Old Glory (62 page)

“I worked forty-three years there. I had a room in a rooming house right here. That’s why they let me stay when they put up the hotel. They give me a real good room here. With a TV. Only I can’t see the colors now.”

“What programs do you like to watch?”

Miss Lily stirred the slop on her plate with the point of a knife.

“Oh … Lawrence Welk. I like Lawrence Welk.”

“Can you remember how the town was when you were a girl? How Levee Street and China Street used to look?”

“I never did see much of Levee Street. I wasn’t one for going out nights. I worked in the depot all day; then I come home to the rooming house. People then … they looked down their noses at a working girl; and I kept myself to myself. Hey, do you have a wife back home where you come from?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Oh, I do wish you did.” Her face was filled with her own long and lonely spinsterhood. “I never married. There was two people in my life … we was real close friends. But I didn’t love neither of them. Sometimes, I wished I had of done. Too late for that now, though … thank the Lord! I shall be one hundred in two months … if the Lord spares me. That’s
old
, ain’t it?”

“It is. Very. Do you think you’re lucky to have lived so long?”

“I don’t know. I done nothing to deserve it. It must be the Lord’s will. You know …” She put her hand on my sleeve. “… you ought to get yourself a wife, for company—she’d be a lucky girl!”

“I’m afraid I doubt that, but it’s sweet of you to say it.”

“Oh, yes, she would.”

She drifted away from me. I could see her own lost chances multiplying
in her eyes. Then she told me again how Milliken’s Bend had been swept away by the river.

“You should eat, Miss Lily. I’m taking up your time.”

“No. You stay with me. Please. I’d be beholden. I got plenty of time. All I got now is time.”

I was looking for a magus. Someone must understand the Mississippi. After riding it for fourteen hundred miles I certainly didn’t. Captain Mac could still be deceived by it after forty years of piloting. There were people in the woods south of Vicksburg who were supposed to read the river’s character and tell its fortune: the Corps of Engineers had its Waterways Experiment Station there. I went out to meet the Director of Boils, Eddies, Cut-Offs and Fast Currents.

The place was like a University of the River. I was driven through the trees from hangar to hangar, where the Engineers had reconstructed little bits of the Mississippi in concrete, coal and crimped wire. Every time they planned to deepen a channel or build new dikes, revetments, dams or levees, they made a scale model of the reach, fed water through it for weeks at a time, and measured all its changes of height and speed with instruments in the little aluminum drums that dotted each model.

“This,” said my guide, “is St. Louis.”

The river was a yard across, and I could comfortably straddle the Poplar Street Bridge. Fifteen yards away up the hangar, the entry of the Missouri River was obscured by an electric buggy with a load of wire mesh. The water was six inches deep and ran over a shiny coal bottom. I lay on my face and squinted up it, looking for the scrolls and humps, the scruffy edge of a shoal, the interlocking patches of glaze and mat.

“You haven’t got a magnifying glass, have you?”

I couldn’t see any difference between the water under my nose and the water in the bath at the Downtowner. It didn’t look at all like the Mississippi to me. It might have passed as a convincing model of the upper Thames; the model makers seemed to have built everything into it except its essential personality.

“You want to see another?”

Outside, we stood on a State Penal Farm as big as a fireside rug and looked at where the Red River joined the Mississippi. Here, at least, the wind was combing the water into tiny wavelets.

“Have you ever been on the real river?”

“No,” she said, “that’s something I never have done. I’d like to, though.”

“You’ll find it … different.”

“I guess so.”

The Director of Boils and Eddies was in his office. With his broken nose and bristled skull, he might have been a retired heavyweight boxer. He was enormous. He looked powerful enough to deal on equal terms with the real thing.

“When you try something out on a model, how often do your results surprise you?”

“Every time. I’ve never seen a model yet that didn’t show up something real strange.”

I said that I had been living too close to the river. Things like eddies simply baffled and frightened me. I wanted him to tell me, in his own professional language, how Mississippi water worked. If, for instance, he was talking to another engineer, how would he describe an eddy?

“Well … on the Mississippi … you got two kinds of eddies.…”

We were really getting somewhere now.

“There’s the clockwise eddy. Then there’s the counterclockwise eddy.”

“Clockwise and counterclockwise? Is that all? Can’t you sort of define, like, the structure of an eddy … exactly
how
the water swirls in it?”

He crossed and uncrossed his huge hands.

“Well … you know, hydrography’s still a very young science.”

“Yes.” I was deeply disappointed. “What about boils, then?”

“Ah, them mushroom-tops. Yeah. I reckon … it’s those very deep, high-speed currents, and they’re racing along the bottom there, and then,
wallop!
they hit some kind of a rock or something; hell, they have to have somewhere to go, so they come b’ilin’ and b’ilin’ up to the top!” His hands had exploded from his knees and were boiling and boiling above his head. The Director himself had turned into a pluming swell of river water. It was an immensely vivid demonstration, making up in energy what it lacked in science.

“Hey, you know,” he said, “I got a small boat on the river myself. You hit the edge of a mushroom-top, it’s like driving a car fast right into an ice patch; you don’t know which way you’re at, do you?”

“Yes, that’s exactly how it feels. I’ve done it tons of times.”

“When you come off the river at the end of a day, do you ever feel kind of shaky?”

“Every time. I feel all my nerve ends are showing; I can’t keep my hands steady.”

“Me neither,” the Director said. I was delighted. He had looked as constitutionally unshakable as the pillar of rock at Grand Tower. “I
come off my boat, and it’s like I’m running a fever. You don’t notice it when you’re on the river, but as soon as you step on shore the strain hits you.…”

“That’s just how I’ve been, almost every day for the last three months.”

“The river can really shake a man up. You take the disrespectingest man … a man who’s never had respect for anything all his life. Put him on the river. Just for one day. It’d change him. He’d have to show respect for that.”

So I was in the best company. The magi found the Mississippi as alien and mysterious as I did myself. Even their models astonished them; the river itself could reduce them to humble wonder. I felt that they had granted me an official license for my fright.

I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak. In the channel the bow of the boat kept making sudden twists off course. I was having to fight for the steering with a rival, and the simmering current, rolling over and over on itself, had its own ideas about which directions I should take. I watched the paths down which it was leading other bits of driftwood. The river had been rising steadily for days; it was alive with whole trees torn from islands and plantations upstream. A cypress was making a crabwise crossing ahead of me: it jerked, zigzagged, went smoothly down for fifty yards, spun around, headed for the shore, then slid into the channel again, as if a bored child were playing with it by radio control.

A line of indented woody bluffs ran due south on the Mississippi side of the river, which scoured their overhanging rock, swept sharply west away from them until their green turned to a distant purple, and came back. Louisiana was an enormous level marsh, overgrown with trees, cane and vines. The river had never been happy to run along the same course for more than a few decades at a time: it had tried out miles and miles of Louisiana, leaving half the state behind as a jungly bottom of lakes, sludge and sand. There were black caves running through the tangled green on the shore—curving bayous which were the last remains of experimental meanders the Mississippi had abandoned.

At noon I pulled in at a sandbar on the Louisiana side. The water was running in a fast chute around its western edge. Yesterday, probably, it had been connected with the land. It was an island now. It had a thin fringe of cane and cypress on its spine.

With a bottle of wine and P. T. Ferry’s bag of pecans, I could get
myself into shape again for the run to Natchez. I set out my picnic and sprawled on one elbow in the sand. Beside my foot was the track of an animal, as firm as if it had been set in plaster of Paris. It was a shade smaller than my hand, with a round heel pad, a knuckled wedge of toes and five claw marks, as fine as carpet tacks. There were more—they went down to the water and returned to the bushes in a diagonal to my left.

I snapped the shell of a nut between my thumb and forefinger. The odd thing was that the wind was scuffing the sand, yet the tracks were dead sharp. They must have been made only minutes, or moments, before.

Black bear
.

I half-pushed, half-threw myself over the gunwale of the boat. I banged my shin. The hull ground on sand. I dug into the bottom with an oar, leaned on it, and felt the boat slide clear.

Black bear. Where I came from, bears were whimsical creatures whose sole habitat was the colored drawings in children’s books. Bears wore rubber boots and scarves and lived off pots of honey. I found it hard to come around to the idea of real bears skulking in the brush. I didn’t know if bears could swim; the one on the island was likely to be half-starved if it had been cut off from land for long.

Mr. Ferry’s nuts were spilling from their bag on the shore, thirty yards away now. My unopened wine bottle was lying on its side. I peered into the canebrake. There was a darkness there: log? bear? I couldn’t see for sure. It was enough, anyway, to justify my telling people later that it was undoubtedly the bear. In the story, it came waddling slowly from the canebrake and stared after me, looking sad to see me go, not because it needed lunch but because it had run miserably short of company. That wasn’t strictly true. The tracks were true; so was the smudge in the cane. Admittedly, the smudge did stay very still, but it had a sort of lonely, watchful, bearish stillness.

The water darkened, and the warmth went suddenly out of the day. A steepening bluff bent forward to meet the river, and as the current drove south into the hill there was Natchez, pitched high in woods of magnolia and pine, its electric lights already stronger than the sun. I sneaked around the back of the big eddy where the Mississippi made a sudden westward swerve and landed on the concrete ramp at the foot of the cliff.

I was eighty years or so too late. The ramp, and a brick house spattered with green historical markers, were all that was left of Natchez-under-the-hill. This cold little step of a beach had once earned itself a
marvelous notoriety. In 1814, Zadok Cramer was warning his readers to avoid the liquor houses here. In 1826 Timothy Flint called it:

Disappointingly, I had it all to myself: no other boats, no boatmen, no music, no dancing, no liquor shops, no houses of ill-fame. The town-beneath-the-town had gone. It had been built on crumbly sand, and the Mississippi had washed it away just as it had taken Milliken’s Bend. I made the long solitary climb up Silver Street to Natchez-proper.

The Ancient Greek railroad depot had been converted into a restau-rant-and-bar. When I ordered a drink, it was paid for by the plump young man who sat on the next stool. He explained that he wasn’t on speaking terms with his girlfriend tonight; he had some serious drinking to do, and the odd whiskey for a stranger wouldn’t affect his budget for the evening.

When he told me that he ran a nursing home for old people, I said that I had a mild professional interest in old people myself. “Yeah, they’re a gold mine.”

It was just what I’d been thinking. If he could find me a nonagenarian with a long memory from Natchez-under-the-hill …

“There’s a lot of bucks to be made out of old folks. They
pay
. Seven seventy a month a head, federal money … Work it out for yourself.”

I did later. If you want an annual turnover of a million dollars, you will need a hundred and eight point two old people. Suppose a modest profit margin of, say, eighteen percent … You could run a ranch house, a new Cadillac and holidays in Bermuda on old folks.

“Yes—I suppose you can stack them up like battery hens. They don’t eat much, either, do they?”

“No, it’s not like that.…” He laughed. “But you get racketeers in old folks just like in any other business. Wherever there’s a federal dollar, there’s a shyster chasing after it somewhere.”

I bought him a return drink and told him what I was doing.

“Come out and see us tomorrow. You ought to talk with Miss Mary. She’s real sharp. She went to college and all. I remembered when I was
a kid she used to live in a house all on her own. She let the weeds and trees grow right over the windows. We all thought she was a witch.”

The old people’s home was a low, verandaed house standing in its own small forest. Men in pajamas with racy sideburns sat out on the porch in rockers. Inside, colored plastic letters had been arranged on a blackboard to form a shaky announcement: