Old Glory (14 page)

I was puzzled by Dick’s repose. Perhaps this was how physicians dreamed of a perfect world—unpeopled, gray, requiring no surgery to put it right. Alma was on her second Kool of the morning. Lucky Dick. If he hadn’t married her, he might easily have forgotten that he was human.

“When do you have to be at the hospital?”

“Eight,” he said, slicing a sausage as if this were a delicate moment in a transplant operation. “You shouldn’t have any trouble with Pepin today. She’ll be like glass. Watch for the wind around nine, though. Don’t get caught in the middle.”

Alma was busying herself around the boat, taking my journey in hand. I hadn’t felt so mothered in years. She wanted to wrap up everything I had in plastic bags; she wanted to pack me a lunch; she filled my thermos with coffee; she gave me a pocket flashlight and some cookies; she was worried that I didn’t have rain gear. I was the still center of a tornado of kindliness, whirling around me in gusts of menthol-flavored smoke. I hugged her when I left, and blew farewell kisses to her across the lagoon. She looked as if that had been more or less the right thing to do.

The air was wet and heavy. The movement of the river showed only in the faint scar lines of the current. At the ranch house where the Knights of Columbus had held their picnic, the trestle tables had all gone. The flag on the pole was limp, its stripes hanging in sculptural folds as if it had been molded in soft plaster.

When Lake Pepin opened out, it was immense. Its islands showed up faintly behind standing anvils of mist. I searched ahead for the first signs of the sun. There it was, low down, a fitful dim bulb guttering across twenty-something miles of unbroken water.

I had entered an absolutely seamless world. Everything in it tended to one color. Its browns and greens and blues had been mixed until they’d gone to the translucent gray of dirty gauze. I couldn’t tell what was shore, sky or river. The current, exhausted by the sheer space of Lake Pepin, had stopped altogether. In front of the boat, the water
had the gleaming consistency of molasses; behind, it lay smashed and buckled by my wake. I slowed right down until the propeller left only a little string of corkscrew whorls, and even they were the marks of a vandal on an otherwise immaculate landscape.

Lake City went by on the south shore—a foggy smear of holiday cabins and motels. Just beside my boat, a fish jumped. It was a big carp, and as it turned in the air and walloped back, it looked as if someone had chucked a block of gold bullion into the lake. The sky was beginning to brighten now. Five miles or so off, I could see the flat black rectangle of a barge fleet heading upriver, the darker prints of smoke from its funnel just distinguishable from the surrounding mist. There was one other early bird about: on the north side of the channel, a fisherman stood in his flat skiff, casting plugs for walleyes. As the sun came up, his reflection sharpened until he and it joined to make a single cruciform pattern on the water. For me, the moment was unalloyed magic. The picture in my head had been real after all.

D
ick was right
. By eight, the surface was beginning to ruffle. Half an hour later, I was banging and splashing through the last mile to Reads Landing, where the lake turned back into river. A wooden shack on the shore had a cola sign outside. It creaked and rattled in the wind.

“Been out on Pepin?”

“Yes; it’s getting rough out there.”

A huge old man in a boiler suit turned his head to the window without interest. “Ah, she’s just giving her ass a scratch.”

I sipped at a mug of coffee. The woman behind the bar said, “You wouldn’t get me on the river. No way. I’ve always been afraid of it. I grew up with it and I never learned to swim. You work that one out.”

The old man and the woman ran through a long, sad litany of the names of the people they’d known who had been drowned in the Mississippi. Some were from, oh, a good while back now; others were from last fall, out duck shooting, this spring in the flood, or just last month. The names kept coming; Ron … Stan … Nancy … Neal …

“It takes its toll,” the woman said.

“The Mississippi water, it does funny things. You go across to Nelson, they got a high school there, the girls is all
giants
. Seven-foot girls. A whole school of ’em. That’s Mississippi water. Ain’t no other explanation.”

“You’re putting him on, Ed.”

“I ain’t. That’s the truth of it. You been to Nelson? I’m telling you, across in Nelson, all the girls is seven foot tall.”

“What do you do?” I asked him.

“Do?” He stared at me, his eyes vague and placid. “Nothing.” Then he reviewed his life in detail. “Fish.”

The woman clearly thought the man was giving the industry of Reads Landing a bad name. “Jerry, that’s my husband, he’s a shingler. He reroofs.”

“You’ve always lived at Reads Landing?”

“All my life. Never wanted to go no place else.”

“You’ve never hankered after the big city?”

“Nope. The way I look at it, places like the Landing and Wabasha, they’re the
right
size. Now, I got two daughters in school. If they was in a city, they wouldn’t stand a chance. How would they make the team in a graduating class of two hundred? In a class of thirty, forty kids, everybody gets to do what they want to do. What the bottom line says is there’s only five on the basketball team. Right?”

It sounded to me like the clearest and least answerable argument in favor of the small town that I’d heard yet.

The old man stirred. “You ever seen the basketball team from Nelson? They’re so goddamn tall that when they put the ball in that net they look like they was bending down and tying their
shoelaces.”

“Give over, Ed. He’s always been full of bullshit. You grow much older, Ed, you’ll get so full of shit you’ll bust. It’s got to come out sometime. You just make sure it don’t come pouring out all over my lunch counter.”

“Goddamn. Sonofabitch,” Ed said. He was in a good mood.

Wabasha, Minnesota, was just three miles on downstream. Behind me, the lake was white with breakers, but the river, running through a deep grove of tall forest, was quiet. When I pulled into the town jetty at Wabasha, I meant to take a walk around the place and continue on down to the Minnesota-Iowa border before nightfall. It was the sight of the hotel which made me stay. The Anderson House was everything that the St. James should have been but wasn’t: a big, creaky, railroad-and-steamboat hotel with a warren of plain little rooms where the double-hung windows stuck and the screens were torn. The whole building had grown a bit bent and shaky in its wooden old age. Its polished floors were hillocky. The walls of the corridors leaned in on one at odd angles. The key to my room was of a kind that might have unlocked the gate to the Castle of Otranto. Given all these attractions, I was prepared to overlook the fact that the waitresses in the dining room had been got up to look like Meissen milkmaids in pink-and-white-checked dresses and rabbit-eared mobcaps. I decided that I was going to like Wabasha.

“War-bashaw,” said the lady at the desk, correcting me. “We call it War-bashaw.” I’d been insistently referring to it as “W’basher.”

War-bashaw
was a model river town. In a short walk from the river
to Third Street, I saw its classic iconographic pattern unfold. Up and down the Mississippi there were hundreds of places like Wabasha which had grown up at the same date in the same way. Like the key to my hotel room, Wabasha unlocked an unrestored piece of American history.

First there was the river. Then, standing on the levee between the wharves and the railroad track, there was a line of grain elevators. The words
BIG JO
FLOUR
stood out in the sky over Wabasha’s head like a flag. I picked my way between the stationary freight cars, smelling the wheat which had given the town its main livelihood, and was on Front Street, a stretch of low white clapboard, with a muddy pickup parked in every drive and a chained dog grumbling at me from every shaven lawn. Until lately, no one of consequence would have lived on Front; it was too close to the river; its old shacks had been swept away by floods, and their smart successors had been built only after the levee had been made high enough to keep the river from turning up as an unexpected guest in their living rooms.

One up from Front was Main; and here the brick began. Brick meant substance, importance, civic pride. There was hardly a building on the street which didn’t announce that Wabasha had once, at least, intended to be a really big apple.
CITY HALL
1894 said the lintel on a Gothic monster which might have accommodated enough people to keep Chicago going. Across from City Hall (and Main Street, Wabasha, was very nearly as wide as Fifth Avenue, New York) stood a group of fine old pretenders. Kuhn’s Block 1874. I.O.O.F. 1882. Smith’s Block 1884. H. J. Jewell 1880. Masonic Building 1880. Each one was a chunk of fancy architectural confectionery. The European origins of Wabasha showed in its German-Dutch gables, but their facades had gone Ancient Greek, with dadoes, porticos, friezes and lots of Doric columns. The constant toing-and-froing between South and North on the river had brought about a curious intermixture of taste. Even up here in Minnesota, one could see shadows of cotton planter’s Hellenism. Perhaps H. J. Jewell had come upriver, seen the palaces of Louisiana and Mississippi from the Texas deck of a steamboat, and decided that if Natchez had it, then Wabasha must have it—or as much of it as he could remember. His block, at any rate, belonged to a style of architecture exclusive to the river, and evenly distributed down almost its entire length. This Mississippi-Corinthian mode had a marvelous swagger and confident imposture to it. It had class—with a short
a
. It was ritzy. It gave some of the meanest little towns on the riverbank an air of yearning grandeur.

Kuhn, Smith and Jewell, not to mention the Independent Order of
Odd Fellows, would probably have been appalled to see how little had happened to Wabasha since they had put it on its feet. The wind blew down Main Street, rattling the flap of the blue mailbox. One scrawny granny in dark glasses and Bermuda shorts was dragging a toddler in diapers past the drugstore. Otherwise, the only human presence on the street was an acrylic-painted clown in a funny hat who turned out, on closer inspection, to be a fire hydrant, decorated by the local children for Bicentennial Year.

Main Street had been built so that the town, like the rest of the nation, could move indefinitely westward. I went to see how far it had gone. Just two blocks on, Wabasha petered out. There were a row of wooden bungalows, a stretch of dingy grass, Highway 61, a creek, another railroad, and then nothing more than a few hundred miles of corn stubble. In whatever lottery it was that decided which American villages were going to turn into megacities, Wabasha had clearly drawn a dud ticket.

I walked back to Main, and found the granny and her toddler in the hardware store. They were wandering up and down the arsenal of guns. Perhaps that was what had happened to the people of Wabasha. There were enough rifles and pistols to equip both sides of a Middle Eastern war. It was conceivable that the citizens of the town had had some dispute—about street lighting, maybe, or the site of a community swimming pool—and settled their differences in the usual way. I spent a happy half hour buying fishing tackle; flexing rods and sorting through boxes of painted plugs which were supposed to look like fish to fish. Their artists, who had decorated them in Day-Glo stripes and flashes, were deeply under the influence of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. I bought a blinding handful of the things, hoping that Mississippi bass and walleyes understood the conventions of the modern movement. I bought an aerosol spray which promised to repel “mosquitoes, chiggers, gnats, ticks, fleas and biting flies.” A block up the street, I found the offices of the
Wabasha County Herald
, and begged a pile of back issues from a girl who had fallen asleep over a typewriter.

“It’s pretty busy in town today.”

“Yeah,” she said, yawning. “You can hardly move for the crowd”—and resettled her typewriter to make it into a more satisfactory pillow. I smiled at her as I went out. “I ain’t
sleeping,”
she said. “I’m just taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.”

I carried my booty back to the hotel, and assembled my new rod and line. The room was too confined to allow more than an experimental flick of a bass plug into the old china washbowl on the dressing table. I thought about going down to my boat and seeing if I could raise a fish
from there: in the bar by the jetty I had seen glass cases full of huge perch and bass, their enameled carcasses arranged primarily to display their teeth. The general idea was a good one, but the spirit of Wabasha prevailed, as I lay on the bed taking a good look at the insides of my eyelids.

At the American Legion, I sat up at the bar and read over the last few issues of the
Wabasha County Herald
. No wonder the town seemed so exhausted. The summer had been a succession of excitements.
WABASHA GRACED BY ROYALTY JUNE 14!
said the first copy of the paper.
THE “QUEEN” LEAVES THOUSANDS INSPIRED
. The front-page photograph showed a meaningless something with a row of portholes. It was captioned: “The ‘Mississippi Queen’: Shown Is Less than Half of the 385-Foot Stern-Wheeler.” The photographer had not been able to get far enough away from the boat to include all of it in his viewfinder: this had been taken as a tribute to the boat’s glory rather than as a sign of the incompetence of the man who took the picture. The front page continued with a column of breathless asterisks: