Excerpt: Bound by Smoke and Feather

Thomas is Dead

The Cabin was balanced precariously at the edge of the swamp. Someone, a long time ago, had sunken boards deep into the murky waters so the cabin itself didn’t crumble completely into the muck along with the snakes and slime. The structure from afar bore the uncanny resemblance to some of the black water cypress trees. The foundation drooped in making the interior flooring cant in odd directions. Parts of the wooden frame showed the mark of weathering so severely one wondered how the cabin had not fallen to rot like most the vegetation that grew in the humid northern Alabama swamplands.

Inside, though, the three-room cabin was dry and comfortable. Herbs, in various stages of dehydration, were strung from the ceiling on cords, giving the air an aroma of fresh earth and grass. A battered tea kettle hung on a hook by the wood stove. It was always there waiting for a visitor.

The old man who lived there resembled the cabin in many ways. His lanky frame made him seem frail from a distance, as though the slightest gust of wind might shake his brittle bones something fierce. Few people realized that he could be as dangerous as the swamp that surrounded his home. Most thought him a kindly old man. After all, he had a good ear, and folks in those parts came to him to talk out their troubles. Better still, he had healing hands if anybody ever needed physicking. He had no trouble giving out the herbs and teas he made and healing those that needed it. Nobody caused him any trouble for the gift of magic that he held in his rather arthritic fingers.

His name was Thomas Woden, but it had been over five decades since anybody had called him that. He sat on an old stool, smoking his pipe, and watching the swamp. There was a stillness to the land this early in the morning. The mosquitoes weren’t buzzing yet, the gators lazily swam from the water and dozed partway on the land. Only the tree frogs and the cicadas broke the stillness with their chirping.

That was the music to this place, hid away where most of the world couldn’t see it. Thomas had grown to love the music of the swamp — the alternating cadence and silence of the desolate landscape. Once, though, he’d feared it. Back then, he thought the swamp was going to be the death of him.

Perhaps he’d been right, too. For surely, the swamp had killed Thomas Woden. After all, nobody had called him by that name. Nobody even knew that was his name.
His parents had been the last ones to call him Thomas, and they were both long dead. After all these years, he could still hear the way his mother would holler, “Tho-MAS!” when he was needed for some menial task or another. Worse yet was the stern, no-nonsense baritone of his father’s voice as he sat him down for a lecture: “Now, Thomas, you know we have worked hard on our place in this community…”

Over fifty years and he still heard those voices in his head and cringed. It was best for everyone, he’d decided, that Thomas Woden simply died in the swamp.

Old Fox was who he’d become. Least that was what Nan had said GreyDog and ShadowChild had been calling him. His Muskogee wasn’t all that good at the time, so he couldn’t quite be sure what sort of names they’d been given him. In the end, though, they’d named him friend, as least. They’d called him son, and husband. That was good enough for him. They taught him how to live in this world, instead of the world he’d come from.

Ends up, everything he’d been taught in his life about proper community and manners didn’t amount to a hill of beans down here in the swamplands. That was one of the first lessons he’d learned. Then, well, then Grey and Nan started teaching him everything else.

At first he thought he fell in love with the cabin cause in was theirs, and they should him the swamp through their eyes. But he’d learned, later, that the swamp could be a dead lonely place. Yet he loved it still.

Round about that time most the folks that knew him just started calling him Old Man, for they knew he was a Mojo man and they thought that to name him would be to give him power over them. Fools, they were. They gave him power just by talking to him, and telling him their troubles. Course, he wouldn’t use it. Not against them. They were good people.

Then she had come into his life. She had called him PapaAngel, and he realized that was all he wanted to be. All she wanted to be was a little feather, but Grey had taught him how to give her so much more. Grey had given him the power to make her fly.

Of course, this all happened a long time ago, in an age that has come and gone – hopefully never to return. Back in those days, man subjugated man and had the audacity to make him call him “Master” just because of a difference in skin.