Norman Lock - The Boy in His Winter

Recently, since coming here. I decided, at my age, it couldn’t do me any harm. Twain took some liberties — I’ll say that much.

James and I carried the groceries on board. Edmund was asleep on the sofa, a Mexican sombrero covering his face. A nearly empty bottle of tequila, lime wedges, and a hill of salt lay on the table. James took a pinch of salt and tossed it over his shoulder. How many times had I seen Jim do the same?

“Let him sleep it off,” he said. “You can sleep in his stateroom. I’ll take the mate’s cabin. Get a good night’s rest. Tomorrow, we fish.” He smiled at me and went below.

I guessed that Edgar had found company for the night. I felt like a smoke before bed and went outside and into the cockpit, climbed onto the bridge, packed my pipe with tobacco, and, drawing deeply on the stem, dragged sweet smoke into lungs not yet besmirched by tar or time. (Cankers of the flesh and spirit are unknown on rafts such as I had ridden.) The stars did not appear so hectic behind a haze of tobacco smoke, which calmed me and them both. We could be forgiven our weariness after so long an age spent in unceasing motion. I let the stars be, and looked toward Gulfport, whose lights were fewer now that night had deepened.

I hadn’t known many people and couldn’t help wondering at them — the human beings who lived on this edge of the continent, in a border town between elements. I wondered at the kind of life that went on inside its houses. Would I recognize it? I felt alien. And James, asleep in the narrow bunk, Edmund, inside some good or evil dream, and even Edgar, at rest in somebody’s arms (it little mattered whose) — if they were to wake in the darkness, would they feel alien, too? We may as well come from Mars as from Earth, which we insult like rude and careless strangers.

You say I begin to preach too much? That my story is better told without anger.

Anger, friend, is the fuse. (So, too, is love.) And there is nothing like a pipe smoked in the small hours of the night to light it.

Far out on the water, a bell tolled. Its theme was a fitful, broken one: what a buoy performs in concert with an unruly sea. Straining, my eyes picked out a distant light, which came and went with the tilting surface of the Gulf. The wind had risen; I hadn’t been aware of it till now. I shivered, and then I saw Jim.

Jim, my Jim! Surely, I’ve admitted to stranger things! All right, I thought I saw him — thirty or forty yards from shore — floating on his back, caught in a riptide. He was not lollygagging; he was traveling with a full head of steam, as if hurrying toward a rendezvous or a wedding. I remembered him as I had seen him last, at Waggaman, with no more life than a sack of pig entrails tossed onto a steaming ash heap. Only it was the river that steamed with humidity after rain. Jim became what his assassins always said he was: a thing. You must forgive an old man his tears. At my age, we cry easily. He would cry, you know — Jim would, turning his back on me, out of delicacy or shame. He had no more idea of manners than a post, but he was delicate in his feelings. You’d have thought he would have had every inch and particle of them beaten out of him.

Once, Judge Thatcher had to register a will in Jefferson City and took Tom along to see a dead pharaoh recently stolen from its tomb in Memphis (the ancient one). Egypt had been a craze ever since Napoléon’s Armée d’Orient and the Battle of the Pyramids. The museum also had an exhibition devoted to Henry Darcy’s hydrological experiments with water flowing through beds of sand. With his clever mind, Tom conflated water and mummies in what he called “The Hydrology of the Dead.” Tom did have a highfalutin way with words! The gist of his theory was that the dead do not always stay put: They circulate according to principles of hydrology. The pharaoh in the museum had arrived at a point where past and present converged, as if washed up in Missouri by time’s ocean, in an expression of the conservation of momentum. To put it plainly, the dead are often wayward; and the drowned whose bodies are never recovered can be cussed and ungovernable. If Tom was correct, Jim, whose body was dumped into the Mississippi and never given proper burial, would circulate in the world’s liquid element forever. It gave me chills to think of it.

I knocked my pipe against a rail and watched the ember fall and vanish on the water. Even the hardened heart must sometimes feel a prodding of the invisible and be moved, however briefly, by fear or awe. Whether because of Jim’s revenant or a sudden oppressiveness of the magnolia-scented air, I understood that I had, in the quenching of that ember, witnessed a catastrophe: my death in its, the world’s death in my own. My atoms may have started to decay, their orbits worn by age; but I was still only thirteen and could shake off anxiety as easily as I could a pesky fly. I went below and quickly fell asleep.

I DON’T LIKE FISHING. Oh, as a boy in Hannibal, I liked nothing better than to drop a length of twine into the river and lift out sunnies, perch, pickerel, and ugly old catfish, which looked at me out of goggled eyes, expressing an ancient weariness and disgust with the shenanigans of boys and the single-mindedness of men. I had no experience then of fish prized by anglers on big boats: sailfish, tuna, and blue marlin, which can weigh more than a half ton and had kept company with great whales when the waters of the earth were newly formed. (What of Melville’s whale, which was hunted and harried into literature to become an imitation, a whale of words, or worse — a symbol?)

Edmund hooked a marlin the morning we went out to fish the Mississippi Canyon, forty miles off the coast. He spent seventy-five minutes strapped to the fighting chair, pitting his abject self against the fish’s majesty, while James maneuvered from the bridge. Edgar praised and heckled his brother by turns, and I leaned against the gunwale, wanting to be sick. I dreaded the moment when I would have to yank the poor creature up by its gills. Not that I had strength to contribute much to a titanic struggle between the dominant species on land and that of the deep. Shoving me aside, Edgar would have to drag up the inert, broken beast. Fury and indignation spent, it gasped in the morning air, with a profound look of melancholy in its eyes I cannot forget. I don’t know how long it took to pass into what constitutes the timeless dimension for fish. But when it did, I felt what the three Marys must have when Jesus finally died: a mixture of sorrow and relief.

Except for a horse blown apart at Vicksburg, I’d never seen death on this scale; and it shook me more than corpses of my own kind had done. To see this dead thing sprawled in the cockpit affected me as an elephant would, lying in the street, hacked to death with a meat hook. I’d angled up small fish with tiny hooks, which could bite a finger painfully; but the one impaling the great fish’s mouth had the heft of a longshoreman’s. Death has its measurement, and in our minds, we correlate torment with the corpse’s size.

Edmund shambled into the galley to make his own sullen and solitary version of an occasion, with booze and potato chips dipped in a bowl of Chinese mustard. Edgar hosed the blood down the cockpit drain. I went up onto the bridge and sat next to James, who turned the boat toward Panama City, on the Florida Panhandle.

“You’re white as a sheet, Mr. Albert,” he said without derision.

I said nothing, unsure of his opinion of childish tears and flapdoodle. I had been as cruel as any other shiftless knockabout. I’d burned ants alive with a magnifying glass I stole from Judge Thatcher’s desk; I’d scorched a couple of cats and visited death and destruction on a community of gophers. I’d slaughtered no end of innocent birds and varmints with my slingshot and never shed a tear. But here I was, sniveling and wiping onto the back of my hand the snot my nose seemed to manufacture, as if in mourning for all creation.