The Boy in His Winter Page 8

  Yes, I said “waiting,” for so it seemed then and seems even now, seventy-two years after the fact. When I say “waiting,” I’m not suggesting that the crate was motionless during the upheaval. It was moving downriver, like me. (It’s more remarkable, by far, for two things in motion to intersect.) I was saved by the confluence of the crate and myself, and a moment later both were caught in the backwash of a sixteen-foot wave, transported onto land, and set down, with amazing delicacy, among the tombs and monuments of Venice’s only cemetery. And yet I was not dead! The crate had entered the Mississippi at Minneapolis decades earlier (fallen from a pier or loosed into the water after a shipwreck) and had made its long way downriver to Venice, with the intention of lending me its buoyancy. I might just as easily say I’d been thrown into the river in order to give meaning to the “life” of that crate. See how absurd the notion of predestination is? Yet circumstantial evidence screams to me that it is so. The complicated machinery of fate was put in motion for my no-account self.

  I slept in a narrow space between two gaudy sepulchres, sheltered from the brutality of the storm. The cemetery was a little above sea level, though not enough to allow for graves to be dug. The dead rested above ground, immured in brick and stone, as they must when buried near water. Whether from exhaustion or from the shock of having been expelled from childhood (how else explain so deep and unnatural a sleep?), I didn’t wake until the storm had moved seventy-five miles northwesterly into New Orleans. I woke with a start and shivered as with cold, my pockets filled with crumbs of time like sand in those of a drowned man washed up on a beach. I was once again alive in the world, which I had not been all the long while I did not age or change.

  When I was on the raft, I had moved from one incident to another. But they were not demarcated clearly the way they are in this memoir, which must seem to obey a chronology or it cannot be told. But those incidents—so colorful in the telling—did not impress me at the time with their particularity, but instead were experienced—like the river down which I floated—as a steady lengthening from an increasingly far-off past. For a long while after making landfall, I felt my past tugging at me, like a fishing line that stretched back to Hannibal in the 1830s, its hook rankling at the corner of my mouth. Unlike a fish, I didn’t resist—didn’t seem to feel the present. I was immune to its contagion, and if I pictured a future, it was only a vestige of my old dream of Mexico, which I had not relinquished.

  The rain stopped, and the charcoal clouds unraveled in the departing wind. Where all had been drowned by noise of wind and rain, the sound of the world at peace flooded back: gulls rowing the blue air from their inland retreat, the fitful breeze stirring the unfallen cypresses, and river water rattling over stones. It was as though the summer once again drew breath.

  With a flat gray rock, I battered open the crate that had buoyed me to safety. Inside, I found clothes, shoes, socks—all of it made as if for me, so well did they fit. There was also a first edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published, according to the colophon, in London by Chatto and Windus in December 1884. Despite an origin fairly remote in space and time, the book appeared to be newly printed and had suffered not at all by the crate’s lengthy river journey. I opened to the first page and read there words pretending to be mine: You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. I read no farther and under no circumstances would I have turned to the last page.

  Enraged, I threw the book into the river. I would have burned the damned thing had I a match, but the box of locofocos had been lost, together with everything else Jim and I had brought with us from Hannibal. Burning the book, I felt, would declare my outrage emphatically, might even remove it absolutely from existence, as if there’d never been a book by that title or an author by that name—so naïvely did I reason. But I had no match! I watched the book slowly turning in an eddy, its hard covers spread on top of the brown water like wings. I waited for it to sink, but the damned thing remained afloat and soon had escaped the gyre and was off downriver—a bird of evil omen. I threw stones at it, but my aim was poor; or else it was endowed with an intelligence native to books that eluded my fusillade or was under the protection of providence, that infernal engine, and could not, for reasons known to it, be sunk—at least not by a mere boy who only now understood the feebleness of his human presence in time. In a short while, the book was beyond the reach of my stones and of my influence—slipping toward the Gulf. Perhaps it would reach Mexico, I thought, when Jim and I had failed. I cursed it and Mark Twain both for their presumption. What did either know of my life’s adventure or of Tom’s? No more than I had known Jim’s thoughts or might know those in the brain of a dog. I despised the book and its words, which had been set out like a trap to take my freedom. I promised myself I would act in a way to guarantee my self’s independence. I couldn’t have known that—twist and squirm as I might—my course was set. I’d be the man Huck Finn would most certainly have become in the age following the last sentence of Twain’s book. At least for a while. Given the age, which was fallen and corrupt, and given the experiences—innocent and also sinister—that had shaped my character, I could be nothing else.

  What did you say?

  No, no, I did finally escape the life that had been given me to lead until its final agony or surprise. I’m changed—maybe not greatly changed, but enough. Enough to matter in the case of my life—the occasion of it. I swear I am!

  What changed me?

  The usual things. Love, if only in a small way. (You cannot depend too much on love. It is something else than a means to your transformation. It’s a selfish idea to believe otherwise.) Love changed me a little, and also the world did, as it can when it strikes fire against the mind’s flint. And I was changed, too, by something that I will insist, always, was accidental: an instant of senselessness and absurdity when I fulfilled the river’s purpose and my own.

  PART TWO

  August 29, 2005–September 11, 2005

  I NEVER GOT TO MEXICO, BUT MEXICO, as it turned out, came to me: a morsel of its fecundity, indifferent to our well-being, wrapped in plastic, with a street value well over $800,000. At the time, I had no knowledge of this brand of smuggling by water or of the vernacular favored by an outlaw economy flourishing in the twenty-first century. I was thirteen, remember. A boy who’d been floating through life—his life, at a safe distance from current events.

  In the 1830s, I might have joined a band of roughnecks to smuggle Caribbean rum or slaves into the Missouri Territory. (The word trafficking was unknown.) I’d have done it for fun and so would Tom Sawyer; we were the product of our time and saw no harm in strong drink or in the ownership of other human beings. You’d be wrong to judge the boy I was then by the standards of the present age—and this you should know, too: I wasn’t the innocent people have made me out to be. That’s Twain’s doing: His Huckleberry Finn might have had a kernel of goodness. People say so. But I’d have been embarrassed to think I had a spark of decency. No boy wants to be thought of as good. The world and especially girls find bad boys attractive. Don’t they? Oh, it was a very long time ago, but I’m sure I was a devilish child, thoughtless, and casually cruel. A boy, as is often said with a smile, who liked to pull the wings off flies or hang up cats by their tails. Such a boy is hardly good and, in all likelihood, will turn out mean.

  I don’t wish to belabor this, but before we begin the second part of my history, I want you, at least, to understand how it was for me when I got blown into time by Katrina. Maybe I am trying to understand myself. Before this, I’ve taken up such thoughts like a tangle of dirty string; but I never tried to untangle it. Look, I’m just as divided as the next one; but my case is unusual, except among lunatics. Don’t you think? God, I wish Jim were here! He’d know what was troubling me. He was a slave, and I tormented him and loved him. Jim was no fool. He loved me,
and I’m equally sure he hated me. That’s what it means to be human. I wonder if he hadn’t been lynched, what he would have become. The first black president of the United States, perhaps. Let’s leave it at this: I was no better than any other boy and not so bad a man as I might have been for the times. Think what you damn well please!

  You can see for yourself I haven’t long to live. Ha! I don’t hear you arguing the point. I am eighty-five years old, various organs of mine are in revolt, and I am almost tired of this life. I wonder what the next one will be like.

  Yes, I believe in an afterlife—in dwelling, at least for a while, in timelessness, which may not be the same thing as eternity. With my history, how could I believe otherwise?

  IF I FEARED THE CLOTHES, SHOES, AND SOCKS I’d found in the crate because they might be part of an insidious design whose purpose was my enslavement, I put them on anyway. My pants were wet, my shirt a rag; the shoes had gone overboard when the raft capsized. It may have been August in Louisiana, but I shivered with cold. The hurricane had sown wreckage on the ground, dangerous for even a boy used to going barefoot. I walked through the remains of a cannery to the riverbank and headed toward the Gulf. I hadn’t a destination in mind. I was looking for someone who might give me food and fresh water. I sensed that to walk northwesterly along the Great River Road to New Orleans was not for me: To return to a point in space I’d gone by on the raft would mean going back in time, impossible for someone no longer outside it.

  Nothing moved except dirty wavelets of exhausted river water, a few listless birds, branches of the cypress trees, fitfully, and—strange and sad—two flat-bottomed rowboats on the flooded grass, which made me think of the Venice I’d seen in one of Judge Thatcher’s books. But in these boats, no gondoliers sang barcaroles to lovers stunned by moonlight. I was alone with a graveyard of partially tumbled stones, a stove-in pier, dead fish on their way to corruption at my feet. I took a boat and, with a piece of board found in the flotsam to serve as rudder, pushed out onto the river and floated twenty miles to Port Eads, at the end of the Mississippi. Of that final leg of my journey on the father of waters, I remember how the river leafed greenly with fallen branches above its rushing mud, like Birnam Wood moving toward Dunsinane.

  There was nothing magical about this brief trip downriver. I was finished with magic, and magic finished with me. I was alive and growing; I could feel my cells divide, my hair and nails minutely lengthen. I was acutely aware of the sensation of being alive in the world and in time—a novelty I experienced in a way no infant could. The feeling soon passed, and life became ordinary. The river pushed—or say, instead, the river upheld me while I steered, because I was in control. (I have to believe that this was so!) In time, I arrived at Port Eads, with its lighthouse and fishing camp, both of which had survived; and, just beyond the broken piers, the Gulf of Mexico shimmered like the dream it was.

  THE CONNERY BROTHERS, EDGAR AND EDMUND, were cooking a chicken over a fire in an oil drum that had been cut in two when I walked out of the tall salt grass. Attracted by the smell, I was too hungry for caution. Time had restored to me the appetites, present or potential. Startled, Edmund drew a pistol from his belt and fired. I’d have been shot dead if Edgar hadn’t knocked his brother’s arm to spoil his aim. The bullet struck a mangrove tree. The report alarmed the birds, which rose up as one, like a congregation rising in unison at the sharp crack of kneeling benches striking the floor. (Have you never thought about the collective consciousness of gregarious things that fly, swim, or crawl?) I hadn’t flinched. I stood my ground—a wild, grimy boy whose eyes, I was told later, looked overcast by a somber, unsettling emotion strange in a child. I think they were only wide and unfocused, as they will be when coming out of sunlight into gloom.

  They did not know what to make of me. Edmund tucked his pistol into his belt and stared dumbly, the way one would at a monstrous thing, amphibious and scaled, that had crawled on all fours from the fetid mangrove swamp. I was a dirty, ragged boy. I listened to the swamp breathe and, sweeter, the Gulf seethe and settle. I wished Jim could see it, blue and vast. Neither of us had laid eyes, remember, on any water not bound by two mud flanks and brown with particles of dirt. Endued with sympathies his brother lacked, Edgar nodded for me to sit on a log near the burning drum.

  “You look starved, boy,” he said.

  “I am, sir.”

  “We’ve got a chicken—the last one left at ‘the end of the world.’ Edmund pulled it out of a tree, where it’d gone to roost before the storm. A miracle chicken! Seemed a shame to kill it, but we’re hungry.”

  “Not enough meat to split three ways,” Edmund grumbled. He looked at me as you might at a rabid dog.

  “Can’t let the boy starve!” Edgar snapped.

  I blessed him for his defense of helpless orphans and would have signed on, then and there, to any scheme he might propose, regardless of danger or legality. What did I know of either, really? In Hannibal, Tom and I had risked a beating for sneaking into a tent show or a steamboat minstrelsy. We’d pretended to be cutthroats and dreamed of glorious deaths, funerals, and resurrections. By an accidental escape from the universal fate of humankind, I’d been spared—provisionally—Tom’s end and also that of Jim, who had grown a conscience and perished for it. My years had been charmed, but were no longer so.

  With a brand-new barlow knife, Edgar cut off a chicken leg and set it on a plate for me.

  “I’m afraid we’ve only beer to drink,” he said.

  I accepted the beer—the first I’d ever drunk—and would sing odes to hops, in my mind, forever afterward.

  “He likes it, Edmund!” Edgar said, amused by my wrinkling nose.

  Edmund was not amused. I knew he wished the bullet had planted itself in my chest instead of a tree trunk. Look, I’m only guessing at how this scene and dialogue went. It happened seventy-two years ago. I’ve got the mind of an old man who likes to remember what never happened and to forget what did. Don’t think for a moment none of this is true! I swear it is. But seventy-some years is a long time, and I was a writer, of sorts, fond of embroidery.

  I could not keep my eyes open, because of the beer and my exertions coming from Venice on the river and in the swamp. I shut my eyes and slept.

  I OPENED MY EYES ON A PLANKED CEILING close overhead. By the swaying movement of the berth and by the creaking noise of straining planks and ropes, I knew I was on a boat tied up to a dock. I crawled from the berth and looked out a porthole onto a channel winding through a marsh of black mangrove shrubs and cordgrass. A reddish egret stood on one leg, making of its long neck an elegant S. I supposed the channel wound its way to the Gulf, which was hidden by the green marsh. The sky was low and lacked the crystalline purity lent by the departing storm. The humidity was increasing, and the air in the little cabin was close. I tried the door and was relieved to find it unlocked.

  On waking, I was scared I’d been made a captive by the Connerys, although I felt the older brother, Edgar, was kindly disposed toward me. Edmund, I didn’t trust and even feared, recalling his anger and impetuousness. I opened the door and stepped into a narrow passage, then climbed the companion-way to the saloon, where I met James Toussaint, a black man from Trinidad. When he smiled, I noticed a front tooth clad in gold framing the white enamel with the cutout of a heart. He wore a gold-braided captain’s hat bought, I learned later on, in a theatrical supply store. He was drinking rum from a halved coconut. Tom’s aunt Polly would have called him—her tone an alloy of affection and disapproval—a “character.” Had she been living still and aboard the boat, Miss Watson would have flown into a rage at the mere sight of him—wanting to pry the gold from his mouth, wash it out with soap, and purify his innards with castor oil. Or if she happened to be bilious, she’d demand Judge Thatcher hang him, without pausing to blow his patrician nose into his fine linen handkerchief, from Hannibal’s ancient oak, which served frontier justice and the town as gallows.

  “How’re you doing?” asked Edgar, en
tering the saloon.

  “I’m fine,” I said, easing into a barrel chair opposite the black man with the fancy hat.

  “You were out on your feet, friend,” he said. “Edmund and I carried you aboard and put you to bed. I see you’ve met Jimbo.”

  “My name is James,” the black man said, much annoyed. “James Touissant. Formerly of Port-au-Spain, Trinidad.” He began what would have been a slovenly and ironic bow toward me if there had been no table and rum-filled coconut in the way. Foiled, he lifted his head and showed me his mouth’s gold valentine.

  “James is touchy about his dignity,” Edgar said, saluting him. “And that’s okay with us, because James is a first-class captain. We were lucky to get a man so at home in these waters.”

  “And what would you be called?” James said to me.

  I would not be Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn, or any other of Mark Twain’s creatures. Just as I’d drowned his book, I would rename myself in order to begin life anew. Hesitating behind a feigned fit of coughing, during which Edgar brought me water, I hunted the air for a name and, seeing there the one carved above the black iron door of the sepulchre where I’d hidden from the storm, took it as my own.