A Close Shave

From Baden, or what’s left of it, pursue a long, smooth curve of road that skirts the northern flood wall to parallel a palisade of channel markers sunk in earth, the folly of a cement works. Its blank silos overlook a pit of argillaceous shale, the fine and fossilized remains of bivalves, sponges, spines of shark, quarried and burnt with limestone charge to alchemize a binder of brick and the city’s shallow, brittle crust. Around a bend, the riverbed swings wide to open a fetch of field. Shadows skim its mucky thaw as juncos, whisked about by the wind on courses neither fixed nor free, give but a quick metallic chink. Behind you, rain has wrapped the bluffs and scumbled limbs of sycamores. Ahead, each bend assumes the name of a gaudy packet run aground, or snagged and sunk, or blown to bits: for one, the side-wheel Amazon, pluperfect wheelhouse painted green, that struck a honey-locust pike still rooted deep in river mud and tore its hull from stem to stern. Down in minutes! Within the month an island silted up behind. A flock of luggage floated south, remarked by those on Water Street loafing before the trading post and the barbershop of Madame Krull. She can eternally be found at work in her elaborate room toujours prêt to clip and coif or wield her razor with great skill for those who favor her with their chins. The scent of ginger tonic blends with that of borscht, its acrid tang, consumed behind a wooden screen as Illinois grows dark. In this, her second year since coming west.