Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [29]
The storm broke over them toward noon. It was a rage of hail and lightning, followed by torrential rain. Flint’s only comfort was Abigail: she regarded, he said, the prospect of her imminent death with “perfect tranquility.” She was so tranquil, in fact, that she regarded the fate of their children, who were just then huddled in their blankets out on the sandbar, with total indifference. For Flint, a deeply pious and conventional man, this was proof of her sanctity.
As for Flint himself, he was nowhere near as placid. He was terrified to the point of madness; he felt like King Lear on the heath. The storm kept getting more intense hour by hour. Around midafternoon, a sudden, intense gust of wind tore the roof off their boat, and the rain came pouring in. Flint didn’t dare move his wife; he resolved that he would risk carrying her into the forest to look for shelter only if the boat started to tear loose from its moorings and float downriver.
The storm began to spend itself by late afternoon; the clouds broke up and there was a magnificent sunset. The children all came back aboard the boat—they were waterlogged but still alive. Abigail gave birth at eleven that night. The baby girl, Flint could tell at once, was too weak to survive.
The boat remained stuck on the sandbar. After two days, the baby died. Flint emptied out a small trunk to use as a coffin and buried it in the rushes along the bank. The next day, the river began to rise, and the winds returned with it. Flint and his family hoisted their sails and they went on north without further incident. Flint remembered the location exactly: it was “on a high bank opposite to the second Chickasaw bluff.”
Flint would spend the rest of his life, off and on, traveling the river, and he would pass by that spot many times. Invariably he did so with his thoughts on how he was “carrying … my miserable and exhausted frame, with little hope of its renovation, and in the hourly expectation of depositing my own bones on the banks of the Mississippi.”
The death of his child didn’t come as a great shock to Flint. It wouldn’t have been a shock to any parent: the rule of thumb in the river valley was that one in four children died before their first birthday; one in two didn’t make it to their twenty-first. The situation might have been different if Flint’s family had been able to reach a nearby town and find a doctor—but probably not, given the nature of medical care on the frontier in those days. After all, it was a doctor who had given Abigail the mercurous chloride, and another doctor would have most likely succeeded only in killing her along with the baby.
But then, too, Flint had a certain natural callousness. He was curiously unmoved by the suffering and death of other people—even people in his family. It was characteristic of him that in his account of the river journey, he didn’t spare a single thought for what his other children had gone through that night, left to fend for themselves on the sandbar while the storm raged. But in this he was actually a fairly typical inhabitant of the valley: people did not as a rule display a lot of empathy for other people’s problems. The river discouraged it—life on the river was so dangerous, so unpredictable, and so casually violent that it couldn’t help but leave its inhabitants coarsened. Flint doesn’t seem to have been that interested in other people to start with, and the river never taught