Gear, W Michael - Novel 05 by The Morning River (v2.1)

much.
                   I am on the river now, aboard a steamboat
named the Virgil. The boat itself is quite a marvel in that it smokes, rattles,
and shakes, but makes excellent speed. The shore seems to race past.
                   How do I tell you about the river? Imagine, if
you will, dark water winding through wooded, snow-mantled hills. I've spent
hours staring into the depths, sensing the inevitable power of moving water.
Were I not the rational fellow that I am, I'd swear I could feel it, like
something alive. It has a purity, perhaps something baptismal.
                   Water and land, it is an ancient duality, but
one that is pressed upon a person out here in the wilderness. Where the river
is pure and clear, the land is foreboding, dark and brooding. As we pass along
the shoreline I can see small fields cleared from the somber trees. The fields
lie fallow, and snow-covered. Tiny cabins— little more than rude huts—are
situated off to the side, and traces of blue smoke rise from the chimneys.
                   What sort of rude beings huddle next to those
feeble flames? As terrible as the land is, the people who inhabit it are
beneath contempt. Laura, I have entered the dark heart of the benighted
wilderness. The only solace which is mine is that you will be waiting anxiously
for my return.
                   I cannot tell you how much I dwell on that
happy day when we shall be reunited. Each minute passes so slowly as to be an
hour.
                   I hope you don't think that I'm being
presumptuous. Perhaps the wilderness has given me courage to write such things
as I would never have had the temerity to do were I not so far removed from
your presence.
                   Obediently Yours, Richard Hamilton
                   Father, you exiled me to Hell.
                   The steamboat clanked loudly, intruding on the
wistful memory. He opened his eyes to his tiny stateroom aboard the Virgil He
could hear voices in the hall: men discussing the chill in the air as they
walked forward.
                   Richard stared dully at the whitewashed wall.
He kept to his cabin except when cold drove him to the forward parlor and the
stove. Succor came from thoughts of Laura and his precious books. He need only
open to a page and drop into the convoluted prose of Hegel, or the intricacies
of Descartes, and this tawdry world slipped away. The other men aboard
congregated to enjoy card games, drinking, and planning explorations along the
shore during wood stops.
     

                   In Richard's productive imagination, he had
metamorphosed into a sort of Moses in the wilderness, isolated within his own
mind. Such thoughts dominated his letters to Laura and the journal he'd begun
to keep the day after he left Boston . His scribblings had become so voluminous,
he'd been forced to purchase a large ledger book in Pittsburgh .
                   By the Lord, anything to break the monotony of
being trapped aboard this floating cage with its benighted passengers.
                   The Virgil made stops at each of the squalid
little hamlets along the Ohio . Places like Economy, Cincinnati , Wheeling , Louisville , Portland , New Harmony ,
and Paducah . They consisted of a mixture of frame and
log houses—the latter little more than hovels with sod roofs. People lived in
dirt, even to the point of covering the decks of their fragile flat-boats with
it—perhaps so the inevitable bone rick of a milch cow could feel as much at
home as the filth-encrusted humans. Such ungainly craft now floated downriver
in ones and twos. Richard had overheard that those intrepid voyagers hoped to
make homes before spring planting.
                   Dirt into more dirt.
                   He'd seen them from the steamboat as they
passed cleared patches in the trees: generally the homestead of a gnarled