By the time my inspection was over I had decided that something in Achilles had collapsed, and although this made him seem revolting in certain ways, he was pathetic and touching in others. Especially when he had banked up his fire and cooked us supper, which was good plain muddy fish from the river, and begun describing his work for the river-boats. He did this standing in his window, with reflections of the current shuddering across his face, and when he took off his hat I was able to see his features whole for the first time—his deep-set eyes framed by hanks of dirty gray hair, and his jaw tightly clenched when not engaged in chewing or spitting. A face made severe by hardship, but also hollow with sadness.
“Yes, the boats,” he said ruminatively, as if answering a question one of us had put.
“Are there many?” I asked.
“A good many,” he said. “But then again, none.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s none for days, for months even. Then several all together suddenly. They like to keep an eye on one another.”
“Because the river’s dangerous?”
“Just so. Always twisting and turning. Always filling up with mud and trees and I don’t know what. One journey, the captain will find an easy way through—the next time he comes, that way don’t exist no more. The current changes everything, see. Fills up and takes away. Fills up and takes away.”
“So we don’t know when the next one will arrive?” I said, feeling it was dull to be so tenacious, but anxious to hear the answer.
“Oh, soon,” he told me. And then with a shrug, “Or not so soon. I just have to be ready is all.”
“Ready for what?”
“To tell them!” Achilles exclaimed. “To tell them if there’s a passenger!”
“A passenger for where?” I asked, which might have seemed a strange question—but I did not yet know the name of the town on the coast which was our destination.
“Why, for New Orleans,” Achilles said, with a wistful note in his voice, as if remembering a place he loved but had not seen for a long time.
I looked at Natty in the shifting lights and we repeated the name to one another. New Orleans. Then I went back to Achilles.
“And do you have many passengers?” I asked, hoping he might say more about Black Cloud and reassure us that we were safe.
He faced away from us toward the sunset, staring at the long stripes of purple light that now lay across the current as if he was suddenly absorbed by the debris of logs and leaves that disturbed the surface. When he turned back he had forgotten what we were saying, and instead asked whether we had everything we needed for our comfort.
This was kind I am sure, but I did not understand what else he was implying until a few minutes later, when the sun disappeared below the horizon, and the birds in the trees around us fell quiet, and we spread our blankets on the floor of the cabin and bade one another goodnight. He was wondering whether we would sleep comfortably within four walls after so many nights in the open; whether we would feel safe here during the next night and the next, with our enemy still at large.
For this reason, my dreams when I fell asleep at last were filled with visions of myself standing on all sorts of piers and jetties and land-banks, while all manner of ships and luggers and barges and wherries sailed past me without hearing my cries. The effect was so dispiriting that when I woke up I immediately thought of my father; I had been reminded in dozens of different ways how much I longed for his forgiveness.
If I had been left to myself for a moment longer, I might even have begun to rehearse the words I would speak to him when I saw him. But there was no moment of that sort, no time of any kind; when I opened my eyes I found Natty was already on her feet, staring through the window at the river.
She called my name and I jumped up.
A drowned boat was gliding toward us, rising from the river-bed of my dreams.
A phantom, with scraps of morning mist clinging to her hull and blowing around her deck-house, and shadowy figures packed together on deck or working at the oars either side of the bow.
And Achilles was dancing and shouting on the jetty, waving his furry hat above his head.
And a bell was clanking, which told us we had been noticed.
CHAPTER 27
The Southern Angel
Although I did not explore the Southern Angel until our journey was under way I shall describe her now. River-men called her a keelboat, an open craft with a covered stern, over which projected a slender tree trunk (about sixty feet long) that served as a steering oar, operated from a small cabin occupied by the captain; in addition, she was directed by four much smaller oars working either side of the bow, at the rate of about five nautical miles an hour going with the current. Her purpose—which I discovered in the course of our journey—was to travel from the upper reaches of the Mississippi to New Orleans in the south laden with cargo, then to unload before being very tediously rowed and poled and pulled upriver again, until she regained her original berth. Whereupon the journey began all over again. A voyage downstream and back sometimes occupied as much as nine months (the first part of the exercise being the much shorter journey) and gave employment to any number of men, generally very muscular fellows, since the labor was very great.
When steamboats arrived on the river, which was some years after my time, these keelboats were variously sold or sunk or turned into homes for those who had worked in them. And while this change will have spared many men from being almost blinded by the sweat of their brow, I regret their passing. Natty and I felt our lives had been saved when we saw that grand old barge floating toward us through the dawn, and no matter what frights we had to endure after we came on board, we continued to look on her as our salvation.
In truth the Angel was a very humble kind of vessel—a floating tabletop about twenty-five yards across and seventy long, with no keel to mention (despite the name “keelboat”: the shallow river made such a thing impractical); and a warren of cupboards and lockers for storage below-deck; and above-deck a small village of tents, huts, shacks and pens where travelers kept watch, or slept, or played at cards, or quarreled, or made up, or helped to navigate (by volunteering advice about sandbanks, logs, etc.) alongside the sheep and cattle they were transporting, and their families in various states of excitement or distress or boredom, and a whole forest of farm implements, bundles of furs, bales of cotton, sacks of rice, crates of potatoes, parcels of cloth, a gang of slaves, and—I remember this very clearly—an upright piano. To call the Angel a chaos is to do her a disservice, since everything she carried was necessary to someone. Yet the confusion of all these things, and the continual murmur of human talk, blended with assorted bleats and whinnies and grunts and whistles and sighs, and the regular booming instructions issuing from her captain—who seemed never to sleep, and able to make his voice carry to the ends of the earth—gave an appearance of muddle that was at first perfectly flummoxing. I thought I had escaped the hush and solitude of the wilderness only to arrive at a kind of aquatic Babel.
To arrive, and almost certainly to die. Or so it seemed, because as Natty and I stood beside Achilles on the jetty, and joined him in waving at the Angel as her oarsmen steered her toward us, I could not see how even their best efforts might prevent her from splintering the jetty into matchsticks and crushing us in the process. Her speed, which had seemed so lackadaisical in the distance, was suddenly too great, and the power of her oarsmen too slight.
And yet, as I debated with myself whether I should turn and run, and so save my life, a fierce jousting began between the Angel and the river which changed the picture entirely; some of her oarsmen abandoned their rowing and instead picked up long poles which they plunged into the water fore and aft, then heaved on with all their weight, issuing a spate of oaths that in their way seemed as torrential as the river itself, until with a hideous creaking and groaning in her timbers, the boat came under control. Once this was done, a rope snaked out from the prow toward Achilles, w
ho tied it around a convenient tree trunk before retrieving a second rope from the stern, which he also made fast, and so achieved a miracle of mooring. The reaction on board was nothing less than this deserved—namely, a flourishing of the gangplank, followed by a great burst of applause, and laughter, and some hollers of congratulation, and advice about how much more comfortable Achilles might be if he had not come dressed as a bear, and questions about who had put them to all this trouble in the first place and would now join their company.
In some ways, as I have already said, Natty and I felt almost light-headed with relief. Here was an end to our life of land-wandering and here was our redemption. Here was our final escape from Black Cloud, whom I imagined still trekking north to look for us while we were about to glide south. Here was our moon-faced captain leaning through the window of his cabin, with one gigantic hand resting on the rudder of his boat, and the other beckoning for us to hurry up and come aboard.
Yet in the middle of my happiness I was sad—to the point of feeling blind to everything except the past. I remembered the beauty of desert places and the dazzle of starlight when I lay on open ground. I heard the wind-song again, lulling me through miles of dry scrub. I saw the footprints of animals in the dust, marking their companionship with me. I saw them, and knew I would never find the same ways again, or the power of such simplicity.
Worse was to come. After I had collected myself, and told Natty we must fetch our ponies quickly, because they were all we had to use as payment for our journey, then run to untie them from their lean-to by the cabin, then returned to the ferry where I found her waiting with a bundle of our other possessions, then put my hand to my chest to make sure the satchel was still safe and sound—when I had done all this I noticed, which in my haste I had previously failed to do, that the Rider was not on the jetty beside us.
I understood at once. The Rider thought he had fulfilled his obligations. He had done his duty. Now he had his own direction to take, which was not the same as ours. Therefore he had ridden off from us without a word, because he knew we would otherwise try to prevent him, and keep him with us.
Natty saw this as well and the sorrow of it struck her like a fist. “Ah!” she gasped, as if she was actually wounded, and with the blood draining from her face she stumbled away from the jetty toward the middle of the clearing. Here she stopped with her back to me, facing into the trees.
“Hurry up there!” shouted the captain, reaching a hand though the window of his cabin to bang against its wall. “All aboard! All aboard!”
Achilles at least felt stirred up by this; he seized the reins of our two ponies, passed them to men waiting on the gangplank, explained they were the payment for our journey, and smacked them on the rump to send them forward; when they had clattered onto the deck they were tethered in a line with other ponies at the stern of the Angel.
For my own part, I ran toward Natty in the clearing and, as I came close, heard her whispering, “Come back! Come back!” The tears running down her face and her wet mouth were shocking to see, but she was not aware of them. When I put my arm around her shoulder she did not notice that either.
All the same, I like to think we imagined the same things then, the same things in the same sequence. The Rider, keeping himself and his pony out of sight in the cane-brake until the great hullabaloo of the river-boat had taken us away from him. The Rider hiding for a while longer, then skimming northward over the treacherous ground. The Rider melting away as he shook our din from his head, along with the nonsense of the Entertainment.
“Natty,” I said. “We must leave him be.”
She stared into the trees without speaking, and tears dropped off her chin onto the dusty ground. As their stain began to darken, Achilles’s goose waddled forward, mistaking it for a titbit; in other circumstances this would have been ridiculous.
“Natty,” I tried again and squeezed her shoulder.
Still no reply, but I heard more shouting from the boat behind us, and feet pounding along the jetty, which I knew must be Achilles coming to fetch us.
I kept still for another few seconds, watching the leaves tremble and the tufts of moss swaying as though they had been disturbed when something passed through. But that was all I saw; and all I heard was the breeze sighing on its way to the horizon.
Achilles was not so patient. When he lumbered up to us he waved his great furry arms in our faces.
“Now, you two—get! He’s gone, that Indian, gone. That’s what they do, and there’s no point trying to change it. Gone, gone. So you just take yourselves out of here and you be gone too. Go, now! Go—or you’ll never find your way home!”
I think he would have continued in this way for much longer if he had not run out of breath—whereupon he continued flapping his hands as though we were biddable like his goose, and might be directed in the same way. This performance was so violently at odds with our mood I thought Natty might strike him, or rush into the wilderness regardless, which made me tighten my grip around her shoulder.
Whether this helped I cannot say. I do know, however, that when she finally did as I wanted, and ended her watching, my own sorrow at leaving the Rider was offset by the idea that I might bring her some comfort, which she would value.
Not that she had any chance to show it, because as soon as Achilles had shooed us back across the clearing and we had boarded the Angel, we were caught in a great flurry of business—the gangplank pulling up, ropes shivering, our captain shouting his orders, the faces of our fellow passengers surging toward us—travelers and traders and Indians and Spaniards and Frenchmen and free Americans and slaves—and voices clamoring to know who we were, and where had we been, and then just as suddenly losing interest in us so we could move off along to the starboard rail and say our farewell to our latest friend.
Achilles stayed on his jetty until the Angel swept round the next curve of the river, and waved his bonnet in the air with such affection I thought we might have known one another all our lives. We had been in his company for no more than a few hours, yet the drama and strangeness of his existence had made him loom before me like a giant. Was this a kind of distortion, I wondered, watching him continue to wave on the river-bank, with his goose honking at his side and shaking her snowy wings? Was it because I had spent so long in the wilderness, and seen so few people for so long? Or was America full of such grotesques, all remaining their unfettered selves until civilization found them, and diminished them, and made them ordinary again?
These thoughts occupied me for as long as it took Natty to dry her eyes, and when she had composed herself again, and Achilles had disappeared from sight, we were ready to address more practical questions.
The question, for instance, of where we might find a part of the deck to call our own, which we decided should be a few yards in front of the captain’s wheelhouse.
And after that, the question of how best to occupy the great expanse of calm and floating time that lay ahead of us.
To start with at least this seemed easy, for the simple reason that every part of our new existence was very interesting to me, and the river especially. A passionless, remorseless, ineffable, inexhaustible, implacable monster—at once absolutely determined to reach its conclusion, which was the sea, and yet completely witless in its endless wriggling and writhing, so as we drove south we were often required to steer east, or west, or even northward again, and sometimes wondered whether we were in fact traveling on a river at all, and not merely scraping from one sandbank to the next, where the captain and his oarsmen were always required to shunt us forward with their poles.
On the shores of this great expanse we saw the same mixture of moss and leaves, moss and branches, moss and swamps, moss and roots that we had struggled through to reach Achilles’s cabin—but now blissfully separate from us and therefore enjoyable to watch. Occasionally our wash would disturb a flock of egrets that flew up from the mudbanks like handfuls of torn-up paper. Sometimes two rotting logs turned out to be alligators
who slid into the water to follow us for a few yards, loathing us with their hard yellow eyes. Sometimes what I thought must be a solid wall of foliage shook or thrummed or even split apart, and another invisible creature took to its heels.
And between these eruptions?
I would like to say peacefulness.
I would like to say rest.
But the enormous unrolling panorama, like a picture with no beginning and no end, soon soothed me into a state where I only appeared to be half-asleep, lolling against the rail that ran round the whole circumference of our deck; in fact I was busily awake, with my mind wandering wherever it chose.
In particular I found myself imagining the Rider as we continued to float farther and farther away from him. I saw him with his eyes shining, his head cocked at a familiar angle, but of course traveling alone now. Riding on northward until the cane-brake ended and he came to a ferry and crossed the river, where he approached the country of his fathers.
As these scenes flashed through me I began to see other men trekking toward him, Indians like himself, some members of his own tribe, some from tribes who lived adjacent, and all passing him on their way west as he continued east. They came in ones and twos, in families and groups—the children and the older squaws with bundles in their arms, the warriors with their weapons trailing and dogs panting at their heels. They came in silence, and they came chanting in time to the beat of a drum. They came when the sun rose and when the sun set. They filled the pathways under the trees, and the dry trails that crossed the scrubland. They came with the dust billowing around them in muddy clouds, and they came under clear blue skies.
When I brought myself back and found I was still propped against the rail of the Angel, I looked up and thought the trees on the bank beside me were no longer things I would find remarkable. Surely they would have already become monotonous? But as I stayed to watch them, and the river shuddered beneath me, and spray sometimes splashed across my face, I realized they were a part of everything I had been thinking. More than a part, in fact. They were its origin. The quietness of the forest, the absence of anything moving except birds and animals, the absolute lack of any human presence—a village, or a hunting party, or a curl of smoke from a fire—were all proof that the people who once lived here had departed. I dare say some remained, and if my eyes had been sharp enough I would have seen their faces watching from beneath a fringe of leaves, or their hands lifting a branch. But even if I had been able to distinguish such things among the flickering light and shade, I felt sure I would have found very few of them, and thought these few were insignificant when compared to the hundreds of miles of green silence, with empty clearings in between, and long vines trailing through the still and heavy air.
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