The Boy in His Winter Read online

  You’re about to object that it did not happen this way. In fact, my story seems more and more inclined to go its own way, with small regard for the truth. Isn’t that what you’re thinking?

  Does anyone really know how it happened? Do you? Did Mark Twain? Did it really happen at all? Sometimes I wonder. So when you play the tapes back, make damned sure you type it the way I say it. It’s to be my book, after all. Later, you can write your own version. So, where in the hell was I?

  Right. We came by the raft dishonestly. We’d only meant to do a little fishing. It was cool and nice under the big willow with its whips trailing over the water. Christ, it was a scorcher of a day! The whole town must have fallen asleep, along with Jim and me. When we finally did wake—if we ever did—the raft was too far along in space and time to return it. We could no more reverse ourselves, our motions in all five dimensions, than fly to the moon. I told you about the moving-picture show I saw in Baton Rouge. It was made by a Frenchman, a magician, whose name I’ve forgotten—that and a good deal more besides.

  Strange, how we can’t remember the heat of a day gone by or what a thing felt like—say a girl’s silk blouse or the skin of her throat and breast. Oh, a man will say readily enough, “I remember how it felt to touch her breasts. It was a summer night, and she had opened her blouse a little at the neck.” Nothing but words. He can’t summon the sensation in his fingertips when he touched her or the prickling he felt in his own skin, which may have been the heat of a summer’s night but was most likely desire—the yearning of a young man for a girl. Maybe you’ve noticed it’s the same in dreams. You can see, you can hear, but you can’t really smell, taste, touch inside them. Some can maybe, not me. Not that it matters for the story I want to tell but can’t seem to begin properly. In a story, words are sufficient to bring a thing to life.

  The raft. We borrowed it from Mr. Carlson, who had gone to St. Louis to buy a household slave. Looking back, I can’t say whether I had an opinion on slavery or not. Household slaves did get to bathe and wear decent clothes, something I never did in those days. Miss Watson and Judge Thatcher kept them, and they were both good Christians, if too full of starch. I wish I could say I stole Carlson’s raft to spite him for his prejudice. But I already said how Jim and I thought we were taking it for only a couple hours’ fishing. Enlightenment in the year 2077 is relatively easy—now that the white race is no longer in the majority. But in 1835, when Jim and I commenced our journey, people were rawer in their sensibilities, more indifferent in their feelings toward others. When my book is published (if it ever is), one hell of a lot of water will have gone under the bridge since I was a roughneck boy.

  I wonder if I would’ve taken to Jim and treated him squarely if my father had been the owner of a cotton gin instead of the town drunk. But I’m digressing—not that I mind. I’ve always thought you could make a fine book out of nothing but digressions so long as they were scandalous. Have you read Tristram Shandy? No? You’re missing something. I’m parched—mind getting me a cold lemonade? It’s meanness not to allow us liquor, that warm dram of consolation and dreams.

  WE ENTERED A CLIMACTIC MOMENT in the Little Ice Age, below St. Louis. The raft was seized, with a noise like needles knitting, and we were hemmed in for winter—river and the old channel’s oxbow lake having frozen solid. By now, we guessed that we were not two ordinary river travelers; or if we were merely a boy and a black man, then it must have been the river that was extraordinary: a marvel that protected us by the same mysterious action that had given a common horse wings and changed a woman into a laurel tree.

  You want to know if I believe in rapid adaptation—in an accelerated reorganization of atoms in order to rescue what has become suddenly indefensible.

  Yes, but not as the ancients did, but as geneticists and machine neuroscientists do now. But in 2077, we have sciences and technologies unknown and undreamt of when, on a stalled raft in 1850, Jim and I shivered with cold and also with a superstitious dread. We worried about our vulnerability, now that the river no longer moved, and with it us. We were like flying insects, in danger when they are still. Could our days on the river have been like a moving picture, creating the illusion of life until a sudden stop destroys it (to use a twentieth-century figure of speech)? Of course, we aired our doubts in terms appropriate to the age. At least Jim did. As I recall, I could find no words for my uneasiness. Always the more articulate, Jim thought the magic that had kept us safe was, by the extremity of winter, overthrown.

  Yes, I said magic. He believed in it, and so did I. I believe in it yet, skeptic that I am—believe in it at least a little, and a little is enough. We weren’t stupid. I may not have gone to school, but I had the native intelligence Thoreau and Emerson admired. So did Jim, who managed, like so many of us, to make room for superstition in an otherwise reasonable mind.

  We were scared: Jim, because of the Fugitive Slave Act, and me, because I was in awe of the sanctity of property. Yes, even a hooligan like me. Jim was a runaway, and I was his accomplice. Not that I was above stealing, but my thefts had been of small account. The theft of a man, however, gave me pause and anxiety because of its size. Don’t we measure the significance of a thing by the space it occupies? Think of suffering: I believe the pain of a dog to be of a higher order of magnitude than that of a flea. How much greater, then, is the pain of a man? This scale of anguish produced in me a conflict when it came to Jim. On one hand, I sympathized with his misery. He was a man—I could plainly see as much. He’d been bereft of wife and children, who, according to antebellum law, were not his wife and not his children. I understood him well enough to recognize in his silences, his brooding, and in the cries he sometimes uttered in his sleep that he grieved for them. But on the other hand, Jim belonged—by law—to Miss Watson. I hated her, but she had paid good money for him. She had a bill of sale. If he’d been a dog, I’d have gone with Jim “without further ado,” as Tom Sawyer used to say. I confess I did not resolve my confusion concerning Jim’s status until long after I had left the raft for good and had begun to age as any other human inevitably does.

  “I think I ought to go into the woods and hide,” said Jim after a lengthy silence in which, doubtless, he had sized up the situation.

  He had good reason to vacate the raft, but I hung on to him as you will a rabbit’s foot or a cloth doll, for the sake of familiarity and luck. Jim and I’d been inseparable for—how long? From 1835 to 1850: fifteen years. We had covered relatively few river miles together, but time counts for more. Ours was not the same as now; it was the time of myth—of childhood, which is not reckoned by any clock, but by the child, who is a kind of living chronometer. Fifteen child years is an endlessly long and slow time to share so small a space with another person, no matter that few could be found in the states and territories who’d consider Jim one.

  “I don’t see why you’re in such an infernal hurry to get away!” I complained.

  Jim stood next to the ice-locked sweep oar, vacillating. I admit I enjoyed his distress. I knew he had to go—knew in the end he would go—but I wasn’t about to make it easy for him. I thought he should squirm some first.

  “All right, Huck,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

  This was the sort of unselfish gesture Jim was always making in those days, and I did not care for it. Suddenly, I saw myself wintering on the raft, a captive to the ice and to my gratitude. I would be obliged to Jim for having eased my loneliness at the risk of his own safety. It was too much, and I turned the tables on him so I might preen in my own selflessness. What else could a thirteen-year-old boy do?

  “No, Jim, I want you to go. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

  He smiled and thanked me for my friendship. I shook his hand and squeezed it to show I did not worry his blackness might rub off. I insisted he take some of the fatback, biscuits, apples, and rye whiskey with which we’d provisioned ourselves—years before, in Hannibal—for a day of loafing. We must see to our own needs if we’re t
o be better off than the sparrow. None of them had lost its goodness, a miracle of preservation proving we were under a special dispensation. Our supplies never seemed to dwindle. Whether they were constantly replenished by an invisible agency or we had no need of them, having no appetite for food, I can’t remember. But I was glad Jim took what I offered, else I might have hated him.

  “Will you have enough, Huck?” he asked.

  “More than enough. And if I get hungry, I’ll cut a hole in the ice and fish.”

  Jim took the food and a demijohn of whiskey and went into the trees. I did not see him again until spring thaw. I returned to the raft and prepared to wait for it beneath a canvas lean-to we’d set up earlier in our journey to keep off the sun.

  Was I cold that bitter winter?

  I can’t remember, though the broad river and the level ground thereabouts brought to mind a snow-covered steppe on which mastodons and Neanderthals harried one another in a remote, equally fantastic past. But surely it was intensely cold, whether Jim and I suffered from it or not. I saw a picture once, painted by Pieter Brueghel, of skaters on a lowlands river turned to ice. This was how it looked on the upper Mississippi in the winter of 1850, when people stepped out onto the frozen river to indulge a childlike wonder at the rarity of it all—their feet shod in iron blades wrought in the St. Genevieve blacksmith’s forge.

  They paid no attention to me. I thought, at first, I was invisible; but they may have been indifferent in their jubilation and sport to a young ruffian on a raft. In any case, I thought it wise to let Jim be. The sight of a black man in that white emptiness might have diverted them from their pleasure, offering even finer sport than ice-skating. The winter had brought with its chill a kind of carnival abandon. Gray skies were grayer for the bright winter clothes, which were all the brighter for the somber atmosphere. Jim’s fresh blood sprawled on the much-abused ice would have been a colorful addition to the scene.

  The winter seemed exceptionally long to me, who had scarcely noticed the passage of time. I thought the blockade of our raft could account for it. But I did not suffer hardship, except from an impatience to be going on with our journey, though we still had no idea of its destination. Nor did I suffer in the least from hunger during my wintering. I did make a hole in the ice beside the raft and fished for bullhead and carp, bass and pickerel to moderate my impatience, which may have been only a habitual nervousness. I was cursed with the jitters, unlike Tom Sawyer, whose ease and self-possession I’d always envied. I wondered what had become of him, now that he was getting older, according to calendars like the one in Aunt Polly’s kitchen, whose pages he’d already have plucked clean—eager, like any real boy, to escape the serfdom of childhood. The earth turned relentlessly on its axis for Tom, though not for me. (I had no inkling of the coming war, in which he’d play his part with dash, and Jim had not scried it in the bones. But God surely knew of it and would make certain that the ground—iron now with cold—would not deny the dead throngs their lasting rest.)

  I must have slept. There was little else to do among the living while Jim hid. He’d found an abandoned ferryman’s shack and spent his days in speculation, his nights in tormenting himself with the recollection of his family, whose pain he transmuted into spirituals. They were tinged with gloom and bitterness, and I did not care for them. I preferred the comic songs of minstrels like the Ethiopian Serenaders I saw with Tom in Hannibal, having crept inside the tent one summer night. In April, the ice began to thaw, and Jim came out of the woods. I was happy to see him again, although I pretended unconcern.

  “Winter’s over,” I said as he came aboard the raft, which, like me, was chaffing to resume the southward journey.

  “Yes,” he said without adornment, the habit of conversation having broken.

  A bird settled on the lean-to’s ridgepole: a crow, but not even that dire portent had power to move Jim to speech. His jaws were rusted shut by melancholy. I was glad of it, having grown accustomed to silence.

  AT CAPE GIRARDEAU, on a bend of the Mississippi between St. Louis and Memphis, the river water, which had fattened with heavy rains in Nebraska and in Iowa, caught up to us. Thick brown ropes of water knotted all around the raft, but we went on, untouched by the upheaval. Around us, the weather was faultless. We lay on the rough deck, sunning ourselves. We might have fished up great whales from the bottom, so magical the day seemed, though the sky above the shore to either side of us was dark and solemn, as if that afternoon were the first Good Friday and we, two careless centurions throwing dice. We would not have known we were in the eye of a storm, surrounded everywhere by rising water, if not for trees, stumps, the walls and roofs of houses, and the bloated cows sweeping past us. That was 1851, the year of the Great Flood. (Another darkness, far ahead and far more terrible, waited downriver for me.)

  Yes, I was still thirteen years old. I thought I’d made myself clear. I got on the raft with Jim when I was thirteen and got off for the last time—by myself, for Jim had perished—at the same age. One hundred and seventy years had gone, but I hadn’t changed, though my mind must have. All the long while when I was on the river with and then without Jim, I was living (if you can call it that) in mythic time. I know how hard it is to understand; it is nearly impossible for me to explain without resorting to Einstein’s general and specific theories of relativity, which I don’t understand any more than I understand slow light, time dilation, gravity wells, or black holes. One or another of them may account for the vast span of my existence. (I will not call it my life.) Maybe it has to do with time on a raft, which is slower than that onshore. While Jim and I dawdled our way south, fishing and telling tales, the world on dry land kept another sort of time: that of factories and businesses, of railroads and governments. Jim and I had not so much as a fat gold watch between us. Maybe we were dreaming, after all.

  No, we must have been awake—or what am I to make of the chicken coop that, caught in one of the river’s ravels, knocked against our raft? A marvel, an improbability maybe, but not a dream. And that was no dream chicken we ate aboard the raft, roasted over the driftwood fire we kept going in a galvanized washtub. Look, I have the wishbone, kept all these years in my tobacco pouch for luck and as proof against the creeping doubt we entertain concerning the truth of recollection. I agree that a wishbone is meager evidence for one who claims to have seen Halley’s Comet for the first time in 1835 and three times since!

  “What do you believe in, Jim?”

  “Luck, mostly.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Bad luck.”

  “What about the chicken?” I asked, scraping with my teeth the last morsels of savory flesh from the bone.

  Jim shrugged, helplessly, as if the conundrums of the universe were too many and great to be explained by a mere man, free or slave.

  “I have a theory,” I said.

  He said nothing, having become inured to my theories, which were abundant and fanciful. My mind had grown agile in Tom Sawyer’s company, though not nearly so creative. Tom was a liar, mostly, while I hope to be truthful.

  “I don’t think we are any longer in life,” I said.

  “You mean we’re dead?”

  I could see that the idea didn’t appeal to Jim, who looked around wildly, as if expecting to see a fraternity of ghosts or, at the very least, the yellow dog that had died in the schoolyard, chasing its tail and foaming at the mouth. Had Jim worried about the persistence of rabies in the afterlife of a dog, I’d have assured him that glory, however brief, would have purged it of distemper. But Jim said nothing on the subject.

  “No, we ain’t dead.” (If we’d had this conversation, I was sure to have said ain’t. Even so illustrious a citizen as Judge Thatcher employed the vernacular on occasion.) “We’re cut off, like two flies trapped in amber.” (I might have said marmalade, but the meaning is the same.)

  Jim didn’t care for this trope, either. He preferred to avoid the quicksand of metaphysics, which I considered great sport. His min
d was more straightforward, if kinked by superstitions.

  “I want to try an experiment, Jim.”

  He looked at me, his sad eyes full of suspicion and hurt. I knew he was thinking of the last experiment, when I’d tried to teach him to swim by shoving him off the raft. Contrary to my earnest expectations, he did not suddenly acquire the gift of flotation and, if not for a passing log fallen off a lumber raft, Jim would have gone straight to the bottom. He clutched, and I pulled him safely up.

  “I want to see whether we might not have the power of resurrection,” I said.

  “I saw Marie Laveau bring a frog back to life once,” he said.

  I dismissed a frog as too low a creature to prove anything. I pointed, instead, to a dead cow, sailing belly-up on our starboard side, within reach of the boat hook, which I handed to Jim, his arms being longer and considerably stronger than mine.

  “Just touch this to the belly of that poor beast. If my theory is correct, it’ll come straightaway to life.”

  Jim did as I asked, even if he muttered some, while I held on to his pants with one hand and the lean-to with the other to ground the corpse in our miraculous energy. (A boy of the twenty-first century would have said force field.) If I was right, we’d have plenty of fresh milk for our voyage. The cow, however, continued in the intractability of death. Jim looked relieved. Plainly disgusted, he swished the end of the boat hook in the water to rid it of corruption and evil spirits. The cow did stink.

  Did I believe in evil spirits? Hard to say now. But I did believe in evil men, and women. I was impartial, generally speaking, in my low opinion of both sexes. I had only to think of Delilah and Potiphar’s wife. And in my experience, there was no more mean-spirited, foul-tempered, sharp-tongued harridan than pious old Miss Watson, who was a woman, of sorts.