The Boy in His Winter (9 page)

He spoke to Jim about garlands of twisted wire hung with dead men and also with living ones who screamed out their agonies until friend or foe could stand it no longer and—in pity or in sudden anger born of an overmastering irritation—shot them, allowing silence momentarily to pour its balm over the devastated ground. Henry spoke about cages of fire falling from the night sky, about poison gas clouds that smelled like geraniums, mown hay, apples, or almonds. He spoke, too, about winter—its gray snows growing minutely on the barrels of machine guns and cannon, on the broken boots, iron helmets, and great coats of the unharvested dead. It might have been a foreign tongue in which he spoke. I understood very little of what Henry said.

You’re right: Henry would never have said this, would not have uttered such high-flown crap. A lyrical turn of
phrase—no matter how impassioned—cannot capture cruelty, terror, waste, stupidity, and death. Only plainest speech is apt for the occasion of so much misery. What he might have said, as he leaned against the forward post in his baggy corduroy suit, was this:

“I sat in the rain or snow or stench, in a shitty ditch that was muddy, freezing, or choked with dust, according to the time of year. I pissed myself in fear, played cards or had fistfights out of boredom; I got drunk when I could and prayed to go home. I got no medals or kisses on the cheeks from French generals. Instead, I got lice, crabs—caught the clap once—and spent two weeks in the hospital for trench foot. Lucky for me, I lost only one toe, the little one, which I wasn’t using anyway.”

Maybe. Maybe not. I never went to war, although I did go to a prison, of sorts. I’ve been scared many times, but not as Henry must have been—or Jim would be, before his journey’s end. But you make do with what you’re given, and I’ve spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It’s the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own. Henry scared me—worse; he’d given me the taste of bitterness that comes when you realize the world is irredeemably evil. I wanted him off the raft, as you would someone with a fever, a sickness you’re afraid to catch.

Buzz, buzz, buzz!
They spent their time, whispering together like two spinsters—like Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas, whose meanness and piety were unsurpassed. Like flies crawling on the inside of a window, wanting to get out. I got so I hated the sight of their woolly heads. What in hell did they find to talk about all those years?

The years passed: 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, ’25, ’26, ’27, ’28, ’29, 1930. And in all that time, Henry aged no more than Jim or I, which was not at all.

“We’re far enough into the future for you to get off,” I said to Henry when Edgard, Louisiana, came into view around a bend. Jean Lafitte had favored the town’s rum and women with his swashbuckling presence. I doubted Henry would be welcomed with an equal warmth.

Jim took me aside and said we should wait a few more years; he didn’t think we’d given
Homo sapiens
nearly long enough to improve its low character. He thought the job of civilizing human beings was far too big to be accomplished in only a single decade.

“Give him another ten years,” Jim said. “What’s ten more years to us who never alter in time or feel the least inconvenienced by its passing?”

His concern for Henry hardened my heart. I pulled at the sweep oar until the raft scraped up onto a gravel beach, and then nodded to Henry, who understood and got off with his cornet. For a moment, I feared Jim would get off, too; but he remained aboard, although he turned his back on me—whether in disapprobation or disgust, I don’t know. I pushed the raft off the gravel into the river, and we were once again in the current. We spoke not a word while the river reasserted its influence. I looked over my shoulder at Henry, who shrank until there was nothing left of him but the sunlight on his horn. The sun vanished in clouds, perfecting Henry’s obliteration. The world seemed to have hushed, with only the “St. Louis Blues” to disturb the mournful silence. And when we had put the town behind us, Henry’s music was drowned in the noise of water and of the wind that blew with the force of history at our backs.

J
IM WOULD NOT SPEAK TO ME
, and the years passed in silence. I hated him and might have tried to knock him overboard if it were not for the feeling that my destiny was entangled in his. (I believed at the time that I had a destiny, separate and apart from what the river willed.) Could I go on without Jim? What would it mean for my life, for his to end? That he could have considered himself bound up in Henry Wilson’s fate didn’t occur to me—or if it did, I put it out of my mind as a complication beyond its power to unravel. Time slowed as though it meant to stop. I worried what it might mean to me if it did. Would the river, raft, and we two seize up, like a watch in whose works a bit of grit or rust has lodged? Jim did not speak to me, nor I to him. I longed for a scrap of conversation or even a bone of contention we could have gnawed aloud. I don’t mind silence so long as it is companionable. Standing at the sweep oar, I looked at Jim’s back as he sat well forward on the raft. When our positions were reversed, I looked at the river and its shores.

Let me describe once again the beauties of the way: There were swans toward shore that knotted behind them long threads of brown water; and herons standing on one leg, necks preening in the light or elongating suddenly to spear small fish flashing in the shallows; and pelicans straining at the oars of their wings; and geese that hurtled down from the upper air, flailing as they skidded to a stop on the face of the water. There were animals onshore drinking from the river and others on the headlands and in the hills. The trees on the hills and in the valleys and pastures beyond them were green or the color of old gold or, farther to the east, white—in their seasons. I knew how the land lay on either side of
the great river that divided it. And I had it on good faith that the earth was rich and yielded ample harvests unless it was a time of drought or scorching heat or annihilating rains. But they, also, had their places in the shaping of the people’s character. So, too, the western desert and the northern plains and the smoking cities of the East. The river was not so wide as it was up above, but deeper—its depths communicating to me a knowledge of shoals and reefs and of other things hidden from view that give us fear and also hope: the one, that we will founder and drown; the other, that we will avoid—by luck or providence—the snares and continue on our way into a future that may be better than the past.

“He may have played his cornet in the town hall,” I said to Jim at last to break the silence.

He turned to me and said, “Yes, he may have taken the train to New York and played with Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson or gone to Chicago to play with Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver.” (The men’s names meant nothing to me, since, unlike Jim, I hadn’t “been to school” with Henry Wilson during his years on the raft.)

I’ve never known whether Jim was serious or sarcastic at that moment. In any case, the ice between us had broken, and we talked while we floated so very slowly downriver. But it was never the same again, and our talk was not easy or pleasant anymore. Time drained away like sand in an hourglass: a figure of speech that makes up for its unoriginality by its exactitude.

The years rolled on: 1940, 1941, 1942—there was another war, but we didn’t feel it—1945, 1950—and there was yet another war—1954, ’55, ’56, ’57, ’58, ’59. . . .

In 1960, Jim decided to leave the raft for good. We had been on the river for one hundred and twenty-five years.

W
E PUT IN AT
W
AGGAMAN
, on the west bank of the Mississippi. Jim took his pipe and several plugs of tobacco, the darning egg, the stovepipe hat, and
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. We shook hands formally and gravely. He left the raft. I watched him until he disappeared down a side street. I sat for a long time, wondering how it would be to go on without him. Twice, I attempted to gather myself together and push out onto the river, but I couldn’t. I smoked a pipe, drank a little whiskey, and wondered why Jim had taken the darning egg and not his petrified frog. In the end, I followed him into town.

My feelings at that instant—what I can recall of them from this remove in time and space—were complicated. I was bothered that I had come to hate him, bothered even more that I had loved him. I’m not sure that I regarded him then as a man. Not entirely. That broad view of humanity was alien to a mind that had been formed haphazardly, like a shack put together out of old lumber, warped and ill-used. There was about me then a makeshift quality. My nature was rough-hewn. I was cruel and envious because I was often afraid. I regretted I had not been more open with Jim. We’d wasted much time when we might have understood what was happening on the raft while we closed in on the river’s end, which was not to be the journey’s end, as I learned later. No, it was not even the end for Jim. I went on with him—we went on together—for a long time afterward.

Jim stopped at a house and knocked at the door. I watched him fumble off his hat when a bedraggled young woman stepped onto the porch. I was hiding in the bushes, and I heard him ask if there was any little job he could do.
He needed money for a bus ticket, he said. He wanted to go to New York. I wished then that I had taken the coins from Tom Sawyer’s pocket so that I might give them to Jim. The woman looked at him with scorn and with something I couldn’t interpret.

“I got an old chifforobe needs busting up for kindling,” she said.

“I’d be pleased to do that for you, ma’am.”

“You can call me Mayella,” she said, giving him that disquieting look again.

Sensing in her what I could not, Jim began to back up on the porch. But the woman insisted and took his arm and dragged him into the house. Shortly after, I saw him carry the chifforobe into the yard and chop it up with an ax while Mayella stood and watched.

Finished his work, Jim asked politely to be paid, but the girl wasn’t ready to see him leave.

“Come into the house,” she said, “and I’ll give you a cool lemonade to drink. You look all hot and sweaty.”

I could see Jim wanted to light out of there. But he was hesitating. Maybe because of his desire to go to New York City, maybe because of something that had to do with Henry Wilson—I don’t know. Jim went inside, and in what seemed like the next instant, he flew out the door again, without his stovepipe hat. He hurried down the street. I followed him to the bus depot and hid behind a pile of mail sacks, where I could see him waiting on the “colored only” side of the station.

One bus departed for St. Louis, another for Chicago. But before the New York City bus could leave, a pickup truck, half-eaten by rust, stopped with a screech of worn brakes in a cloud of dust and black exhaust. Three men in greasy
overalls and sweat-stained hats jumped out, grabbed Jim, and threw him into the back of the truck. Behind the steering wheel, a man smoked a cigarette with grim determination; beside him sat Mayella, chewing on her hair. A second truck appeared and then a third—all three filled with the same overalls, hats, and bristling cheeks and chins. They formed a convoy and drove out a dirt road into a mangrove swamp by the river. I’d climbed into the back of the third truck. A man gave me an ax handle and told me to beat the n———with it when we stopped. I held it; it was a kind of ticket to the proceedings. I watched Jim sitting in the truck ahead of us, his feet dangling from the tailgate as if he were going to a picnic. He didn’t struggle; he never said a word. I hoped he didn’t see me.

What is it you want to know? Did I want to see Jim lynched? Is that what you think?

No, I did not. I don’t know what I wanted as the truck bounced and bottomed out on the ruts, but it wasn’t that. I held the ax handle. I was scared. I prayed they’d just give Jim a beating and let him go. I held the ax handle, but I had no intention of hitting Jim with it. Can’t you understand what goes through a boy’s head at a time like this? I was scared, and I wanted to be sick. The men with me were like drunks: eyes glazed, mouths open in an ugly leer, their lips white and gummy with saliva, strings of spit stretching like rubber bands when they opened their mouths to curse the n———, to scream how they would kill the n———. Jesus Christ, I wished I were back on the raft with Jim, or without him! I held the ax handle and felt tears start in my eyes and wiped them in shame with the dirty back of my hand. I think I said to the man next to me that I wanted to get off the truck. But the truck didn’t slow until the
road came to an end, and then all three trucks stopped. I think I jumped out and crawled inside a clump of cottonwood bushes and lay on my belly and shook. I think that’s what I was doing when they pulled Jim down from the back of the truck and put the rope around his neck and hoisted him up on a branch. I don’t remember if I looked. All I remember is the noise the rope made while it swung slowly back and forth with Jim’s deadweight at the end of it. Then it began to rain. They didn’t leave him dangling in the tree. They made a joke about sending a package to New Orleans. They cut Jim down and threw him into the river, with a length of rope still around his neck. The way they laughed, it must have been funny.

I waited in the cottonwoods until night came, and then I stumbled through the brush to the river, where I made my way along the shoreline to the raft. I rowed out to the middle of the river and tried not to think of Jim anymore.

I
SURRENDERED MYSELF TO THE RIVER
, its secret purposes. But the river said nothing, except in the way of water: liquid syllables unintelligible to my ordinary mind. Jim might have understood, but not I. Which is not to say that I, like any other boy, did not hear voices in the babble. But they were only those spoken by a childish imagination: the bloodthirsty speech of pirates, the boastfulness of riverboat gamblers, the bravado of soldiers on their way west to subdue the Indians. I knew none of it was real. I was tormented by loneliness.