The River Prophet Part 38

He seemed to close the incident by suggesting that it was time to eat something, and the three turned to getting a square meal. They cooked a bountiful dinner, and sat down to it, the Prophet asking a blessing that seared the hearts of the two because of its fervour.

Rasba asked her to read to them after they had cleared up the dishes, and she took down the familiar volumes and read. Rasba sat with his eyes closed, listening. Terabon watched her face. She seemed to choose the pages at random, and read haphazardly, but it was all delight and all poetry.

She was reading, which was strange, the Humphrey-Abbott book about the Mississippi River levees, the cla.s.sic report on river facts, all fascinating to the mind that grasps with pleasure any river fact. When Rasba looked up and smiled, the two were absorbed in their occupations, one reading, the other watching her read. She stopped in conscious confusion.

"Yas, suh!" he smiled aloud. "I 'low we uns can leave hit to Old Mississip', these yeah things that trouble us: I, my triflin' doubts, and you children yo' own don't-know-yets."

What made him say that, if he wasn't a River Prophet? Who told him, what voice informed him, at that moment? Who can say?

The following morning the big mission boat and Missy Nelia's boat landed in at Memphis wharf, and the three went up town to buy groceries, newspapers and magazines to read, and to help Nelia choose another set of books from the shelves of local book stores. Old Rasba had never been in a book store before, and he stared at the hundreds of feet of shelves, with books of all sizes, kinds, and makes.

"Sho!" he cried aloud, and then, again, "Sho! Sho!"

It was fairyland for him, a land of enchantment, of impossible satisfaction and glory-be! Terabon and Nelia saw that they had given him another pleasure, and Rasba was happy to know that he would always be able to visit such places, and add to his own store of literature, when he had read the books which he had, as he would do, page by page, and word by word, his dictionary at hand.

Magazines and newspapers had little interest for him. Nelia and Terabon could not help but wish to keep closer in touch with the world. They picked up a copy of the _Trade-Appealer_, and then a copy of the _Evening Battle Ax_, just out.

They read one headline:

UNKNOWN DROWNS IN CRUISER

It was a brutally frank description of a motorboat cruiser which had floated down Hopefield Bend, awash and waterlogged, but held afloat by air-tight tanks:

In the cabin was the body of a man, apparently about 30 years of age, with a whiskey jug clasped in one hand by the handle. He was face downward, and had been dead two or three days. It is supposed he was caught in the heavy wind-storm of Wednesday night and drowned.

The river had planned again. The river had acted again. They went to look at the boat, which was pumped out and in Ash Slough. It was Carline's cruiser. Then they went to the morgue, and it was Carline's body.

Nelia broke down and cried. After all, one's husband is one's husband.

She did the right thing. She owned him, now, and she carried his remains back home to Gage, and there she buried him, and wept on his grave.

She put on widow's weeds for him, and though she might have claimed his property, she ignored the will which left her all of it, and gave to his relatives and to her own poor people what was theirs. She gave Parson Rasba, whom she had brought home with her to bury her husband, $5,000 for his services.

Then, after the estate was all settled up, she returned to Memphis, and Terabon met her at the Union Station, dutifully, as she had told him to do. Together they went to the City Clerk's and obtained a marriage license, and the River Prophet, Rasba, with firm voice and unflinching gaze, united them in wedlock.

They went aboard their own little shanty-boat, and while the rice and old shoes of a host of river people rattled and clattered on their cabin, they drifted out into the current and rapidly slipped away toward President's Island. Parson Rasba, as they drifted clear, said to them:

"I 'lowed we uns could leave hit to Old Mississip'!"

THE END