The Boy in His Winter Page 7

  My feelings at that instant—what I can recall of them from this remove in time and space—were complicated. I was bothered that I had come to hate him, bothered even more that I had loved him. I’m not sure that I regarded him then as a man. Not entirely. That broad view of humanity was alien to a mind that had been formed haphazardly, like a shack put together out of old lumber, warped and ill-used. There was about me then a makeshift quality. My nature was rough-hewn. I was cruel and envious because I was often afraid. I regretted I had not been more open with Jim. We’d wasted much time when we might have understood what was happening on the raft while we closed in on the river’s end, which was not to be the journey’s end, as I learned later. No, it was not even the end for Jim. I went on with him—we went on together—for a long time afterward.

  Jim stopped at a house and knocked at the door. I watched him fumble off his hat when a bedraggled young woman stepped onto the porch. I was hiding in the bushes, and I heard him ask if there was any little job he could do. He needed money for a bus ticket, he said. He wanted to go to New York. I wished then that I had taken the coins from Tom Sawyer’s pocket so that I might give them to Jim. The woman looked at him with scorn and with something I couldn’t interpret.

  “I got an old chifforobe needs busting up for kindling,” she said.

  “I’d be pleased to do that for you, ma’am.”

  “You can call me Mayella,” she said, giving him that disquieting look again.

  Sensing in her what I could not, Jim began to back up on the porch. But the woman insisted and took his arm and dragged him into the house. Shortly after, I saw him carry the chifforobe into the yard and chop it up with an ax while Mayella stood and watched.

  Finished his work, Jim asked politely to be paid, but the girl wasn’t ready to see him leave.

  “Come into the house,” she said, “and I’ll give you a cool lemonade to drink. You look all hot and sweaty.”

  I could see Jim wanted to light out of there. But he was hesitating. Maybe because of his desire to go to New York City, maybe because of something that had to do with Henry Wilson—I don’t know. Jim went inside, and in what seemed like the next instant, he flew out the door again, without his stovepipe hat. He hurried down the street. I followed him to the bus depot and hid behind a pile of mail sacks, where I could see him waiting on the “colored only” side of the station.

  One bus departed for St. Louis, another for Chicago. But before the New York City bus could leave, a pickup truck, half-eaten by rust, stopped with a screech of worn brakes in a cloud of dust and black exhaust. Three men in greasy overalls and sweat-stained hats jumped out, grabbed Jim, and threw him into the back of the truck. Behind the steering wheel, a man smoked a cigarette with grim determination; beside him sat Mayella, chewing on her hair. A second truck appeared and then a third—all three filled with the same overalls, hats, and bristling cheeks and chins. They formed a convoy and drove out a dirt road into a mangrove swamp by the river. I’d climbed into the back of the third truck. A man gave me an ax handle and told me to beat the n———with it when we stopped. I held it; it was a kind of ticket to the proceedings. I watched Jim sitting in the truck ahead of us, his feet dangling from the tailgate as if he were going to a picnic. He didn’t struggle; he never said a word. I hoped he didn’t see me.

  What is it you want to know? Did I want to see Jim lynched? Is that what you think?

  No, I did not. I don’t know what I wanted as the truck bounced and bottomed out on the ruts, but it wasn’t that. I held the ax handle. I was scared. I prayed they’d just give Jim a beating and let him go. I held the ax handle, but I had no intention of hitting Jim with it. Can’t you understand what goes through a boy’s head at a time like this? I was scared, and I wanted to be sick. The men with me were like drunks: eyes glazed, mouths open in an ugly leer, their lips white and gummy with saliva, strings of spit stretching like rubber bands when they opened their mouths to curse the n———, to scream how they would kill the n———. Jesus Christ, I wished I were back on the raft with Jim, or without him! I held the ax handle and felt tears start in my eyes and wiped them in shame with the dirty back of my hand. I think I said to the man next to me that I wanted to get off the truck. But the truck didn’t slow until the road came to an end, and then all three trucks stopped. I think I jumped out and crawled inside a clump of cottonwood bushes and lay on my belly and shook. I think that’s what I was doing when they pulled Jim down from the back of the truck and put the rope around his neck and hoisted him up on a branch. I don’t remember if I looked. All I remember is the noise the rope made while it swung slowly back and forth with Jim’s deadweight at the end of it. Then it began to rain. They didn’t leave him dangling in the tree. They made a joke about sending a package to New Orleans. They cut Jim down and threw him into the river, with a length of rope still around his neck. The way they laughed, it must have been funny.

  I waited in the cottonwoods until night came, and then I stumbled through the brush to the river, where I made my way along the shoreline to the raft. I rowed out to the middle of the river and tried not to think of Jim anymore.

  I SURRENDERED MYSELF TO THE RIVER, its secret purposes. But the river said nothing, except in the way of water: liquid syllables unintelligible to my ordinary mind. Jim might have understood, but not I. Which is not to say that I, like any other boy, did not hear voices in the babble. But they were only those spoken by a childish imagination: the bloodthirsty speech of pirates, the boastfulness of riverboat gamblers, the bravado of soldiers on their way west to subdue the Indians. I knew none of it was real. I was tormented by loneliness.

  The beauties on the way. There was none to be had; nothing to excite the senses or busy the mind with the effort of recognition, nothing to uplift the heart or lighten the gloom, nothing to resist the pull of memory and the gnawing of remorse.

  Was I sorry?

  No, yes, no—what could a boy have done against a dozen ruffians with ax handles, knives, lead pipes, and a rope that knotted readily around Jim’s neck, as if the destiny of hemp were to lynch black men? What could I have done other than I did, which was to shut my eyes, to wait for the dark, to get away, to get back aboard the raft and wash my soiled pants in the river?

  Courage?

  Courage didn’t come into it. I was obedient to my body, whose every cell screamed self-preservation.

  Time must have finally stopped or come as near to stopping as the laws governing physical existence allow. I saw an old movie made from an H. G. Wells story about an insignificant man whom the gods give superhuman abilities. He stops the earth from turning, and everything—houses, cities, people—flies off into space. I must’ve been afraid of something like that happening, although I wonder if I even knew that the earth turned. I was a fairly ignorant boy, remember; and such a fact would not have been common knowledge among children of the 1830s. What did, in fact, occur was—how do I describe it? Think of how it is when the balance between light and dark tips, when there is more night than day, when light seems to drain out of things and things begin to fade, growing more and more indistinct. I seemed to be drifting—no, not drifting: stalled. No, not even stalled, for one can sense in that word the potential to move. But I sensed no such thing.

  What did I sense?

  I sensed murkiness, gloom, faint noise, a smell like ozone, the taste of a nine-volt battery when you lick the terminals, the sound you sometimes hear when you put your ear to a railroad track, a grayness, a sullenness, the smell of old cellars, a lassitude, a numbness, a noise of a solitary airplane high above the earth, turbidity, odor of dust, of earth, of nothing at all, the taste of stale water, stale air, smell of old books, of must, tar, blood, burning oil. All of it. None of it. I was alone. That much I knew if I knew nothing else. The river was gone, or I was steeped in it so completely that I could no longer recognize it, any more than one who is sleeping can recognize sleep. Not that I was asleep. While my sensations were barely intelligible, I d
id feel; I was aware of tastes and odors, no matter that they seemed to float free of any source. They were a sensory reality proving to me that I was not dreaming and could not have been asleep.

  Decades passed unknown to me: 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990. . . . I was aware of little more than those raw, confused sensations. Things did happen in the world, of course: wars, the collapse of regimes and economies, revolutions, riots, assassinations, epidemics, more wars, mass slaughters, catastrophes, murders, extinctions, space flights, moon landings, the discovery of exotic particles, dark matter and energy, black holes, the age and origin of the universe, inventions, elations, horrors—fear happened and death and love also happened, but not for me. I knew the history of the era, only because I read about it much later. But by that time, I was living among men and women who had no memories, who were indifferent to public events in the wider world; like them, I was improvising from day to day, like a man without attachments or a future. I had forgotten the river. I don’t know whether or not the river had forgotten me.

  The second millennium arrived without my noticing.

  Time weighed on me hardly at all. I was not in it—or if I was, I was like the raft, lightly held by the river, without a keel to bury me in its element. Like the raft, I displaced very little; and that is the secret to existing apart from time. To be weightless is to be outside time, the heaviest element. I sensed my future was drawing near—that is, the point where I would reenter the world. I believed it would be Mexico, that old dream. Had Jim ever talked to me of Mexico? I can’t remember.

  And what about Jim? I can’t help wondering what his body might have done to the river that upheld me. Did it change it a little as tea leaves do water? Did it alter it profoundly, contributing Jim’s atoms to the river’s own? Was I with Jim while I passed blindly down an unused passage of time: a back channel long ago closed as unnavigable, a worm hole that would shortly deliver me into Mexico? I wish I could recall whether Jim had said anything about Mexico. I could make something up, I suppose. I’ve done so often enough. But what good would it do?

  The years flowed into one another: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004. . . . The river reasserted itself, although not entirely. It materialized as if it were emerging from a fog. As if the world strained toward recognition and revelation where nothing is recognized or revealed. Yes, that is what it was like: An ordinary fog—wet, bluish gray, and pervasive—replaced the tumult of sensations that had been the world for me, as it is for a blind person. No matter I could see only a very short distance at any compass point; fog was a common occurrence on the river. I had dealt with it many times before this. I imagined that, when the fog lifted, I would see New Orleans.

  Once more, I could feel the raft moving, and with it me. Time quickened, and my body registered a slight pressure: what a barometer might feel in the moving column of mercury. I felt heavier; my body began again the ancient struggle with gravity. I was not yet completely in time, neither had I been returned, by motion, to the special time of myth, of the literary history in which I had been immersed . . . how long? Since 1835, when Jim and I had set out on the raft. Maybe longer. What do I remember of the thirteen years of childhood that had gone before the start of our journey? Light and a feeling of lightness, which are no more than vague recollections of childhood, summoned in old age.

  What else?

  A few vividly colored memories of having played by the Mississippi and in Hannibal’s streets and alleys with Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, of having tormented Jim, of having been afraid of Injun Joe, of having hated Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas. Of a circus, a minstrel show, a tent meeting. I’m infuriated by a boyhood that seems, even now, not to have belonged to me but, rather, to have been written for me; and I fear much of my adult life has been spent in a futile resistance to fate. Many times, I did bad things for no other reason than I believed I was acting contrary to what Presbyterians call “predestination.” By whatever name, the notion upsets and revolts me. But maybe we live our lives in just that way. What about you? Nothing to say? You look half-asleep. I would send you home, but my story—the first part of it—is nearly finished.

  The fog still had not lifted at New Orleans, but I could hear the city, its sounds coming as if from a long way off: noise of cars, trucks, buses, trains, and also ships of varied use and tonnage, blaring horns, tolling bells, the steam whistles of factories and the roar of airliners flying unseen high above me. I speak, of course, in hindsight; I was not yet of the world or in it. I couldn’t know what the world had become in my absence. But in my heightened sensitivity, I also heard people at work, in love, in contention, at war, at their prayers, beseeching mercy, love, release from pain; heard people dying solitary deaths. In this, the world had not changed, nor will it ever.

  You won’t believe what I’m about to tell you: I saw Tom Sawyer and Jim, Henry Wilson and the old Choctaw Indian—as they were in life or as they are in death, I couldn’t say. One by one, they appeared to me out of the fog. None had a word for me although I thought I saw Tom raise his hand to salute me, to wave good-bye, or to summon me. I don’t know. What do we know? What can we tell or say about another? Jim wore the cut piece of rope like a necktie. Henry clutched his cornet. The Indian looked as if his eyes were gazing on the beyond.

  Do I believe in ghosts?

  Having been one myself, I do believe in them and in much else besides that is strange and doubtful.

  Two thousand and five. August. The twenty-ninth day. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. At Venice, southernmost town on the Mississippi, called by some “the end of the world,” I reentered the world and also time.

  TIME BROKE OVER ME like an enormous wave, and I was overthrown by its weight and finality. (To admit time is to admit its end.) It staggered me, like an ox by the sledgehammer. I fell to my knees, but with no thought of praying; my fear was too immediate and electric, crowding out all other thoughts but it. Besides, I had not the habit of prayer and would rather have cursed God in stubborn contrariety because of Miss Watson’s belief that a child could be made pious by the rod and cod-liver oil. She’d tried them on me often, and failed. Unless you were ever, even for a moment, outside time, you can’t know what it means to be thrust into it. Maybe those who die and venture a little way toward the light or the final darkness, only to be pulled back once more into the body, know; maybe those under the influence of certain psychotropic drugs do. But I suspect you’ve experienced neither death nor a powerful hallucination. If you don’t mind my saying so, you have the look of a cautious man who does not stray far from the polished rails of time.

  All around me, while I clung to the sternpost, the winds roared. The sweep oar was gone, and soon the raft would be capsized by waves of water that the hurricane caused to accumulate into a mounting surge. Sky and river appeared a seamless gray, relieved by blackness. I had never known fear to equal this moment’s, which increased with time’s strengthening hold on me. My mind was emptied of everything save the danger, the cold misery of my sodden clothes, and the pain in one hand from desperately clutching the post. Had I been able to ask questions at that harrowing instant, I think it would have been these: What will it be like to drown in time? Will it be more painful than drowning in water when my lungs fill up? What organ does time—rushing in with the force of an arriving wave—swell and burst? I’ve since wondered at the tenacity of life: how it clings to the sternpost marking its outermost limit—to mortality’s outpost, if you like—when, by opening a hand, we might end our fear and pain forever. (Unless Miss Watson and her hellfire sorority were right about the afterlife, though I can’t believe those obnoxious souls could have been right about anything, except my own cussed and irremediable self.)

  A noise was heard during the wind’s bellowing, like splintering glass, as if I’d gone through a window separating the geometric certainty of rooms from the violent irregularities of the world outside them. A noise announcing—with a crash of falling millibars—that a hurricane whose name was Katrina had reached the p
oint to which its forces had been straining: the saturation of matter by energy. Electrified, my hair stood up; the air crackled; the sternpost and the lean-to’s frame (canvas torn away) trembled with blue and violet lights of St. Elmo’s fire. The air grew thinner as its atoms rose, and the world would have yielded to the seduction of weightlessness, had gravity, momentarily weakened, not resumed, and with it time. Unused to it, I would have been crushed if the raft had not been overturned at that instant by the unpent surge. I was thrown into the river, which retained a measure of timelessness—or if not so absolute a quality, then a record of past ages held within its turbulence: moments of the history that had shaped it since leaving its source at Lake Itasca and its origin, as far as humankind is concerned, in the fourth millennium before the Common Era, when, in its fertile valleys, squash, goosefoot, marsh elder, and sunflowers were cultivated by indigenous peoples, whose later flowering included an old Choctaw Indian. If my mind had not been overwhelmed by terror, I might have thought him a fool to have gone peaceably to his death in this same river. (I take a different view of rivers than Heraclitus did.) But nothing crossed my mind while I struggled up from the river’s black depths into the rain—saved, I have never doubted it—by the past, which has always been kinder to me than the present ever since I reentered time, off the western bank of the Mississippi, at Venice, on that catastrophic August Monday in 2005.

  I’ve said before, how I resent the idea that a will alien to my own should be in control of my life: providence, fate, destiny—call it what you like. And something about that moment when there seemed no other possibility than death by drowning has always worried me. Strange, isn’t it, that I would feel otherwise than jubilant thanksgiving for my rescue from drowning—by water? I continue, to this day, to be drowning in time and will do so until my last breath. Don’t think I’m ungrateful to have escaped a painful death. But my escape weakened my faith in chance and the lucky accident. You see, I prefer to think that my fortunes and misfortunes are either of my own doing or else the result of a broken cog or gum in the works—a broken data chain or genetic sequence (to be modern)—rather than by design, God’s or Mark Twain’s. I ought to have drowned! There was no other reasonable outcome after being knocked from a raft into the water during a category-three hurricane. But I didn’t drown, because at the very instant I reached the surface, a crate was waiting for me. And I heaved myself up on it.