Epilogue

The graveyard is old and overgrown, and filled with the sounds of the river. It sits high on its bluff, and below it rolls the Mississippi, on and on, as it has rolled for thousands of years. You can sit on the edge of the bluff, feet dangling, and look out over the river, drinking in the peace, the beauty. The river has a thousand faces up here. Sometimes it’s golden, and alive with ripples from insects skimming the surface and water flowing around some half-submerged branch. At sunset it turns bronze for a while, and then red, and the red spreads and makes you think of Moses and another river a long way away. On a clear night, the water flows dark and clean as black satin, and beneath its shimmering surface are stars, and a fairy moon that shifts and dances and is somehow larger and prettier than the one up in the sky. The river changes with the seasons, too. When the spring floods come, it is brown and muddy and creeps up to the high water marks on the trees and banks. In autumn, leaves of a thousand colors drift past lazily in its blue embrace. And in winter the river freezes hard, and the snow comes drifting down to cover it, and transforms it into a wild white road upon which no one may travel, so bright it hurts the eyes. Beneath the ice, the waters still flow, icy and turbulent, never resting. And finally the river shrugs, and the winter’s ice shatters like thunder and breaks apart with terrible, rending cracks.

All of the river’s moods can be seen from the graveyard. From there, the river looks like it did a thousand years ago. Even now the Iowa side is nothing but trees and high, rocky bluffs. The river itself is tranquil, empty, still. A thousand years ago you might watch for hours and see nothing but a solitary Indian in a birch bark canoe. Today you might watch for just as long, and see only one long procession of sealed barges, pushed by a single small diesel towboat.

In between then and now, there was a time when the river swarmed and lived, when smoke and steam and whistles and fires were everywhere. The steamboats are all gone now, though. The river is peaceful. The dead in the graveyard wouldn’t like it much this way. Half of those buried here were rivermen.

The graveyard is peaceful, too. Most of the plots were filled a long, long time ago, and now even the grandchildren of those who lie here have died. Visitors are rare, and the few who come visit a single, unimpressive grave.

Some of the graves have large monuments. One has a statue on top of it, of a tall man dressed like a steamer pilot, holding a portion of a wheel and gazing out into the distance. Several have colorful accounts of life and death on the river inscribed on their tombstones, telling how they died in a boiler explosion, or the war, or by drowning. But the visitors come to none of these. The grave they seek out is relatively plain. The stone has seen a hundred years of weathering, but it has held up well. The words chiseled into it are plainly readable: a name, some dates, and two lines of poetry.

CAP’N ABNER MARSH
1805–1873
So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night.

Above the name, carved into the stone with great skill and great care, is a small decoration, raised and finely detailed, showing two great side-wheel steamers in a race. Time and weather have wreaked their damage, but you can still see the smoke streaming from their chimneys, and you can almost sense their speed. If you lean close enough and run your fingertips over the stone, you can even discern their names. The trailing boat is the Eclipse, a famous steamer in her day. The one in front is unknown to most river historians. She appears to be named the Fevre Dream.

The visitor who comes most often always touches her, as if for luck.

Oddly enough, he always comes by night.