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HAREKINS Charles L. Sullivan PART I — Swamp Duel
That’s what the old folks at home used to call them.
As I sit in my living room on this Friday night in the aftermath of Hurricane Frederic, enjoying once again things like electric lights, ice, and air conditioning, the ghosts of other witches and warlocks from the Gulf rise again.
I barely remember the 47 one, having ridden it out in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, at the tender age of four. I do remember the banshee wail of the wind and the disembodied hand I spied crawling through the beachfront wreckage on the morning after. My father kept telling me it was something called a crab, but I knew better. Even deep-sunk in my grandma’s feather bed up in the Delta I could manage a cold sweat on any hot summer night for years just thinking about that hand.
I remember another one, too, called Betsy, which I toyed with the summer of ’65 just after my August graduation from the University of Southern Mississippi. I had hied myself to New Orleans to seek fortune and fun. I certainly found no fortune, but I thought I was having fun.
With Betsy en route, I joined some denizens of Chartres Street in a “Hurricane Party.” We spent the night on a balcony in the lee of the wind, hurling empty cans into the gale just to see them snatched away to bang against the brick wall of the patio below. We laughed a little uneasily as slate titles sang through the air and cut down the shop signs overhanging the street, but we felt secure.
In the gray muggy dawn light, I found my previously beaten up VW right where I had left it, apparently no worse for the wear of the storm. The Cadillac in front of it had a 2 x 4 stove through the back window, and the Buick behind it had all four wheels bucked up in the air due to the weight of a large oak which had lain down on the front seat.
Urgent business of a personal nature, delayed only so I could be in the storm, demanded my presence in Jackson before 5:00 p.m. With the downtown underpasses flooded, I had to pick my way through the Garden District to Airline Highway. The VW proved to be a jewel at negotiating the tangled webwork of downed power lines and threading the maze of fallen trees. I got a grin out of zoot-
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