RIVERS
What I’d like to hear about, the reporter starts in, is the time you and that little boy… and I silence him again with a turn of my head, thinking to myself that this is supposed to be an interview about the war and my service in it, from the day I enlisted despite being almost a score years too old, having several mouths to feed, and running a tavern under my own name a grasshopper’s jump from the riverfront, to the day we were sent by wagon and train down to Brazos de Santiago, where we launched the fight that ended on that spring day, ten years ago, along the Rio Grande on the meadows of Palmito Ranch, which, we learned later from a scout we captured from the other side was the final battle in the first great war for our freedom, or between the states as they like to call it these days, so I ain’t about to devote a minute to those sense-defying events of forty years before.
Yet the mere mention of that boy’s name, one I seldom think about, not even in dreams or nightmares, retrieves the sole two times since those years that I saw his face. That first time the name and face had become molded to the measure of a man, still young and with a decade before him but rendered gaunt and taut by struggles unknown to me and perhaps to that writer, also from Hannibal, who had made him, both of us, briefly famous. That face with its narrow angles and sharp agate eyes, with the sandy tufts of hair now framing it at the cheeks and chin, that glanced past me on Chouteau near the Pacific railroad tracks as I passed it and that other one I knew so well, on my way back to the public house where I worked, near the waterfront, ten years after that voyage down the Mississippi — my folly, when I could have crossed with my wife of those years, and my children, then still little, right there at Alton, and made my way east and we all would have been truly free — ten years before the conflagration that would cleave the country in two.
The other face, the Sawyer boy’s, froze as it glimpsed mine, and when it had passed several steps beyond me said loudly to its companion, “Whoa, Huck, I think that was your old boy from Hannibal!” and then, “Old buck, hold up, now,” and “Ain’t you Jim Watson, you, that keeps on walking without stepping to the side when you see two gentlemen approaching, like you ain’t heard one of ’em call out your name?” So I paused and turned around, and faced them. There they were, Huckleberry, now in his early 20s, and Sawyer, same in years, both taller than me now, still lean in their youthful frames, each one looking from their clothing alone fairly prosperous as so many were during those charging years, though in Huck’s mien I could see that all the gold they had gotten from that mess in the caves had not alleviated whatever inner torments afflicted him. “Well, now,” Sawyer said, brushing the sleeves of his worsted suit coat as he approached me, Huck behind him, “I should have figured we would come across you one day down here.”
“Howdy now, Jim,” Huck said, and extended his adult hand.
“Howdy, Huckleberry, howdy, Tom,” I answered, tipping my hat ever so slightly and taking his palm only momentarily in mine.
Sawyer leaned against a stile and proceeded to tell me all about himself, how he was working during the day in the law offices of Judge Thatcher’s brother and after spending a year at Centre College in Kentucky and another at the University of Virginia, President Jefferson’s school he proudly pointed out, he was studying law at night at Reverend Eliot’s new seminary not far from here, though he reminded me neither he and Huck had to work and that I certainly should not have forgotten why. He told me he had traveled down the Mississippi on a steamboat several times, including by himself, all the way to New Orleans, which is where he thought he might eventually settle if he didn’t stay in St. Louis, since the culture and people down there appealed to him, and that he would probably write about it all when he was past the bar and in an equitable position. He kept talking for a good while longer but I confess that though my eyes never left his mouth I rapidly quit listening.
After Sawyer had finished his personal resume he spoke about Huck, who he said had gotten himself some schooling too up in Cambridge, Illinois, near Rock Island, where he had gone to stay with some distant relatives of his late father’s, and between stints in the cooler for “minor infractions,” which he did not detail and about which I wasn’t going to ask, he said that Huck liked to sample a little of every kind of job. Tom chuckled as he spoke, Huck for his part peering off into the roadway, as though he was searching for a way out of the story Tom was telling and a new path into himself. Such a “river rat,” Tom continued, his words bubbling with laughter, Huck was that he now served as an assistant foreman in the river salvage company run by Captain Eads. Just before this new position, Huck, Tom concluded, his laughter evaporating like mid-morning dew, had just returned from Kansas. “He went out there to see what the troublemakers were up to, the ones from New England and the East and Iowa and here as well, who want to overthrow centuries of civilization and take away our way of life and liberty and tell us what we can and cannot do and own.”
I said nothing, looking intently at him and then at Huck, who finally said, “This winter I gone out to Lawrence, which is a good ways past the state border. I got up to a few scrapes but nothing serious,” and then, “I don’t think old Jim wants to be bothered with hearing about any of that.”
“Hearing about it and us ain’t no bother to Jim,” Tom said, and trained his gaze on me.
“All the same, he don’t want to hear some scuffle with a troublemaker. He sure looks like he been minding his business and it’s good to see him.”
“Thank you, Huck,” I said, and nodded at Tom, who frowned.
“He ain’t got no business that’s more important than what we’re doing, does he?” Tom said. “Can’t be likely, can it?”
“Not certainly,” Huck said, and when Tom turned away from him, he shrugged his shoulders for me. “Then again I don’t know nothing about his business these days.”
“When did you get yourself down this way?” Sawyer said, his razor lips cutting me a smile. “Cause I reckon soon as you knew you had got your freedom we all woke up to find you gone.”
I thought to tell the boy that although once Huck and I got back and I learned Miss Watson’s will had freed me, a man in town, La-Fleur, and his brothers, all later to take up arms for the Confederate cause, would come into the stables where I worked and keep on making jokes about selling me back into bondage since Washington had cut off the trade and our bodies were a premium further south down the Mississippi, so I planned out resolving the matter once and for all by crossing to the other side, practicing a number of times when I knew the tide was low, since I knew how to swim and even a blind man in a blindfold behind a high blind wall could see Illinois from Hannibal. One night when I was waist-deep in the water I had to remind a white patrolman strolling the levee I was emancipated and showed him my papers which I kept in a waterproof metal locket that hung around my neck, though they were also on file down in the main courthouse of Marion County, Missouri, and he said he ought to lock me up just for talking so freely, like I was equal to a white person, but since I had belonged to the late Miss Watson, God Rest Her Soul, he would let me go, which I knew well enough to nod to, before I crept carefully back to my little room in the black section of town, and resolved even more to flee.