The Boy in His Winter Read online

  “Albert Barthelemy.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Albert,” said James, raising a mermaid-topped swizzle stick as though it were an aspergillum poised to sprinkle me with a blessing.

  “So, Al, what’re you doing out here all by your lonesome?” Edgar asked.

  And then and there, I created from whole cloth a story of my life. (It was not the first I had told and would not be the last.) I don’t intend to retell it now, except for my recent bereavement.

  “We were living in a shack by the river in Venice when the hurricane blew Pap, Ma, Uncle Jim, my brother Tom, my dog Duke, and me into the flood,” I said. “Pap, who was a shrimper, got tangled in his nets and drowned. Twisted up in her nightdress, Ma followed him in death as she had in life, obediently. I managed to climb onto a crate the size and shape of a coffin. Meanwhile, Uncle Jim was trying to rescue Duke from a whirlpool, but before I knew it, both of them had drowned. I reached my hand out to Tom, but his mind seemed elsewhere; and in a minute, he was drowned, too, the light in his eyes put out forever. And there was nobody left in the river except me.”

  I was enjoying myself immensely while I spun the yarn. I’ve always taken pleasure in invention. Of Tom Sawyer’s many and varied talents, the most admirable to me was his way with a story, which he could concoct, complicate, and elaborate with a facility and artfulness I consider nothing less than the stuff of genius. I paused a moment in the narration of my own fabrication, taking a drink of water—not because my throat or my imagination had gone dry, but for dramatic effect. My confidence in my ability to take up the thread, now that I had found it, was unshakable. The storytelling impulse was unstoppable once it had seized and fired my brain. I’ve never identified its origin—whether the gift of some muse that might be a spirit residing in the ferment of barley and hops or else in a more radiant atmosphere such as Swedenborg or Blake imbibed. While I took another draft of water, I looked out over the rim of the glass at my audience: James sat on the sofa with the coconut at rest on his knee, the mermaid swizzle stick in his hand like a conductor’s baton at the moment of a downbeat. Edgar leaned against the saloon bulkhead, hands in the pockets of his dungarees, his expression frozen midway between curiosity and pity. I had them in the palm of my hand, so to speak, and renewed my recitation.

  “I rode the coffin—it seemed one to me after watching my family perish—downriver to the end of the world. On the way, the coffin bumped up against roofs and porches, barns and gazebos, Sunday schools and pianos, drowned pigs and cows—the whole mess of it moving toward the Gulf, like one of those Mexican parades where saints are carried through the streets by people dressed in black. It was a regular procession of last things, a flotilla of death. I lay on the coffin and waited to expire on its lid—struck by a floating tree, stabbed by a steeple or a weathervane, or smothered by an outhouse, its half-moon grinning at my corpse like a village idiot goggling at a passing hearse. I was ringed round by destruction: trees toppled; cars and pickup trucks flipped onto their backs like box turtles tormented by cruel boys; houses gone with the wind, their cast-iron bathtubs like something ancient and saurian muddling on clawed feet.”

  Did I use those words and speak in just that way while I told them my story?

  Those words or others, in that way or in another. However it was said, I went on with glee.

  “The river churned with mud. On its bank, mud lay thick and oozing, rank with rotting crabs, their insides torn out by rapacious gulls, cormorants, and brown pelicans. Had I slipped off the coffin lid and drowned, I knew they’d soon be banqueting on my guts. The coffin plunged and shook and swerved in the contrary currents and rapids. I held on for dear life and might have prayed if I had not been made to in the past by a good Christian woman, who liked to lay a white sliver of soap on my tongue, like a holy wafer. I gripped my coffin and cursed—words truer to my nature than prayer—and looked down into the tangled water, hoping to catch a last glimpse of my family or, at least, the dog.”

  My audience had increased by one: Edmund squatted in the saloon doorway, grinning at me while he twisted the point of his knife on his palm. He was a perfect specimen of Neanderthal man. His spite was universal. Not content with hating me, he despised fully grown Homo sapiens of either sex, as well as dogs, cats, insects, the fish he caught and savagely brained against the gunwale, even the squid and ballyhoo he used to catch them. He loved to test the temper of his knife on flesh—thawed or frozen. Flaying me would have been a pleasure.

  Edmund was named for a villain. In fact, both brothers had been given names recalling the fraternal pair in Lear. Their parents must have been exceptionally droll, or vicious. To call one son after an infamous bastard and the other after a character famed for virtue is to predispose them to brotherly strife. The joke was diabolical, like that which Mark Twain had played on me, annexing my name for fiction and making it a hobble to keep me in character. The similarity of the brothers’ given names made matters worse. To call themselves Ed resulted in misunderstandings, but Edgar and Edmund sounded ridiculously old-fashioned. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Connery—assuming their union had been sanctified—thought such highfalutin names would toughen their sons and make them mean enough to get on in the world. Or maybe they loved King Lear. I have, ever since the duke of Bridgewater introduced me to this and other works of the immortal bard when Jim and I were traveling together. (I’m not sure, now, whether that memory belongs to me or to the other Huck.)

  “Horse feathers!” said Edmund, remarking on my story.

  You don’t believe he said “horse feathers.”

  Neither do I. Not such a piece of work as one who’d stab his brother in the back. All right, then: Let’s settle the issue of verisimilitude before you take down another word. Edmund, Edgar, James, and most of the other men and many of the women I met during my days and nights as Albert Barthelemy were casual in their employment of obscenity. It was a spice to enliven conversation, a rude noise for the elimination of silences, a sign of bravado and stylishness. For most of my life in the twenty-first century, I was no better than anybody else. I said (let me say them once and be done with them) shit, fuck, cunt, motherfucker, bitch, cocksucker, in addition to lesser terms of opprobrium like prick, twat, jerkoff, turd, dickhead, and douche bag.

  Years ago, I experienced a kind of—what? Beatitude, revelation? No, nothing so exalted. I don’t want people to think I was abnormally good or virtuous, like those pious, hypocritical pismires Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas. (Goodness is a problem, isn’t it? How are we to be good in this world, in this age, and not seem laughable and absurd?) What has complicated matters is my questionable beginnings—and their remoteness from the present: Doubtless, I behaved according to the lights and customs of the time. But I could no more see the truth than Newton a boson or Hans Lippershey Uranus’s moons.

  I wish I could remember—truly—the life I led then: what I did and the actual words I said. Obscenity, for instance—profanity, as it was called. What dirty words did Tom and I say to provoke the sadistic spinsters to yank us by the ears to the kitchen sink and wash our mouths with soap? I’m not convinced that the choicest curses available to us then were tarnation, cussed, bull, quim, blazes, bollocks, and lickfinger. Can you imagine a sailor of the time drawing his knife on a mule skinner and muttering murderously, “I’m gonna cut off your bollocks, you cussed lickfinger!”? Do you believe Abe Lincoln, reared on the frontier, swore “blue blazes” at Mary Todd? In any case, how Tom and I cussed can never be known: The participants and witnesses are deceased, or soon to be. What Edmund probably said when I’d reached a stopping place in the story of my rescue was, “What a crock a shit!” And that, reader, is my sole concession to literary naturalism.

  “Shut your damned mouth!” said Edgar, a rebuke endearing him all the more to me.

  “Let Albert finish,” said James, who would have been called, regrettably, by Deep South rednecks, a n———, not only in 1835 but also in 2005.

  The villainous
Edmund glared, clutched his knife, and went out on deck, silencing even the squabbling gulls.

  “My brother’s manners stink,” Edgar said, nodding for me to continue.

  “I did not know the color of the sky,” I said solemnly. “Eyes fixed on the water, I raced along, on top of my coffin, while the jetties narrowed and quickened the current. The river sounded like lard on a skittle or a sack of snakes. Just above Port Eads, the coffin snagged in branches of an uprooted swamp oak and slewed sideways against the current. It changed course as if I’d pulled hard on a sweep oar, jumped a low bank, and slipped into the flooded marsh. After a while, I came to rest in the high salt grass near the fishing camp. I lay, worn-out—brain reeling with what’d happened to me. Grief-stricken for my drowned folks, my brother Tom, Uncle Jim, and old Duke, I cried until I smelled your chicken cooking and came out of the swamp, hungry and generally miserable. The rest you know.”

  “And you’ve got no family living anywhere?” asked Edgar, his voice soft and whispery.

  “None,” I said, lowering my eyes from his—not in shame or embarrassment, mind you, but for effect. I’d learned the dramatic arts in company with the duke, who’d played Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in London’s Drury Lane Theatre. Or so our handbill claimed in boldfaced twenty-four-point Baskerville when we trod the boards in a hellhole of a town in Arkansas, whose name I don’t recall.

  “It’s a crying shame!” said James, taking off his fancy cap like a man coming into a house where there’d been a death. I liked him for it, even if the occasion for his delicacy was a lie.

  Did I mind telling so personal a lie?

  Since I hadn’t killed off anybody real in my imagination—no, I didn’t mind at all.

  “I’m an orphan,” I said softly. If I’d had an onion, I would have oozed tears.

  You disapprove. Well, you’re wrong! I might not have been recently bereaved, but I was very much an orphan and alone. I hadn’t many folks to call mine to begin with, except for Tom and Jim, after a fashion. I didn’t even have a dog to lick my hand. And in all the wide world in the year 2005, I knew none and none knew me, but for these three men. Who wouldn’t shed tears—genuine or false—if, like me, they had lost what little they had?

  “James, a moment if you please?” said Edgar.

  James nodded, emptied his coconut of rum, and followed Edgar out the saloon door and into the cockpit, where Edmund was savagely beheading a mangrove snapper with a bloody knife. James and Edgar stood with their backs to me, but I saw plainly how Edmund scowled. I wondered what they had in mind, without the least anxiety. I knew I’d be more than equal to their scheming. I was wonderfully sure of myself in those days, feeling, no doubt, a vestige of the mythic world in which lately I had traveled.

  I turned the pages, idly, of a magazine devoted to the breasts of women and another showing men pulling great fish from the water by their gills. I’d have thumbed a magazine promising, on its cover, a body with the strength and endurance to wrestle alligators, subdue bears in hand-to-hand combat, and make women scream in ecstasy if James had not leaned in through the doorway and asked me to step outside. I put the magazine down and never did remember to open it again, though, like most thirteen-year-old boys, I was fascinated by alligators.

  “Yes, sir?” I said, squinting in the sunlight glancing off the late-afternoon water.

  “He’s a well-behaved boy,” James said approvingly.

  “Yes, he is,” Edgar agreed with a broad smile.

  Edmund mutely scowled.

  “Al—do you mind if I call you Al?” asked Edgar. I was flattered by his deference. He could call me by any name he pleased so long as it wasn’t Huck. “Seeing as how you’re alone in the world . . .” he began; and then he hesitated, saying, “You are telling us the truth, aren’t you, Al? There’s nobody that will miss you?”

  “Nobody at all, sir.”

  James picked at his tooth’s golden valentine with the mermaid swizzle stick, and I thought, momentarily, of the overthrow of enchantment and the ruined world of myth.

  “Then why don’t you come with us?” Edgar suggested, looking at his brother, who growled a fierce assent.

  My nose wrinkling, I sensed the possibility of an adventure that would impress even Tom Sawyer. Then I recalled that Tom was dead and a long time underground, and a tear coursed down my grimy cheek. The tear was genuine. Uncertain of themselves, the men shambled foolishly.

  “Poor boy,” said James.

  “Pathetic,” rumbled Edmund ambiguously.

  Edgar put an arm around my shoulder. Affection such as this had never before been shown me—not even by Jim, who knew better than to touch anyone belonging to the white race, regardless of how dissolute. Soon, I was crying in earnest. Embarrassed, the men went inside the boat, leaving me the cockpit to wallow in. Thankfully, emotions Tom would have considered unbecoming were rare in me. I blew my nose nonchalantly into my hand, after the fashion of boys everywhere (and of professional men like baseball players, who find themselves marooned in a desert of grass without a hankie). After wiping my hand on the back of the transom door, I went into the cabin to see what would come next.

  “Where’re we going?” I asked, sliding behind the galley table, next to James.

  He was poring over a nautical chart. I’d seen enough of them to know, in steamboat chart houses where Tom and I had crept in hopes of discovering the location of sunken ships that might contain treasure. We were always interested in enriching ourselves, although we never found anything more fabulous than arrowheads and the teeth of prehistoric sharks, dug from the mud below Hannibal.

  “Across the Gulf to the east coast of Florida, then up the Inland Passage, across the C&D Canal to Delaware Bay, south around the Jersey capes to the Atlantic, then north to Atlantic City,” said James, tracing the lengthy route with a scaly index finger. “Should take us twelve days, barring the unforeseen.”

  I must have looked either dazzled or baffled by the possibility of a second journey—a right smart pace in space, if brief in time. Edgar felt obliged to elaborate on James’s sketchy itinerary.

  “It’s a fishing trip,” he said. “You’ll be our gaff man, mess boy, steward, and mate. What do you say, Al—sound like fun?”

  It did sound like fun, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to exchange a raft for a fifty-eight-foot twin-diesel fishing boat. If anybody deserved shore leave, after 170 years on the water, I did.

  “We need to leave now if we want to make Gulfport before dark,” said Edmund, reminding his brother of the urgency of their departure.

  “What about it, Al? You want to come, or stay and wait for the Coast Guard to show up?”

  I thought of spending the night alone in Port Eads, without fresh water or a chicken to be plucked from a tree. I looked at the saloon, with its upholstered chairs and sofa, at the galley, with its stove and a box from which Edmund had just taken a beer, beaded with condensation like a bottle of milk from the icehouse. I recalled the cabin where I’d wakened on a soft mattress and a pillow—the light from the porthole, stained green by cypress trees, falling on me like an insinuation of a world beyond worry and travail.

  “They’ll put you in the New Orleans Superdome with ten thousand other homeless people lined up for the toilets,” Edgar said. “When they find out you’ve no family, they’ll stick you in an orphanage. Not much fun there, my friend.”

  “Time to move!” Edmund barked.

  “I’m afraid he’s right,” said James, folding up his chart. “We’ll lose the tide and the light if we wait much longer. It’s now or never, Mr. Albert.”

  All three turned their eyes on me. I was like a fish, free in its ignorance of the dragnet that shortly will begin to close on it, circumscribing its life with each haul on the line, till not even a sliver of freedom is possible. My instincts warned me to take my chances in the bayou, but the moment had already crystallized around the contrary decision, indifferent to my qualms. (All my life thereafter, at each crux, I would wonder
just who or what threw its weight into the scales, deciding my next move.)

  “I’ll go,” I said in a voice drained suddenly of possibility.

  Did I regret my choice?

  Yes, no, yes, no, catch a tiger by the toe. Think of any momentous decision in your own life. You have a wife, I know. Do you regret having married her? It doesn’t matter whether you’re happy at this moment or not; instant by instant, your mind wavers, unable to make itself up. Instant by instant, for as long as you both shall live, regret and contentment will be interchangeable terms in your life’s balance sheet.

  “I’ll go,” I said, this time with a greater show of enthusiasm. I did not want to go with them, and yet I did. Our fear of the future and our thrill before it are concurrent in us—even, I sometimes think, if the future can mean only death.

  Edgar clapped me on the back; Edmund gazed inscrutably at me; James saluted with two fingers touching the garlanded visor of his cap before climbing the stairs to the bridge to wake the sleeping engines. Moments later, the boat lurched. Gravity and the heaviness of matter reinstated themselves. A boy who’d never been to school or watched a science documentary could not have articulated the physics. My back and buttocks pressed against the chair—a sensation to remind me of my place on earth, bound by iron physical law.

  I remembered The Time Machine found by Tom Sawyer’s deathbed. A slow reader, I’d never finished; and it had changed the terms of its existence to become a lump of papier-mâché or, reduced to its elements, a primal goo retaining not a word of its former self. No, I could be wrong. Whatever’s left of the book may keep the memory of its vanished words. I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them. This is what illuminates the merest stone or shell, arrowhead or shark’s tooth. This is what can make mud shine. And Tom? And Jim? And me at the end of my time? Our bones, the carbon of their pulverized dust, will tell a story of our lives.