The Boy in His Winter (5 page)

One of the sailors vomited over the side of the skiff. I was pleased to see that my theatrics were appreciated. (Wasn’t the raft a kind of stage on which we played parts assigned to us by someone else?)

“Might that be Jim you’re dining on?” Tom asked.

“It is,” I said. “He keeled over day before yesterday of starvation. His last words to me were to eat him before he spoiled.”

“Smells like he’s gone off some,” said Tom, his finely shaped nose hunting the air as if for the departing atoms of his childhood, instead of the deceased slave he’d frequently bedeviled.

“Hotter than usual for the time of year—don’t you think so, Tom?”

He nodded in agreement, and I admired how well he had grown into a man. He had dash, and his looks had ripened into a dark handsomeness. At thirty-eight, he looked about as striking as a man can in a Confederate uniform.

“Jim was a good n———,” he said. “Makes me glad to see him dead, else I’d have had to hang him for a runaway.”

I thought for sure Jim would scream or make a
commotion, but he didn’t—aware, doubtless, of the gravity of his situation.

“Care for some?” I asked, indicating the place on Jim’s back I’d been carving.

“No, thank you, Huck,” said Tom, with the nice manners of an officer and a gentleman.

“How ’bout you boys? Care for some dead n———?” I was sure Jim would forgive me for using that hateful word in the name of verisimilitude.

I am not one to curry favor, but for Jim’s sake, I smiled at the pair of Mississippians; for so I knew them to be from the timbre of their voices. They refused me. Fortunately, not one of the three men in gray showed any desire to take a look at Jim’s face hidden under the blanket.

“You don’t look a day older, Huck,” said Tom, who bore his early middle age splendidly.

“I’m still only thirteen,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“Don’t know,” I said.

Our conversation was suddenly becalmed, but Tom seemed reluctant to go. He and I had been the best of friends, and maybe he thought we should speak fondly of the days of our common boyhood on the wharves and mudflats of Hannibal. But apparently he could find nothing more to say. As for me, I was nervously waiting for him and his oarsmen to be gone. Just then, a bell rang out merrily on the
General Sumter.

“Lunch is ready!” said Tom, suddenly discovering his appetite. “Row us back to the boat, boys,” he said, taking his seat in the stern. “It was swell to see you again, Huck.”

“Same here, Tom.”

“You take good care, now.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

And then Tom was gone from our lives, and Jim could breathe once again like a living man.

I said earlier that I would avoid the vernacular in favor of a more dignified way of speaking. But I couldn’t resist it and may fall, again, into a common usage for the fun of it. The only person who might object to my attempts at dialect is Jim, and he’s long dead.

“I
HATE WHEN YOU SIT
and brood, Jim.”

“I don’t brood; I think.”

“What do you think about?”

“At night, I think about the origin of stars: how they hurl themselves against the outposts of nothingness. During the day, of the effects of sunlight on fog and water, the secret language of birds and how they turn as one in flight, and how a cloud of gnats reproduces certain nebula in miniature.”

I feel obliged to rehabilitate Jim after having shown him in less than a heroic light during the performance of our theater of cannibalism. He was not the simpleton Mark Twain made him out to be, nor was he the blank, the zero, the empty slate I sometimes took him for. It isn’t easy to describe well and truly the persons and events that figured in my story. I’ve scribbled some before, but not at length or with a responsibility to my characters—which, in this instance, are Jim and I.

To continue our palaver, without the artifice of dialect to make it plausible:

“What do you dream, Jim?”

“I dream of the oracle bones used by my ancestors to
foretell the future, of a small drum, and also of animals—their eyes full of suffering.”

To be honest, I don’t know what Jim was thinking and dreaming during the 125 years we were together on the raft—from 1835 to 1960, although it seems now to have been no time at all. I can’t read minds, and Jim, by nature shy and reserved, would not have shared his innermost life with me. Some things I have to imagine, else there will be no story. And if I have not been entirely truthful, it is not with any intent to deceive. Mark Twain passed his book off as if I had written it myself. I’ve told you before that it was none of my doing. Frankly, I resent the words he put in my mouth. If Jim were here, I’m sure he’d say as much. I’m not out to correct Twain’s mistakes; he’s famous and has every right to them. I want only the chance to tell the story in my own way while I’m aboveground and in my right mind.

What was I thinking then?

God knows. Probably about the river: its bottom, bends, shoals, reefs, and snags. It always fascinated me. When Pap was sober, he would take me down to the mudflats, where we’d do a little fishing. He liked to eat river carp. Before his hands shook from liquor, Pap could scale and skin a carp faster than any other man I know. I can see him now, against the sinking river light, his bare arms glittering with pink scales.

My mother? Never knew her. You can say that my youth was spoiled by men. I mean, I never knew the gentleness of women, which might have smoothed and civilized me. The Widow Douglas thought too much about the next life to be of any use to a boy in this one. Miss Watson was a backbiting screech owl of a woman without a charitable bone in her body. She was as stern and unbending as a corset and had a
face like a broadax. In Hannibal, when I recommended killing her to Tom, I wasn’t fooling.

I ought to mention the dead man Jim and I fished up from the river, north of Memphis. From his striped overalls and cap and the coal dust ingrained in his hands, his cheeks, in the loose folds of his bristly neck, he gave every appearance of being a locomotive engineer. But the wonder of it was how he’d come to be adrift in the main channel of the Mississippi. We had no answer, and never did discover anything to account for the incongruity. The night after we’d fished him up, I heard a locomotive beating its way downriver toward our raft—its cyclopean headlight looming in the dark. I put the blanket over my head and prayed like mad. It was only a lantern belonging to a towboat or a barge, but I couldn’t shake my expectations of being sunk by a runaway train. You can’t always be testing reality. Try, and progress will be slow and halting, like a man’s on snowshoes crossing a snow bridge flung over a bottomless crevasse. You have to step out and hope the snow isn’t rotten. I have always believed in recklessness and the amplitude of time, which are the creed and virtues of any boy.

After our encounter with the celestial railroad engineer, I took an interest in the deceptive appearance of reality, debating it with Jim while we meandered southerly in what must have been almost a state of suspended animation. My capacity for abstruse thought was becoming sly and subtle, like a seducer worming his way into a woman’s boudoir.

“Do eels have souls?” I remember having put that question to Jim, as he brought one up from the depths, where, presumably, it had lived in contentment, maybe even joy, regardless of its lowly, uncharismatic appearance.

“If men have souls, then I do not see why an eel shouldn’t,” he replied with his usual sagacity.

But I thought he was being evasive, and said as much.

“Not at all,” he said. “I’m inclined to give life in all its forms the benefit of the doubt.”

“I doubt men have souls,” I said, wanting to goad him.

“You’re a skeptic, Huck, and you’ll be the worse off for it if ever you grow up.”

Of course, the argument probably went more like this:

Me: “Do eels have souls, Jim?”

Jim: “Don’t know. Maybe.”

Me: “What about human beings?”

Jim: “Good Book says so.”

Me: “Good Book mention anything about eels?”

Jim: “No, only serpents.”

Me: “Eel’s a kind of serpent.”

Jim: “Then it don’t have a soul.”

Speaking of appearances, I would like my future readers to know that the picture of Jim and me that Thomas Hart Benton painted on the wall of the Missouri state capitol bears not the slightest resemblance to either one of us. I look like a scrawny old man miniaturized, and Jim, like a muscle-bound grotesque escaped from a road gang. I’ve never been satisfied with any representation of myself and have seen only one picture of Jim that did him justice. I don’t know why this should be, unless it is evidence of a nearly universal prejudice against us, instigated by Sunday school superintendents, Republicans, and bigots.

Time passed, but slowly as we moved toward the future, with what must have been antiquity at our backs. We would feel it suddenly like a cold draft upon the heart, making us shiver in fear. The past had vanished, but it still had power
to influence us, while the momentary present engaged us in its toils. We were being carried onward into a space not yet woven on time’s loom. There was nothing to be known—not even indirectly, the way unseen magnolia trees are known by the heady odor of their white blossoms. The future is said to be unborn. But how, then, do you explain the bottle of patent medicine we took from the water below Memphis, manufactured in Natchez in 1925? The empty bottle had floated impossibly
upriver,
bringing with it a future, assembled out of particles of nothing into a town.

“How could it happen, Jim?” I asked, mystified after he’d finished reading me the milky blue bottle. He was not an illiterate, having been taught to read by Miss Watson, who liked to “show him off” to company.

“Now and then, time must flow backward,” he said.

“But the bottle rode upriver
against
the current!” I nearly shouted in my perplexity.

“Then the river must be like a Möbius strip.”

Jim didn’t know a damn thing about Möbius or his strip, although he was still alive at the time of its discovery. I’m only amusing myself. Anachronism is a storyteller’s prerogative. But I know this much: We must head always toward the future. At least on a raft.

Then why, you ask, am I writing this book, which is a return to a dubious past?

What else can a man do who has used up his future? And if I should die before finishing this—what will happen to the boy and the black man on their raft?

E
VERY THIRD DAY
, I
LET
J
IM BE CAPTAIN
of the raft. I was captain more often than he because I took pleasure in it,
not because I considered Jim incompetent. His pleasure was to take inventory of the valuables stolen from Miss Watson’s and Judge Thatcher’s houses. We had between us a mother-of-pearl opera glass; a phenakistoscope, with which we watched a Scotsman jig, a circus girl jump, and a bass fiddler fiddle; a barometer that neither rose nor fell but always stayed the same; an ivory-handled revolver without bullets; a bottle of cod-liver oil to pour down the throats of our enemies;
The Pilgrim’s Progress
to read to our enemies as a punishment; two tobacco pipes, one corncob and one briar wood; a jar of navy plug tobacco; an onyx letter opener; a splinter that had entered Judge Thatcher’s left foot in 1802 and emerged twenty years later to the day from his right foot; a stovepipe hat; a file in case Jim was ever chained up again; a petrified frog once belonging to Tom (the same frog Jim had seen Marie Laveau resurrect); a darning egg; a viola whose bow Tom had broken playing Robin Hood; Aunt Polly’s christening spoon; a marlinspike; a frock coat; fire tongs; a cast-iron dog; the jug of rye whiskey; a box of locofoco friction matches; sealing wax; and a bar of Belgian soap in the shape of a hot-air balloon.

Jim liked to make up stories about the valuables: how they might behave if they could talk or how we might make outlandish use of them, such as steering the raft by whatever way the darning egg rolled, in order to avoid snags and wrecks, or sawing on the viola strings with the petrified frog. He thought this might raise a chorus of the dead and cause the varmints inside our clothes to jump overboard. He liked to tell me about the creation of the world from a handful of mud and thorns, about the moon’s whispering secrets all night to the sea, the noise of stars, the drowned who coursed forever through the river’s veins, a woman who
ate her children, and the sad wedding of a weeping willow to a locust tree. Jim’s themes tended toward sadness, which must come naturally to a man bereft of nearly everything.

Once, Jim shocked me by putting on a frock coat and a stovepipe hat (belonging to the judge), and with his hand gripping the sternpost as if it were a podium, he recited from memory Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He would never say how he had come by the text, not even when I dosed him with rye whiskey to make him talkative. While Jim was no teetotaler, he couldn’t handle liquor and would fall asleep before he could be coaxed into revelation.

“Do you think God made us all equal, Jim?” I asked when he had recovered his wits and the power of speech.

“Yes, Huck,” he said simply, so that I was ashamed to think otherwise.

When John Wilkes Booth shot and killed Old Abe, Jim was inconsolable for days afterward, weeping and gnashing his teeth and jabbing at his leg with the marlinspike, until I feared he might throw himself overboard or at the very least lose his mind. I didn’t know what I would do with a deranged black man on such a small raft. I thought of putting him ashore but couldn’t bring myself to abandon him. I would sooner have set a Christian in a coliseum rampant with starved lions. Jim was my friend, and if grief turned him into a raving lunatic, then so be it.