Lock Norman - The boy in his winter : an American novel

Also by Norman Lock

Fiction

A History of the Imagination

Joseph Cornells Operas / migrs

Trio

Notes to The Book of Supplemental Diagrams for Marco Knauffs Universe

Land of the Snow Men

The Long Rowing Unto Morning

The King of Sweden

Shadowplay

Grim Tales

Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions

Eschers Journal

Love Among the Particles (Bellevue Literary Press)

Stage Plays

Water Music

Favorite Sports of the Martyrs

The House of Correction* (Broadway Play Publishing Co.)

The Contract

The Sinking Houses*

The Book of Stains*

The Monster in Winter

Radio Plays

Women in Hiding

The Shining Man

The Primate House

Lets Make Money

Mounting Panic

Poetry

Cirque du Calder

In the Time of Rat

Film

The Body Shop

* Published in Three Plays

Published in Two Plays for Radio

First Published in the United States in 2014 by
Bellevue Literary Press, New York

FOR INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Bellevue Literary Press

NYU School of Medicine

550 First Avenue

OBV A612

New York, NY 10016

Copyright 2014 by Norman Lock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lock, Norman, 1950

The boy in his winter : an American novel / Norman Lock.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-934137-77-2 (ebook)

1. Finn, Huckleberry (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. Time travelFiction. 3. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Fiction. 4. Reconstruction (U.S. history, 18651877)Fiction. 5. African AmericansCivil rightsSouthern StatesHistory20th centuryFiction. I. Twain, Mark, 18351910.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. II. Title.

PS3562.O218B79 2014

813.54dc23 2013049254

This is a work of fiction. Characters, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donorsindividuals and foundationsfor their support.

Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

FIRST EDITION

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

To my grandsons, Max and Drew, and for my father, a sailor who has lit out for the Territory

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Contents

July 2, 1835August 29, 2005

I LOOK BACK IN MY OLD AGE on that long-ago day when I came off the river and began my grown-up lifeand much earlier still, when, no more than a boy, I set out from Hannibal on the raft with Jim. Of course, I reckon time differently now than we did then, sweeping down the Mississippi toward Mexico as though in a dream. Those days did seem like a dream, though not mine, or Jims, either, but one belonging to somebody whose hand I almost felt, prodding me onward in spite of my reluctance. Or maybe it was just the river I sensed, shaping a kind of destiny for me and also for Jim, whose end came before mine and was, sadly, neither glorious nor kind. We were, each of us in his own way, looking for something that did not exist.

That other story, Jims and mine, about a trip downriver, was true enough. But this, the one I am about to tell, is just as true and even more amazing.

You want to know what I mean by true enough?

I mean thatregardless of how things might have been exaggerated in the telling, how far the truth got stretchedyou could always find in the world the same sort of perversity that was set down in his book, only the reality is not so entertaining or picturesque. What I hope to tell if I can find the words and can bear the sometimes bitter recollection is terrible: an abomination dragged up from the minds reeking bottom like a dead woman asleep inside the closed petals of her sodden skirts. I saw that after the wreck of the Sultana, whose charred flotsam glided down the somber river like so many smashed front porches. Mine will not be painted in the garish colors of the book that preceded it by nearly two hundred years.

Whose book?

Mark Twains, of course. Who else besides him (and now me) has bothered about the fate of two outcasts and runaways: one a thief, the other a slave, both determined to put a thousand miles of river water between themselves and righteousness? We wanted only our freedom. We saw it in different lights, but thats all we wanted. To take the cramp out of existence, to lift our heads above our galled necks and tell all those who said no at every turn to go to hellor to blazes, as Tom Sawyer would have said, whose language was more refined than my crude midwestern vernacular, which, in the years since then, I have smoothed out like a wrinkled pair of pants after the hot iron has done its work.

What? You want to know why the story I have to tell is more amazing?