Delta Wedding, Second Quote

She rode by the thick woods where the whirlpool lay, and something made her get off her horse and creep to the bank and look in--she almost never did, it was so creepy and scary. This was a last chance look before her wedding. She parted the thonged vines of the wild grapes, thick as legs, and looked in. There it was. She gazed feasting her fear on the dark, vaguely stirring water.

There were more eyes than hers here--frog eyes--snake eyes? She listened to the silence and then heard it stir, churn, churning in the early morning. She saw how the snakes were turning and moving in the water, passing across each other just below the surface. and now and then a head horridly sticking up. The vines and cypress roots twisted and grew together on the shore and in the water more thickly than any roots should grow, gray  red, and some roots too moved and floated like hair. On the other side, a turtle on a root opened its mouth and put its tongue out. And the whirlpool itself--could you doubt it? Doubt all the stories since childhood of people white and black who had been drowned there, people that were dared to swim in this place, and of boats that would venture to the center of the pool and begin to go around and everybody fall out and go to the bottom, the boat to disappear? A beginning of vertigo seized her, until she felt herself leaning, leaning toward the whirlpool.

AMDG