The Boy in His Winter Read Online Free PDF Page B

boat, boys,” he said, taking his seat in the stern. “It was swell to see you again, Huck.”
    “Same here, Tom.”
    “You take good care, now.”
    “I’ll try,” I said.
    And then Tom was gone from our lives, and Jim could breathe once again like a living man.
    I said earlier that I would avoid the vernacular in favor of a more dignified way of speaking. But I couldn’t resist it and may fall, again, into a common usage for the fun of it. The only person who might object to my attempts at dialect is Jim, and he’s long dead.
    “I HATE WHEN YOU SIT and brood, Jim.”
    “I don’t brood; I think.”
    “What do you think about?”
    “At night, I think about the origin of stars: how they hurl themselves against the outposts of nothingness. During the day, of the effects of sunlight on fog and water, the secret language of birds and how they turn as one in flight, and how a cloud of gnats reproduces certain nebula in miniature.”
    I feel obliged to rehabilitate Jim after having shown him in less than a heroic light during the performance of our theater of cannibalism. He was not the simpleton Mark Twain made him out to be, nor was he the blank, the zero, the empty slate I sometimes took him for. It isn’t easy to describe well and truly the persons and events that figured in my story. I’ve scribbled some before, but not at length or with a responsibility to my characters—which, in this instance, are Jim and I.
    To continue our palaver, without the artifice of dialect to make it plausible:
    “What do you dream, Jim?”
    “I dream of the oracle bones used by my ancestors toforetell the future, of a small drum, and also of animals—their eyes full of suffering.”
    To be honest, I don’t know what Jim was thinking and dreaming during the 125 years we were together on the raft—from 1835 to 1960, although it seems now to have been no time at all. I can’t read minds, and Jim, by nature shy and reserved, would not have shared his innermost life with me. Some things I have to imagine, else there will be no story. And if I have not been entirely truthful, it is not with any intent to deceive. Mark Twain passed his book off as if I had written it myself. I’ve told you before that it was none of my doing. Frankly, I resent the words he put in my mouth. If Jim were here, I’m sure he’d say as much. I’m not out to correct Twain’s mistakes; he’s famous and has every right to them. I want only the chance to tell the story in my own way while I’m aboveground and in my right mind.
    What was I thinking then?
    God knows. Probably about the river: its bottom, bends, shoals, reefs, and snags. It always fascinated me. When Pap was sober, he would take me down to the mudflats, where we’d do a little fishing. He liked to eat river carp. Before his hands shook from liquor, Pap could scale and skin a carp faster than any other man I know. I can see him now, against the sinking river light, his bare arms glittering with pink scales.
    My mother? Never knew her. You can say that my youth was spoiled by men. I mean, I never knew the gentleness of women, which might have smoothed and civilized me. The Widow Douglas thought too much about the next life to be of any use to a boy in this one. Miss Watson was a backbiting screech owl of a woman without a charitable bone in her body. She was as stern and unbending as a corset and had aface like a broadax. In Hannibal, when I recommended killing her to Tom, I wasn’t fooling.
    I ought to mention the dead man Jim and I fished up from the river, north of Memphis. From his striped overalls and cap and the coal dust ingrained in his hands, his cheeks, in the loose folds of his bristly neck, he gave every appearance of being a locomotive engineer. But the wonder of it was how he’d come to be adrift in the main channel of the Mississippi. We had no answer, and never did discover anything to account for the incongruity. The night after we’d fished him up, I heard a locomotive