The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth Read Free Book Online

his mind.
    James will never bestir himself to attend a funeral, he will never see a body, and of course he will never lay eyes on pretty Peggy Doig again. And it sustains me, during these harsher, colder winters at the far end of my life, to imagine little Charles alive somewhere in the Hebrides or deep in the fields of the English countryside, a carpenter or a master printer by now, with no knowledge of his father and with no true understanding of his bliss.

3
     
    A S THE RIVER uncoils to the south, London goes to ground. Over the space of fifteen waterborne minutes, it melts unceremoniously from sight. Clusters of docks and wharves no longer clutch at the current. One outpaces the smoking kilns and the mountains of coal rising from the side of the water, tiny colliers attacking them madly with tiny shovels. Watermen suddenly leave off shouting obscenities, as though the increasingly open countryside were a chapel.
    The air cleanses itself of burnt lime-stench and the smoke of brewers and soap-boilers, while the river itself outruns the slag and runoff and sewage. Broad fields of green and tan elbow out the warehouses, then begin to link and stretch away in patchwork as far as the eye can see, gorgeous, tended, verdant. The banks of the river are suddenly lush with grass and reeds, beds of marsh willows, rather than brick and waterlogged lumber. The wind is tamed. Sunshine pours down now on my little green canopy, sweet and heavy as honey. I am sweating through the arms of my coat, but in the relative quiet I welcome the heat. I catch myself dreaming over the water.
    Insects are suddenly at play in the canopy with me, but the indolence of the open fields is such that I cannot bring myself to swat them. For long moments, I have the pleasant, forgetful sense that I am on holiday, with a friend.
    I recognize the sensation, this sudden extra-London calm, because today’s excursion is my second by river to Greenwich this week. Once I learned that James and Johnson were to take a Saturday afternoon excursion to Greenwich together—and once I had decided to make myself a
de facto
member of their party—it seemed prudent to reconnoiter so the day could not fail to run smoothly. And so I made this same trip this past Wednesday, three days ago, by way of a dry run. That simulation, along with a memorandum James wrote to himself Tuesday night, laying out a number of things the two hoped to see and do come Saturday—these things have made my planning for today a great deal easier.
    Rather than following James and Johnson in their second, longer boat all the way to Greenwich, rather than hiding in the river traffic like a thief, I have told the waterman to move out ahead and to take a long comfortable lead. My thought is, let them follow me for a bit. They are content to let their own oarsman dawdle. They have nothing to accomplish today. I have a good, long list.
    As we pass, near enough in the water that I might reach out and notch their boat with my sword, Johnson is braying about the canny vulgarity of Methodist preachers. I watch the two of them through a tear in the wool shrouding me. Seeing them that way is a strange thing, a feeling not merely of alienation but of inhabiting different realms altogether, with different relation to the earth and the men and things on it. The dead spying on the quick.
    Johnson and James have oranges torn open on their laps, and they are pulling the flesh from the rinds and casting them into the flood. I see trout and shad rising to their leavings, and silver minnow cloudbursts.
    In the long, thin craft, Johnson’s size is magnified: he seems vaguely inhuman, a river-troll, a great hunched mass at the center of the boat, hoarding his powers, sucking his fruit. The heavy-lidded, amphibian eyes and the thick lips are in constant terrible motion ashe speaks. He is correcting James, something I expect I might have heard no matter the moment I happened to pass them by.
    “
No
, sir, no, no, no,”