Jack: Book One in the Trilogy, the Battle Begins

Earlier Years Part 9

"They call me the Midnight Raider," said Jack.

"Wow Jack! Where did you get that nifty fishing pole?" I asked, staring wide-eyed at the long imported bamboo rod that had ten eyelets for the line to pass through and was thick as a large carrot and narrow as a green bean at the top. Call me Jeremy. Jeremy Foster. I was his best friend, perhaps his only friend.

Jack Stone, the cool, collected, braggart, exaggerator, smooth talker, putter-downer and sometimes bully, said he had found it lying on the river bank just waiting for him to come along and snatch it and take it home.

"It was a'beggin' me to take it," he said.

But that wasn't exactly true. In actuality, he stole it out of his grandpa's store near the slave auction, having broken into it the previous night. The tag was still on the reel, one dollar.

"They call me the midnight raider," Jack said laughing.

10 LICORICE STICKS AND FISHING HOOKS

It was April, 1853, in the heart of the South - eight years before the Civil War - wonderful years for many folks, even for some black folks although many didn't cotton much to their lot in life, being slaves and all, and having to be sold, separated from their families and work the plantations and cotton fields. Charleston was bustling with activity and politics. And not all of the white folks had it easy either. Many worked in the same fields twelve hours a day. Me, I was eleven years old and the whole debate about freeing the Negroes or keeping them slaves or bringing them into the new territories west of the Mississippi recently conquered from Mexico didn't mean much to me. I mean, I didn't pay much attention. Those were the good old days running around with Jack and Mike Hawkins, playing at adventures and doing whatever we wanted to do.

Stole that pole? No, borrowed it. That's the way Jack viewed the matter. He planned to give it all back - everything he took from his grandpa's store including the fishing gear such as poles, bobbers, hooks, sinkers, lines; the rabbits' feet; the coins from the cash drawer; the sour balls; fire balls; lemon balls; honey suckers; the orange, lemon, and lime pops; the salt candy; the peanut brittle; licorice sticks; and lemonade jars not to mention the hunting gear with boots, a jacket and even a musket.

Jack fully intended to return all of it someday. And I believed him. I'd never seen him return anything yet but he sounded convincing. Jack was always borrowing this or that from somebody who never knew it was Jack doing the borrowing. And he intended to give back the canoe he borrowed from the old Indian across the river down from the old Smythe plantation. He said he'd give that back too if only he could find it. Said he awoke one day in the riverbank grass and the darn thing that he left tied to a stick in the mud was gone just like that; said that perhaps the old Indian sensed where it was and took it while Jack was sleeping.

Indians have special powers of sense and can find anything that was lost or taken from them even if it was across a river, Jack said, which it was in this case. He probably didn't need it anyway, Jack concluded. Although Jack didn't have much schooling - skipping out as much as he could get away with and all - he knew a lot about Indians and what was what and who was doing what on the river.