The Boy in His Winter by Norman Lock

Author:Norman Lock [Lock, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781934137772
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

I SAT IN THE COMPANION’S SEAT, next to James while he led the boat out from the bayou into the Gulf. Ahead, its water had turned golden like a molten ore poured down from the foundry of the sun. It slipped and rolled in shining disks, and white ibis, gulls, and albatross, come to rest or hunt, turned golden, too, like idols. Much later, in a travelogue, I would see a holy man walk down a stone ghat into the Ganges and sink to his chest into such a gold. The water, at this late-afternoon hour off the Mississippi coast, might have hidden in its depths the ancient water gods: Repun Kamui, Lir, Mazu, Vedenemo, Galene, Chalchiuhtlicue, Kanaloa, Idliragijenget, Mizuchi, Tangaroa, Nammu, and Rán, who, in her nets, collected drowned men for the Norse. Of course, I knew nothing about the heathen deities—my religious education having been limited to what I saw enacted in Sunday school Nativity and Easter plays. Miss Watson would tempt me with cookies and doughnuts to spruce up and bruise my backside against a hard pew. But while James steered northeasterly for Gulfport, I felt what must have been reverence. Maybe an intimation from my own timeless days reached me while I sat on the bridge and stared at the transfigured water. Or I may have sensed the presence of gods with whom—unknown to me—I’d shared a mythic past.

You’re right, it sounds far-fetched, even for me. Why don’t we put it this way: Childhood had made me susceptible to evening’s fugitive beauty. Those sensations of awesomeness—nettlesome and unfamiliar—must have scared me; I broke my spellbound stare and turned to James, like a boy throwing stones at a stained-glass window to prove himself a roughneck and a clod. No boy wants to be thought an angel!

“What’s that sticking in your ears?” I asked, pointing to a Y-shaped wire disappearing into James’s blue-denim shirt pocket. It was, I tell you, a diversion, nothing else: I didn’t want to appear flummoxed in front of James.

“My iPod,” he said, his hand beating time on the polished ball of the throttle. “It’s music, man! Where’ve you been hiding, Mr. Albert? On Mars?”

If only he knew. I leaned toward him and heard a faint and distant singing, reminiscent of a wasp caught in a jar of marmalade. For all I knew of iPods, the sound really might have originated on Mars.

“That’s ‘Slave Driver’ by my righteous man Bob Marley. Listen up, Mr. Albert,” James said while he pushed one of the “buds” in my ear.

I listened without enthusiasm. I did not dislike what I heard; I was indifferent. My heart had moved too strongly toward a recognition of—how do I say it without sounding impossibly vain and pretentious? I guess I can’t, and the reader, if I have one yet, must take me as I am: thoughtful. Call me a thoughtful man who wishes to make himself understood in matters closest to his soul and is in love with words.

So, my heart

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