The Boy in His Winter Read online

  You say, this is no way to tell a story. That I’ve been merely threading one incident after another on a string of recollection and conjecture. Maybe so. But I don’t know any other way.

  Later, when we were once again on our own, I asked Jim to cast the bones concerning my future. He did.

  “What do you see, Jim?”

  “You will live long,” he said, studying the augury, “but not happily.”

  And then he cast them for himself.

  “What do you see, Jim?”

  He shrugged and said, “Neither happily nor long.”

  I was sorry about that.

  I’ve neglected to describe the beauties of the way. Let me do so now: The river was wide and brown. Where I had seen the water close over the old man’s head, a cloud of midges wavered. The shore on either side heaved up into wooded hills whose trees shook and swelled in the wind that was corrugating the surface of the river and dispersing the midges before the trout could rise to them. (Thus are we cheated of our rightful expectations.) A shadow swung out suddenly like an enormous hinge, darkening the hills and also our raft. Our sweat-dampened shirts chilled us, and we shivered as though we held in our hands a warrant for our own deaths.

  “Passenger pigeons,” said Jim.

  “Look at them!” I said in admiration, as anyone does who looks on immensity.

  They were countless as stars, as grains of dust, as the dead lying underground or underwater. Birds in their millions, sweeping overhead like a dark aerial river. They moved as one bird, as if at the behest of a common intelligence. I thought to myself there would never be so many again. Jim scried their future in a crystal ball that had belonged to Marie Laveau, which all this time he had kept secret from me. I did not ask how he’d come to have it, whether she had made him a present of it or he’d stolen it because of a passionate, overmastering desire to see what is hidden from us.

  “On September first, 1914, the last passenger pigeon left on earth will die in the Cincinnati Zoo,” he said, wrapping the crystal in a piece of black cloth. “Her name will be Martha, named for the first First Lady.”

  “How can that be, Jim?”

  “I see it and much else besides: the end of many, many species. The last of the elephants will die in chains,” he said, and I knew he was thinking, too, of his own kind.

  In 2034, during a boat show, I would visit the Cincinnati Zoo. There were no animals, only plasma screens, each showing a video of the poor beast that had once occupied the cage. The videos played in endless loops while zoo visitors tossed peanuts into the otherwise clean cages, in homage to what was irretrievably lost or as a ritual whose object was forgotten. I don’t recall having seen a memorial to Martha. I do recall having seen in the capital a heroic statue in bronze of General Grant on his horse Cincinnati, whose genus, Equus, has very nearly followed so many others into extinction. I didn’t give a damn, but now that I, too, have an end in sight, I feel sentimental toward all who are fated to disappear. Like tumbled columns, the wreckage of time is submerged in the river at its end—choked with the silt of hours beyond reckoning, compounded of blood, bone, gold, rust, and ashes. Jim and I shuttled toward the Gulf on time’s vast loom—one year yielding to the next in a continuous stream whose noise was like rain or like the wind in Wyoming, which is said never to cease.

  On the heights above Fort Adams, where the treaty had been signed expelling the Choctaw from their aboriginal homeland, a flaming cross was decorating the night sky. I thought it was a pretty sight. I wondered if I would see the old man again who’d killed himself in order to save time or trouble or else to rush into the land of the dead, which would—he believed in his bones—give him ease. If I were to come upon him standing ghostly on the river that had enfolded him, his eyes disks of sky overcast by clouds, would he have something to say to me, and would I him?

  AT BATON ROUGE, WE ENTERED the twentieth century. We did so by night, like thieves stealing into a house we would ransack for unimaginable treasures and horrors. We knew nothing of what lay ahead on that river in space and in time. Not even Jim’s prophetic gifts could enlighten us about the future’s somber recesses, other than we would die in it. But we were entranced as anyone would be who sees for the first time a town made incandescent by Mr. Edison’s lightbulb. At first, we thought the cause of our astonishment must be a myriad of candles or oil lamps strung among trees for some grand civic occasion. We had been born, remember, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the infant science of electricity produced little other than parlor tricks, and we had been well insulated from progress of most every sort on the raft.

  “Looks to me like sparks blown up a chimney,” I said. “Or else shooting stars laid thickly on the hills.” I was an almost mythological boy who might have been expected to have a poetic streak. “Only it ain’t. What is it, Jim?”

  Jim said nothing, but I could tell he was becoming unsettled.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know, Huck. But I have a bad feeling all of a sudden.”

  “But it looks swell!” I said, falling into the vernacular, which is to proper speech what mud is to a shoe shine. (I can’t explain why my life should have been tainted by the character Mark Twain made of me. I’ve never forgiven him.)

  “If you were to see a fire burning way off in the distance, you’d think it looked swell, too—even if it was somebody’s house ablaze.”

  Jim was deep, as I’ve said on more than one occasion. But at the moment, his depth was that of someone who had sounded to the bottom of despondency. Yes, it had a bottom. Jim suffered much, but he did not seek, like some others, to make his life more tragic than he could bear. Or I could stand to listen to.

  “We ought to investigate,” I said, hearing in those words the voice of Tom Sawyer, whom I had nearly forgotten during the years since we left Plum Point. “We could work our way up the cove and slip into town. Streets are likely to be empty this late.”

  Tom would have suggested a lark: minor vandalism of public property, a skirmish, a small robbery, bullying a defenseless boy, or a visit to a whorehouse, where he would hop straight out of bed and then out the window, without paying. (Women. Did we miss them? I was thirteen. Jim mourned his lost wife and children. Sexual desire was not part of our journey.)

  Jim would not agree, no matter how I declared my wish to discover the nature of the light—unnatural in its cast and stillness; there was a small wind that night that would have set ordinary flames shivering or scattered the will-o’-the-wisps you sometimes see in marshes. No, these town lights were unmoving, and so was Jim in his refusal to go ashore. In the end, I had to respect his conviction that the lights—at first so astonishing in their novelty—did not bode well for two travelers in flight from their origins. I guessed that the town was under a curse, unless it was only Jim and I who were. Whatever uneasiness he felt about this place, at this time, soon jumped from his mind to my own, like a flea from one dog to another; and now I wanted also to be gone.

  “We should get to Mexico,” I said, having understood that America was dangerous.

  Jim smiled at me as you would a child who has just said something wise. I was, remember, a child and I spake as one, while Jim was foolish only occasionally, like anyone who is mostly wise. For the first time since leaving Hannibal, I was afraid. I wished Tom could be with me, but the wish was momentary; for I knew—despite the namelessness of my dread—that not even the indomitable Tom Sawyer could prevail against it.

  Jim and I were no longer aimless, although it could be argued that we were never so, having borrowed, unconsciously, the river’s own ineluctable end: steadfastly south to the broad Delta and to the Gulf and from there to the world’s far ends in space and also in time. I think now that we had been all along at the service of time, whose perfect materialization in history was the Mississippi, the great river, the father of waters. For good or ill, like it or not, it colored our thoughts and shaped our consciousness to its own unfathomable purpose. />
  “We should go,” Jim repeated as he worked with his muscular arms the raft’s long sweep until the current had caught us up.

  WE HAD GONE ONLY A LITTLE WAY SOUTH of Baton Rouge when a steam launch came alongside the raft and a Western Union boy shouted, “If you’re Huck Finn, as I suppose, and you want to see Tom Sawyer before he departs this world for the next, then you’d better hurry.”

  Suspicious of chicanery, Jim tried his best to dissuade me, grasping my wrist; but I shook off his hand and went aboard the launch. Several minutes later, I was deposited on the quay and directed to the place where my old friend lay dying.

  I had no difficulty in finding the house, because of the electric lights that shone down upon the streets and from the homes of the well-to-do. Apparently, Tom was not one of them; he had fetched up in a small and shabby room of a dilapidated boardinghouse, like a piece of driftwood brought by the tide (his tide, the last but one, which would, at the moment of his death, carry him out onto the limitless ocean beyond the reach of history). The world had turned gaily for Tom Sawyer, though not for me; and shortly, it would turn for him no more. (And me? I had no idea of what lay around the bend any more than a fly does—nervously pacing a windowsill as winter’s imminent death chills the sash.)

  I took my friend’s hand and wondered at its dryness, the wrinkled skin, fingernails long and broken, and at how a ring hung loosely on one finger. I brought the candle that burned with a meager flame on the bedside table nearer to Tom’s face and saw—with a shock of surprise and disgust—that my friend was an old man. I did a quick calculation in my mind and realized that Tom Sawyer had used up nearly eighty years and would have no others to call his own. I closed my eyes and saw again the reckless, scheming boy who’d set Hannibal on its ear and, much later, the naval ensign aboard the Confederate warship General Sumter. I shook off the vision, which frightened me for a reason I almost understood—shook it off with a violent movement of my head and allowed the light to swell against the darkness, until it splashed the wall behind poor Tom’s pillow and fell over the sheet shrouding his ruined frame. Then it was Tom’s turn to open his eyes, and, having done so, his look registered a dismay and confusion the equal of my own.

  “Huck?” he said weakly, so that I was forced to lean over him. When I did, I started at the smell.

  “Tom,” I said, and then said again, stupidly: “Tom. It’s your Huckleberry come off the river to give you a send-off.”

  “I was dreaming of you,” he said, and he seemed to come alive for an instant as he told me his dream: “We were back in Hannibal, out behind Miss Watson’s house, and we had stuck Jim’s hat on the branch of a tree. Remember how we persuaded him that witches had taken him all over creation while he was asleep?”

  I nodded gravely, aware that Tom was about to be ushered into eternity, or extinction. You can’t help feeling solemn in the presence of a dying man. I’ve known people to be boisterous around a corpse—I’ve seen the Hannibal constable summoned to a wake for a disturbance of the peace—but bearing witness to the approach of death tends to dampen even the most exuberant spirits.

  “I knew you’d come to see me off,” he said. “I sensed you in my dream, out there on the river.”

  For a second time, I nodded, having known stranger things than this in my lifetime. If Jim and I partook of the supernatural, I reasoned, then why not Tom Sawyer, who was more advanced in age and intellect than Jim and me put together? Looking back now from the vantage of my seniority (waiting for my own tide to go out, and with it me), I can’t be sure the Western Union boy was of this world or some other. I wouldn’t put it past Tom to have summoned him telepathically, in dots and dashes, if he was keen to have me escort him to the gate of eternity. As for the steam launch, it could readily have been of otherworldly origin: Ghost ships are familiar to anyone who has been to sea or even, like me, on a river as extraordinary as the Mississippi.

  “Isn’t Jim with you?” asked Tom, attempting to see past me into the shadowy recesses of his narrowing room.

  “I ate him. Don’t you remember?”

  He gave a feeble laugh and said, “That was nothing but a hunk of fatback! You could fool those Johnny Reb sailors, but not Tom Sawyer. Pretty piece of legerdemain, though, Huck. My hat was off to you.”

  I was shocked to hear Tom confess so blithely to a serious dereliction of his duty as an officer.

  “I left him on the raft,” I said. “He’s scared to come ashore because of the lights in the town. He took them for a bad omen.”

  “I’d like to have seen Jim,” he said peevishly.

  I couldn’t guess why he missed Jim, whom he’d tormented in his childish humor, unless it was to ask for his forgiveness. But I wasn’t much interested in Tom’s mental workings, which could scarcely have been in order. I’ve since regretted the lack of curiosity, because of my own guilt in the matter of Jim.

  Why?

  I mistreated him. Not in the ordinary way of a bully or an ignorant white child lording it over a black man. That’s not it, although I did behave sometimes as if he were inferior. I had the faults of my time and race. But I wrong Jim by reconstructing him in these pages. I’ve done to him what Twain did to me because I need Jim with me once again and cannot resurrect him any other way. Memory holds nothing in its sieve, except rubbish we clutch until the last hour, mistaking it for the truth, the facts, the real McCoy. I need Jim to make me real.

  Tom shut his eyes and died without another word. I thought it a shame that he went before he could tell me if he saw anyone coming for him in the dark. I’d always imagined that someone would come, stealthily, even if all that could be seen of him were his shoes stepping in and out of a circle of lantern light, like a town watchman.

  I looked through the dresser drawers to see if there was anything worth taking. I knew Tom would not begrudge me. None of the clothes fit, of course; and I had no use for a hairbrush nested with Tom’s silver, a razor bearing Tom’s stubble caked in dried lather, or a celluloid collar yellowed with Tom’s sweat. But I liked the title of the book he’d been reading and took it with me: The Time Machine, by Mr. H. G. Wells. How very like Tom Sawyer to own such a tale of outlandish adventure! I realized when I was back on the raft that he had borrowed it from the Baton Rouge Public Library. I’m ashamed to say, it is long overdue. I’ve read the story many times since then and never fail to picture the Time Traveler as Tom himself, how he looked on the skiff, coming toward me from the General Sumter.

  Yes, I’d been taught to read haltingly, in Hannibal by Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas as part of their campaign to civilize me.

  I thought the book was a sign—not a bad omen, but a harbinger of good fortune; that it was a guarantee of safe conduct through the streets of Baton Rouge, which Tom had consecrated by having lived there and having also died there (which the more powerful juju, I could not know). My ideas were hazy and unformed about the meaning of Jim’s and my journey downriver, but I guessed it had something to do with time travel. If not, why was Tom an old man while I was still a boy?

  What year was it?

  Nineteen hundred and three. April. The sixteenth day of April, in the year 1903. What day could have been more auspicious? The beginning of spring, of new life, the dawn of a new century. A new age. Charmed! And I supposed that the enchanted life Jim and I had on the raft was joined by a benevolent hand to the place where Tom and I met for the last time. I sensed (a raw boy could not have articulated it) that I stood at the convergence of two currents, two electrified rails—two “mystic chords of memory,” as Mr. Lincoln said—and the rare, scarcely possible occasion of their meeting would protect Jim and me. I nearly called to Jim in my mind, with the intention of urging him telepathically to join me in a send-off Tom missed by too promptly dying. I felt he was owed an incomparable escapade, a grand bust-up, a rambunctious carouse. I wanted to run outside, into the streets of Baton Rouge, and commit high jinks and devilry in honor of our friendship. I was young, remember. My imagi
nation was of a heroic cast and did not yet encompass low boozing and sex. I went through Tom’s pockets but discovered nothing except an ancient letter from Becky Thatcher, a yellowed and brittle greeting from Jeff Davis, and some silver money—none of which had any value for me. (We had no use for money in those days. God Almighty, I’d whistle a different tune once I was off the river for good and understood that it is the universal balm and nothing whatsoever can be done without it!) I arranged Tom’s hands as I had seen people do in Hannibal and pulled the sheet over his face. Then I snuffed out the candle, closed the door, tiptoed down three flights of stairs, and stepped out into the street with a sense of ecstatic relief that I had the power in me to escape the gravity of the deathbed. I was already forgetting Tom—so dismal is the idea of oblivion, so strong the attraction of life, even for someone like me who has kept his distance from it.

  Darkness reigned, but not oppressively. The stars seemed hospitable fires in the April night, the moon smiled like a simpleton, and people milled noisily in streets made cheerful by electric light. I walked slowly toward the river, reluctant to enter the blacked-out stage of our little raft. I was sick to death of loneliness—of the absurdity of our journey. I felt like Hamlet when he was delivering his “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, which I’d heard the Duke rehearse years and years before. I cursed myself for a fool because I hadn’t sense enough to turn back when I could. I was homesick for dry land and an ordinary life where a boy can be counted on to grow up and die, which is the natural way of things. Maybe I was feeling no more than the restlessness of youth, which would will itself into adult life if it were able. Whatever the cause, I felt discouraged and forlorn. I put off returning to the raft awhile; I went to find myself some cheerful noise and light and people, no matter that I was already tending toward misanthropy. I clutched Wells’s book for courage, while I walked streets made dangerous by my friend’s death.