The Boy in His Winter Page 4

  “I doubt men have souls,” I said, wanting to goad him.

  “You’re a skeptic, Huck, and you’ll be the worse off for it if ever you grow up.”

  Of course, the argument probably went more like this:

  Me: “Do eels have souls, Jim?”

  Jim: “Don’t know. Maybe.”

  Me: “What about human beings?”

  Jim: “Good Book says so.”

  Me: “Good Book mention anything about eels?”

  Jim: “No, only serpents.”

  Me: “Eel’s a kind of serpent.”

  Jim: “Then it don’t have a soul.”

  Speaking of appearances, I would like my future readers to know that the picture of Jim and me that Thomas Hart Benton painted on the wall of the Missouri state capitol bears not the slightest resemblance to either one of us. I look like a scrawny old man miniaturized, and Jim, like a muscle-bound grotesque escaped from a road gang. I’ve never been satisfied with any representation of myself and have seen only one picture of Jim that did him justice. I don’t know why this should be, unless it is evidence of a nearly universal prejudice against us, instigated by Sunday school superintendents, Republicans, and bigots.

  Time passed, but slowly as we moved toward the future, with what must have been antiquity at our backs. We would feel it suddenly like a cold draft upon the heart, making us shiver in fear. The past had vanished, but it still had power to influence us, while the momentary present engaged us in its toils. We were being carried onward into a space not yet woven on time’s loom. There was nothing to be known—not even indirectly, the way unseen magnolia trees are known by the heady odor of their white blossoms. The future is said to be unborn. But how, then, do you explain the bottle of patent medicine we took from the water below Memphis, manufactured in Natchez in 1925? The empty bottle had floated impossibly upriver, bringing with it a future, assembled out of particles of nothing into a town.

  “How could it happen, Jim?” I asked, mystified after he’d finished reading me the milky blue bottle. He was not an illiterate, having been taught to read by Miss Watson, who liked to “show him off” to company.

  “Now and then, time must flow backward,” he said.

  “But the bottle rode upriver against the current!” I nearly shouted in my perplexity.

  “Then the river must be like a Möbius strip.”

  Jim didn’t know a damn thing about Möbius or his strip, although he was still alive at the time of its discovery. I’m only amusing myself. Anachronism is a storyteller’s prerogative. But I know this much: We must head always toward the future. At least on a raft.

  Then why, you ask, am I writing this book, which is a return to a dubious past?

  What else can a man do who has used up his future? And if I should die before finishing this—what will happen to the boy and the black man on their raft?

  EVERY THIRD DAY, I LET JIM BE CAPTAIN of the raft. I was captain more often than he because I took pleasure in it, not because I considered Jim incompetent. His pleasure was to take inventory of the valuables stolen from Miss Watson’s and Judge Thatcher’s houses. We had between us a mother-of-pearl opera glass; a phenakistoscope, with which we watched a Scotsman jig, a circus girl jump, and a bass fiddler fiddle; a barometer that neither rose nor fell but always stayed the same; an ivory-handled revolver without bullets; a bottle of cod-liver oil to pour down the throats of our enemies; The Pilgrim’s Progress to read to our enemies as a punishment; two tobacco pipes, one corncob and one briar wood; a jar of navy plug tobacco; an onyx letter opener; a splinter that had entered Judge Thatcher’s left foot in 1802 and emerged twenty years later to the day from his right foot; a stovepipe hat; a file in case Jim was ever chained up again; a petrified frog once belonging to Tom (the same frog Jim had seen Marie Laveau resurrect); a darning egg; a viola whose bow Tom had broken playing Robin Hood; Aunt Polly’s christening spoon; a marlinspike; a frock coat; fire tongs; a cast-iron dog; the jug of rye whiskey; a box of locofoco friction matches; sealing wax; and a bar of Belgian soap in the shape of a hot-air balloon.

  Jim liked to make up stories about the valuables: how they might behave if they could talk or how we might make outlandish use of them, such as steering the raft by whatever way the darning egg rolled, in order to avoid snags and wrecks, or sawing on the viola strings with the petrified frog. He thought this might raise a chorus of the dead and cause the varmints inside our clothes to jump overboard. He liked to tell me about the creation of the world from a handful of mud and thorns, about the moon’s whispering secrets all night to the sea, the noise of stars, the drowned who coursed forever through the river’s veins, a woman who ate her children, and the sad wedding of a weeping willow to a locust tree. Jim’s themes tended toward sadness, which must come naturally to a man bereft of nearly everything.

  Once, Jim shocked me by putting on a frock coat and a stovepipe hat (belonging to the judge), and with his hand gripping the sternpost as if it were a podium, he recited from memory Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He would never say how he had come by the text, not even when I dosed him with rye whiskey to make him talkative. While Jim was no teetotaler, he couldn’t handle liquor and would fall asleep before he could be coaxed into revelation.

  “Do you think God made us all equal, Jim?” I asked when he had recovered his wits and the power of speech.

  “Yes, Huck,” he said simply, so that I was ashamed to think otherwise.

  When John Wilkes Booth shot and killed Old Abe, Jim was inconsolable for days afterward, weeping and gnashing his teeth and jabbing at his leg with the marlinspike, until I feared he might throw himself overboard or at the very least lose his mind. I didn’t know what I would do with a deranged black man on such a small raft. I thought of putting him ashore but couldn’t bring myself to abandon him. I would sooner have set a Christian in a coliseum rampant with starved lions. Jim was my friend, and if grief turned him into a raving lunatic, then so be it.

  We’d found the patent-medicine bottle in the fall of 1862, below Memphis. We floated down to Vicksburg, a distance of 180 river miles, in about one hundred days, arriving in the middle of the Union siege of that Mississippi town, on June 21, 1863. We’d made unusually good time for a raft steeped in legend, a speed Jim attributed to the overriding effect of “historical urgency.” (Did Jim say that, or did I read it somewhere much later, after I had embarked on a serious study of time travel, commencing with Minkowski’s Space and Time, which I didn’t understand?)

  Listen: Every author wants to write at least one time-travel novel in his or her life. If I failed to produce mine, it was not for lack of trying. I would lose myself in the bewildering complexities of the subject. After a while, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.

  There was one other valuable, which I forgot to mention: a fragment of a meteorite that had fallen on the shore of Bull Shoals Lake, where Judge Thatcher had gone fishing for walleye. I have wondered, often in the years since our journey, if the “thunderstone,” as Jim liked to call it, did not possess otherworldly properties. Jim would hold it to his ear as you might a conch to overhear the roar of a distant sea. He claimed he heard planets hissing down the black jetties of space, whales breaching tropical seas, an unknown music called jazz, and a prophecy of a second Flood.

  The past is vivid. Don’t you find it so? It’s like watching a movie in Technicolor while the present, in which I am engulfed, is black and white and fading before my very eyes. A specialist in mental disintegration once wrote that mine was an extreme case of arrested development. Jim knew better when he said my boyish heart had been flummoxed by time and my brain soused by too much Mississippi River water.

  AT VICKSBURG, WE LEFT THE RAFT for the first time since the winter of 1850. We could go no farther, because of Pemberton’s cannonading from the bluffs overlooking the river and Grant’s bombardment of the beleaguered town from the opposite bank. Outwardly, Jim and I had not changed. How our thoughts and tempers may have been altered by ex
perience, I cannot guess. We had seen death pass by us on the river, but death had been ample in Hannibal, too. In those days, the mortuary parlor was not the exclusive precinct of the recently departed. Death was present in houses and on the streets. More than once, Tom and I had stumbled onto corpses while hunting river rats or searching the rank mud for pirate treasure. The Mississippi was a river of the dead as familiar to us as Lethe or Styx to the ancient Greeks, and occasionally it would deliver up from its abundance the well-washed bodies of the murdered and the drowned.

  Jim and I hid the raft in a bayou and waited for the town to fall, which it did to hunger, dysentery, and malaria as much as to the ceaseless shelling by Union artillery and gunboats. The Confederates surrendered on the Fourth of July, 1863, and Jim and I wandered the ruined town and the “prairie-dog village” dug out of the yellow-clay hills above it. We marveled at earthen living rooms like caves domesticated by fancy carpets, beds and other furniture, with slaves to wait on tables, though their masters, after a forty-eight-day siege, had little to eat except their own shoes. Jim and I didn’t think much about it, not being hungry ourselves. Besides our seemingly inexhaustible provisions, the Mississippi was generous with its fish. If Jesus had been in Vicksburg then—which he most certainly wasn’t—he would have had more than three little fishes with which to work his miracle. My God, but the river was rich, unlike now, when we’ve sown the waters with poison and brought forth deformity and death unimaginable in the days of our youth. As I recall, Jim and I were never thirsty, either. We had aboard the raft a jug as miraculous as Cana’s, which was filled always with sweet water. It was wonderful drizzled into rye whiskey.

  The slaves looked at us with mistrust and, I thought, resentment.

  “Because you seem to them a freeman,” I said to Jim in explanation.

  “Because for you, this is just scenery,” said Jim. (Or maybe I read it in his eyes.)

  He may have been right to think I made a cartoon out of suffering. He understood people better than I. Pain had made him sensitive; loneliness (he was lonely even when in company), alert to the slightest motions of the hearts of others. I wouldn’t say Jim was a better man than I. To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom. Jim was only sometimes brave, sometimes good, and sometimes wise. The same can be said for most of us. And Jim never got the chance to flower or to fall.

  That afternoon while the Army of the Tennessee was celebrating victory and Independence Day both, a photographer—one of Matthew Brady’s—asked to take Jim’s picture. I was annoyed that he did not consider me an interesting subject for posterity. For a reason I could not explain, I longed to have myself copied onto a glass-plate negative. To have my light stored away—carried in his lumbering darkroom up north, as if I wanted to resist a destiny already shaped for me, like an inheritance too onerous to accept. In that brief moment in which I sought to burn my image onto the negative, directly, without the intermediary of a lens, I matched my will against a stronger one, and failed.

  “Step away, boy,” the photographer ordered from inside the camera’s black drape.

  “Why not me?” I wanted to ask. “Why them and not me?” I gazed at a sullen heap of dead men, whom a variety of cruel deaths had made anonymous. I’d watched him take satisfaction in photographing them. They had no more interest for the eye than sacks of feed, although, in their perfect stillness, they had been accommodating subjects during the long exposure when they gave up the remnant particles of light. They would go underground in total darkness. But I knew the cameras that harvested in the sorrowful aftermath of that most uncivil strife were greedy for what still moved, as well as for what would never move again.

  Then why not Huck?

  “Clear out of the way!” he shouted at me, so that his camera might devour Jim alone.

  I backed into the shadow of one of the white tents that dotted the hills like new lambs among the red placentas announcing their recent arrival. But here the scene was other than pastoral, and men leaned against rifles instead of shepherds’ crooks. Inside the tent, I felt myself swallowed by silence. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw around me, neatly laid out, a row of dead Union soldiers waiting to be collected . . . to be sent on. I rifled their pockets.

  Later, when we were back on the raft, drifting south toward Natchez, I showed Jim what I’d taken to be added to the valuables: a pocketknife, a buckeye nut believed to strengthen virility, a signal mirror, chewing tobacco, a black-bound testament, a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon, a rosary, a photograph of a bride and a groom glaring in mutual accusation, a hank of chestnut-colored hair, a woman’s ivory comb, a jaw harp, and a heavy key such as might have locked its owner for all eternity inside his sepulchre.

  “It’s wrong to rob the dead, Huck,” Jim said softly. “But I suppose you had no choice. It’s your nature, which was given to you. You’re too weak to fight against its demands. You are like a fish hauled up out of the life you had believed to be your own.”

  “Do you believe in free will, Jim?”

  “Is there a more ridiculous question to ask a slave?” he said, laughing.

  And for a moment, I hated him.

  BELOW NATCHEZ, AT RED RIVER LANDING, the Mississippi divides for the space of a small island near the middle of the river. As we swept toward it, we were hailed by a soldier who, along with his captive, had waded onto the islet’s gravel beach from a sandbar where their skiff had run aground. The other man was Choctaw and looked as if, in better days, he might have been a chief or a shaman. He had remnants of what must have been a lordly dignity, although it was worn to rags by misery and sorrow. I didn’t admire him for his suffering or for the obvious contempt with which he viewed his captor. If anything, I felt resentment toward him, which I didn’t bother to understand. The day was hot, the yellow beach stifling. Unlike the soldier, who had rightly found himself shade, the Choctaw stood in the sun, as though it were only another insult to be borne.

  “I should have taken the ferry, up above the reach,” said the soldier, cursing his misfortune, which he attributed to the entire race of red men. “I lost the oar halfway across and nearly drowned myself in the goddamned river. Lucky for me, the boat ran up on the bar.”

  I could see that Jim was hesitating to take them aboard, in case they should be struck dead as soon as they touched the raft. He had speculated that the raft was a charmed space where we were kept unspoiled and unchanged, like fresh meat in an icehouse. But the raft could have the opposite effect on anybody else. I whispered to him from behind my hand that he should chance it. Frankly, I always did have a scientific inclination and thought the experiment worth the risk. Jim agreed, but I noticed that he took the soldier aboard first. I thought it was natural for Jim to favor the Indian, since they were both members of a despised race. The soldier got aboard with no harm coming to him, and the Indian followed wordlessly.

  “I’m taking this old bag of bones back across the river to Indian Territory,” said the soldier, letting river water run out of his boots. “Son of a bitch up and left without permission so that he could die in his ancestral homeland. Not that he would have gotten it. These good-for-nothings think they can lie down and expire anyplace they feel like. He claimed a railroad track ran across his tribal burial ground, and he had made himself a little place to rot, in plain sight of a train crammed full of congressmen. They were going to visit some Civil War battlefield or other, as if there wasn’t one they could have paced closer to Washington. Self-righteous pissants raised a holy stink when they saw the chief. They didn’t think a dying Indian, or even a dead one, added much to the scenery. This here Hiawatha is about as picturesque as mattress ticking left out in the rain. We’d just as soon have shot him and tossed his heathen bones into a sinkhole, but the bastards said they couldn’t allow such infamy, not in the year of our Lord 1873. So I was ordered to take ‘Cochise’ back to his reservation—
at the army’s expense and my own considerable inconvenience.”

  The soldier glared at the Indian, whose eyes remained unwaveringly on his, registering in their dark depths nothing I knew how to read.

  “I suppose I should thank you boys for stopping for me.”

  Jim spoke of providence and the sparrow as he swept the long oar back and forth in the heavy current; the soldier, of the pleasures of drink, beseeching us with greedy eyes to give him some of our whiskey. I spoke of the river’s difficult navigation; and the Indian, of nothing at all.

  In those days, I didn’t much care for Indians. Injun Joe had colored my opinion of them, so that I believed they were, one and all, no better than cutthroats and drunken renegades. But when the old man slipped over the side of the raft and, having made himself a quiet little hole, sank down under the water, I thought a Christian and a gentleman could not have died more politely and more conveniently. I was feeling so favorably disposed toward him (I never did learn his name—Christian or otherwise) that I said not a word to the others until we’d crossed to the Mississippi’s western bank.

  I was tempted to return to the island. I liked how the water seemed to shape itself around it and wondered if a life there might not shape itself around me, granting me rest from our hectic journeying toward an end that had not yet announced itself. Neither Jim nor I had given any thought to a destination, trusting ourselves to the river—its will and deeper knowledge.

  I did not know what I wanted. Now, at a moment distressingly near my last, I’m not sure I ever knew—not even when I’d gotten my hands on what passes for the world’s exuberant bounty. Many years after I’d left the raft, I realized most of the dreams of a river rowdy, of a sneaking and thieving no-account boy. I had money, cars, women, a home not far from the ocean. Tom said that what a boy wanted was glory. I never heard him say what it was a man wanted. Not glory, surely. Maybe not even adventure, for glory and adventure stale. Love? Having known it only once, I’m not the best judge. Jim and I—maybe all we wanted was to fall, not from any height, but as a bird does, scudding headlong above the river in defiance of gravity, hoping to be saved from the terrible effort of resolve. I told you what Jim and I wanted was freedom, but I’m not certain anymore if we did. It’s hard to live a purposeful life.