The Way of the Mississippi/Chapter 3

ERALD TOSKIN, having cut loose from the bank of the Mississippi, floated down the midstream, and breathed deeply in the inspiration of his wonderful experience. At last, with ample funds for a year or two of river studies, he was about to come into his own field of endeavor.

"These magnificent distances—can I ever show that monster flood?" he asked himself, gazing in awe at the coiling and swirling of the surface eddies, led in his glance to the miles distance down the visible slope of the sweeping current.

He seized charcoal and tacked up a sheet of drawing paper on his board, to try by sketches to catch the spirit of the things which presented themselves to his eyes. He tried broad lines and fast strokes—and then seized a sharp pencil tip and essayed the effect with fine, hard lines on a smooth calendered surface, which he soon covered with India ink—and regarded the dozen sketches he had made with equal disfavor, since the reality was so much more wonderful than the mere suggestion of lines and shades and strokes.

He forgot to eat his lunch, he was so busy with his art; he studied the swirls of the surface and watched the diminishing spirals of the little sucks; he dropped on his hands and knees, to look over side and close at hand at the spreading of the boiling glaze, when jets from the bottom poured up and swept out upon the surface in great, circling figures of many shapes, trying to catch the lines of the crinkling edges and the weaving masses of silt as they fell into shapes of their own weave; he leaned against the cabin of his boat and looked at the low banks, with their shadows of overhang and purple mass, with their tangles of tree roots, exposed by the washing away of the earth, dooming the forest in miles of caving bend; and on approaching an island he saw on the right hand a wide, vast lake in motion, and down the chute, on the other, a rippling little river sparkling in the sunshine—and a thousand effects, a thousand spectacles, challenged his skill and doomed him to the eternal strife of doing with a few pigments and all the paints and brushes available, what the river was undertaking to show, using the floods of a thousand valleys, the light of the sun and the shadows of cyclone and hurricane clouds for its master effects.

"Oh, yes!" Toskin blinked, when in the twilight following sunset he rowed into an island eddy and heaved an anchor overboard near the edge of the main current. "There's no doubt in my mind that there are pictures down here—for one to paint! My land—and I didn't take a photograph! I've been fussing with sketching when I ought to have made photographs!"

His heart sank within him as he wandered if he should ever again see just precisely those same effects that had charmed and baffled him all the afternoon. He caught up the work that he had attempted, and by lamplight, without the spectacle of the reality to shame his work by the truth, he was startled to see, and especially to feel, in what he had done an undertone of spirit that just suggested itself to him—an atmosphere of expression which lifted him to his tiptoes, for it might mean at last a rudiment of style and themes of his own.

Those sketches, hasty, crude, and even to some extent snatches of the most commonplace phenomena of the flood mass and far perspectives of the Mississippi did reveal to him the fact that all his dreaming, all his expenditure, all his efforts were worth while, and if he were to leave the river at this very moment he should not have come in vain. A few quick scratches, a sweep of charcoal, a twist of the hand—as long as he lived, that one bit, surrounded by a dozen other attempts, would inspire him with hope and confidence, for he had seen and recorded in it the effect of a dozen acres of the Mississippi surface, with its ripples and breaks and reflections of the wilderness along the banks.

He went about cooking supper. It was surprising, now that he thought of eating, how rapidly his hunger increased, and he broiled his steak over the red-hot plate of his oil stove, fried potatoes, percolated coffee and made ample preparations to appease his ravenous appetite. Having dined, he leaned back in a luxurious arm chair that was part of the boat's outfit, and before he knew it, he was asleep. Never in his life had he had a more engrossing day, and never had he been more tired.

It was after midnight when he awakened. He looked around him, and was a minute or two resolving his dreams of exhibitions in art galleries that were miles long and down both banks of the Mississippi, into the fact of his being afloat in a shanty boat He sat up and looked around himself with some satisfaction. On a shelf in one comer of the room were several newspapers, and he went to gather these up to read a little, not realizing how long he had been lying there.

There were five or six of the papers, and they showed that they had been carried around in peoples' pockets. He opened one of them, and there across the full breadth of the first page was the headline:

It was an account hurriedly thrown together by an evening newspaper reporter and gave the salient details of the discovery and mystery of the river crime. Toskin read the story with interest, though horrible things had never attracted his fancy.

The other newspapers contained other accounts of the investigation into the circumstances of the homicide, and there in the columns of the Trade-Caller was a picture of the shanty boat, a photograph of the victim, and more discussion of the Mississippi River's penchant for strange and inexplicable crimes—here was a man who had been murdered while he slept! Shanty boaters declared a river man would have felt the boat shake and been awakened by any one coming aboard, no matter how silently and carefully, since a touch will make the floating craft vibrate noticeably.

Toskin needed no back to his chair as he read down this second day story. Over and over again he looked at the picture, and there crept into his thoughts the feeling that he must have seen that boat somewhere, but not till he saw, in a still later paper, a statement that the custodian of public property would offer the mystery murder boat for sale, did it really occur to him that when he purchased this beautiful house boat, all neatly painted, all wonderfully equipped, from the harbor policeman, he had acquired the very craft of that newspaper sensation.

“Gracious!” he exclaimed, looking around him. “Murder—ugh!”

Reading tragedy at midnight on the Mississippi, especially Mississippi River’s own strange brands of horrible circumstances, is not to be recommended save for those people who are seeking sensations. Toskin, whether he knew it or not, was undergoing a bit of river lore.

When he looked at the bunk, he could see there the dim outlines of the very picture of the murder victim, so vivid was his imagination. He felt himself shrinking and the cold chills painting goose pimples along his thighs and across the back of his shoulders.

His lips were dry, his throat dusty as alkali, but when he started to walk out into the dark and gloomy kitchen, where there was a water pail, but no light, he stiffened where he sat, unable to move. Fear gripped him—terror that grew within till the very beating of his heart was thunder in the silence of the cabin in the river quiet.

Jerald Toskin had trifled a little with stances and mediumistic phenomena, and sometimes he had seen a OuijiOuija [sic] board spell out things which were startling and inexplicable. The flutter of a curtain, moved by invisible powers, the lifting of a table under the gentle urge of a circle of hands, whose finger tips were on it, messages across the border land of ultimate adventure were all well enough with one’s own people around, but here in this boat!

"Good land! Good land!" Toskin breathed. "That—that blamed old cop! That blamed old cop! That's why everybody was rubbering—ah-ah!"

He heard something; it sounded as though his anchor rope was stretching when a current in the eddy pulled the shanty boat about; he felt a cold wave, and no iceberg out of Greenland ever made a man shudder more than Toskin. He turned his from side to side, and he reverted to another look at the bunk on which, he had read, murder had been done.

“It’s the boat—my boat! My Gawd!” he thought, and the hollow groan of his voice checked him where he sat. He trembled, and as he trembled, he forced himself to rise and walk steadily out into the kitchen, and around the end of the partition into the pale shadow and drink till his thirst was assuaged with the water. Then he returned to the chair and resumed his seat. He picked up the newspaper and read the several accounts of the results of a ghastly tragedy.

When out of his subconsciousness welled up whole flood tides of fears and dreads, he forced himself calmly to reason with himself, and urge away the terror by bringing in the reign of his judgment. But that fight which he made with himself in those long hours left its mark on his very soul. He won out, but not by banishing the spectres from him.

Instead, he accepted their presence; he told himself that far and wide across the earth are the dismal places of violence and cruelty and hate; down the Mississippi, especially, he was traversing the realms of ten thousand steamboat, war time and individual tragedies; if he would do all these things full justice, it would not be merely by pretty drawing and coloring of charming, forceful current lines, the crumbling down of undermined banks, the pitiful circumstance of giant, beautiful trees ready to fall in their prime into the eddies; more than these gentle beauties, he must show the darkness of the deeps and the protest of the losers.

And when he had come to this resolution he was astonished at the change he found in his attitude. He leaned forward on his fist, his elbow on his knee and gazed steadfastly at that bunk in the corner, against the kitchen partition. He was not trying to see anything; he was trying to understand the situation; he knew, from the papers which reporters and detectives had left on board, all that was known generally about the matter; but the river knew the answer—that great flood pouring by just knew everything!

He walked out on the stern deck, closed the door behind him and looked as the glare of the lamplight faded in his eyes out across the waters. At first he could see nothing,  and then he saw more and more clearly another most wonderful spectacle—the river night: the waters glimmered, the far wilderness seemed to be astir, the near ripple down the chute was whispering like many voices, scarcely audible; there was as perfect a river individuality in the night gloom as by the flare of day.

The river, however, was not through with Jerald Toskin—not by any possible means was he a finished river man. He had fought his superstition, he had overcome it, and he stood just a little too calm, just a little too proud of his heroic accomplishment. Old Mississip' saw him, sure enough.

From somewhere right around him came a cry, low and thrilling:

"He'p! He'p!"

Toskin nearly collapsed, as with bulging eyes he leaned forward and and gaped out over the water.

"He‘p! He"p!" the voice repeated, high and squeaky, like a bird's. "I cain't git to move. He'p! He'p!"

The artist, all ready to begin his great career, now that his studies were over, leaned to see—and yet he was sure in his very soul that if he saw anything it would be with his mind's eye. and that any reply he might have to make to that cry must be with the voice of his soul alone.

"It's the murdered spirit!" he thought to himself. "Good Lord—what can I do? What 'll I say to comfort 'im?"

He projected his ideas into space, and wished that he had paid more attention to the telepathic questions of the day, and wildly he groped about in his mind for the polite forms of polite address at such a moment.

Then over the side, he heard a splashing in the water; he heard the spattering of something afloat and uneasy; right by him he heard a whispering wail:

"He'p! He'p! I'm a-drownin'!"

Toskin leaned over and looked, and there right under him was a face, a mortally white, peaked face, with eyes that fairly glowed as they bulged.

"My Gawd! My Gawd!" Toskin gurgled. "What next?"

There it was, and as two hands were lifted slowly, the face submerged, and instantly there was a bubbling and gurgling. One long, white, bony hand brushed against the side of the bot, and the finger tips worked around and along the planking till they found the slight little crack, where a splinter had broken out. There they hooked in, and the face emerged above the surface again.

The other hand came squirming up out of the water, rising higher and higher, and as the face turned over, the back of a man's head showed. Sputtering, ducking, gurgling, the figure reached up and a white hand hooked over the top of the gunwale.

Straining there. it was joined by the other, and Toskin drew back with his own two hands, with long, delicate fingers drawn bone-rigid, rising before him in deep-breathed mortal expectation.

The river was pale, the banks of earth were revealed beneath the now visible massive trunks of trees; a few yards distant stretching away upstream, was the gray distances of a sand bar, turning yellow and bluish toward the low switch willows.

If it had still remained dark, there is no telling what Jerald Toskin would have endured, or whether his excitement and experience would have proved too much for him, but this was the short moment of a lower Mississippi dawn; daylight was coming on apace, and in a moment sunshine swept like a golden haze through the top twigs of the 'longshore forests.

The livid, pale hands crawled and reached, straining over the gunwale, and alongside was the gasping and groaning of something, perhaps a man, in the awful struggle of a heart reluctant to die, but weakened and growing breathless.

Toskin slowly realized that this was daytime; he found it hard to overcome the tense belief that the thing was a river spirit; but when the truth dawned on him he sprang and seized the wrists of the figure, and with a strength he did not know he possessed, lifted the bedraggled figure over the side, and then stretched him out on the deck.

It was, indeed, a man—a man pale and shriveled by hours and hours of floating in the water. The necessity of struggling ended, the body fluttered a little, and the eyes closed in unconsciousness.