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Show RIVER "Thanks," I said. "No need for thanks," said the Doctor. "You don't meet many adventurers these days." We followed the road back from the ferry looking for a store. Away from the river we found empty cotton fields. The dying weeds along the roadside were littered with balls of cotton left over from the harvest. The poplar-shaded road was lined with wood frame houses so old and broken down that they must have been held in place by inertia alone. The air was thick and heavy with Indian summer. We didn't found any white gas, but on that lost stretch of backcountry Tennessee road we finally found the South. Adventurers. Even the locals could see us for what we had become. That night we talked about the trip past and the trip to come. We speculated about New Orleans and how good it would feel to get there, though we were still not half the distance between Rock Island and New Orleans. "You know, we're going to get there," said Rosie, and I believed her. Alone with each other, Rosie and I were crazy in love. I'd never been in closer harmony with another person. I can no more recall the emotions of those October weeks in Tennessee and Arkansas, now dreamlike and distant, than ashes can recall the green wood. But I remember we were very much in love. We fell in love with the South, too, the voluptuous green countryside, the fine weather, the slow time, the slow musical softness of southern voices. The land sometimes seemed a parody of itself: there really was Spanish moss in the oak trees, there really were magnolias and white-pillared plantation houses hidden behind the levees. We saw white cranes and flights of ducks and geese bound for the tropics. Sometimes the wind was filled with the webs of spiders that floated -92- |
