The Boy in His Winter (4 page)

“I don’t think we are any longer in life,” I said.

“You mean we’re dead?”

I could see that the idea didn’t appeal to Jim, who looked around wildly, as if expecting to see a fraternity of ghosts or, at the very least, the yellow dog that had died in the schoolyard, chasing its tail and foaming at the mouth. Had Jim worried about the persistence of rabies in the afterlife of a dog, I’d have assured him that glory, however brief, would have purged it of distemper. But Jim said nothing on the subject.

“No, we ain’t dead.” (If we’d had this conversation, I was sure to have said
ain’t.
Even so illustrious a citizen as Judge Thatcher employed the vernacular on occasion.) “We’re cut off, like two flies trapped in amber.” (I might have said
marmalade,
but the meaning is the same.)

Jim didn’t care for this trope, either. He preferred to avoid the quicksand of metaphysics, which I considered great sport. His mind was more straightforward, if kinked by superstitions.

“I want to try an experiment, Jim.”

He looked at me, his sad eyes full of suspicion and hurt. I knew he was thinking of the last experiment, when I’d tried to teach him to swim by shoving him off the raft. Contrary to my earnest expectations, he did not suddenly acquire the
gift of flotation and, if not for a passing log fallen off a lumber raft, Jim would have gone straight to the bottom. He clutched, and I pulled him safely up.

“I want to see whether we might not have the power of resurrection,” I said.

“I saw Marie Laveau bring a frog back to life once,” he said.

I dismissed a frog as too low a creature to prove anything. I pointed, instead, to a dead cow, sailing belly-up on our starboard side, within reach of the boat hook, which I handed to Jim, his arms being longer and considerably stronger than mine.

“Just touch this to the belly of that poor beast. If my theory is correct, it’ll come straightaway to life.”

Jim did as I asked, even if he muttered some, while I held on to his pants with one hand and the lean-to with the other to ground the corpse in our miraculous energy. (A boy of the twenty-first century would have said
force field.
) If I was right, we’d have plenty of fresh milk for our voyage. The cow, however, continued in the intractability of death. Jim looked relieved. Plainly disgusted, he swished the end of the boat hook in the water to rid it of corruption and evil spirits. The cow did stink.

Did I believe in evil spirits? Hard to say now. But I did believe in evil men, and women. I was impartial, generally speaking, in my low opinion of both sexes. I had only to think of Delilah and Potiphar’s wife. And in my experience, there was no more mean-spirited, foul-tempered, sharp-tongued harridan than pious old Miss Watson, who was a woman, of sorts.

I had no adequate theory to explain why the raft was able to travel through time. The water at the river’s source,
Minnesota’s Lake Itasca, was also traveling into the future. For all I know, it may go on forever and, with it, the piece of river that had seized our raft and held us fast in timelessness. Do you think that’s a plausible explanation?

I know the river flows into the Gulf of Mexico! I don’t need you to give me a lesson in the geography of the Mississippi Delta. I got soaked to the skin with it. But the water—braiding and unbraiding for more than two thousand miles before finally entering the Gulf—doesn’t just stop. It goes on and on. Our raft, in that water, may have been a kind of time machine carried by a freak of nature (
singularity,
to use a modern term)—an unrepeatable combination of circumstances—toward time’s distant unfolding, which it never reached because of the damned hurricane.

What is it now? You want to know if we slept.

Naturally, I’ve said as much. We slept in the ordinary way of men, or a man and a boy. Days alternated with nights, good weather with bad. Only in memory do the conditions of our life on the Mississippi appear uncommon. We may have been surprised, but in those days we accepted magic; we took miracles in stride. When we ventured onto land is another story, which sometimes appalled us. If all seems now to have been a dream, it is only recollection that makes it so. Would it have been a waste and a pity if it had been a dream? I, for one, have spent the best part of my life in dreaming and have profited by it. I’ve been cheered and uplifted—especially now, in the winter of my life. Even nightmares have something to tell us about ourselves. And inasmuch as dreaming is an aspect of human life, we ought not to reject it.

And if it had been no more than a virtual journey, well—what do
you
say? You’re a young man and have more
experience with this sort of thing, although I’m deft at raising online maps from the swamp of data. You were born into the Digital Age, while I spent my formative years in the Age of Steam, which I miss. It had its familiars, gods, and avatars, such as the locomotive, the steamboat, the primitive automobile, as well as that most genial altar of the age: the old-fashioned cast-iron radiator, to replace the ancient hearth. For all its speed and efficiency, feats of memory and logic, the computer cannot warm you on a winter’s night and—its processes being invisible and all but silent—there’s nothing to see and very little to adore.

W
E LEFT
C
APE
G
IRARDEAU
and the year 1851 behind, and next morning, not long after first light, we made New Madrid, at Missouri’s southeastern heel. I watched in fascination as Jim, leaning into the brightness of the newly risen sun, seemed to be eaten by it—first his head and then the balance of him, until he was nothing but an engulfing light—or so it seemed to eyes widened by the recent night.

“You look like a ghost,” I said, shifting my gaze because my eyes were stinging the way they will when you step out of darkness into daylight.

Jim was afraid of ghosts and all other tokens of the unseen, which to him was a teeming place fraught with menace. (It must be the same for a virologist.) He was a Christian, but his Baptist faith had become confused with voodoo, as practiced by old Mambo Laveau, who could animate the dead.

“Do you believe in ghosts, Jim?” I asked, to needle him.

“I do.”

I shivered to hear his voice, tremulous and thrilling, issue from the temporary dark. I recalled how Tom had scared
poor Jim out of his wits by removing the mirror from Miss Watson’s chifforobe. When Jim came to make up the fire (his eyes, like mine now, nearly useless after chopping wood in the glaring sun), Tom began to moan hideously. He’d draped himself in a sheet and floured his face, and when he climbed through the mirror’s empty frame into Miss Watson’s bedroom, Jim fainted dead away. According to voodoo, mirrors are passageways between the living world and the next. At the time, I didn’t feel the least sorry for Jim, thinking it only right that someone ignorant enough to believe in the resurrection of frogs, in zombies, and in other perversions of sense should suffer the consequences.

New Madrid floated past us—that is to say, we floated past New Madrid, which the town’s boosters claim is the oldest American city west of the Mississippi. Maybe it is; I never bothered to check. A lifetime isn’t long enough to verify the countless truths of this world—not even a lifetime as long as mine. My eyes grown accustomed to the new light, I turned once more and looked at Jim, who had reassembled himself in the stern of the raft.

“Ever hear of the 1811 New Madrid earthquake?”

I took every opportunity to sound the depth of Jim’s ignorance; such is the cruelty of boys.

“No,” he said. Jim was smart, but he had no learning to speak of.

The water that rose in 1811 after the earthquake, flooding fields and streets all the way to the Gulf of Mexico—where is it now? Time, imprinted on its atoms, must have commingled with the Gulf, flavoring it with the past, before seeping to earth’s far corners. Much later, did a Fiji islander wash her clothes in antebellum Mississippi River water? Did a woman from Ceylon or Sicily? Did a kayak on Baffin
Bay slip through water that had been stirred, centuries earlier, by the paddle wheel of a Mississippi steamboat? I seem helpless not to think about time, and what I had intended to be a simple story of Jim’s and my life on the river becomes more and more snarled in complexity.

Seeing a gaudy paddle wheeler near the opposite shore, I found my thoughts wandering to the pleasures of a journey by boat, instead of toiling aboard a raft. We did often struggle, Jim and I, no matter that we traveled in mythic time toward the future.

O
N
M
AY
10, 1862,
WE ARRIVED
at Plum Point Bend, where a naval engagement between the Confederate River Defense Fleet and a squadron of Union ironclads was in noisy progress. I should describe the ships’ maneuvering, the skirmishing of men on either side, the confusion and alarms. I ought to give an account of the battle’s importance, and because the American Civil War is relatively ancient history, I should summarize its causes (having more to do with Jim and his family than with me and mine). But at this moment, I prefer to note the color of the water, the behavior of clouds and cannon smoke in the changeable wind, the elegant figures traced by birds against the reeling sky.

You say I have a duty to history.

Having been in history as long as I have relieves me of any further obligation to it.

You say I have a duty to readers to flesh out my story.

Sorry, but I find such fleshing-out to be tedious and beside the point.

You want to know what my point is in all this?

I’m not sure. You see I am, at least, honest. But I think
“all this” has to do with ideas of time and the secret confluences by which we arrive at points in our own histories. But because I do not wish to be remembered (if I will be remembered) as a self-indulgent fantasist, I’ll skip the purple patch for now, however much I wish to write it. I need to make amends for my indifference, for having turned my back on the world in favor of the beauties of the way. I’ll try to study cruelty (I regret my own) and render it in more familiar terms. But something of Mark Twain’s playfulness, his habit of fantasizing and exaggerating must have rubbed off on me. How could it be otherwise? So this account of my life must be impure: a mixture of high-minded tragedy and lowborn comedy. At Plum Point, at this moment in time, I was more interested in the rude clash of ships and ironclads than in grand ideas or my moral misdeeds and childish stupidity. (How could I have imagined that—215 years in the future—I’d be preparing to leave time once more and, in all probability, never come back to it?) I had the smell of gunpowder up my nose, and no other smell is so exciting to the boyish imagination.

Yes, yes! I am an old man and may have forgotten how the scent of a woman has power to inflame! But if you’re to be the secretary of my memories, you had better learn to flatter me. I’d have used a Dictaphone, but I dislike machinery that does not hum or clank—crude sounds that give it humanity.

Plum Point.

The
General Sumter
had rammed and driven off the Union ironclad
Cincinnati.
I’d seen the
General Sumter
many times before, on the river near Hannibal, when she was the
Junius Beebe,
a side-wheeled steamer working as a tow. She’d been outfitted in Algiers, Louisiana, with iron
plates covering her bow and commissioned as a ram for the Confederacy. She was giving the Union boats hell, and I had my hat off to her when the
Cincinnati
ran aground. I could see Jim didn’t approve of my enthusiasm, but at the time I thought no more of the skirmish than if I’d witnessed a contest of battling eggs or a ruckus in the schoolyard. My conscience was raw and unformed.

On the
General Sumter
, three Confederate officers were leaning on the upper-deck railing, when one of them straightened up and began to shout toward us, “Ahoy! Huckleberry Finn!”

He and I might have been parted by fifty yards of water and twenty-seven years when we’d gone our separate ways, but I knew at once and without doubt that the officer waving to me was Tom Sawyer! He climbed down the ladder onto the lower deck and, shortly, was making toward us in a skiff rowed by two rebel sailors. Jim was in a panic, for he could expect nothing but the whip and the shackle from representatives of Jeff Davis’s government. And I couldn’t be sure that Tom hadn’t become a dyed-in-the-wool Confederate since I had seen him last; he came from Missouri and had grown up surrounded by slaves who called him “young master.”

“Play dead, Jim,” I said.

Jim fell facedown onto the raft, where he gave a convincing portrayal of a man departed from this earth. I never did fathom how, in that desperate moment, he had managed to suppress the natural shiver that comes to a human being in fear for his life. I threw a blanket over his head and laid a piece of fatback on his naked back. It looked just like mutilated flesh, and to complete the illusion, I pried open the tin can where we kept putrefied chicken gizzards, a sovereign
bait for catching catfish. As the skiff pulled alongside, Tom and his crew hesitated in the presence of so formidable a stink. I had my knife and appeared to be cutting a strip of meat from Jim, as though hunger had driven me to the extremity of cannibalism.

“Hello, Huck,” said Tom, eyeing me with a look of profound disappointment at how low I had fallen. “Are you eating that n———?”

“I am, Tom,” I said. “Hunger’s made me do it.” I cut off another strip of pinkish meat, put it in my mouth, and chewed noisily. Jim never moved a muscle.