Norman Lock - The Boy in His Winter

Jim and I were no longer aimless, although it could be argued that we were never so, having borrowed, unconsciously, the river’s own ineluctable end: steadfastly south to the broad Delta and to the Gulf and from there to the world’s far ends in space and also in time. I think now that we had been all along at the service of time, whose perfect materialization in history was the Mississippi, the great river, the father of waters. For good or ill, like it or not, it colored our thoughts and shaped our consciousness to its own unfathomable purpose.

“We should go,” Jim repeated as he worked with his muscular arms the raft’s long sweep until the current had caught us up.

WE HAD GONE ONLY A LITTLE WAY SOUTH of Baton Rouge when a steam launch came alongside the raft and a Western Union boy shouted, “If you’re Huck Finn, as I suppose, and you want to see Tom Sawyer before he departs this world for the next, then you’d better hurry.”

Suspicious of chicanery, Jim tried his best to dissuade me, grasping my wrist; but I shook off his hand and went aboard the launch. Several minutes later, I was deposited on the quay and directed to the place where my old friend lay dying.

I had no difficulty in finding the house, because of the electric lights that shone down upon the streets and from the homes of the well-to-do. Apparently, Tom was not one of them; he had fetched up in a small and shabby room of a dilapidated boardinghouse, like a piece of driftwood brought by the tide (his tide, the last but one, which would, at the moment of his death, carry him out onto the limitless ocean beyond the reach of history). The world had turned gaily for Tom Sawyer, though not for me; and shortly, it would turn for him no more. (And me? I had no idea of what lay around the bend any more than a fly does — nervously pacing a windowsill as winter’s imminent death chills the sash.)

I took my friend’s hand and wondered at its dryness, the wrinkled skin, fingernails long and broken, and at how a ring hung loosely on one finger. I brought the candle that burned with a meager flame on the bedside table nearer to Tom’s face and saw — with a shock of surprise and disgust — that my friend was an old man. I did a quick calculation in my mind and realized that Tom Sawyer had used up nearly eighty years and would have no others to call his own. I closed my eyes and saw again the reckless, scheming boy who’d set Hannibal on its ear and, much later, the naval ensign aboard the Confederate warship General Sumter. I shook off the vision, which frightened me for a reason I almost understood — shook it off with a violent movement of my head and allowed the light to swell against the darkness, until it splashed the wall behind poor Tom’s pillow and fell over the sheet shrouding his ruined frame. Then it was Tom’s turn to open his eyes, and, having done so, his look registered a dismay and confusion the equal of my own.

“Huck?” he said weakly, so that I was forced to lean over him. When I did, I started at the smell.

“Tom,” I said, and then said again, stupidly: “Tom. It’s your Huckleberry come off the river to give you a send-off.”

“I was dreaming of you,” he said, and he seemed to come alive for an instant as he told me his dream: “We were back in Hannibal, out behind Miss Watson’s house, and we had stuck Jim’s hat on the branch of a tree. Remember how we persuaded him that witches had taken him all over creation while he was asleep?”

I nodded gravely, aware that Tom was about to be ushered into eternity, or extinction. You can’t help feeling solemn in the presence of a dying man. I’ve known people to be boisterous around a corpse — I’ve seen the Hannibal constable summoned to a wake for a disturbance of the peace — but bearing witness to the approach of death tends to dampen even the most exuberant spirits.

“I knew you’d come to see me off,” he said. “I sensed you in my dream, out there on the river.”

For a second time, I nodded, having known stranger things than this in my lifetime. If Jim and I partook of the supernatural, I reasoned, then why not Tom Sawyer, who was more advanced in age and intellect than Jim and me put together? Looking back now from the vantage of my seniority (waiting for my own tide to go out, and with it me), I can’t be sure the Western Union boy was of this world or some other. I wouldn’t put it past Tom to have summoned him telepathically, in dots and dashes, if he was keen to have me escort him to the gate of eternity. As for the steam launch, it could readily have been of otherworldly origin: Ghost ships are familiar to anyone who has been to sea or even, like me, on a river as extraordinary as the Mississippi.

“Isn’t Jim with you?” asked Tom, attempting to see past me into the shadowy recesses of his narrowing room.

“I ate him. Don’t you remember?”

He gave a feeble laugh and said, “That was nothing but a hunk of fatback! You could fool those Johnny Reb sailors, but not Tom Sawyer. Pretty piece of legerdemain, though, Huck. My hat was off to you.”

I was shocked to hear Tom confess so blithely to a serious dereliction of his duty as an officer.

“I left him on the raft,” I said. “He’s scared to come ashore because of the lights in the town. He took them for a bad omen.”

“I’d like to have seen Jim,” he said peevishly.

I couldn’t guess why he missed Jim, whom he’d tormented in his childish humor, unless it was to ask for his forgiveness. But I wasn’t much interested in Tom’s mental workings, which could scarcely have been in order. I’ve since regretted the lack of curiosity, because of my own guilt in the matter of Jim.

Why?

I mistreated him. Not in the ordinary way of a bully or an ignorant white child lording it over a black man. That’s not it, although I did behave sometimes as if he were inferior. I had the faults of my time and race. But I wrong Jim by reconstructing him in these pages. I’ve done to him what Twain did to me because I need Jim with me once again and cannot resurrect him any other way. Memory holds nothing in its sieve, except rubbish we clutch until the last hour, mistaking it for the truth, the facts, the real McCoy. I need Jim to make me real.

Tom shut his eyes and died without another word. I thought it a shame that he went before he could tell me if he saw anyone coming for him in the dark. I’d always imagined that someone would come, stealthily, even if all that could be seen of him were his shoes stepping in and out of a circle of lantern light, like a town watchman.

I looked through the dresser drawers to see if there was anything worth taking. I knew Tom would not begrudge me. None of the clothes fit, of course; and I had no use for a hairbrush nested with Tom’s silver, a razor bearing Tom’s stubble caked in dried lather, or a celluloid collar yellowed with Tom’s sweat. But I liked the title of the book he’d been reading and took it with me: The Time Machine, by Mr. H. G. Wells. How very like Tom Sawyer to own such a tale of outlandish adventure! I realized when I was back on the raft that he had borrowed it from the Baton Rouge Public Library. I’m ashamed to say, it is long overdue. I’ve read the story many times since then and never fail to picture the Time Traveler as Tom himself, how he looked on the skiff, coming toward me from the General Sumter.

Yes, I’d been taught to read haltingly, in Hannibal by Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas as part of their campaign to civilize me.

I thought the book was a sign — not a bad omen, but a harbinger of good fortune; that it was a guarantee of safe conduct through the streets of Baton Rouge, which Tom had consecrated by having lived there and having also died there (which the more powerful juju, I could not know). My ideas were hazy and unformed about the meaning of Jim’s and my journey downriver, but I guessed it had something to do with time travel. If not, why was Tom an old man while I was still a boy?