Free My Present Age by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page A

mind’s blackness. My choice was
Huck Finn
. The book was a favourite of mine. Huck was, like me, superstitious. He lived in a world in which danger could be deflected by signs and ceremonies. Like Huck’s Pap I put a cross oftacks in the heel of my shoe. I also hung a lucky penny on a string around my neck, which left perfect green circles under my sweaty armpits when I slept.
    I talked to myself then, I talk to myself now.
    The bed I lie on is a raft, a raft riding the silt-laden, chocolate currents of the Mississippi. The darkness which surrounds me is the southern night, warm and still, enriched by the heavy, fertile smells of growth and decay. Far away on the river bank to starboard a dog barks sharply, once. The sound is strange, distant yet distinct across the water. A brief light shows itself high on the bluffs, a kerosene star shining behind oilskin in a cabin window. Water rips languidly round a snag unseen in the blackness, the raft spins a quarter-turn when the current coils momentarily like a snake.
    There are two people on this raft, the boy Huck and the man Jim. I play both parts, modulating voice and accent as required. Ed is bound for the Gulf and for the moment I know no impulses but the river’s. Borne on its broad, strong back through a night of huge, flaring stars an arm’s length above me, and soothed by the faint music of the river’s surge, I feel a great peace. For several minutes I lie silent, lulled by the gentle tugging of the current. I clear my throat and speak softly into the night. “A body gits to feelin’ mighty low, ’n po’, ’n lonesome come night on dis ribber, doan he, Mars Huck? A body gits to feelin’ der hain’t no pusson in de worl’ tall dat cares nuff’n fur ’n ole nigger like Jim.”
    “Drat you, Jim! I was most asleep! How you carry on!” Huck cries. Victoria used to reply in a similar vein but in a more modern idiom when I carried on like this.
    “Dat sho is a turrible lonesome feelin’ when you onliest fren’ doan wants to keep you comp’ny on no raf’. Sho nuff is, Huck honey. Hain’t ole Jim bin good to you, chile?”
    “Ain’t you
s’posed
to be good to me? Why d’you think I brung you along, if it warn’t to be good to me?”
    “Dat’s de troof, Huck. Dat’s a fac’.”
    The raft glides around a bend in the Mississippi and a riverboat comes into view, sparks tossed into a sky of pitch by the handful, deck lights blazing like the eyes of angels.
    “Lookee thar, Jim! What you speckilate that is a-makin’ fur us? Sidewheeler or sternwheeler?”
    “Doan ax Jim. Doan ax an ole burrhaid nigra, chile, to speckilate on dat.”
    “Sternwheeler!” cries Huck, triumphant.
    “I calc’late dat’s de
Natchez
boun’ fur St. Joe.”
    “Could be,” allows Huck, topped, crestfallen.
    “Dem sparks a flyin’ out ub de smoke stack am a wonder, hain’t dey, Huck?”
    “ ’Deed they are.” A long silence follows. The great floating hotel of gaiety and pleasure blazes a stately progress down the river, a snatch of music wafts to our bobbing raft, tiny handsome men and stunning women lean against the railings of the upper deck and gaze into the sombre evening, their faces white. Then the sternwheeler churns out of sight and the great train of light spreading from its stern flickers, disappears.
    “Goodnight, Jim,” says Huck at last.
    “Goodnight, Huck honey.”
    A little conversation before sleep is a comforting thing. And that’s not a bad sight to hold in the mind, those sparks streaming upward from a riverboat chimney into the dense, blue-black canopy of an Arkansas night. As Huck notes at one point in the relating of his
Adventures
, “There warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped and smothery, but a raft don’t.”
    No, a raft don’t. And experience has taught me it rides the dark a good deal easier and lighter when it carries two.

4

    I t would be hard to imagine a worse day. To begin with, the weather