IT WAS THE KIND of mistake I was happy to make: Commerce, Missouri, had not yet been entirely washed away. Other than the white church and steeple, there were several houses, a post office, and a small winery nearby, but the rest of what was once there—the name notwithstanding—was a motley few beat-up and shut-down buildings, and no one selling gasoline or anything else. Northward along a diminishing road below a wooded bluff was the Williams home, a small cabin added on to over the years so that it was a warren of dim rooms. Inside, the air lay compacted into a single scent of children, cooking food, and river-bottom damp; it was a heavy air, but one generated by breathing people, the very sort we were relieved still to be among.
Annie, Dariel’s wife, offered us appetizers of bologna on white bread, to be followed by catfish—blues and flatheads—he had taken from the river; she battered the big chunks in cornmeal and fried them in an iron skillet. “Is there enough?” Pilotis said. “I mean, with all your family?” “It’s hard to run out of catfish here,” Dariel said.
While the dinner crackled in the skillet, we sat at the kitchen table. Dariel operated heavy machinery at a quarry, a dangerous job requiring him to move rock around the edges of the pit. The Piper took out his fife and played an old Erie Canal tune, and children, Williams’s nephew and nieces, came from unseen corners of the house: a young girl just recovering from chickenpox, a ten-year-old boy, and his elder sister. The boy, Michael, sat absorbed in the music, the teenager trying not to be, and the little girl alarmed. Michael soon began pouring out questions. Where had we come from? Had anyone drowned? Did we think our boat would sink? When he heard Pilotis mention New York City, he stood up. “You saw the Statue of Liberty? I’ve only seen her in a book.” We told our tale, the boy alight with fascination at one more strange thing the Mississippi had washed up into his life. His excitement grew until his questions turned into a narrative of his own. He had a slight speech impediment, the result of a perforated eardrum affecting his hearing, something a recent operation should correct, but still his words required attention. What I heard as “Thomas” was “Commerce,” and “hatchet” was “statue.” He reported the indignities his elder sister visited on him and his attempt to sell her up in Farmington once, a try that brought an alleged offer of fifty dollars. To that she said, “Quit it!”
He talked so much I said, Son, I think you’ll run for governor one day. “No,” he said, “I want to be an author.” “It’s about the same thing,” Pilotis said. “Slinging the bull.” Michael reached for a pencil. “I’ve got my signature ready,” and he carefully demonstrated it for us. You need to write a book before you can sign one, I said. “I’m about ready,” he said. “My first title will be An Outline of Missouri. You think that’s history, but it’s not. It’s about a ten-year-old boy who has no sisters and walks around the border of Missouri with his dad. They cross the Missouri River okay, but when they get to the Mississippi the father drowns, so the boy has to go on by himself. After he reaches his starting point, he goes to see the governor who gives him a million dollars, and the boy becomes a legend.”
Nodding toward me, Pilotis said, “Watch what you give out in front of him. He’s been known to appropriate a story or two. That’s probably why his pen’s working right now.” “He can have it,” Michael said. “I’ve got more. Like The Ghost of the Mississippi. It’s about this ghost with pale blue eyes, no nose. Long, bony fingers that can claw girls’ necks.”
At that point, the room went dark. After surprised exclamations from around the house and a shriek from an elder sister, Dariel guessed the flood was responsible, and Pilotis said to the boy, “I think you’ll be an author all right because coincidences take to you. That’s how our skipper gets by.”
Annie pulled out a kerosene lamp. By its lambent wick and the flickering blue flame under the skillet, we began to eat while she kept the catfish coming, crisp and moist and sweet, and the talk rolled along. The boy told how river people when they really needed food “fished intelligent,” if illegally, by cobbling together a simple battery-powered device inside a snuff can that could make a catfish dance on its tail and sometimes even jump into the boat. The little shock boxes were almost better than food stamps.
The house got so close in the warm darkness we all went onto the porch and stood looking out at the river, now agleam with moonlight, more lovely than lethal, and Dariel said, “The current’s bad in this section because the river’s narrow and it goes over hard bottom. Tomorrow you’ll catch it pretty good from here on up past Cape, and the river’s still rizen. And the Missouri’s worse.”
Honeysuckle and tree frogs and mosquitoes drenched the muggy night, and our conversation was a staccato of slaps and sentences until someone said, “Oh my god, look out there!” Down through the thick moonlight came a single barge, twisting in the currents, a juggernaut broken free and in search of a collision to stop it. “If there’s one loose barge, there’s six more,” the boy said, and a few moments later came a horrendous thud, a deep and ominous sound, and Dariel said, “That’s another one hitting the railroad bridge at Thebes, three and a half miles upriver.” When Pilotis and I went aboard Nikawa for the night, I lay swatting at mosquito whines and listening to the awful thuddings of berserk barges roaming the dark.