Don good-bye, next night I dreamed I caught that white winged horse and it took me away. What was odd, Sue Ellen, was that I was naked as the day I was born, riding on that horse up into a night sky, riding right up at the moon. I looked down, and behind me that black horse was coming, flying without wings, and then it come undone, like it was made of dry shadows, and those shadows were swallowed up by the night and were gone. Me and that white horse, we just kept on flying, flying fast to the moon. Next night, I didn’t dream anything about it at all.”
“I guess that’s good,” I said.
“Yes,” Mama said. “It certainly is.”
We slept with our tickets on an end table, the lard can with May Lynn’s ashes holding them down, the bucket of money nearby.
During the night I woke up in my little bed thinking I was on the raft again, and that I was floating downriver. I looked around the room; it took me some time to realize that not only was I not on the raft, but that Skunk was no longer after us; wasn’t nobody after us anymore. I got out of my bed and got dressed in my shirt, overalls, and shoes, and slipped outside.
I strolled down the street toward where the river was. It was a pretty good walk, but the night was nice and I enjoyed it. I could smell the river and hear it before I got to it. Where I ended up was the spot where Captain Burke had loaded me and Jinx in the motorboat and taken us back upriver.
I sat on a smooth part of the ground, in a spot where I could see the water. The river wasn’t too far away from me. I could have spit from where I sat and hit the edge of that dark water without any trouble. It was not a bright night. All there was of the moon was a thin slice of silver, like a curved knife blade. Still, it was bright enough on the brown water I could see it good. The river flowed along like nothing had ever happened on it, to us or anyone else. It was just the river. I had the sudden idea it was like life, that river. You just flowed on it, and if there came a big rain, a flood or some such, and some of it was washed out, in time it would all wash back together. Oh, it might look some different, but it would be the same, really. It didn’t change, but the people on that river did. I knew I had. And Mama had, and so had Terry, and maybe Jinx-but with her, it was hard to tell.
But that old brown snake of a river, it pretty much stayed the way it was, running from one end to the other, out to the great big sea.
I got up and brushed myself off and walked back to the boardinghouse. I went in the room and quietly lifted the lard bucket with May Lynn in it, held it for a moment, and silently thanked her, because in her own way, even if I was a little mad at her, she had put us all together, made a family of us, sent us downriver to find out who we was and where we was going.
I picked up my ticket and placed the bucket down tenderly. I sat by the window with the ticket in my hand, waiting for the first crack of light.
