Old Glory (50 page)

He had a complete kit of engineer’s tools and rooted my aerial to the boat in two or three expert minutes.

“You’ve come all the way down from Minnesota without a radio?”

“Yes—stupidly.”

“No,” he said, giving a screw a final pinch, “that wasn’t too bright of you.”

“I had a deathbed conversion.”

I went aboard the
Morning Star
for coffee and brownies. Inside, it was a tiny, dark, untidy family house. Five of us huddled in the galley: Ted, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law and I.

“We’re not going anyplace today. This wind, it’s too big even for a boat our size. We’ve had a night of it. It started up around two
A.M.;
we were laying up behind an island, but the anchor dragged, so we came on down here. Shipped a deal of water, too. But further down, it gets more dangerous. You’ve got the Grand Chain through Thebes—that’s big rocks both sides of the channel. They’ve had just about everything wrecked there. Towboats. Cruisers. Yachts. The Coast Guard says you can see the masts sticking up behind every rock.”

The galley stove creaked in its gimbals. When a tow went by, Ted’s wife landed in my lap and a mug of coffee smashed against a bulkhead.

“It’s kind of an art, living on a boat,” Ted said. “I don’t think we’ve got it quite sewn up yet.” More crockery came down in a heap and slid along the floor.

Ted was a geologist. Until the summer, he had made his living draining watery areas for power plants. Then, along with his son and daughter-in-law, he’d given up his job. They had sold their house in Michigan City, east of Chicago; put their furniture in storage; bought the boat and set out to sail around the world. After three weeks,
they had navigated the length of the Illinois River, plus a hundred and eighty miles or so of Mississippi. Originally, they had meant to be in New Orleans by now. The younger couple needed to pay their own way, stopping for two or three weeks at a time to take odd jobs, serving in restaurants or tending gas stations. Already they were running short of money. After New Orleans they’d head on for Florida. With luck they’d reach Puerto Rico before the end of winter. Then … they didn’t know. They hadn’t tested their boat at sea yet. Their attempts at running her under sail had not worked out too well. They were learning as they went along; by Puerto Rico, they would have either drowned or turned into real sailors.

“It was my son’s idea,” Ted said. “Sometimes I think that instead of listening to him I should have gotten him some psychiatric help.”

“That’s just when the wind’s blowing over forty,” his son said.

I said, “I would have thought that living in a space as small as this, the worst things that are likely to blow up are family rows.”

“Oh, yeah, we have our share of those.” Ted was rubbing his glasses with a dishcloth. Without them, his eyes looked small and naked. “My wife here, she’s got a hearing problem. Only on the boat it’s no problem. She never gets involved in the arguments.”

His wife smiled vaguely at him, trying to look as if she had understood.

The river was slapping at the hull. I could see it through the porthole: shredded into curds, it looked cold, dangerous and ugly.

“Why do you think we’re all hooked on traveling like this?” I said. “I have long moments of thinking that I need a dose of psychiatry myself.”

“I don’t know,” said Ted. “Ask a lemming, I guess. But I’ll tell you this—you’ve probably had the same thing too—every guy I’ve ever told about what we’re doing, he’s had two responses, one right after the other. The first is
You must be mad!
and he makes out like he’s looking at a maniac. But then there’s always the second—you know what that is?”

“
I envy you.
”

“Right. Every time.
I envy you
. And the envy’s real. They’d kind of like to hear of our family drowning, just to prove that they needn’t do it themselves. I don’t know. We may get nowhere. We may get as far as Florida and just take the plane back to Chicago. Big defeat. But I’d hate to grow old and die and never have tried it.”

Cape Girardeau itself was forgetful, a place littered with things absentmindedly discarded. It had left its river behind. It was vacating its
old town. Perhaps, with luck, it would soon forget its shopping plazas and motels. Looking at this amnesiac city, I wanted to meet someone with a long memory. The editor of the local newspaper suggested that I should pay a call on Rush Limbaugh, the oldest practicing attorney in town.

He had moved west too. He said over the phone that I would recognize the building where he worked because it was “white” and “Colonial”; but it was a new suburban mock-up of a planter’s mansion, built within earshot of the Interstate. Mr. Limbaugh himself gave to this insipid replica a gravity it didn’t quite deserve. His room was darkened with walls of calfskin books and antique oak. His own face was walnutty, his hands liver-spotted. When he talked, he spoke in an accent very different from the liquid twitter of the usual southern Missouri voice. He held words in his mouth as gently as if they were eggs, liable to be broken by a careless movement of the tongue. His style of speech, a whispery plainsong, was one that I associated with the old gentry of Virginia and Kentucky; in Cape Girardeau it sounded stranded out of place and time.

He showed me his copies of Coke and Littleton: lovely eighteenth-century editions, printed in London.

“You know Sir Edward Coke?” He made the Tudor lawyer sound like a contemporary of his. Mr. Limbaugh was eighty-eight and could afford to be on easy, first-name terms with the historical past. He quoted: “Six hours in sleep, in law’s grave study six, Four spend in prayer, the rest on Nature fix.” He looked like a man who had followed Coke’s precepts to the minute.

He wanted to talk about England, I wanted to talk about Cape Girardeau, and we spent half an hour in courtly negotiation over our preferred topics. I told Mr. Limbaugh how Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn had been when I’d last seen them and how half the courts in the Old Bailey now looked like split-pine sauna baths. In what I hoped was a smart barrister’s move, I wriggled from the architectural nastinesses of modern London to those of Cape Girardeau’s new West Side.

Yes, he said, the plazas were the latest phase of a movement that had started way back when he was a boy. He remembered Cape Girardeau as a real river town. He’d seen steamboats double- and triple-parked down at the landing. There had been a big trade in lumber then; and in shoes; and in cement. The “love boats” had come down from St. Louis: stern-wheeled brothels with a girl in every cabin.

“The old people then, they disapproved of the river. It brought lax morals down from the big city, and radical ideas. They feared that if anything was going to destroy their community, it was the river. But
without the river, the town was nothing. It was like a good boy with a crook for a father. It was dependent on the river, but it knew the river was bad.”

The story that Mr. Limbaugh told had all the elements of a fable. The good child grew up and rejected its disreputable parent. From what it believed to be the best of motives, Cape Girardeau had turned itself into an orphan and inherited the orphan’s lot of rootlessness, anxiety and disquiet.

“Oh, it must have started, now, in nineteen and four. That was the year they completed the ’Frisco railroad, and from then on the town began to turn its back on the river. By the twenties, we had automobiles here. Then in the thirties, when the towboats went from steam to diesel, they could go right by the town without stopping off. It was very gradual. The city kind of
tilted
slowly away from the river and over toward the highway.”

“And the Wall was the final seal on things?”

“Yes … the Wall.” Mr. Limbaugh clearly cared as little for it as I did. He half-closed his eyes and leaned back in his black leather chair. “Our wall. It was the city’s great enterprise. Everybody was for it. They campaigned for it. They raised money. Oh,
I
was all for it—we all were. We looked on the wall as a savior. Every year, people downtown were getting flooded out, and the wall was going to save downtown for us. Instead, it turned into an eyesore and a barricade. I think, now, the wall was a great tragedy that happened to the town. It turned us into a segregated city.”

“But you’ve still got docks below the highway bridge.” I had seen them. Grain, sand, rock, oil and cement were shipped through the port of Cape Girardeau; and there was a big marine repair yard and dry dock where towboats were fitted out.

“Yes,” said Mr. Limbaugh, “but that’s the problem—they’re beyond the wall. The Port Authority is rich, but it doesn’t really belong to Cape Girardeau anymore. Look. Just last year, the Rotarians were getting together to fund a big civic project, and they went to one of the top guys in the Port. They wanted him to contribute. He said, ‘Why—what’s this project got to do with me?’ They said, ‘Well, it affects us all. It belongs to the whole city.’ ‘That’s the point,’ he said; ‘it don’t belong to me. What has the city ever done for me? Everything that comes to me, it doesn’t come from the city, it comes from the river. The river is where I make my living from; why should I care about the town?’ I don’t know how many divorces I’ve handled in my time, but I reckon that the divorce between the river and the city is just about the biggest and saddest divorce I’ve ever seen.”

“Even so, surely downtown could have survived?”

“Without the river? No. Business goes where the wealth is. Where’s the wealth now? It’s out there, on the Interstate Highway. There
is
wealth on the Mississippi, but the city cut itself off from that. So you get the old stores holding out downtown. A lot of folks have sentimental feelings for Bellevue and Fountain and Middle and Main. They’d like to stay. They stay even when they know they’re losing business by it. Every year, though, more of them move out to the plazas. They have to. Right now, the First National is moving its offices west. That’s a big symbol. The bank has
always
been downtown. When the bank moves …” He spread his creased palms upward, and smiled: a lizardy, resigned, old man’s smile. He could regret history, but was wise enough to know he couldn’t quarrel with it.

“Yes,” he said, “the wall was a mistake, but it’s too late to pull it down.”

I was out, beyond the wall, just after dawn. The
Morning Star
had been awake and away before me, and the river was empty, its far shore hidden behind smoky spirals of mist. In the silence, I listened for the hissing noise of boils, but all I could hear was the steady suck of the current at the reveted bank and the pontoons of the jetty.

I connected the radio and switched on to a crackle of river talk. Invisible captains were nursing one another through chutes and cutoffs many miles away.

“I’m just going to tuck myself right in behind you here, Cap, if that’s okay with you now?”

“All righty. Fine and dandy.”

“ ’Preciate it.…”

“We’ll take it real nice and easy. I can see you good, now.”

“Yeah, I can see you too, Cap—”

It was like overhearing people talk in bed. I had seen the tows as a dangerous herd of very alien brutes indeed. It was disconcerting to listen to them now, snuggling up together and fitting the rhythm of their breathing to their mates’. I had no excuse to try broadcasting anything over the air myself, but was in a state of anxious anticipation as to whether I would be let into this privileged world of whispers between the sheets.

Six miles downstream, I had the bend at Gray’s Point marked on my chart as fast and tight. I clicked the button on my microphone and asked it, feeling foolish, whether there were any upstream tows between the Thebes railroad bridge and Mile 46. A voice immediately came back.

“Yeah,
Raven’s Nest?
This is the
Sidney Beale
. We’re coming up now at Mile 45. What’s the problem?”

“I’m in a small boat and don’t want to get caught in your wake. I’m just about to come around the bend at Gray’s Point.”

“You just keep on coming, Cap. We’ll look out for you. How big’s your boat?”

“Sixteen feet.”

“We won’t trouble you none with our wake. We’ll cut right down. You got some good deep water on your black buoy side off-channel. If I was you, I’d run that bend just about as close as you can shave it. Okay, Cap?”

“Thanks very much—”

“Hey, if you don’t mind me asking, where’s that goddamn accent from?”

“England.”

“England? Shit, up here we had it figured for some kinda crazy coon-ass voice—”

So I wasn’t to be blackballed from the club. There was nothing to be scared of in the fast water on the bend. The boat rode it lightly, its bow high, as I skidded off the edge of a boil, steadied on a rip and found my way into the main current again, where the river was as evenly glossy as brilliantine. I waved to the pilothouse of the tow. It had slowed down to a walking pace for me; its wake came in a series of gentle slurps which barely rocked the boat at all.

Sailing nonchalantly in mid-channel through the Grand Chain, I noticed that I was developing all the characteristics of that particularly despicable figure in Victorian novels which touch on clubland, the New Member. He is easily spotted: the New Member lolls comfortably close to the fire on the padded leather seat of the fender, while the Old Member, whose place this has been for fifty years, growls in a corner. The New Member bags the morning’s
Times
and reduces it to a crumpled heap. He borrows five-pound notes from the club servants, exhausts the supply of club notepaper, complains about the inferior quality of the baize on the billiard table, and generally lives under the happy misapprehension that he is the most popular fellow around.

I thought the Grand Chain a pretty piece of scenery. On both sides of the channel, the water creamed around the tips of big redstone boulders. It was a marine graveyard. For four miles, between Thebes and Commerce, the rocks gripped the last remains of every kind of craft that had ever ridden the Mississippi. There were keelboats and flat-boats down there; steamboats, tows, rafts, yachts and sixteen-foot-long aluminum fishing boats. With my new radio, though, out in the main-stream,
a pipeful of Captain Black drawing smoothly, I was looking at the river with the arrogant familiarity of the New Member. Eddies yawned behind the rocks; boils broke in front of them; all as nicely arranged as the patterned coils of water in a Bingham painting.