The Boy in His Winter (12 page)

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, entering 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.

“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?