt beneath him, as it did feel like a shell of some kind underneath his upper thigh, and he briefly wondered whether swamps could be host to clams as can other bodies of water.

To his surprise, when he reached down to grab the clam he felt his stick. Can it be, he thought? He rolled over and retrieved the stick to see if it in fact was his favorite one and to his delight, it was. Ay by golly, there you are, he whispered to himself and to his walking stick. With that, he was springing to his feet and taking a look around. He saw the swamp and all it’s trappings, the insects that gave it life, swarms of wasps going back and forth, dragonflies, gnats and beetles. An occasional swallow would swoop down, it’s mouth full of bugs.

Patrick peered off at the rooftops in the distance beyond the swamp, with the women on top busying themselves with the hanging and drying of the tobacco and the peat, as well as everything else that needed to be dried in this swampy, dank, humid mess of a settlement; the grain, the corn, the clothing and linens.

I need to get dried off myself, by golly, thought Patrick as he stumbled away from the swamp toward the path that led through the forest.“I’d rather be in some dark holler where the sun refuse to shine, then to see you leave me, lord, and know your grace be no longer mine.”

The stick guided him so well that he didn’t even have to open his eyes, for he had been on this path once before and thus knew it well enough to follow. His mind at ease, even though he started to piece together in his mind how he ended up at the swamp in the first place. Getting tossed out of the meeting when he objected to a comment one of the other fellows had made. Boy, they turned on him quick, didn’t they? Even though he was just trying to bring a little enlightenment to their ignorance.

And they were all unmasked, which might have put him a bit on edge in the first place. The ones with the bills sticking out of their pockets, thinking they owned the town, which they kind of did if you looked at it that way through their eyes. But he felt otherwise, Patrick did, as did some of the other folks who were a bit more quiet and reserved and didn’t speak up about it all. So Patrick had bore the brunt and down to the swamp he was hauled. He couldn’t remember whether the pain in his head was from all the ale he drunk or from a blow or two that he had endured while being dragged down to the swamp, and he concluded that was a combination of the two.