Frog Tales

The following excerpt comes from the Prologue in KING OF NOD.  We hope to add more excerpts soon.

PROLOGUE: EARLY LESSONS

He was a little white boy, but he crawled into the old black woman’s lap as if she were his very own mother–or, more likely, his grandmother or even his great-grandmother, for she was certainly old enough.  A frog’s foreleg was snatched in the round puff of his right fist.  The rest of the animal dangled, lifeless and pungent as a stalk of seaweed rotting on the beach.

He presented the frog to her chin.  “Lookit, Miss Laylee!  Lookit what I done killed.”

“Why look at that, Mr. Boo!  You kill him all by yourself–or you find him dead?”

“Myself.  Hit ‘im with a stick.”

She examined the frog with doctorly interest.  Her jowls, butterscotch pudding, sagged.  “Oh well now,” she said and tapped the frog with a yellow pad of flesh, sending a dozen tin bracelets clattering to her elbow.  Then, blazing for a miraculous instant, bluish sparks fizzled from her fingernail.  In the boy’s knuckles, abruptly, a mossy knee flexed.  “I don’t see as that jasper’s really dead.”

The boy was used to her jokes.  And her magic.  He slung the frog close to his eyes, frowning and uncertain.  “He a’sleepin?”

“Naw, he ain’t sleepin.”

He waggled his fist.  “He pretendin?”

The boy’s words curled tartly around the edges–the salt of Carolina low country.  Oak leaves fallen and left to broil in the sun.  The old woman’s voice was a sweet lyric of songbirds and Baptist hymns.  The boy came from one of the wealthiest families on the island.  The old woman lived in a shack.

She stroked a gnarl of brown sticks through his hair.  “Mr. Boo, I ever tell you the story ’bout this ol frog I come ‘cross one day?”

The boy was still eyeing the dead animal mistrustfully.  He shook his head.

“Don’t figure you wanna hear ’bout him . . .”

“Tell me!”

She shifted his slight frame around to ease the stab against her hip.  Then she told him the story the way it actually happened, and it had happened a hundred years ago (or maybe it was two hunnert, she guessed), about a little frog who had once approached her from Pigg’s Creek.

Ice crystals glittered, melted in her eyes.  She was made of cinnamon and molasses, burnt wood, rusted bedsprings, pine soap, cypress hides.  Her dress was the rag she used to mop floors.

“Come hippy-hoppin right up to my garden where I’se pullin weeds.  Well, I look at him.  An’ he look at me.  Then you know what that jasper went an’ done?”

The boy lowered the frog and watched her closely.

“Why, Mr. Boo, that ol frog get to talkin.  Jes open his little mouth and talk, plain as you talkin to me.  An’ he say, ‘Is you the guffer doctor?’”

And since it had been some considerable time since she had come across a talking frog, she had dropped her load of weeds in surprise and nearly squashed him.  When she didn’t answer him right off, the frog had asked his question again.  (She rocked-creaked her chair gently, petting the boy’s small back.)

“‘Why yes, I suppose I is the guffer doctor,’ I says to him.

“‘Then he say, ‘Thank gawd, cause I got a black whammy on me that needs fixin.’”

So she had picked up the talking frog and carried him insider her little house. (Passing through the very same tottering porch where she and the boy now sat, looking over the very same garden.  Pigg’s Creek was beyond the garden, beyond a field, slogging somewhere behind the oaks and ficus and magnolia.)

The frog told her, “Witch put that whammy on me, turnt me into this here frog.  ‘Fore that . . . well, it been so long, I don’t hardly remember.  Seem to figure I was a prince once, a ways back.”

(The dead frog curled into a rancid green pickle on the boy’s naked legs.)

So, she had gathered up some stump water (so she told the boy) and some bellis petal and some teneka root and dry cricket wings and pennywort and the two fattest beetles she could find along with all the other magic flotsam it took to untangle a witch-spell.  It went into a skilled over a low flame . . . she chanted . . . she spit . . . set light to four candles . . . snipped a sprig of her hair and chucked it into the flame (not the skillet, mind you, boy, but the flame–an’ my, wasn’t my hair jes as black-pitch as crow feathers in them days?) . . . recited the twenty-second Psalm (only the beginning part–My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?  Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?) . . . dappled in some sour mash . . . poured the lumpiness into a wooden cup . . . then set the concoction under the house to cool.

The frog, as instructed, gulped it down.

“Well, Mr. Boo, you know what happen next?”

The boy rocked his head slowly, mouth open.

“Why that little frog, he turn into a slug.  A slimy ol gray slug.”  Her wrinkles wadded into a scowl of distaste, and the boy, watcher her, scowled too.  “‘You ain’t no prince,’ I says.  An’ that slug, he look up at me with them slimy eyes, an’ he say, ‘Oh, that’s right.  I’m gettin to remember it all now.  That wasn’t no black whammy that witch put on me–it was a white one.’”

The old woman cackled and rocked the chair.

The boy scrunched his lips; a tuft of chestnut hair fell across his brow.  One eye closed, he considered the green sack of jelly in his lap.  “Not a prince . . .” he said thoughtfully.  The dead frog suddenly squirmed.  It sat up and looked at him with dull accusation.

The boy yelled out and then laughed.  The old woman’s pigtails reared back, ans she laughed with him.

That was the first lesson.