The Classic Crusade of Corbin Cobbs

by Michael Ciardi

The course of my expedition transported me to yet another darkened habitat, but this terrain wasn’t nearly as daunting as the previous location. Fireflies flickered in patches of flowery sedge along a river that unfurled like a muddy sleeve through a meadow. The glow worms’ luminous mating calls provided me with random glimpses between the magnolias and sycamores, but most of this summer evening’s illumination derived from a moon unmarred by cloud cover. Ashen moonbeams caressed the river’s swarthy tides, stippling the currents with flecks of ghostly light. I progressed along a grassy embankment in awe of this waterway’s persuasive grip upon the landscape. Eventually, my eyes settled on a cluster of willow trees jutting from a low portion along the riverbank.

  The willows’ umbrella-like branches tickled the water’s surface with their prancing arms. I nostalgically thought of my boyhood refuge at Lake Endelman. A chorus of crickets helped lure me into a phase of remembrance, where I once sat with a journal in hand and the exuberance of untainted dreams as my allies. Naturally, I felt pacified in this similar environment, and imagined that nothing could’ve disrupted my respite here. I gathered that no harm could’ve ever befallen me while encamped beneath the vigil of these emerald-armed sentinels.

  Of course, this reprieve from more essential ponderings didn’t last longer than a boy’s fantasy. Just beyond a verdant shield of the willow tree nearest to me, I noticed the edge of a canoe protruding from its intended camouflage. I then detected the plume of smoke rings rising from behind the canoe’s opposite end. The tobacco-laced air served as a signal for me to investigate these premises further.

  While I considered it rather ordinary that someone other than me would’ve found solace in such wooded quarters tonight, my eyes weren’t quite prepared for who remained stealthily tucked in the underbrush. A boy, who I deemed no older than fourteen summers, squatted in the thicket behind a canoe. If not for the smoke, an amber glow emanating from his corncob pipe might’ve been mistaken for the largest lightning bug to ever flit within this sylvan backdrop. Obviously, the boy’s intentions here were of a furtive nature, and I encroached his space accordingly.

  The adolescent didn’t pay much mind to my rambling movement at first. Perhaps he was too preoccupied with his surveillance of the river’s driftwood to lend an eye or ear to my observations. The moonlight proffered an advantage to those not born with nocturnal vision on this night. Even through the spliced shadows of treetops, I clearly perceived this lad’s unkempt appearance. By even a vagrant’s standards, this boy’s clothing and skin looked in dire need of a thorough cleansing.

  He wore ragged denim overalls with the legs cuffed to the middle of each shin. A misshapen straw hat covered his mouse-brown hair, and I suspected he preferred the earthy scents encompassing him rather than a wash barrel of soapsuds. As he puffed away on his pipe like a connoisseur accustomed to nasty habits, I shifted through the brushwood to study him at closer range. A crackle of broken twigs beneath my shoes spoiled any chance of a surreptitious examination of his character. Upon hearing the disturbance, the boy leaped into a crouching position like a jumping frog.

  The connection between this particular boy and the river behind him now seemed indivisible. After observing the splotches desecrating the front of his clothing, I resolved that I had happened upon this boy just as he was about to embark on his adventure along the mighty Mississippi’s currents. Of course, this passageway’s trek between North America’s mid-western states was synonymous with no one better than this iconic Missourian.

  Huckleberry Finn most likely looked and acted like the majority of untutored boys coming to age in St. Petersburg during the South’s antebellum. Aside from the pig’s blood staining his overalls, his skin held a myriad of textures from the soil he scuttled over. But I imagine that no amount of water—perhaps not even all of it gushing from the mouth of the Ol’ Man itself—could’ve washed the boy’s spirit clean of tomfoolery. Besides, I knew he had other matters to contend with rather than adhering to routine bathing practices. From my understanding of his present circumstances, avoiding his father’s inebriated wrath registered as a far more crucial chore.

  Obviously, my abrupt emergence from the line of trees startled Huck. He might’ve already presumed I had a stake in returning him to the pallor-faced Pap. As a mode of defense, he squandered little time in letting me know that he didn’t plan on being captured after elaborately faking his own death. He may have lived just shy of fourteen years, but his voice flashed with more cold energy than all the fireflies pulsating in the grasslands.

  “You best get a-going back along the river, mister. Hain’t nothing here alive going to haul me back to Pap’s cabin. That’s all I’m a-saying.”

  I recalled the course of Huck’s travels, and realized that he hadn’t yet taken to the river en route to Jackson Island. My unscheduled visitation surely wouldn’t have delayed him by more than three minutes. If I expected to make any headway with this rascal, then I first needed to prove that my allegiance belonged to him more so than his abusive father.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” I told the boy. “I don’t even know Pap, and I’m not in the mood for chasing after kids in your predicament.”

  Huck scratched the side of his torso as a hoard of mosquitoes snacked frenziedly on his exposed flesh. Based on my attire alone, he was wise to the fact that I had indeed ventured far from my own home. “I reckon you is lost,” he said.

  “It’s that obvious, huh?”

  “On account of your funny talking and getup, I’m a-thinking that you never drifted down this far south before.”

  “I guess there’s no fooling you, Huck,” I declared, realizing too late that I stated the boy’s name before he introduced himself.

  “You knowed me by name,” said Huck. His tone became increasingly cautious as he continued. “If you warn’t on a lookout for me, then who blabbed to you where I was a-hiding?”

  Fortunately, I was able to pitch a credible response to explain my foresight. “The folks back in town haven’t stopped calling for you since you turned up missing. I just assumed that you might be the same boy everyone is searching for.”

  “For all they knows I got myself killed by robbers and throwed out by a slough or creek. I’m a-guessing that will put them off my scent for a spell.”

  Huck already expected that Pap was oaring down the river between the driftwood to reclaim what he presumed was the corpse of his child. He refused to take his eyes off the water for too long a period. “I could help you launch that canoe in the water if you like,” I said, hoping that he’d view my proposal as a genuine favor between strangers.

  “You have no cause to help me none, mister.”

  “No reason why newly acquainted folks can’t be hospitable, right?”

  The boy humored me by almost producing a gap-toothed grin, but his wide eyes eventually found their way to the sky, where a bright moon balanced over our shoulders like a wagon wheel of cheese. “The moon is good for a-lotta reasons on most nights,” he debated, “but that kind of shine on the water will get a fella catched in a hurry. I’ll be paddling down current by and by, but I hain’t fixing to leave just yet.”

  Huck’s reservation was understandable, and I couldn’t fault him for keeping a safe distance from anyone older than his good friend Tom Sawyer. It was to my advantage that I had acquired some knowledge of his forthcoming journey, and I wished to investigate the significance of his plight in comparison to my own. I continued to observe the boy as he focused his attention on the river’s currents. He cupped his hand to one ear and tilted his head over the embankment, apparently to listen to whatever might’ve been floating our way. In this case, I gathered that the oars shifting in the locks of Pap’s boat was an unwelcome signal. Huck had already figured out that the drunkard would’ve scouted the river until a corpse was found. This delay granted me a little extra time for interaction.

  “Once you get to Jackson Island,” I asked, “do you have any plans?”

  By now, Huc
k had repositioned himself along the river’s banks to reclaim his pipe that he mistakenly dropped in a wet patch of soil moments ago. I noticed that the boy’s bare feet were almost as black as the ground he stood on.

  “It dasn’t rightly matter,” he replied. “Grown ups is always a-aiming to rig things. I reckon it’s best to stop scrabbling for a plan. The river has a good enough one of its own a-stirring anyhow.”

  Huck’s eyes sparkled in the moonlight as he trained his glance on the massive expanse of water awaiting him. It seemed as though he was viewing its mighty swath for the first time. I intrinsically understood his plight, and the humbling reality of permitting the flow of life to move me like a river. As an adult I had erroneously believed that I had the skill to alter my natural direction, but this boy enabled me to recognize that thrashing against the course of a river produced the same lackluster results as grasping for the ebbing glory of youth. I wondered if Huck determined the significance of his expedition even before it began.

  “It looks like you have a long journey ahead of you, Huck, so I was wondering where you’ll go after you’re free from your father?”

  Predictably, this question caused the boy to crinkle his nose as if a large beetle just crawled up his nostril. “You sure dos ask a heap of questions, mister. If I didn’t knowed any better, I’d says you were looking to hold me for a ransom.”

  “That’s not my intention. I’m just a lost teacher passing through town. Once you get your canoe on the water and head down the river, I’m sure we’ll never see each other again.”

  “Honest injun?”

  “I’m pretty sure. It’s not as easy to get back here as you might think.”

  Huck took a moment to satisfy another itch settling behind his ear before commenting on my words. “You says you’s a teacher, ain’t that right?” I nodded my chin, which didn’t persuade the boy to change his curdled expression. “I hain’t had much time with your kind, and I’m a-trying to keep it so.”

  “Why do you want to avoid teachers?”

  “On account of you a-being one, your ears might take offense to what I gots to say.”

  “Try me anyway.”

  “Well, the way I sees it, you folks are a-looking to sivilize kids like me. I can’t find much good in any of it no how.”

  I was not startled by Huck’s opinion of education, but decided to entertain his line of reasoning. “So you don’t see yourself ever going to school?”

  “Not like other folks thinks I should,” answered Huck. “That widow Douglas and Miss Watson is always a-pecking at me to learn to read and whatnot, but I’d rather do it by and by than cling to their nagging habits.”

  I couldn’t argue with Huck’s notion that the lessons he’d soon encounter didn’t exist in any schoolbook from his time. Even while compromised by illiteracy, this boy recognized hypocrisy among those who praised themselves as civilized beings. In Huck’s world, the river was perhaps the most honest and direct passageway to freedom. My forthcoming confession must’ve sounded bizarre to the boy’s way of thinking.

  “You know, Huck, I once believed that I could help a boy like you see things as they were taught to me. Most of the kids surrender to society’s expectations, but a few of the lucky ones make it to the river. When I was a boy around your age, I wandered as far as the water’s edge. But I never gathered the nerve to let the currents take me away. I kept my feet on dry soil. I suppose a civilized man never gets his toes too wet.”

  “If you’re a-fetching for a change, mister, this here river has enough space left over after I gets on it. Ain’t nothing a-stopping you from clumbing aboard my canoe, neither. I’m a-going as least as far as Jackson Island.”

  I acknowledged Huck’s offer as a kind one, but also understood that this particular adventure didn’t have room for me. “It’s best for me to discover my own course,” I said. “Maybe I’ll be lucky to find the right direction one day.”

  Something akin to compassion simmered in the boy’s freckled countenance, but he rubbed it away as if it was nothing more permanent than another itch. “I reckon being a teacher ain’t so evil as most things anyhow,” he muttered. “And if it warn’t for folks like you, people would just keep mostly unliterated. Pap says all that reading is the devil’s business, but I thinks he’s just a-trying to hide. If I ever learns to read real good, I won’t bend the meaning of words. I reckon that those high-headed folks who do so hain’t half as sivilized as they feel.”

  I watched Huck push his canoe out from the coverage of willow branches and spring inside it with the agility of a critter born to such aquatic rituals. Rather than sit upright, he decided to lie down in the canoe’s bottom, still figuring that people were scouring the river for any trace of him. Before another word passed between us, my attention was drawn to a marvelous event in the sky. The burning tail of a meteorite arched across the violet-hued firmament. Huck and almost everyone else his age referred to such celestial occurrences as shooting stars.

  “Making a wish on that should steer off any bad luck,” Huck uttered to me.

  “It looks as bright as Halley’s Comet,” I remarked with a grin.

  “Shucks, hain’t so bright,” commented Huck. “I’s pretty sure that there comet only comes ’round once every seventy-five years or so anyhow.”

  “Well, how can you be sure when it was last seen?”

  “On account that Mr. Mark Twain was born when it last came into sight. He ain’t so old as that just yet, or that’s what he’s a-saying. Mr. Twain dasn’t fib, mainly, and he’s a-telling folks it’s a-coming by and by or somewhere next to there.”

  In another moment the arching line of fire faded behind the moon’s bold claim over the atmosphere. Perhaps I should’ve viewed the brevity of this sighting as a message from Huck’s creator. He might’ve been uncomfortable with my influence on the boy’s future endeavors. But the positions had flip-flopped in terms of who served as the mentor and student in this exchange. In my mind, Huckleberry Finn showed me that the pathway to liberty rarely unfolded on trails forged by other footsteps.

  Of course, other intrepid travelers had navigated the watery byways between the banks of the Mississippi, yet little evidence of their progress marked the motion of the water’s currents on this night. I left Huck hunkered in his canoe beside the willow trees, hoping to do more than merely wallow in the turbulence yet to come. I learned that those who truly wished to impact others must first recognize the autonomy of childhood.

  What dreams had I already abandoned beside Lake Endelman’s wooded periphery? I wanted nothing more than to return to this tranquility and rekindle the words still latched within my mind. But time was now my primary nemesis, and the hands that once seemed so plentiful now ticked with the vagueness of a stilted heartbeat. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, I imagined that I’d never sit beneath the shade of a willow tree again. In these seconds, I sensed my thoughts churning in the flux of water, carving its everlasting imprint into the muddied depths of my imagination.

  Chapter 59

  3:25 P.M.