Ghosts of Pine Island
When I moved away from the Piney Woods, my old canoe stayed behind. Years passed before I came back to fetch it last spring. To my consternation, the canoe had been flipped upright and was filled to the brim with a slurry of fallen leaves and rainwater.
The standing water, I soon realized, was not such a bad sign: no leaks. I dumped out the canoe and drug it off the back porch of a lakefront shack my brother owns about halfway between Tyler and Longview, a semirural patch of East Texas where everyone in my family, besides me, still lives. From the hull, I mucked out the wet leaf compost. Then I hoisted the length of wobbly green plastic onto the roof of my Honda and headed south, through the pines and over the Sabine River
Described by East Texas author Joe R. Lansdale as “a brown run of water that twists its way along dirty banks, underneath lean-over trees and all their shadows,” the Sabine River wends through the low places of my home country. It slows and slowly widens as it approaches the Louisiana line and Toledo Bend Reservoir, the largest manmade lake in the South. I had spent time on this stretch of river a decade earlier, getting to know the people who camp along its banks, out of sight from the rest of us. The king of these river folk was a semi-reformed outlaw named Danny Tidwell.
Danny lived on a small, unnamed island of the Sabine with his wife, Marcia Tidwell, and their chickens, turkeys, doves, cats, and dogs. The island had no running water or electricity, but the Tidwells didn’t seem to mind. Danny hunted deer and squirrel, and his trotlines hooked more channel cats than they could eat. Each spring, they planted a garden by the phases of the moon, and Marcia canned their home-grown produce to carry them through the
