Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

“Something wrong with that fellow,” says the uncle.

“Who’s that?”

“That Dr. Van.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s a little on the sweet side.”

“Sweet? How do you mean?”

“He’s slick behind the ears.”

“Let’s go,” says Vergil. “Over here.”

It’s a trick getting into the pirogue. The water’s a couple of feet below the planking. Vergil has no trouble, holding it steady with one foot and letting himself down, balancing like a cat. He holds fast to the wharf while I get in. We both hold for the uncle.

It’s not bad in the dead water behind the towhead. The pirogue is new-style light fiberglass with two seats like a canoe. The uncle sits comfortably on the bottom amidships, arms resting on the gunwales, back against a thwart, like an easy chair. It’s a big pirogue. There are perhaps three inches of freeboard.

The going is easy in the dead water, even downriver from the towhead. But there’s a noise ahead like the suck of floodwater in a storm drain.

Then it takes us, the current of the Chute. Something grabs the bow at my knee. It’s like starting out from the siding in a roller coaster car and being jerked by the big cable. A sluice of brown water ships over my paddle hand and catches the uncle. “Shit!” breathes the uncle. This isn’t going to work, I’m thinking. But as soon as we’re airborne, caught up in the current, it’s better. We could be standing still if you didn’t notice the green shapes of the batture slipping by like stage scenery.

It comes down to Vergil steering from the stern and me paddling some, mainly to keep heading up. Dark shapes, logs, scraps of dunnage nuzzle up, drift off, as friendly as dolphins.

“Look out for snags, Doc,” says Vergil.

“The snags are going faster than we are.”

“Shit, those are not snags,” says the uncle at my ear. “Those are stumps, whole trees. Don’t worry about them. Do what the man says.”

We’re settling down. It’s even quiet out here. The current carries us close to the Pointe Coupée bank. The pale quilted concrete of a revetment shoots past like railroad cars.

The river turns. Sunlight glitters in the boils and eddies of the current. We’re around Tunica Bend and at the foot of Raccourci Island. The levee runs out and the Chute slams straight into the dark hills of Feliciana. We find easier water near the inside of the bend. Now we’re gliding along a pencil-size strip of beach on the Pointe Coupée bank. There is a break in the treeline and, beyond, what looks like a tufted lake. It’s a hummocky swamp. We’re out of the Chute. The racket is behind us. Now it’s as quiet here as a bayou, but we’re still making good time.

“You know what that is, Mr. Hugh Bob?” asks Vergil behind me. He must be pointing with his paddle.

“I ought to,” says the uncle to me. “I been there enough. That’s Paul’s Slough.”

“That’s right,” says Vergil. “It’s also the western end of the Tuscaloosa Trend.”

“I know that,” says the uncle.

“You go another ten miles west and you got to drill forty thousand feet just to hit gas. This is where the Devonian fault takes a dip.”

“That’s right,” says the uncle to me. “And that ain’t all. I’ll tell you something else about that piece of water that some folks don’t know. I’m talking about that steamboat. Some people don’t know about, but his daddy knows about it.” His voice went away behind me. He must have jerked his head toward Vergil.

Vergil doesn’t answer. We’ve got crossways of the current and are busy heading up.

The uncle, piqued by Vergil’s showing off his geological knowledge, enlists me by tapping my shoulder. He knows some stuff too. “We heard it many a time when we were running our traps. Vergil Senior, his daddy, told me he heard it when he used to spend the night over there before a duck hunt.”

“Heard what?” I say, thinking about Belle Ame. “How much farther to Belle Ame, Uncle?”

“Not all that far. Well, you know right here is where the old river used to come in. Right here. You know the Raccourci Cut happened one night during a June rise just like this. All it takes is one little trickle across the neck, then another little rise, a little more water, and before you know it, here comes the whole river piling across and ain’t nothing in the world is going to stop it, not the U.S. engineers, nothing. If this river wants to go, it’s going to go. Look out! The old river is still over there, you know, about twenty miles of the old river still looping around Raccourci Island, right there, blocked off, right across that neck where the swamp is. You can walk across to it in ten minutes. What happened was this. The night the river decided to come down the Chute, a stern-wheeler was working up the old river. They had a river pilot of course, and he was cussing. I mean, what with the fog and the rain and him fighting the current, he couldn’t see bee-idly. It was taking him all night. Then he noticed the water was getting low. He began scraping over sandbars. He’d run aground. And he’d cuss. He didn’t know the river had already made the cut across the neck and he was stranded. And he’d back off and head upriver and he’d run aground again. And he cussed. He couldn’t get out. He cussed the river, the boat, the captain. He swore an oath. He swore: ‘I swear by Jesus Christ I hope this son-of-a-bitching boat never gets out of this goddamn river.’ And he never did. What he didn’t know was that he was sealed off — the river had already come busting down the Chute. He couldn’t get out. But the thing is, they couldn’t find the boat. So they thought it had sunk in the storm. They never did find that boat. But I’m here to tell you that there’s people, people I know, who have seen that boat in the old river on a foggy night during the June rise.”

“Have you seen it, Mr. Hugh?” Vergil asks him.

“I’ve heard it!” the uncle shouts. “And so has many another. Vergil, his daddy, and I heard it! We was camping out right over there across the slough by Moon Lake and the Old River and you could hear that sapsucker beating up the river through the fog, that old stern-wheel slapping the water like whang whang whang. Vergil Senior claimed he could even hear the pilot cursing. But we heard it!”

“I’ve heard that story,” says Vergil behind him and talking to me past him. “It’s part of the folklore of the river. You can hear the same story up and down the river wherever there’s been a cutoff. In fact, I’ve heard the same story from Mr. Clemens.”

Don’t argue, Vergil.

“What I’m telling you is, I heard it,” says the uncle, still talking to me. They argue through me. I half listen. Here’s a switch. Here’s Vergil, the scientist, skeptic, the new logical positivist, and here’s the uncle, defender of old legends, ghost ships, specters.

Let it alone, Vergil.

“The thing is,” says Vergil, “either that steamboat is there or it isn’t. If it is there, then how come nobody has seen it in daylight or seen the wreck? If it was there and it sank, there would be some sign of it — the Old River is no more than twenty feet deep anywhere. The pilot house would be sticking out. It all reminds me a little bit of modern UFO sightings.”

“I’m here to tell you I heard that sucker,” cries the uncle.

“Okay. Let me ask you both something.” I’m not interested in hearing them try to upstage each other and don’t like Vergil patronizing the uncle by talking about Mr. Clemens. To get them off it, I ask them where New Roads is, knowing it is off to the west and that we all have relatives there.

“You see right over there, over that cypress,” says Vergil, his paddle coming out of the water. “That’s False River and just past it is New Roads and over there is Chevron Parlange Number One, the most famous gas well in history, twenty thousand feet, the discovery well of the whole Tuscaloosa Trend, came in August of ’77, a hundred and forty thousand cubic feet per second, that’s a million dollars a day. So big, in fact, it blew out.”