The Drought

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At noon, when Dr. Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among the limp plumage. The caking mudbank was speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom the dreamfaced figure of Quilter resembled a demented faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the river.

Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the comparison was perhaps less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time watching the river as Ransom or anyone else, his motives would be typically perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge-an eccentric gift from Quilter's protector, Richard Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom's neighbor-had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a foot in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.

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