Old Glory (28 page)

I was deep in conversation with Marv, the insurance salesman. Marv was worried. He looked as if he had spent much of his time in worrying. Permanent crinkles of worry had indented themselves around his mouth and eyes. His mustache had, I guessed, once been grown to cheer himself up, but that had evidently become an object of worry too. Every now and again he picked at it, and I could see the pink skin of his upper lip behind the uneven growth of bristle. For the moment, Marv was full of kindly worry on my behalf.

“You
do
wear a life preserver, don’t you?”

“Always.”

“Never go out without that life preserver on. And always do it up tight. The river’s so treacherous … it’s too easy for a guy to die in it. Your boat don’t sound big enough to me. What’s the size of your engine?”

“Fifteen horsepower.”

“Oh … I wish you had a thirty.… Thirty would really get you out of trouble fast.”

“It seems to be doing fine so far.”

“But the farther you go down, the worse it gets. Oh, dear. Look, I want you to listen to a piece of advice. Do you mind me giving you advice?”

“No, of course not.”

“Never try to swim against that current. If you go in the river, swim
with
the current. That current, it’s a lot stronger than it looks. It’ll tire you out, and you’ll drown. That’s what folks always do. There’s an instinct in them that says fight the current, and that’s what kills them. Never fight the current. Go with it. Let it take you along where
you
want to go. You’ve worried me, you know? I hate to think of you in that boat.”

“You think I ought to buy a chunk of life insurance from you?” I wished that I had bitten back the remark. Marv’s face instantly clouded with hurt. I had to explain, painfully, that it had been a silly joke and that I did value his advice. I did. I suspected, too, that Marv had had some experience of his own of swimming against currents and finding himself helpless in their power. His home-and-auto-insurance franchise
business was run from a one-room office on the corner of the block. On weekends he played clarinet, the saddest instrument, in a dance band. His wife taught English at the junior high. Together they were struggling to send their eldest son through law school in Chicago, and it was the clever son’s career which was Marv’s main claim to success in life.

“I missed out. I went straight from high school into the Army, and for just a high school graduate, there isn’t nothing much. If I’d been smart and gone to college like my boy … He’s a real bright kid. But I could’ve been something. Like, suppose I’d gotten a Master of Insurance degree … With one of those you can work right alongside people like attorneys … you could go right to the top.”

“But you’d have chosen insurance anyway, not music?”

“There’s no security in the music business. I don’t know. It’s a long way from Saturday gigs in Dubuque to having a career.…”

He drove me home to meet his wife. I had said that I’d enjoy talking to her English class, and we went over Jan’s school textbooks to see if we could find some passage on which I could pin a lesson. I came across a story by Saki, a story written in a very period British accent, which I thought it might be fun to read aloud.

“I got them to read that last year,” Jan said. “They just didn’t understand what it was about at all.” Saki’s “The Story-Teller” was in fact about an ingenious and cynical bachelor who, finding himself closeted in a railway carriage with a pious aunt and two fractious children, keeps the children enthralled and outrages the aunt by telling a tale in which exemplary infant virtue is rewarded with well-deserved death in the jaws of a wolf. I thought that I might be able to carry off the role of the bachelor rather well.

“I guess it was just too British for them,” Jan said. She sat framed by pots of prickly cacti. Between us stood a vast balloon glass, two feet high, filled with fine sands of different colors. They had been poured into the glass to make a picture of a setting sun over an ultramarine sea, with sand rocky mountains and a streaky sand sky.

“You like it? That’s a real work of art.”

“In Chicago,” Marv said, “they sell those for a hundred dollars. We got it cheap—fifty dollars. Fifty dollars for a work of art.”

As with the Wyoming Jackalope and the pinecone men, its merit lay exclusively in the cute oddity of its manufacture. You couldn’t be interested in what it did, but you could be absorbed by the question of how it was done. “I can look at that for hours,” Marv said. It was too American for me.

We drove back to Canavan’s. Main Street flickered with the lanterns
of the railroad men as they sliced through the fog that was beginning to rise from the river. I could hear the towboats calling to each other, their rude horns mingling with the musical chords of the trains. In the bar, I made another appointment to look forward to: if the next night was clear, Bob, the machinist, was going to take his dog and “tree some coons.” I was to meet him in Canavan’s at 1
A.M
., and we’d hunt till dawn. Talking till nearly four, about coons, Saki, the migration of coyotes, Frances FitzGerald’s
Fire in the Lake
, land prices, the buoyancy of the soybean and the inedibility of carp, I was impressed that the nightlife of Savanna seemed to have that of London and New York beaten hands down. Already I was beginning to be happily tired out by its rigorous sociability.

“Good morning, sir! We have rain today! A wet morning!” The old man in the corridor lifted his straw hat to me. Groggy, only half awake, I tried to grin back. He wore a thin, neat suit of silver-gray and patent-leather shoes. He certainly wasn’t a railroad man. “You’re a resident here?” “That’s correct, sir. Since my late wife passed over. Fifteen, no, sixteen years …” And he went on, chipper as a popcorn, down the corridor, spinning his hat by its brim.

I had to run through the rain to the Lincoln Junior High School. Rain chattered in the leaves of the elms and maples; it hid the river behind a thick curtain of dirty gauze, and turned Quincy Street to a rocky brook of rivulets and little waterfalls. The inside of the school was steamy. It smelled of damp raincoats, and umbrellas.

Facing the eighth grade through a trembly hangover was not unlike squaring up to the Mississippi itself. I had never seen thirty such impeccable children: every nail pared to the quick, every hair of every braid perfectly in place, every smile as polite and expectant as if it had been learned at charm school. I felt like a living example of what happened to naughty children who didn’t pay attention to their lessons.
Look at his eyes! Listen to his lungs! Could you but see his liver!

“I don’t know if we have an ashtray in school,” Jan said; “maybe I could find you a saucer?”

I looked at the children, blanched under their stares, hid myself behind a fat cloud of Captain Black tobacco, and launched into Saki. It was a wickedly funny story. The silence that met it, though, was at once innocent, well mannered and profoundly intimidating. Had a hair pin fallen, it would have been heard as a crash; except that at Lincoln Junior High, no one would have been sufficiently disheveled to allow a hair pin to drop in the first place.

At the word “horribly,” one boy in the back row giggled, then put his hand over his mouth. I slowed my reading, exaggerated the accents of the children, exaggerated the blasé voice of the bachelor, and raised another suppressed snigger from the middle of the class. At last they began to laugh: furtively at first, checking with Jan to see whether laughter was an offense against the state, then openly, riding comfortably along with Saki’s malicious demolition of “improving” literature. At the end of the story, the park pigs scuttled to freedom and the horribly good Bertha was eaten by the wolf, who left behind only her shoes, a few shreds of her clothing and three medals for goodness.

“Hey, that’s a real funny story,” said the boy who had started the laughter from his back row.

“Now we’ve all listened to the story,” Jan said, “I want you to tell me: does it have a happy ending, or a sad ending?”

The question certainly had me stumped for an answer, and it clearly bemused the class. Eventually a girl in the front hesitantly suggested that perhaps it had a sad ending.

“Yes, Cathy. A sad ending. That’s right. Now, why does it have a sad ending?”

“ ’Cause the girl gets eat by the wolf?”

“And that’s sad, isn’t it, children?”

The eighth grade agreed, reluctantly, that Bertha’s end was just about as sad as sad could be. The questions that I wanted to put to the children were rather different. I asked them to guess their lives ten years ahead. Would they stay on in Savanna, or move to another part of the United States? Would they like to live abroad? Would they prefer a big city or a small town? I pressed them to daydream and offered them the freedom to be anything from a New York dentist to a movie star in Cannes. I knew that when I was their age my class would have been almost unanimous in our longing for escape—to the big city, to a success unthought of by our parents, to a cheerful moral wilderness where we could kick the narrow values of the small town firmly in the teeth.

These thirteen-year-olds were just as certain of their destinations. They wouldn’t move more than a mile or two from Savanna if they could possibly help it. They hated the idea of the big city. Many had never been to one; perhaps half the class had visited Chicago for a football game or a shopping trip.

“It’s so noisy—”

“Everything gets stole—”

“It’s a big crowd—”

“It’s dirty—”

“People don’t talk to each other in Chicago; nobody knows nobody else.”

The boys hoped to work with their fathers. One wanted to work on the railroad, one at the John Deere plant, one at his father’s gas station. Lots of the girls wanted to be salesclerks; the most ambitious of them said that she’d like to become a beautician. Many women, I said, now had their own careers, and preferred living independently to marrying a man and bringing up a family. This was not an idea that found favor with the girls of Savanna.

“I want to get married … when I’m around nineteen,” said a girl with an embarrassed, serious smile. Others nodded. ‘I want to be a homemaker.”

I talked about my own trip down the river and about how, thirty years before, I had become haunted by the idea of the Mississippi after reading
Huckleberry Finn
. I imagined that these children, growing up right on the doorstep of Huck’s river, would know the book by heart. They didn’t. A small, doubtful scatter of hands went up when I asked how many people in the class had read it. No one, it turned out, had managed to finish it.

“It was too difficult,” a girl said. “It was all that Negro talk. I couldn’t understand it at all. There was just so many Negroes.…”

But the river … surely they had been excited by Twain’s portrait of their own river? They shrugged. For them, the Mississippi was just a big wet highway. The boys went fishing on it. The girls saw it as a dangerous, dirty place. None of the children needed literature to make it real.

When I left the school, the rain had cleared and the sun had come up. I went down to the dock to check that my boat was safe. The river looked like a cloudscape seen from the window of a high-altitude jet. Crags, pillars and twists of thick mist covered it almost completely, the sun shining on their fluffy tops. Here and there one could see irregular scraps of dark water, but they might easily have lain thousands of feet
below. The mist slowly rolled and plumed. A vertical column of it rose over the white shed of Smiley’s Fish Market and its waiting line of black women in fur coats and turbans. They’d come from Chicago, in old pickups and sagging, chromium-snouted Buicks and Chevies, to carry off hundredweights at a time of channel catfish, buffalo, crappies, carp, eels and sunfish. The luminous mist flattened them to two dimensions. The fish market, the women, the sprawl of boats drawn up on the shore, the piled hoop nets all came accidentally together in a perfect pictorial composition. I was bailing the rainwater from my boat, and saw that I’d left my camera in the open compartment behind the wheel. I photographed what I believed I was seeing, and was puzzled when the transparency came back from the processor’s: it didn’t look like a genre painting in refracted Mississippi light; it was a picture of yellowish mist, with the outline of a leaning telegraph pole faintly visible in the background.

At 1
A.M
., the party in Canavan’s was fully afloat. Bob the machinist had returned from his night shift in the factory at Davenport. “Thunder’s in the car out back.” Two young men, Ron and Bill, arrived with an absurd hound called Ketchup who whooped and skidded around the bar, legs splayed, tail flying, beside himself in his excitement at being allowed up so late. Tonight we were only going to “tree” coons: the season hadn’t opened, and their pelts would be in poor condition still; the hunt was a routine training session for the dogs. We drove out into the black hilly country behind Savanna, past darkened farmsteads and grain elevators looking like pale castles in the starlight. Bob watched the sides of the road for animals’ eyes.

“We got a saying around here,” he said: “ ‘When the cats are out, coons are about; when the wind’s in the east, coons run least.’ Don’t know why that is, but it’s a true saying.” Thunder murmured from the seat in the back. He was an old hand at treeing coons and affected an Etonian air of vague superiority. The cars stopped at the top of a rutted lane. Ketchup came over the tailgate of the second car in a joyful somersault and set himself to rolling energetically on his back. Thunder growled at him; his apprentice was showing bad form.