Old Glory (40 page)

Aunt Sally had won in the end, as Aunt Sally was bound to. Hannibal had adopted Twain’s angry masterpiece and civilized it into a nice, profit-making chunk of sentimental kitsch.

Downtown, a cobbled street had been coyly restored around Judge Clemens’ law office, the Becky Thatcher Bookshop, a moldy waxwork show, a decent little museum of Twain relics and a stretch of new white wooden fence. This, a guide was telling a party of visitors, wasn’t just
like
the fence Tom Sawyer had been set to whitewash on that fictional summer Saturday in the 1840s: it was the fence itself—as material a proof of the veracity of an old book as the thighbone of St. Peter. I looked at the fence for a very long time indeed. I learned the set of each one of its narrow boards, and the slightly bubbled sheen of its starch-white paint. If I’d had a spray gun on me, I would have been
content to write one word across that fence:
HADLEYBURG
. One or two people might have known what it meant before the tourist board whited it out.

Below Main Street, though, the waterfront of Hannibal—its business end—was incorruptible. The catchpenny whimsy of the Mark Twain industry couldn’t touch it. Past the closed-up Ice House Theater, the closed-up hotel, the eyeless warehouses, there was a proper river town to escape into. I crossed the dusty tracks of the Wabash and the Burlington Northern to where the air was fogged with grain husks and the chutes and elevators made Gothic-castle shapes in the sky. From all over Missouri, it seemed, the grain trucks were coming in to Hannibal. They stood growling in line, bumper to bumper, queueing to be weighed and emptied. The Hannibal Grain Terminal resembled a city under siege. Everyone was shouting at everyone else. The muddy trucks rolled in like tanks. The dry, gritty air swirled and mushroomed. It stuck in one’s throat; it gave people’s faces the pale, encrusted look of bomb-blast victims; it turned the whole queer landscape to a sickly yellowish monochrome, like an underexposed daguerreotype.

The battle headquarters of this operation was in a long hot shed. The fans which had been scattered around the place to cool it were keeping several thousand bills and invoices in a state of perpetual flurried motion. Today’s prices were chalked up on a blackboard: $6.40 a bushel was the going rate for soybeans, while other grains, like wheat, corn and sorghum, were all floating at around $3.50. I found the field marshal at his desk, teaching his several telephones to talk to each other rather than to him. Since the beginning of the harvest, he had been working a fifteen-hour day, seven days a week, and it showed. Mr. Hooley’s narrow, knobbly face was creased and powder-burned. Had I been he, I would have thrown me out, but he said no, sure he’d talk, he’d be happy to, if I didn’t mind these goddamn phones going off all over the place. There was a signed photograph of the President lying flat among the paperwork.

“That’s an unusual distinction around here,” I said. “You actually like Jimmy Carter.”

“Oh,
that,
” Mr. Hooley said. “I guess I won’t even get around to framing it. You know, when Jimmy Carter came to Hannibal on the
Delta Queen?
It tied up right out there. I had the whole plant full of Secret Service men. I said, ‘Sure you can use my elevators …’ and they went swarming up there, dozens of them. Sharpshooters. So I get a signed photograph from the White House.…” He shuffled it under a file of correspondence.

“So what turned you off him?”

“You know what he did? He got right off that boat; he went to the Mark Twain museum and saw the Tom Sawyer Cave; made a speech; then he got back on the
Delta Queen
again. Now, if he’d shown interest in what makes Hannibal tick, this town would’ve taken the President to its heart. All he had to do was to go up to some fellow and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on here? What’s this elevator all about?’ But he didn’t do nothing like that. He walked right on past the guts of this town, just like a tourist. Now, if those soybeans had been peanuts, he’d have known what was going on … maybe. But he had to act like some dumbhead on a scenic tour. If that Mark Twain museum and such takes a hundred dollars, we take a million: that’s the scale of it. You understand what I’m saying? This ain’t a tourist town; it’s a farming town. There’s not one store in Hannibal now that could keep its doors open if it wasn’t for the farmers’ daughters. But what does the President go see?
Mark Twain.
”

“Did you ever read
Huckleberry Finn?
”

“No, I never did read that book. You read it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I read it once.”

Mr. Hooley explained to me how he bought grain from the farmers, dried it and stored it. Its humidity had to be kept to exactly eleven percent, so that it could bounce without shattering. He hired the barges that were waiting off the channel and shipped his grain down to New Orleans, where he sold it to firms of exporters. We went out to the elevator and watched the soybeans coming in. Tip-up trucks fed them into an underground chamber. Thousands of little buckets on chain belts scooped them up to the top of the chute, from where they were hosed into the holds of the barges below. It was just noise and dust to me, and I felt a little guilty at being unable to see the glory of the business. If there was glory in it, it was a glory of figures; of bushels per hour, of percentile moisture, of the delicate correspondence between the silent motion of dollars and the slow, rowdy circulation of these trucks and buckets and barges as they engaged in a kind of elephantine ballet.

“What do you think?” shouted Mr. Hooley.

“I was trying to see it as money.…”

“Why, that’s ten thousand bushels an hour … six, seven dollars a bushel … works out at around a thousand dollars a minute, give or take a cent. How much do you reckon that Mark Twain museum takes?”

“At least it makes nonsense of that saying about things’ not amounting to a hill of beans.”

“You get yourself a hill of beans, I’m telling you, you won’t have to
do no more book writing. Whoever it was made that saying, he didn’t know nothing about beans.”

At the Ole Planter’s restaurant that night, business was flat. The tourist season was trickling to an end. The owner came to sit at my table.

“This town, it used to be the Gold Coast. On this street here, it was girls upstairs, nickelodeons downstairs, all up the street. Now all we got is soybeans.”

“What happens to your high school graduates?”

“They go. If they got brains, they go.”

A hundred and fifty dollars a week, he said, was reckoned to be a decent wage in Hannibal. A few wealthy families had the town sewn up “real tight.” “You want to get on in this town, you keep your fingers clean and your mouth shut.”

Tight
seemed the right word for Hannibal. It was too tight for me. I didn’t like its prematurely dark and empty streets. If there were adventures to have here, I didn’t know where to find them. I went back to my motel room and cheered myself up with bourbon and soda and Laurence Sterne.

The high school marching bands were parading down Broadway through the morning drizzle. They came in all the uniforms of the armies of Victorian Europe: girls in Prussian shakos and English busbies, their tunics frogged with gold and silver, their fluffy pompons looking like splats of melted ice cream in the rain.

“Well! Ain’t that just a lovely thing to happen on!” a black woman laughed at me out of the crowd on the sidewalk. She was weighed down with shopping in brown paper sacks. “That’s the best thing I seen in
weeks
. Ain’t they so
pretty?
”

Drums, cornets, bugles, pipes. The bands filled the town with bangs and skirls. They were marching through Georgia, burying John Brown’s body, Yankee Doodling and hailing the Chief; but the tunes had all leaked into each other like wet colors, leaving the musical and military equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting in the air.

A boy bandleader went by in war paint and feathers, tossing his baton as high as the roof of the cigar store across the street. I thought I saw the face of a real Indian in the crowd, and studied him; but he had the same expression of empty good humor as the rest of us.

The band of the Missouri Military Academy brought up the end of the event: boys in spats, white helmets and pale blue battle dress. They were all eyeglasses and Adam’s apples, their necks thrown rigidly back, their eyes ceremonially glazed over. Scratch one of those serious children, and he would have bled slogans about Laura Norder, the domino theory and the defense of the West. After the pantomime and the chocolate soldiers comes the real thing.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free
 … But the jolly iambic rhythm of the tune squeezed out the small print from the line. What the drums and the brass section actually came out with was a message of telegraphic compression and telegraphic foreboding:
AS DIED MAKE HO, LET DIE MAKE FREE
—and it was this sinister communication which stuck in my head as I carried my bags to the river.

The faint
oom-pah-crump
of the marching bands carried from the town over the water. I was in the river of the novel now, and found in my slipping out of Hannibal odd, weighty echoes of Huck Finn’s escape from St. Petersburg. I had hated the stupid literalism of Tom Sawyer’s fence, but the Mississippi was different. Twain had been superstitiously careful in his handling of the geographical details of Huck’s voyage. I had checked his mileages and directions against the charts, and they tallied exactly. They didn’t correspond with the local tourist board’s version of things, nor with the academic notes at the back of my edition of
Huckleberry Finn
; but they fitted the river. Pap Finn’s hut was in the thick timber on the Illinois shore, tucked behind Armstrong Island; the big slough with its wild duck was The Sny. “Jackson’s Island” was
not
Glasscock Island, right across from Hannibal itself; it was the much bigger Gilbert’s Island, eight miles farther on downstream and safely out of range of the town. Huck paddles “away below” the ferry landing at Hannibal, and sees the hump of Jackson’s Island in the darkness from a distance of two and a half miles. In reclaiming Huck as its prodigal son, the town had managed to turn its stretch of the Mississippi upside down.

I went through Lock 22 and
there
was “Jackson’s Island”:

In the late morning, in gauzy rain, it was an insubstantial gray. The cottonwoods and willows were losing their leaves. The bar at the head,
with its line of spindly saplings, stood eight or nine feet proud of the water. There was no doubt at all that it was Huck’s island.

The channel wound around it on the Illinois side. It would still be a good place to go into hiding, with its steep woods and outcrops of limestone like pieces of cheese tunneled by mice. Hanging back on the drift of the current, I let it unroll as slowly as I could. Thirty years ago, I’d smelled the catfish grilling over a wood fire on that shore, and counted the stars and drift logs and rafts. Now, watching the dark places where the boughs leaned far out over the river making dripping caves and grottoes, I was full of the nervous pleasure of being a poacher. Gilbert’s Island was posted as a wildlife sanctuary. I was hunting a memory, out of season. The island had brought it so nearly within my range, but the current took me past it and back to being cold, wet and thirty-seven again.

The drizzle had thickened to heavy rain. It was coming down in quills, stabbing at the water. The wind, too, was beginning to freshen, making the waves curl and fleck with foam at their tips. Nine miles farther on, at Louisiana, Missouri, I put in at a landing where other small boats were jostling noisily at their moorings and I had to inch my way along a tippy pontoon which bucked and twisted as the breakers caught it.

Louisiana was laid out as plainly as a diagram. It had the standard components of a river town: one levee; one pair of tracks; a ruined button factory; one grain elevator; one lumberyard; one bluff lined with mansions, mostly in a state of poor repair; one stretch of flats, littered with clapboard and tarpaper shacks, ditto. Its great merit on that particular afternoon was that the Fireside Lounge really did have a fine log fire. Steaming, stamping, feeling the warm whiskey burn my throat, I was very grateful that Louisiana existed. The woman who was tending bar said, “You fell in?”

“No,” I said. “Not that it would have made much difference if I had.” The woman’s face went serious. “I had a son. He drowned in the river.”

“I’m sorry.”

She used a phrase that I’d heard hundreds of miles upstream, in the mouth of another woman, in another accent: “It takes its toll.”

She said she’d known too many drownings. She came from a family of professional fishermen, and drowning to her was as natural a cause of death as heart disease or cancer. Her son had gone duck hunting in winter. His jonboat had lurched on the wake of a tow and he’d gone over the side. “There was another boy with him. He couldn’t do nothing. Even if they’d got him out, he’d have been dead for sure, the water
was that cold. I don’t like the Mississippi. I never liked it. But my father … my husband … my son … they’ve all loved the river. There was no way I had of stopping them.…”

Two women were sitting up at the bar. Both had mops of crinkly black hair which looked as if it had been fried like Chinese seaweed. “That chickenshit!” one was saying. “Chicken … 
shit.
” Her cigaretty laugh carried down the room.