On the River Styx: And Other Stories

by Peter Matthiessen

  In other days, running away, he had hidden past the dusk in the autumn garden, peering out at the oncoming dark, waiting for a voice to call him into the warm house. They knew his ways, and no one ever called. Choked with selfpity, a dull yearning in his chest, he would sneak up the back stairs without his supper.

  The boiler room has an outside entrance under the broad terrace, on the downhill side. He draws on gloves to remove a pane, lever the lock. He crosses the spider-shrouded light to the cellar stair and enters the cold house from below, turning the latch at the top of the stair, edging the door open to listen. He steps into the hall. The house feels hollow, and white sheets hide the unsold furniture. In the kitchen he surprises an old cockroach, which scuttles beneath the pipes under the sink.

  THE SILENCE FOLLOWS HIM around the rooms. On his last visit before his father sold the house, faint grease spots still shone through the new paint on the ceiling of his former bedroom. Sometimes, sent up to his room for supper, he had used a banged spoon as catapult to stick the ceiling with rolled butter pats and peanut-butter balls.

  From his parents’ bedroom, from the naked windows, he gazes down over the lawn, standing back a little to make sure he is unseen. The court is empty. He is still annoyed that the paddle-tennis players have his name. Possibly they are calling the police. To be arrested would reflect badly on his judgment, just when he has asked if there might be an assignment for him someplace else.

  HEARING A CAR, he slips downstairs and out through the cellar doors.

  “Looking for somebody?”

  The caretaker stands in the service driveway by the corner of the house. He wears a muscle-tight black T-shirt and big sideburns. He is wary, set for trouble, for he comes no closer.

  Had this man seen him leave the house?

  He holds the man’s eye, keeping both hands in his coat pockets, standing motionless, dead silent, until uneasiness seeps into the man’s face.

  “I got a call. The party said there was somebody lookin for someone.”

  “Can’t help you, I’m afraid.” Casually he shrugs and keeps on going, down across the lawn toward the brook.

  “Never seen them signs?” the man calls after him, when the stranger is a safe distance away. “What do you want around here, mister?”

  2

  WITH SOME IDEA of returning to the hotel by walking south beside the tracks, he makes his way down along the brook, his street shoes slipping on the aqueous green and sunshined leaves.

  Whenever, in Africa, he thought of home, what he recalled most clearly was this brook below the house and a sandy eddy where the idle flow was slowed by his rock dam. Below this pool, the brook descended through dark river woods to a culvert that ran beneath the tracks into the Hudson. Lit by a swift sun that passed over the trees, the water crossed the golden sand—the long green hair twined on slowly throbbing stems, the clean frogs and quick fishes and striped ribbon snakes—the flow so clear that the diadem of a water skater’s shadow would be etched on the sunny sand glinting below. One morning a snake seized a small frog—still a tadpole, really, a queer thing with new-sprouted legs and a thick tail—and swallowed it with awful gulps of its unhinged jaws. Another day, another year, perhaps, peering into the turmoil in a puff of sunlit sand of the stream bottom, he saw a minnow in the mouth and claws of a mud-colored dragon. The dragonfly nymph loomed in his dreams for years thereafter, and he hated the light-filled creature it became, the crazy sizzle of the dragonfly’s glass wings, the unnatural hardness of this thing when it struck the skin.

  For hours he would hunch upon a rock, knees to his ears, staring at the passages and deaths. Sometimes he thought he would like to study animals. How remote this dark brook was from the Smiling Pool in his Peter Rabbit book up in the nursery, a meadow pool all set about with daffodils and roses, birds, fat bumblebees, where mirthful frogs, fun-loving fish, and philosophical turtles fulfilled their life on earth without a care.

  Even then he knew that Peter Rabbit was a mock-up of the world, meant to fool children.

  NEARING THE RAILROAD, the old brook trickles free from the detritus, but the flow is a mere seepage, draining into a black pool filled with oil drums. An ancient car, glass-shattered, rust-colored, squats low in the thick Indian summer undergrowth where once—or so his father said—an Algonkin band had lived in a log village.

  In the sun and silence of the river, he sits on the warm trunk of a fallen willow, pulling mean burrs from his city trousers. From here he can see across the tracks to the water and the Palisades beyond. Perhaps, he thinks, those sugarmaple yellows and hot hickory reds along the cliffs welcomed Henry Hudson, exploring upriver with the tide four centuries before, in the days when this gray flood—at that time blue—swirled with silver fishes.

  Hudson’s ship—or so his father always claimed—had an elephant chained on the foredeck, an imposing present for the anticipated Lord of the Indies. Turned back at last by the narrowing river from his quest for the Northwest Passage, fed up with the task of gathering two hundred pounds of daily fodder for an animal that daily burdened the small foredeck with fifteen to twenty mighty shits—his father’s word, in its stiff effort at camaraderie, had astonished and delighted him—Henry the Navigator had ordered the elephant set free in the environs of present-day Poughkeepsie. Strewing its immense sign through the woods, blaring its longing for baobab trees to the rigid pines, the great beast surely took its place in Algonkin legend.

  Misreading his son’s eager smile, his father checked himself, sighed crossly, and stood up. A vigorous Anglo-Saxon term, not necessarily a dirty word to be leered and giggled at. You should have outgrown all that by now. He left the room before the boy found words to undo such awful damage.

  BEYOND THE MISTED TREES, upriver, lies Tarrytown—Had someone tarried there? his mother asked his father, purling demurely. Why his father smiled at this he did not know. From Tarrytown one might see across the water to the cliffs where Rip Van Winkle had slept for twenty years. As a child he imagined a deep warm cleft full of autumn light, sheltered from the northeast storms and northwest winds. He peers across the mile of water, as if that shelter high up in clean mountains were still there.

  In the Indian summer mist the river prospect looks much as he remembered it—indeed, much as it had been portrayed by the Hudson River School of painters so admired by his maternal grandmother. Atrocious painters, all of them, his father said. The small landscape of this stretch of river—was that in the crate of family things he had in storage? How much he has lost track of, in those years away.

  He places a penny on the railroad track.

  He longs to reassemble things—well, not “things” so much as continuity, that was his mother’s word. Her mother had been raised on the west banks of the Hudson, and she could recall, from her own childhood, her great-aunt relating how her grandmother had seen Alexander Hamilton sculling downriver one fine morning just below their house—“Good day, Mr. Hamilton!”—and how Mr. Hamilton had never returned that day, having lost his life to a Mr. Burr in a duel at Weehawken.

  His father loved this story, too, the more so because that reach of river cliff had changed so little in the centuries between. For both of them, the memory of Mr. Hamilton had an autumnal melancholy that reached far back across the nation’s history, to the Founding Fathers.

  It seemed he had not responded to it properly.

  I suppose you find it merely quaint, his mother said.

  AT ONE TIME he attended Sunday school here in Arcadia, and he thinks he will rejoin the Episcopal Church. On sunny Sundays in white shirt and sober suit he will find himself sustained and calmed by stained-glass windows and Bach organ preludes. Afterward he will return to the garden cottage with its antique furniture, blue flowers in white rooms, fine editions, rare music, and a stately dog thumping its tail on a warm rug. He envisions an esoteric text, a string quartet, a glass of sherry on a sunlit walnut table in the winter—his parents’ tastes, he realizes, acquired tastes he is determined
to acquire.

  In this civilized setting, smoking a pipe, he will answer questions from young women about Africa, and the nature of Africans, and how to deal judiciously with these Afro-Americans, so-called. Those who imagine that Africans are inferior do not know Africans, he’ll say. Africans have their own sort of intelligence, they are simply not interested in the same things we are. Once their nature is understood, he’ll say, Africans are Africans, wherever you find them, never mind what these bleeding-hearts may tell you.

  A TRAIN COMES from the north, clicketing by, no longer dull coal black, as in his childhood, but a tube of blue-and-silver cars, no light between. In his childhood he could make out faces, but with increased speed the human beings are pale blurs behind the glass, and nobody waves to the man on the dead tree by the railroad tracks.

  The wind and buffet of the train, the sting of grit, intensify his sense of isolation. To his wave, the train responds with a shrill whistle that is only a signal to the station at Arcadia, a half mile south.

  He gets up, stretching, hunts the penny. It glints at him among the cinders. Honest Abe, tarnished by commerce, has been wiped right off the copper, replaced by a fiery smooth shine.

  Looking north and south, he picks his way across the tracks. The third rail—if such it is—is a sheathed cable between pairs of rails marked “Danger Zone 700 Volts.” Has the voltage increased since his childhood? If you so much as point at that third rail, explained his mother, who worried about his solitary expeditions to the river, you’ll be electrocuted, like one of those ghastly criminals up at Sing-Sing! He hesitates before he crosses, stepping over this rail higher than necessary.

  The tracks nearest the river are abandoned, a waste of rusted rails and splintered oaken ties and hard dry weeds. Once across, he can see north to the broad bend where a shoulder of the Palisades juts out from the far shore into the Tappan Zee. A thick new bridge has been thrust across the water, cutting off the far blue northern mountains. In his childhood, a white steamer of the Hudson River Day Line might loom around that bend at any moment, or a barge of bright tomato-red being towed by a pea-green tug, both fresh as toys. His father would evoke the passage of Robert Fulton’s steamship Claremont, and the river trade on this slow concourse, flowing south out of the far blue mountains.

  In his own lifetime—is this really true?—the river has changed from blue to a dead gray-brown, so thickened with inorganic silt that a boy would not see his own feet in the shallows. The real-estate agent, not a local man but full of local lore, asserts that the Atlantic salmon have vanished from the Hudson, and that the striped bass and shad are so contaminated by the poisons dumped into these waters by the corporations that people are prohibited from eating them. Only the blacks, says he, come out to fish for them, prowling the no-man’s-land of tracks and cinders.

  A grit beach between concrete slabs of an old embankment is scattered with worn tires. He wonders, as his father had, at the sheer number of these tires, brought by forces unknown so very far from the roads and highways and dumped in low woods and spoiled sullen waters all across America, as if, in the ruined wake of the course of empire, the tires had spun away in millions down the highways and rolled off the bridges into the rivers and down into deep swamps of their own accord.

  But the horizon is oblivious, the clouds are white, the world rolls on. Under the cliffs, the bend is yellow in the glow of maples, and the faraway water, reflecting the autumn sky, is gold and blue. Soiled though they are, the shining woods and glinting water and the bright steel tracks, the high golden cliffs across the river, seem far more welcoming than the valley slope above, with its tight driveways, smelly cars, vigilant houses.

  For a long time, by the riverside, he sits on a drift log worn smooth by the flood, withdrawn into the dream of Henry Hudson’s clear blue river, of that old America off to the north toward the primeval mountains, off to the west under the shining sky.

  3

  THE REAL-ESTATE AGENT has persuaded him to come to dinner, to celebrate his move into the cottage, and a van has delivered a large crate containing what is left of the family things. On a journey home after his father’s death, he had got rid of everything else, glad to have Arcadia behind him. But when his years in Africa were ended, and he was faced with a return to the United States, where he knew no one, this crate, in his imagination, had overflowed with almost everything from childhood. However, all he finds are a few small antiques that could not be sold quickly yet had seemed too valuable to abandon. There are also a few unaccountable small scraps—a baby-blue bathroom rug with faded bears, the Peter Rabbit book, the photograph of his duel with the Great Dane Inga.

  His grandmother’s riverscape is jammed in carelessly, its gold frame chipped. Wrapped around his father’s Hardy reels and .410 Purdy shotgun is the Assistant Secretary’s worn-out hunting jacket, the silver brandy flask still in the pocket, the hard brown canvas and scuffed corduroy irrevocably stained with gun oil, bird blood, and the drool of setter dogs.

  The riverscape is hung over the mantel, with the Purdy on oak dowel pins beneath. He likes the feel of the quick gun, with its walnut stock and blue-black finish, its fine chasing. He will keep it loaded, as a precaution against looters and marauders. Agent Ed has advised him to emulate the plump homes of his neighbors, which are walleyed with burglar lights, atremble with alarms.

  However, he hates all that night glare, he feels less protected than exposed. As soon as his pistol permit is restored—he concocts this plan over his evening whiskeys—he’ll use a silencer to extinguish every burglar light in the whole neighborhood.

  Why scare off marauders, he asks the agent’s wife at supper, when the death of one burglar at the hands of a private citizen would do more to prevent crime than all the floodlights in Westchester County? He has said this for fun, to alarm this upstate couple. Poor Ed loves this dangerous talk, having no idea that his guest means it, and as for the hostess, the woman is agog, her eyes loom huge and round behind her spectacles.

  “You’re such a … well, a disturbing man!” she says.

  “Disturbed me from the very first day I met him!” Ed cries jovially to soften his wife’s inadvertent candor. “I suppose you’re waiting for a new foreign service job?”

  “There won’t be one,” he says abruptly, as if admitting this to himself for the first time.

  He drinks the whiskey he has carried to the table. That these folks want a Harkness for a friend is all too plain. He picks up the wine, sips it, blinks, pulls his head back from it, sets his glass down again. “A bit sweet,” he explains, when her stare questions him.

  Ed jars the table and his face goes red with a resentment that he has avoided showing until now. “Well, shit,” he says. “You’re a damn snob,” he says.

  “Oh my.” The woman does not take her round eyes off their guest.

  Ed scrapes his chair back and goes to the front door and opens it. “We just thought you might be kind of lonely,” Mrs. Ed mourns.

  “Probably likes it that way,” the agent says.

  Things are awry again. Afraid of something, he takes a large swallow of wine and nods approvingly. “Not bad at all,” he says, with a poor smile.

  “It’s not just the wine,” the agent warns his wife. The woman has crossed her bare arms on her chest in the cold draft that wanders through the opened door.

  “I was hoping you’d call me Henry,” he says, drinking more wine. “Very nice,” he says. She turns her face away, as if unable to look upon his desperation. “Forgive me,” he says.

  “Nosir,” the voice says from the door. “Nosir, I don’t think we will.”

  4

  NOT WANTING HIS NEW HOUSE to be finished, leaving things undone, he takes long walks along suburban roads and drives. People stare to let him know they have their eye on him. Bad dogs run out. Even so, the walks are dull and pointless. More and more often he returns to the low river woods, the endless iron stretch of tracks, the silent river, flickered over by migrating swall
ows.

  One day in October, he crosses the tracks and sits on a dock piling with twisted bolts, wrenched free by some upriver devastation. The piling’s faint creosote smell brings back some childhood boat excursion, upriver through the locks of Lake Champlain.

  The breeze is out of the northwest, and has an edge to it. With a fire-blackened scrap of siding, he scrapes out a shelter under the old pilings, partly hidden from the woods by the pale sumac saplings that struggle upward from the cinders.

  In the early autumn afternoon, out of the wind, he is warmed by the westering sun across the river. If the beach litter were piled in front of him, he thinks, he would be unseen even from the water. Not that there is anyone to see him, it is just the sheltered feeling it would give him. The freighters headed up to Albany, the tugs and barges, an occasional fat white motor cruiser with its nylon Old Glory flying from the stern, pass too far offshore to be aware of a hat-shadowed face in a pile of flotsam.

  He hunches down a little, squinting out between his knees.

  He is safe and secret, sheltered from the world, just as he had been long ago in his tree houses and attic hideouts, in the spruce hollow in the corner behind the lode of packages under the Christmas tree, in warm nests in the high summer grass, peeping out at the Algonkin Indians. Delawares, his father said. Algonkin is the language family. In the daytime, at least, no one comes along the tracks. He has the river kingdom to himself. As to whether he is content, he does not know.

  He has packed dry sherry in his father’s silver flask, a sandwich, a hard apple, and also a new bleeding-heart account of modern politics in the former Belgian Congo. His name receives harsh passing mention. He thinks, To hell with it. I did what was asked of me. I did my duty. Having the courage to dirty one’s hands, without glory and at great risk of ingratitude, may become one’s higher duty to one’s country, wasn’t that true?