Old Glory (52 page)

He was not much of a hand as a writer, but one could see the effort that had gone into the careful shaping of each letter. Over the top of this painstaking map of his identity, another prisoner had written an enormous SUCK.

I asked for Joseph Pride in the bar across the street, in the café at the end of town, at the motel on the highway. No one had heard of him.

“Pride? Pride? That name ain’t familiar to me. Sure you got it right? Who is he, this guy—a friend of yours or something?”

“Sort of. I’m just curious about him.”

“Whoever he is, he ain’t from Noo
Mad
-rid.”

Of course he had to be a stranger. Finding himself in a jail cell a long way from home, he was easily panicked into the fear of forgetting who he was. So he had arranged his family around him in a double-entry
accounting system. The connecting arrows, the dots over the capital I’s done as round o’s, had given shape and logic to an accidental life. I thought I knew the fear he’d been through. I hoped that he’d got some sleep after he’d finished making his family tree.

In a motel room that was only a little less sordid than the police cell, I sat writing letters home until sunset. I was sorry, I wrote, that it had been so long since I’d last been in touch, but today I had been prompted by Joseph B. Pride, and if I sounded down in the mouth, this was just a momentary flicker of loneliness in a trip that was not really lonely at all. At six, the lights came on in the Church of Christ across the highway, and I went to the evening service.

It didn’t look like a church. It was a brown concrete box like an old-fashioned bomb shelter. It was furnished with bare pine walls, two rubber plants, an electric clock and a green nylon carpet. Everything about it was a tacit reproach to the showiness of other churches. No piano playing was allowed in the Church of Christ. No rhetoric was permitted in its prayers and sermons. It was a strict, homespun, plain-spoken sect. It had broken away from the Baptists in protest against the singing, shouting and idolatry of the parent church.

The congregation was thin. We were all middle-aged. Most of us were women with tight home perms. We listened to Brother Southern talk on the theme of “troublesome times.” He spoke flatly and sensibly. He had a “secular job” selling tractor parts, and he chatted to us as if we were farmers who knew our business and wouldn’t stand for any hokum from him. He reminded us of the Depression and the Wall Street Crash, of the businessmen in the 1930s who had killed themselves because they couldn’t see a way out. He said that no one in 1979 was going through a rougher time than St. Paul had known; and he upbraided those who, in 1979, had been drawn to religion simply because they had fallen on troublesome times.

“Sometimes, I think our religion is like deer hunting. Just seasonal. You get a bad harvest, or inflation goes up, and on Sundays you see the cars lined up and down the streets around the churches. Then things get better and all you see are the cars of the faithful. That’s what I mean by a seasonal religion. But such is not to be.”

After listening to television gospelers and ranting Baptist preachers, I felt well counseled by Brother Southern. Dry, solemn, moderate, he addressed us as his friends, and sounded as if he really meant it.

“There is a way, friends. We can know the way. To the extent that we can find that way, we can know God. And I believe that the … majority … of the problems in our lives can be solved by our belief in God.” That qualifying
majority
was Brother Southern’s hallmark.

We sang:

Had there been a robed choir and an electric organ up at the front, the words would have sounded grasping and brash. With just the two rubber plants and the wall clock, and with our voices halting as we listened for one another, fractionally out of key and out of time, they sounded modest and groping. In our version, walking in Heaven’s light came across as the most difficult accomplishment in the world. Baptists might find it easy to shun the wrong and do the right; but the Church of Christ knew otherwise.

As I beat my way around the second half of the loop, the waves built steadily higher. At eight-thirty, the river had been cold and calm under a salmon-pink sky. By nine, the sky had gone blue, the wave points glittered, and I could feel the wind on my cheeks, coming in long warm gusts like the breath of a panting dog. It was blowing up from the southwest, dead across the channel, and I had to tack up and run, tack up and run, gaining only a few yards of water on each maneuver. At the neck of the loop, where the river turned right and ran straight into the wind, the shores were marked in lines of white froth and the waves were several inches taller than my boat. If I made a wrong move, or met a tow at too-close quarters, I’d be swamped. I beached in a sandy cove on the Missouri side. Even after I had pulled the boat up as far as I could, its stern was being lifted by the breakers and thumped down in the sand.

There was nothing much to do and nowhere much to go. The brush and timber were too densely tangled to walk through. According to the chart, there was a lake a quarter of a mile beyond them, and behind the lake there was an old meander course which would probably be marsh. I was on an island, and apparently, I had company of a kind: in the impacted mud above the sand there were a lot of large animal footprints—probably coyote, possibly bear. It seemed wise to stay close to the boat.

I settled down to read Timothy Flint. He had been stranded in New Madrid over the winter of 1819. “The region is interesting in many points of view,” he wrote, and as I looked out from my seashore I thought that it must have changed remarkably little since Flint was
here. Around the river, at least, it was still his wilderness of forest, swamp and dead lakes. When he arrived, the town was in a state of reconstruction. The New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 had destroyed almost every log cabin and turned lakes into land and land into lakes. Flint had listened to firsthand accounts of the terrifying events in the night on December 16th, 1811.

I looked up from the book and saw a white motor yacht rounding the bend below Toney’s Towhead. I raised its skipper on the radio.

“What’s it like out there in the channel?”

“Well, it’s getting to be pretty rough, now. We’re forty foot long, and we got a hell of a lot of spray coming over the front. She’s yawing on the boils, too. Ain’t too good out here. We got a wind gauge up in the cabin, here, and we’re getting readings of up to thirty, thirty-five off it. Whereabouts are you?”

“I’m beached up on the island over to your right.”

“How long’s your boat?”

“Sixteen feet and open.”

“Well, I’m telling you: best place for you is on your island. I wouldn’t risk it out here. And if them weathermen are right, I reckon you better start building yourself a house there. Raise yourself some chickens. Stuff like that. Have a good trip, now.”

He suddenly came back. “Shit, I just got you in these glasses. I see your boat now. You better wait till this wind dies right down, man. That ain’t no boat to ride out the kind of weather we got now.”

I counted out my provisions. Having expected to make a new town by lunchtime, I hadn’t equipped myself very well for the life of a castaway. I still had half the bottle of bootleg bourbon, a can of Miller’s left behind by the boy in Cape Girardeau, most of a can of peanuts, and a package of potato chips. I hadn’t touched the fishing rod for weeks, but there were hooks and weights in my grip. All I needed was a worm or two. Using a piece of driftwood as a trowel, I went excavating in the bank of mud and dug out a long, gray, flat-tailed creature. On the hook, it knotted itself into a squirming ball. I used to be tougher-minded about these things when I was seven. I was glad to see it plop into the river twenty yards out where I didn’t have to watch it writhing. I propped the rod on a forked stick, tightened the line, and set to waiting.

Three worms later, the rod tip started to joggle, then be drawn down in a series of long sucking pulls. I struck; expected the muscled run of a trout or bass and got what felt like a large plum pudding. I could feel it burrowing dully at the bottom, trying to shake the hook from its mouth. It came in, lumpishly flapping on the end of the line: a catfish of about a pound and a half. It was a sad, spotty, limp-whiskered thing; the best that one could say of it was that it was definitely lunch.

I got a fire of twigs alight in the lee of a boulder, and set up the foldaway Bar-B-Q that Herb Heichert had loaded onto the boat in Minneapolis. My gutted catfish lay splayed on the grill. A mat gray film had covered its eyes, and a leaping flame burned off its whiskers. Its skin wrinkled and split away from its flesh. Catching and eating catfish had once been part of my old dream of the river; in the future, that bit had better be left out. I burned my fingers on it. It tasted oily, charred and sweet. I ate only a little of the stuff: mild hunger seemed far preferable to dead catfish.

The gusting wind kept steady all afternoon, with waves creaming across the sand and long troughs and ridges stretching smoothly in parallel all the way to Tennessee. The tows were having a rough time of it. They pushed up thirty-foot pillars of spray ahead of them. I listened in to their pilots, kidding each other along through the stormy water. Someone’s barges had broken loose; someone else was going to mosey on down a ways to help find them.

Shortly before dusk, the river quieted just enough for me to move. I made a long diagonal across the waves to the far shore, hugged the bank and reached a muddy inlet by the Tiptonville ferry landing. The
ferry itself was a burned-out hulk rotting on its chains, its cabin sides scratched over with graffiti. There was no sign of traffic on the dirt road on the levee, and the town of Tiptonville was nearly a mile away across fields of late soybeans and cropped cotton. Hoping that the authors of the graffiti were fully occupied elsewhere, I left my luggage in the boat, taking only the radio and the pile of ring-bound notebooks in which I kept my trip.

I trudged through cinders along a raised dike above the fields. Although the cotton had been harvested, shreds of it still clung like tufts of sheep’s wool to the dead brown stubble. In the failing light, the cottonfields looked as if they had caught some sort of fungoid disease. The last time I’d seen cotton had been in Egypt, where it had been as thickly white as shaving foam; acres and acres of it under a blinding sky. This Tennessee cotton, or what was left of it, these grubby, solitary bolls on their mangled stalks, gave the black bottomlands an air of tedious desolation. The mile seemed longer than it was. By the time I reached the town it was night, and wolfish dogs were baying for me from their backyards.

No, sir, said an old man on the street, there sure wasn’t no taxi service in Tiptonville. There had been, but that was ten years back; hell, maybe it was twenty, even. He took a toothless relish in this information, and grew even happier when I asked him if there was a hotel. He
thought
there was a motel, but it was miles out of town. How many miles, he couldn’t rightly say.

“Thanks for your help,” I said.

“It’s a pleasure,” he said, and for once the mechanical expression rang with sincerity.

However, I began to like Tiptonville when, in irritable gloom, I fetched up at the County Sheriff’s Department and met Officer Guyland Todd. If I didn’t mind waiting a few minutes, he said, he wasn’t above turning the police car into a cab for a while. Guyland Todd was kind, courteous and as spruce as a cadet in a graduation parade. He seemed saddened by the fact that my life lacked the orderliness of his own, and he set about taking me in hand: muddying his boots as he helped me unload my luggage from the boat, settling me into a motel cabin on Reelfoot Lake, warning me off the “rough” bars in town, and pointing my path through the trees to Gooch’s Dining Room. I wasn’t to worry about the boat, he said; he’d see that it was checked regularly by the night patrol. If he hasn’t yet been made the sheriff of Lake County, an injustice has been done in Tennessee.

Gooch’s Dining Room was alive with the sound of an unfamiliar hyphenated word:
Eye-ran
. Farmers in their working clothes and baseball
caps were indignantly hurling the word at each other. Eye-ran this, Eye-ran that.… I had to have the whole thing explained to me from scratch. I had been out of the way of news for a good twenty-four hours, and it was possible that I was the last person in the United States to learn that Iranian students had seized the American Embassy in Teheran and taken the entire staff hostage.

As a foreigner, I instantly came under suspicion myself.

“This Eye-ran … is that anywhere near where you come from?”