The Boy in His Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mississippi steamboat? I seem helpless not to think about time, and what I had intended to be a simple story of Jim’s and my life on the river becomes more and more snarled in complexity.
    Seeing a gaudy paddle wheeler near the opposite shore, I found my thoughts wandering to the pleasures of a journey by boat, instead of toiling aboard a raft. We did often struggle, Jim and I, no matter that we traveled in mythic time toward the future.
    O N M AY 10, 1862, WE ARRIVED at Plum Point Bend, where a naval engagement between the Confederate River Defense Fleet and a squadron of Union ironclads was in noisy progress. I should describe the ships’ maneuvering, the skirmishing of men on either side, the confusion and alarms. I ought to give an account of the battle’s importance, and because the American Civil War is relatively ancient history, I should summarize its causes (having more to do with Jim and his family than with me and mine). But at this moment, I prefer to note the color of the water, the behavior of clouds and cannon smoke in the changeable wind, the elegant figures traced by birds against the reeling sky.
    You say I have a duty to history.
    Having been in history as long as I have relieves me of any further obligation to it.
    You say I have a duty to readers to flesh out my story.
    Sorry, but I find such fleshing-out to be tedious and beside the point.
    You want to know what my point is in all this?
    I’m not sure. You see I am, at least, honest. But I think“all this” has to do with ideas of time and the secret confluences by which we arrive at points in our own histories. But because I do not wish to be remembered (if I will be remembered) as a self-indulgent fantasist, I’ll skip the purple patch for now, however much I wish to write it. I need to make amends for my indifference, for having turned my back on the world in favor of the beauties of the way. I’ll try to study cruelty (I regret my own) and render it in more familiar terms. But something of Mark Twain’s playfulness, his habit of fantasizing and exaggerating must have rubbed off on me. How could it be otherwise? So this account of my life must be impure: a mixture of high-minded tragedy and lowborn comedy. At Plum Point, at this moment in time, I was more interested in the rude clash of ships and ironclads than in grand ideas or my moral misdeeds and childish stupidity. (How could I have imagined that—215 years in the future—I’d be preparing to leave time once more and, in all probability, never come back to it?) I had the smell of gunpowder up my nose, and no other smell is so exciting to the boyish imagination.
    Yes, yes! I am an old man and may have forgotten how the scent of a woman has power to inflame! But if you’re to be the secretary of my memories, you had better learn to flatter me. I’d have used a Dictaphone, but I dislike machinery that does not hum or clank—crude sounds that give it humanity.
    Plum Point.
    The General Sumter had rammed and driven off the Union ironclad Cincinnati. I’d seen the General Sumter many times before, on the river near Hannibal, when she was the Junius Beebe, a side-wheeled steamer working as a tow. She’d been outfitted in Algiers, Louisiana, with ironplates covering her bow and commissioned as a ram for the Confederacy. She was giving the Union boats hell, and I had my hat off to her when the Cincinnati ran aground. I could see Jim didn’t approve of my enthusiasm, but at the time I thought no more of the skirmish than if I’d witnessed a contest of battling eggs or a ruckus in the schoolyard. My conscience was raw and unformed.
    On the General Sumter , three Confederate officers were leaning on the upper-deck railing, when one of them straightened up and began to shout toward us, “Ahoy! Huckleberry Finn!”
    He and I might have been parted by fifty yards of water and twenty-seven years when we’d gone our separate ways, but I knew at once and without doubt that the officer waving