Old Glory (37 page)

Oh, fweet myrtle. Oh, melancholy cyprefs. I must not turn into a learned Smelfungus. I did feel, though, that all of Mr. Yorick’s capacity for boundless curiosity and high humor would have been stretched by the bar in Dallas City. Looking for something to fasten my affections on, I fastened them on the river. Myrtles were native to Florida, and there were no true cypresses this side of the Rockies. There were some willows out on Dallas Island, swirling from side to side and touching their toes like gymnasts, but they couldn’t match the dazzling motions of the water. Torn and furrowed, it was like streaky jade. It frothed on the shore in a long rime of cotton candy and shook the few still-standing piles of a smashed jetty. Thick white smoke from a factory on the Iowa bank was flattened by the wind and blown low over the river.

“What’s that place over there where the smoke’s coming from?”

“Huh?”

“Over there. The factory …”

“First Miss.”

“Yes, but what does it do?”

The man stared out the window. He’d answered one question. He was damned if he could be bothered to answer two. The next man along the bar growled, “Makes nitrogen.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

I didn’t feel it. I went back to Sterne.

The wind had eased a little during the afternoon. It was only eight miles downstream to Fort Madison, Iowa, where there should be a proper hotel and, with luck, some less surly company. I pushed the boat out into the swell. The waves were much bigger than they had looked from the bar window, and I couldn’t keep a steady course through them. For half a mile I flopped about, losing steerage and taking in water over the gunwales. Then I put ashore at a little pier that ran out from the trees.

“Hey! That’s my landing there!”

He was Charon to the life. His scraggy gray beard, wrinkled face and soft wheeze all typecast him for the part of the Stygian boatman. He wore a bran-new ten-gallon hat, and the hat was everything that he was not. It curled, swelled and billowed, while he was small, stiff and frail, with matchstick wrists and spindly legs, cruelly outlined by
the wind which had pasted the trousers of his dungarees around his crab-apple kneecaps.

I explained how the weather had forced me off the river. As soon as he heard my accent, his wheeze loudened with excitement. Well, hell and goddamn! He’d been to England himself in World War Two. Devonport. Southampton. Bournemouth. He named them carefully. In November 1944—or was it October? he wasn’t sure on that point—he had seen a show at the Windmill Theatre, London.

“Now you got me thinking. You got plans for this evening? Can you eat corn bread and beans? Can you sleep in a trailer?”

His name was Wayne Oakman, proprietor and sole hand of Oakman Enterprises. From his stilt house on the shore he dabbled in every Enterprise that took his fancy. He was a commercial fisherman. His shed was festooned with lines, gill nets, seines and traps. He had an old mimeograph machine on which he ran off handbills for the local stores. He dealt in junked pickups, old trailer homes, bits of inscrutable farm machinery covered in weeds, twenty-dollar TV sets and gas cookers which had field mice nesting in their ovens. He pointed at the gas station beyond the railroad tracks. “I’m buying that up, too. I always did want a garage.”

He had the glittery, acquisitive eyes of the manic collector. Tonight, he had collected me. He took me to his house to show his latest
objet trouvé
to his wife. “Hey, Ida Belle! Come out of that kitchen and see what I found! Look: an Englishman.”

I could see that Mrs. Oakman had had a lot of practice in admiring Mr. Oakman’s finds. She was used to plows, arrowheads, dead polecats, electrical generators, bulk lots of barbed wire, rattlesnake skins. She wasn’t sure into which category I fell. “Well … that’s … interesting,” she said.

I had never yet met anyone whose obsession with the river so far exceeded mine. Wayne Oakman was an enslaved courtier of the Mississippi. The front of his spruce frame house was a long window, so that the water seemed to fill the rooms and color the walls. You could hear it lapping on the beach under our feet. Wayne’s old basket chair was placed next to the glass so that he could watch the current uncoiling downstream on another westward dogleg. He was inseparable from the water. When he was out of the room, Ida Belle shook her head over her husband’s hazardous extramarital affair with the Mississippi. In the last couple of years, he had had two major operations. One of them had left him temporarily paralyzed in his legs. He suffered from diabetes. He had emphysema. None of this had stopped him. No sooner was he out of the hospital than he had gone ice fishing in January.
Stumbling on his weakened legs, he had fallen through the hole in the river. It was a miracle that he hadn’t drowned. Somehow he had managed to hold on to the edge of the ice while the current swept his body back, and he’d been rescued by a neighbor with a long ladder. As soon as spring came, he had decided to make a long voyage south in his leaky fourteen-foot jonboat.

Wayne came back into the room, gulls crying in his chest.

“I was telling him about your river trip.…”

It was his odyssey. In the war, he had fought in Europe and in the Pacific, but his journey down the river was much the most exciting piece of traveling he had done in his life. He got out his charts and notebook, and laid them out on the floor. He showed me the narrow chutes where he’d seen the banks whistling past his ears as fast as a pair of railway trains, the slough where he had been swamped by a tow, the sandbars on which he’d been marooned, the bends where his boat had been sent spinning by whirlpools and eddies.

“Once you get down by St. Louis, gosh, this river, she’s something else. Wide? I’m telling you … it’s wide like you never seen. And the tows … they got tows down there so big you ain’t seen nothing like it. The wakes, they come right up, big screw wakes that’ll throw you around all over the river, you better believe it. And the current there
 … fast?
Hell, it just kind of whips you along with it; you don’t know you’re moving, it’s going so fast. And when it comes up against something, it blows up in a kind of big, whirling boil that’ll take a hold of you and you can feel it sucking at you, trying to pull you right around and under.”

The river he was describing was a place in a legend, and Wayne was beginning to frighten me with this, his favorite story. It was all very well for him: his trip was over; it lay in a mythological past. Mine, though, was still ahead and wide open.

Wayne had made Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 350 miles downriver. The leak in his boat had worsened steadily, and he’d had to keep on bailing himself out with a bucket. His outboard motor, with half the horsepower of mine, had not been able to cope safely with the strong current of the lower river. Ida Belle, who followed him down by car, persuaded him to give up. He was still sad that he hadn’t gone farther. We knelt over the charts showing the junction with the Ohio, the huge loops above Memphis, Sunflower Cut-Off, Scrubgrass Bend, Opossum Chute … “Gosh,” Wayne said, “you know, one day I’m going to do just what you’re doing. I’m going to go all the way. Too bad I had that leak. Gosh, I was sore.”

We sat up at the table. The foam on the crests of the black water was
speckled with moonlight. The river gurgled on the shore beneath us.

“You have the sort of house I dream of living in,” I said.

“I had my eye on this place for years,” Wayne said. “I remember it when I was a little kid. Used to belong to a doctor’s wife. Hell, she turned it into a re-sort. She used to lay on a beach fair every year. Oh, she’d get two, three thousand people down here. There was buggies parked all the way up the road. They had all kinds of things. They had horseshoe pitching … baptisms …”

“Baptisms?”

“Yeah, baptisms and all
kind
of things.”

“You mean they baptized people in the river?”

“Hundreds and thousands of them. It was like the River Jordan. The preacher, he’d wade right out there, and the folks was all waiting in line, and he’d dunk them under, one by one, baptizing them in the name of the Lord. Oh, they had all kind of things at them beach fairs.”

I was digging into the strong, sweet-tasting flesh of a catfish.

“Did you catch this?”

“Yeah, that was off of one of my trot lines, a coupla days back.”

“What bait do you use?”

“Cats … they’ll eat just about anything you can think of. Oh, I use congealed blood … that’s a real good bait for cats … meat … worms … chopped snake. They love a piece of rattlesnake. Then for carp, there’s corn and doughballs. You get good money for carp, now. They all go up to Chicago, where the Jew-people eat them. Them Jews, they reckon carp a real delicacy.”

“I wouldn’t eat no carp,” Ida Belle said, wrinkling with disgust at the thought.

“Ah,” said Wayne, sniffing the beginning of a philosophical debate, “but if you was a Jew-person, you wouldn’t eat no pig. We don’t eat no carp, they don’t eat no pig; it works out just the same, when you get down to it.”

“It ain’t the same thing at all. Carp don’t taste good. Pig do.”

“But for the Jew-people, it’s all the other way around.”

“But I ain’t
Jewish,
” Ida Belle said, finishing the argument with an unassailable stroke of logic.

I slept in a prettily furnished trailer home which was parked on its own grass lot across the track. It was another of Wayne’s enterprises. In the summer it earned its keep from weekending fishermen. Now its thin walls rattled in the wind. It felt fragile, cold and lonely. All the lights of Dallas City were out. A railway train ambled slowly through town, rousing the dogs for a few minutes. Then there was nothing except for the ragged gusting of the wind.

I doubt if Wayne had ever read Emerson, but Emerson, I thought, would have warmed to Oakman Enterprises. It was a small empire of sturdy self-reliance. Independent, shrunken, chipper, Wayne was an enviably happy man. Captivated by the Mississippi, he had built himself a splendidly various life around the river. He was no one’s hired man, unless the river itself could count as his employer. After dinner, he’d taken me to see the barn-sized shed that was his headquarters. It was crammed with treasures. Nets, guns, snares, radio sets, refrigerators, a player piano whose insides had been wrecked in a flood, a wooden boat, a stuffed squirrel with a pointy-toothed grin exactly like Wayne’s own … He pottered contentedly in this trove of precious junk. “You like it in here?” he had asked. “This is where I get my ideas for my enterprises. See? I can fish right out the door here.” And he had opened the door on the river, wheezing with pleasure at the simple, indestructible magic of the thing.

By dawn, the wind had eased off to a murmur. The surface of the river smoked, the water hidden under twists and pillars of mist. Ida Belle was cooking eggs and hash-browns for breakfast, and Wayne was in his basket chair, scanning the long window like a painting.

“You got a good hour or two yet. Then that wind’ll be back. They were forecasting eighteen to twenty on the radio.”

The commercial fishermen were coming in. One boat slid by under the window, close enough for me to see the live catfish squirming in tubs in its bow. The boatman, huddled in his camouflage parka, saluted us as he went past. Wayne had already weighed the man’s catch in his head. “Duane there, he’s got better than two hundred pounds. Maybe two fifty.”

As the sun rose, the water began to twitch and ripple. Lazy drafts of wind were coming out of the southwest, peeling the mist off the river. The Oakmans came to the landing to see me off.

“There’s wing dams down there,” Wayne said. “You go right on out till you hit the main channel, then it’s just, oh, around twenty blocks, I guess, to the bridge at Fort Madison.” I was delighted by this way of measuring distance over open water. What to me was breadth and sweep and emptiness was really as mapped as a grid city. I waved goodbye. I promised to write. I motored four blocks, made a left, and counted down the streets in the river.

At each new block, the wind freshened in my face. By Fort Madison, the boat was bucking hard on the choppy little waves, and the wide pool around Nauvoo Bend was ribbed with shreds of white. It looked like a bad place to be caught in a storm. I put in at a marina so that I
could watch the weather and wait for the right time to make the seven-mile run into Nauvoo. A small sailboat had gone ahead of me, and we tied up next to each other. The man and the woman, both in their twenties, looked cold, sleepless and rather dirty. They were looking for a warm place that served coffee. I joined them.

The man did all the talking, while the girl rubbed her hands miserably against each other and stamped up and down in her boots. They were bound for New Orleans. Already they were more than two weeks behind time. Their homemade model of a Boston Dory was not taking well to the Mississippi. They had set off from Madison, Wisconsin, and sailed down the Wisconsin River to below Prairie du Chien, where they had entered the main river. First they’d been becalmed, then stormbound. They had spent days laying up in creeks waiting for the wind to drop. They had a tiny eggbeater of a motor, sufficient only to drive them into and out of locks. In a toneless voice, the man listed their adventures like a talking ship’s log. Sunday, they’d run aground. Monday, they’d been swamped by a tow. Tuesday, they’d capsized and lost some gear from the cockpit. Wednesday, their anchor had dragged, and they’d run aground again. Thursday … but I didn’t listen to Thursday. I was thinking that the man bore an uncanny resemblance to the learned Smelfungus.