The Boy in His Winter Read online

  I had no adequate theory to explain why the raft was able to travel through time. The water at the river’s source, Minnesota’s Lake Itasca, was also traveling into the future. For all I know, it may go on forever and, with it, the piece of river that had seized our raft and held us fast in timelessness. Do you think that’s a plausible explanation?

  I know the river flows into the Gulf of Mexico! I don’t need you to give me a lesson in the geography of the Mississippi Delta. I got soaked to the skin with it. But the water—braiding and unbraiding for more than two thousand miles before finally entering the Gulf—doesn’t just stop. It goes on and on. Our raft, in that water, may have been a kind of time machine carried by a freak of nature (singularity, to use a modern term)—an unrepeatable combination of circumstances—toward time’s distant unfolding, which it never reached because of the damned hurricane.

  What is it now? You want to know if we slept.

  Naturally, I’ve said as much. We slept in the ordinary way of men, or a man and a boy. Days alternated with nights, good weather with bad. Only in memory do the conditions of our life on the Mississippi appear uncommon. We may have been surprised, but in those days we accepted magic; we took miracles in stride. When we ventured onto land is another story, which sometimes appalled us. If all seems now to have been a dream, it is only recollection that makes it so. Would it have been a waste and a pity if it had been a dream? I, for one, have spent the best part of my life in dreaming and have profited by it. I’ve been cheered and uplifted—especially now, in the winter of my life. Even nightmares have something to tell us about ourselves. And inasmuch as dreaming is an aspect of human life, we ought not to reject it.

  And if it had been no more than a virtual journey, well—what do you say? You’re a young man and have more experience with this sort of thing, although I’m deft at raising online maps from the swamp of data. You were born into the Digital Age, while I spent my formative years in the Age of Steam, which I miss. It had its familiars, gods, and avatars, such as the locomotive, the steamboat, the primitive automobile, as well as that most genial altar of the age: the old-fashioned cast-iron radiator, to replace the ancient hearth. For all its speed and efficiency, feats of memory and logic, the computer cannot warm you on a winter’s night and—its processes being invisible and all but silent—there’s nothing to see and very little to adore.

  WE LEFT CAPE GIRARDEAU and the year 1851 behind, and next morning, not long after first light, we made New Madrid, at Missouri’s southeastern heel. I watched in fascination as Jim, leaning into the brightness of the newly risen sun, seemed to be eaten by it—first his head and then the balance of him, until he was nothing but an engulfing light—or so it seemed to eyes widened by the recent night.

  “You look like a ghost,” I said, shifting my gaze because my eyes were stinging the way they will when you step out of darkness into daylight.

  Jim was afraid of ghosts and all other tokens of the unseen, which to him was a teeming place fraught with menace. (It must be the same for a virologist.) He was a Christian, but his Baptist faith had become confused with voodoo, as practiced by old Mambo Laveau, who could animate the dead.

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Jim?” I asked, to needle him.

  “I do.”

  I shivered to hear his voice, tremulous and thrilling, issue from the temporary dark. I recalled how Tom had scared poor Jim out of his wits by removing the mirror from Miss Watson’s chifforobe. When Jim came to make up the fire (his eyes, like mine now, nearly useless after chopping wood in the glaring sun), Tom began to moan hideously. He’d draped himself in a sheet and floured his face, and when he climbed through the mirror’s empty frame into Miss Watson’s bedroom, Jim fainted dead away. According to voodoo, mirrors are passageways between the living world and the next. At the time, I didn’t feel the least sorry for Jim, thinking it only right that someone ignorant enough to believe in the resurrection of frogs, in zombies, and in other perversions of sense should suffer the consequences.

  New Madrid floated past us—that is to say, we floated past New Madrid, which the town’s boosters claim is the oldest American city west of the Mississippi. Maybe it is; I never bothered to check. A lifetime isn’t long enough to verify the countless truths of this world—not even a lifetime as long as mine. My eyes grown accustomed to the new light, I turned once more and looked at Jim, who had reassembled himself in the stern of the raft.

  “Ever hear of the 1811 New Madrid earthquake?”

  I took every opportunity to sound the depth of Jim’s ignorance; such is the cruelty of boys.

  “No,” he said. Jim was smart, but he had no learning to speak of.

  The water that rose in 1811 after the earthquake, flooding fields and streets all the way to the Gulf of Mexico—where is it now? Time, imprinted on its atoms, must have commingled with the Gulf, flavoring it with the past, before seeping to earth’s far corners. Much later, did a Fiji islander wash her clothes in antebellum Mississippi River water? Did a woman from Ceylon or Sicily? Did a kayak on Baffin Bay slip through water that had been stirred, centuries earlier, by the paddle wheel of a Mississippi steamboat? I seem helpless not to think about time, and what I had intended to be a simple story of Jim’s and my life on the river becomes more and more snarled in complexity.

  Seeing a gaudy paddle wheeler near the opposite shore, I found my thoughts wandering to the pleasures of a journey by boat, instead of toiling aboard a raft. We did often struggle, Jim and I, no matter that we traveled in mythic time toward the future.

  ON MAY 10, 1862, WE ARRIVED at Plum Point Bend, where a naval engagement between the Confederate River Defense Fleet and a squadron of Union ironclads was in noisy progress. I should describe the ships’ maneuvering, the skirmishing of men on either side, the confusion and alarms. I ought to give an account of the battle’s importance, and because the American Civil War is relatively ancient history, I should summarize its causes (having more to do with Jim and his family than with me and mine). But at this moment, I prefer to note the color of the water, the behavior of clouds and cannon smoke in the changeable wind, the elegant figures traced by birds against the reeling sky.

  You say I have a duty to history.

  Having been in history as long as I have relieves me of any further obligation to it.

  You say I have a duty to readers to flesh out my story.

  Sorry, but I find such fleshing-out to be tedious and beside the point.

  You want to know what my point is in all this?

  I’m not sure. You see I am, at least, honest. But I think “all this” has to do with ideas of time and the secret confluences by which we arrive at points in our own histories. But because I do not wish to be remembered (if I will be remembered) as a self-indulgent fantasist, I’ll skip the purple patch for now, however much I wish to write it. I need to make amends for my indifference, for having turned my back on the world in favor of the beauties of the way. I’ll try to study cruelty (I regret my own) and render it in more familiar terms. But something of Mark Twain’s playfulness, his habit of fantasizing and exaggerating must have rubbed off on me. How could it be otherwise? So this account of my life must be impure: a mixture of high-minded tragedy and lowborn comedy. At Plum Point, at this moment in time, I was more interested in the rude clash of ships and ironclads than in grand ideas or my moral misdeeds and childish stupidity. (How could I have imagined that—215 years in the future—I’d be preparing to leave time once more and, in all probability, never come back to it?) I had the smell of gunpowder up my nose, and no other smell is so exciting to the boyish imagination.

  Yes, yes! I am an old man and may have forgotten how the scent of a woman has power to inflame! But if you’re to be the secretary of my memories, you had better learn to flatter me. I’d have used a Dictaphone, but I dislike machinery that does not hum or clank—crude sounds that give it humanity.

  Plum Point.

  The General Sumter had rammed and driven off the Union iron
clad Cincinnati. I’d seen the General Sumter many times before, on the river near Hannibal, when she was the Junius Beebe, a side-wheeled steamer working as a tow. She’d been outfitted in Algiers, Louisiana, with iron plates covering her bow and commissioned as a ram for the Confederacy. She was giving the Union boats hell, and I had my hat off to her when the Cincinnati ran aground. I could see Jim didn’t approve of my enthusiasm, but at the time I thought no more of the skirmish than if I’d witnessed a contest of battling eggs or a ruckus in the schoolyard. My conscience was raw and unformed.

  On the General Sumter, three Confederate officers were leaning on the upper-deck railing, when one of them straightened up and began to shout toward us, “Ahoy! Huckleberry Finn!”

  He and I might have been parted by fifty yards of water and twenty-seven years when we’d gone our separate ways, but I knew at once and without doubt that the officer waving to me was Tom Sawyer! He climbed down the ladder onto the lower deck and, shortly, was making toward us in a skiff rowed by two rebel sailors. Jim was in a panic, for he could expect nothing but the whip and the shackle from representatives of Jeff Davis’s government. And I couldn’t be sure that Tom hadn’t become a dyed-in-the-wool Confederate since I had seen him last; he came from Missouri and had grown up surrounded by slaves who called him “young master.”

  “Play dead, Jim,” I said.

  Jim fell facedown onto the raft, where he gave a convincing portrayal of a man departed from this earth. I never did fathom how, in that desperate moment, he had managed to suppress the natural shiver that comes to a human being in fear for his life. I threw a blanket over his head and laid a piece of fatback on his naked back. It looked just like mutilated flesh, and to complete the illusion, I pried open the tin can where we kept putrefied chicken gizzards, a sovereign bait for catching catfish. As the skiff pulled alongside, Tom and his crew hesitated in the presence of so formidable a stink. I had my knife and appeared to be cutting a strip of meat from Jim, as though hunger had driven me to the extremity of cannibalism.

  “Hello, Huck,” said Tom, eyeing me with a look of profound disappointment at how low I had fallen. “Are you eating that n———?”

  “I am, Tom,” I said. “Hunger’s made me do it.” I cut off another strip of pinkish meat, put it in my mouth, and chewed noisily. Jim never moved a muscle.

  One of the sailors vomited over the side of the skiff. I was pleased to see that my theatrics were appreciated. (Wasn’t the raft a kind of stage on which we played parts assigned to us by someone else?)

  “Might that be Jim you’re dining on?” Tom asked.

  “It is,” I said. “He keeled over day before yesterday of starvation. His last words to me were to eat him before he spoiled.”

  “Smells like he’s gone off some,” said Tom, his finely shaped nose hunting the air as if for the departing atoms of his childhood, instead of the deceased slave he’d frequently bedeviled.

  “Hotter than usual for the time of year—don’t you think so, Tom?”

  He nodded in agreement, and I admired how well he had grown into a man. He had dash, and his looks had ripened into a dark handsomeness. At thirty-eight, he looked about as striking as a man can in a Confederate uniform.

  “Jim was a good n———,” he said. “Makes me glad to see him dead, else I’d have had to hang him for a runaway.”

  I thought for sure Jim would scream or make a commotion, but he didn’t—aware, doubtless, of the gravity of his situation.

  “Care for some?” I asked, indicating the place on Jim’s back I’d been carving.

  “No, thank you, Huck,” said Tom, with the nice manners of an officer and a gentleman.

  “How ’bout you boys? Care for some dead n———?” I was sure Jim would forgive me for using that hateful word in the name of verisimilitude.

  I am not one to curry favor, but for Jim’s sake, I smiled at the pair of Mississippians; for so I knew them to be from the timbre of their voices. They refused me. Fortunately, not one of the three men in gray showed any desire to take a look at Jim’s face hidden under the blanket.

  “You don’t look a day older, Huck,” said Tom, who bore his early middle age splendidly.

  “I’m still only thirteen,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Don’t know,” I said.

  Our conversation was suddenly becalmed, but Tom seemed reluctant to go. He and I had been the best of friends, and maybe he thought we should speak fondly of the days of our common boyhood on the wharves and mudflats of Hannibal. But apparently he could find nothing more to say. As for me, I was nervously waiting for him and his oarsmen to be gone. Just then, a bell rang out merrily on the General Sumter.

  “Lunch is ready!” said Tom, suddenly discovering his appetite. “Row us back to the boat, boys,” he said, taking his seat in the stern. “It was swell to see you again, Huck.”

  “Same here, Tom.”

  “You take good care, now.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  And then Tom was gone from our lives, and Jim could breathe once again like a living man.

  I said earlier that I would avoid the vernacular in favor of a more dignified way of speaking. But I couldn’t resist it and may fall, again, into a common usage for the fun of it. The only person who might object to my attempts at dialect is Jim, and he’s long dead.

  “I HATE WHEN YOU SIT and brood, Jim.”

  “I don’t brood; I think.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “At night, I think about the origin of stars: how they hurl themselves against the outposts of nothingness. During the day, of the effects of sunlight on fog and water, the secret language of birds and how they turn as one in flight, and how a cloud of gnats reproduces certain nebula in miniature.”

  I feel obliged to rehabilitate Jim after having shown him in less than a heroic light during the performance of our theater of cannibalism. He was not the simpleton Mark Twain made him out to be, nor was he the blank, the zero, the empty slate I sometimes took him for. It isn’t easy to describe well and truly the persons and events that figured in my story. I’ve scribbled some before, but not at length or with a responsibility to my characters—which, in this instance, are Jim and I.

  To continue our palaver, without the artifice of dialect to make it plausible:

  “What do you dream, Jim?”

  “I dream of the oracle bones used by my ancestors to foretell the future, of a small drum, and also of animals—their eyes full of suffering.”

  To be honest, I don’t know what Jim was thinking and dreaming during the 125 years we were together on the raft—from 1835 to 1960, although it seems now to have been no time at all. I can’t read minds, and Jim, by nature shy and reserved, would not have shared his innermost life with me. Some things I have to imagine, else there will be no story. And if I have not been entirely truthful, it is not with any intent to deceive. Mark Twain passed his book off as if I had written it myself. I’ve told you before that it was none of my doing. Frankly, I resent the words he put in my mouth. If Jim were here, I’m sure he’d say as much. I’m not out to correct Twain’s mistakes; he’s famous and has every right to them. I want only the chance to tell the story in my own way while I’m aboveground and in my right mind.

  What was I thinking then?

  God knows. Probably about the river: its bottom, bends, shoals, reefs, and snags. It always fascinated me. When Pap was sober, he would take me down to the mudflats, where we’d do a little fishing. He liked to eat river carp. Before his hands shook from liquor, Pap could scale and skin a carp faster than any other man I know. I can see him now, against the sinking river light, his bare arms glittering with pink scales.

  My mother? Never knew her. You can say that my youth was spoiled by men. I mean, I never knew the gentleness of women, which might have smoothed and civilized me. The Widow Douglas thought too much about the next life to be of any use to a boy in this one. Miss Watson was a backbiting screec
h owl of a woman without a charitable bone in her body. She was as stern and unbending as a corset and had a face like a broadax. In Hannibal, when I recommended killing her to Tom, I wasn’t fooling.

  I ought to mention the dead man Jim and I fished up from the river, north of Memphis. From his striped overalls and cap and the coal dust ingrained in his hands, his cheeks, in the loose folds of his bristly neck, he gave every appearance of being a locomotive engineer. But the wonder of it was how he’d come to be adrift in the main channel of the Mississippi. We had no answer, and never did discover anything to account for the incongruity. The night after we’d fished him up, I heard a locomotive beating its way downriver toward our raft—its cyclopean headlight looming in the dark. I put the blanket over my head and prayed like mad. It was only a lantern belonging to a towboat or a barge, but I couldn’t shake my expectations of being sunk by a runaway train. You can’t always be testing reality. Try, and progress will be slow and halting, like a man’s on snowshoes crossing a snow bridge flung over a bottomless crevasse. You have to step out and hope the snow isn’t rotten. I have always believed in recklessness and the amplitude of time, which are the creed and virtues of any boy.

  After our encounter with the celestial railroad engineer, I took an interest in the deceptive appearance of reality, debating it with Jim while we meandered southerly in what must have been almost a state of suspended animation. My capacity for abstruse thought was becoming sly and subtle, like a seducer worming his way into a woman’s boudoir.

  “Do eels have souls?” I remember having put that question to Jim, as he brought one up from the depths, where, presumably, it had lived in contentment, maybe even joy, regardless of its lowly, uncharismatic appearance.

  “If men have souls, then I do not see why an eel shouldn’t,” he replied with his usual sagacity.

  But I thought he was being evasive, and said as much.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I’m inclined to give life in all its forms the benefit of the doubt.”