Authors: Jonathan Raban
I found myself blubbering with shock. Had the towboat been pushing a barge fleet, I would be dead now, or drowning, unconscious, under its screws. I had lost all sense of the shape of the river. I didn’t know where the shore was; I didn’t know up from down. The tow’s lights had left the river even darker than it had been before. I saw one faint glimmer, and what looked like the distant outline of a tree, but I was frightened that it would turn into another tow, its leading barges a black wedge waiting to suck me under. I drove away from it, then
around it, then cautiously approached it. It was an electric light on a pole. Under it, a jonboat, piled with hoop nets, was drawn up on the sand.
There was a house behind, a wooden cabin on stilts, its timbers warped and peeling away in a tangle of frayed ends. The window of its queasy-looking front room was lit up. I shouted “Help!” and “Excuse me!” and “Hello!”: if the river was thick with invisible tows, the land might well be full of German shepherd dogs and householders with twenty-gauges. No one came to the window. No dog barked. I climbed a steep companionway that led to the door at the side of the house and knocked on the glass. I could see the people inside: two elderly women and a man. They all appeared to be knitting. They took no notice of me, but went on drawing out hanks and threads. I had to bang and shout before the old man got up stiffly, took a shotgun from a cupboard, and came to the door. We faced each other through the glass panel—the man staring, deaf, pointing his gun at my chest while I yelled that I was traveling down the river, I was English, I had run into trouble, I needed help.
“He says he’s from England. He’s been on the river. He’s asking for help,” said one of the women in an ordinary conversational voice, her hands full of yarn.
“What you want me to do with him?” said the man.
“Let him in, I guess. But keep that gun on him.”
When they saw the miserable figure I was cutting, they were immediately kind, bringing coffee and cookies to this stammering intruder with his peculiar accent. They were not knitting; they were trying to untangle a knotted fishing line. They had been at it nearly all afternoon. The line had a thousand hooks, spaced at intervals of a foot or two, and it looked as if the hooks had gone into a rabbitlike orgy of interbreeding.
“We ain’t got but the one other line, and we live off what we can catch; so you can see how it is.…” the woman said. “We got to get it out by morning.”
I tried to help, but I wasn’t of much use. My hands were too shaky to disentangle anything from anything. I explained what had happened; my words were reported back to the old man at second hand.
“I don’t care too much to be out on the river at night,” he said; “and I lived on it all my life.”
The second woman had said nothing since I’d arrived. “He won’t get no cab to come out here.” She didn’t look up from her lapful of raveled line.
Mrs. Lupus—I learned her name later—said, “I can run him into Burlington.…”
I was grateful, and apologetic. I asked if I could pay her the price of the cab fare.
“I wouldn’t be beholden to you, mister. You give me what it costs for the gas, and that’s that.”
In her station wagon, driving up a twisty dirt road through the trees, Mrs. Lupus talked. She seemed glad to be able to make a list of her troubles to a stranger. She spoke flatly, staring ahead through the windshield.
“We lost our only son last year, mister. He’d just gotten his own auto-repair shop. His daddy and me, we’d put our savings together to help him buy it. First week, he was lying under a car on the ramp … it fell on him. He was dead before they got him to the hospital. It almost killed my husband, Billy’s death. Six weeks after, he had a stroke. Then my hip went. We made the down payment on a trailer home for our retirement. There was a gas leakage. It blew up. There wasn’t nothing of it left after the explosion.”
We joined the traffic on the highway. Mrs. Lupus said, “That’s the way life is for us, just now. Ain’t so good.”
There was nothing to say. I passed her a cigarette.
“We get by,” Mrs. Lupus said.
Every night it was her job to bait the hooks on their two fishing lines. They had one of five hundred hooks and one of a thousand. At six in the morning, Mr. Lupus drove to the foot of Big Rush Island in his jonboat, hauled in the night’s catch and laid the other line. They sold the fish to a merchant in Burlington who didn’t ask them their names. In return for this anonymity, they got a bad price, but they weren’t licensed as professional fishermen, and any declaration of their earnings would have threatened Mrs. Lupus’ unemployment pay of $140 a month, their only other income now.
When she dropped me at the railroad hotel, I tried to pretend that her fishy-smelling car had gotten roughly two miles to the gallon. She passed me back five of the seven dollars I gave her. “I wouldn’t be beholden,” she said. “Besides, it does you good to talk sometimes, you know?”
Too tired to wash or eat, I fell in a heap on the hotel bed in my clothes. It was barely nine o’clock, but I felt that I’d been without sleep for days. Since leaving Muscatine, I had been attacked by vultures, faced a storm, been nearly drowned in the dark, and held at gunpoint. I hadn’t bargained for half such an adventurous life. I ached
to be able to talk myself down from these jittery heights with a friend. I called Judith’s number in Muscatine. Her roommate answered. Judith was out. She didn’t know when she’d be back. Late, she guessed. No, I said, it didn’t matter; I’d call her up some other day.
Fields of late wheat had been combed back and flattened by the high winds. The Burlington taxi driver had been a farm worker himself once and looked aggrievedly out on the ruined harvest. “See that? Only use for it now is maybe the guy can turn his hogs loose in it. Look at it. Ain’t it a goddamn shame?”
We got lost on the dirt tracks that crisscrossed the land close to the river. The driver told me how he had turned to the Bible. “Something was wrong with my life. I didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out. My nerves was all shot to pieces. I wasn’t sleeping good. It wasn’t right. So I went to the Book.”
“The New Testament?”
“No. I been reading about Moses. How he led the Israelites out of Egypt.”
“I’m surprised. I’d have thought you’d go to the Gospels.”
“There’s something in them old stories. I don’t know what it is. It kind of sorts out your perspective. Now I sleep at night. Ain’t had a drop of liquor for, oh, must be a coupla months now. Look—steady hands.…”
We went bumping down through the trees,
“Them Israelites …” he shook his head and chuckled. “Hell, they still got
their
problems over there. And it’s all in the Book. Every word. If you read it right.”
I could see the Lupuses’ house on its tall stilts in a clearing. In the night, someone had dragged my boat high up on the shore for safety. I pointed it out to the driver.
“You going all the way down the river in that? You
need
a Bible. You could run into more trouble than all them Israelites put together.” He helped me load up, clucking over the smallness of the boat. “God bless you, and have a good trip, now!” he shouted as he turned his car around and headed back up the hill.
I found Mrs. Lupus in a tumbledown shed in her yard. She was cleaning catfish with a kitchen knife and laying them out in fruit crates.
“How was it this morning?”
“Just sixty-three fish. None of them’s big ones, neither.” She smiled, her face taut with tiredness. “Ain’t so good.…”
“You got your line untangled.”
“Yeah. Just about. We was up at it till after three. But it’s laying out there now. Maybe tonight we’ll come lucky.”
“I hope so. You deserve to.”
She pulled the innards out of another fish and dropped them in the tin bucket of floating guts. “What you get ain’t necessarily what you deserve.” She laughed sadly. The catfish heads with their gummy eyes and limp whiskers looked as if they had escaped from a
Purgatorio
by Hieronymus Bosch; their presence was calculated to lower the highest spirit. “Don’t you ever go out on the river at night again, mister, There’s been too many tragedies. You know what they say about the Mississippi … he never lets go of a man with his clothes on. That’s a true saying.”
I heaved at the bow of the boat and joggled it through the soft sand into the water. The dangerous glitter of the waves, the faces of the dead fish and the warnings of Mrs. Lupus and the cabdriver made my launching more solemn than usual. That morning, I felt as if I were pushing off into the Acheron. All I needed was an obol in my mouth and an old man with a ragged beard to see to the business of navigation.
With the wind in the northwest, the swell was running with the current. The humps of the waves were a comfortable distance apart, and motoring at half speed, I could keep the boat balanced on the same crest for minutes at a time. I let the city of Burlington slide by: a loss that I felt I could afford. I had read somewhere that it was famous as the place where the Westinghouse air brake had been perfected. It seemed a doleful and unalluring reason for celebrity.
Below Burlington the Mississippi divided into two. The channel kept to the Iowa side, protected from the sprawl of the rest of the river by a wooded island eleven miles long. It was like a sunny day on the Thames, with the banks reassuringly close, the water prettily scalloped by the wind, and time to watch the herons and pack a corncob pipe with Captain Black. I should have known by now. These holiday moments were designed by the river to lull one into a sense of false security: they were an inevitable prelude to some new and alarming aspect of the Mississippi’s character.
The long island petered out into a trickle of sandbars. The channel swung suddenly westward. Where there had been less than half a mile from shore to shore there was now a mile and a half of roughening water, with the wind blowing hard across the line of the current. I tacked from side to side along the channel. The boat bucked, slopped, and took on plumes of drenching spray over the bow. Seeing a tow ahead, I ran for shelter to a bunch of little islands on the Illinois side.
I hadn’t checked the chart. I was afloat over a stump field submerged under just a few inches of water. As a roller sucked the river away, it exposed the bed of black-buttery peat, the sawed-off boles like bad teeth, and the boat grounded with a groan and a bang, the motor stalling as it hit a root. The next wave came in over the stern and carried me fifty yards on, bumping over the stumps. I shipped the motor and tried to row in to shore, but nothing I could do with the oars had much effect against the combined force of wind and waves. I landed, dismally, on a mud patch under a dead tree.
The wake of the tow, as it came in over the stump field, showed that there was a way out. Its troughs bared the rotten forest floor and revealed a narrow gully of deep water running out from a bay to my left. The wake picked up my boat and slammed it down on the mud. When the last roller had washed into the trees, I punted my way to the gully, using the crests of the waves to lift the boat while I made a foot or two of ground at a time. Back in the channel, the breakers seemed steeper than they’d been before. I clung to the lee of Grape Island on the Iowa bank, running at full speed to keep the bow of the boat as clear of the waves as it would go. It was a clanking, scary ride. I was frightened of popping a rivet as the booming hull hit the whitecaps as if they were blocks of concrete. I could see a white grain elevator across the river.… Dallas City … a harbor … a warm bar … hot Scotch and water … a quiet, well-lighted corner in which to settle over Sterne’s
A Sentimental Journey
. Between these comforts and me, though, there was the obstacle of two miles of seething Mississippi water. The waves were running diagonally, across and down the stream; if I turned the boat now, they should take me straight in to Dallas City. I lurched along with them, tuning the motor to their speed. In mid-channel, they were running four to five feet high; beyond, they were as tall as I. So long as I didn’t allow the boat to drift broadside to them, they were perfectly safe. All I had to do was keep going in their direction, just a fraction more quickly than they were moving themselves. I was surprised by the excitement of it, this lolloping thrust forward with the rollers crowding at my back and the line of ragged surf stretching out on either side for as far as I could see. The boat was fitting snugly into the weather. As I rode with the wind, the air felt still, and the shoulder of the wave a happy perch from which to watch Dallas City come steadily forward across the river like a steamship.
“City” was a courtesy title. The grain elevator dwarfed everything else in town. A trail of frame houses was bunched around the railroad track, and when a long haul of freight cars came through on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, the engineer would be way up north in
Lomax while his brakeman would be back in Pontoosuc; Dallas City was just a dozen carloads of corn and phosphates somewhere in the middle. It had a diner with steamed-up windows, a derelict flophouse and a one-story bar on the waterfront next to the ruined button factory. A historical marker announced that Abraham Lincoln had made a speech in Dallas City on October 23, 1858, and it looked as if nothing much of any interest had happened there since. My own arrival caused an enormous stir among the town’s population of chained dogs, and I could hear the news of my visit being whooped and growled from yard to yard; but the enthusiasm of the dogs was balanced out by the profound indifference of the people. In the bar, three wordless fat men in plaid jackets stared at the river. The woman bartender stared at
As the World Turns
on the TV.
“It’s getting rough as hell on the river,” I said. No one turned his head. One man silently pushed his glass forward for a refill of beer.
“Can you do a whiskey and hot water?” I asked the bartender.
“Ain’t no hot water,” she said, her eyes on the screen.
“Well, make it a whiskey and ordinary water, then, please.”
She dumped three ice cubes into a tumbler with an automatic hand. I gave up my attempt to get on with Dallas City and dug my copy of Laurence Sterne out of my bag. It was a nice eighteenth-century edition, with f’s for s’s, in a chipped calf binding, which I had once looted from my father’s library and left unread for years. In London I had packed
A Sentimental Journey
on the strength of its title. I now treated it like a Gideon Bible, letting it fall open where it would.
IN THE STREET. CALAIS.