Dead Water (9 page)

“She call herself a lady, an' go on about how great her family is,” muttered the girl, settling herself by the rail beside Rose and January so that January could look at her bruised and bleeding ear. “Maybe Michie Binoche, that owns my mama, ain't no more than a contractor, but I seen decent white folks in my time, an' Miss Skippen ain't one of 'em, no matter what she say. When Michie Molloy buy me for her, an' bring me home to that house he got for her, I could see she didn't have a thing but what he buy her. Every one of them dresses she got is spang new, some of 'em just delivered by the dressmaker that week. . . .”

“That doesn't mean she isn't respectable,” objected Sophie, who'd come down to fetch water from the galley to rinse a coffee-stain from her mistress's cuff. “When poor Madame fled from her husband in Cincinnati, she tells me she had to escape with only the clothing she stood up in, lest he pursue her and force her to live with him and endure his abuse again. I am myself a good Catholic,” she added, crossing herself, “and of course I believe that divorce is wrong, but in cases like that . . . But what I mean is, Madame is a most respectable woman, even if she is . . . even if she has found a man who loves and cherishes her.”

“Oh, Mr. Molloy love an' cherish Miss Skippen, all right, with her hangin' on his arm, an' feelin' faint, an' goin' on about her finishin'-school, an' how she ain't never been with a big, strong gentleman like him before.” Julie's lips tightened, and she gazed out over the rail at the brown water, prickled and studded with the groping black fingers of snags, and the tangled gray wilderness of the banks. “He should see her when he ain't there, an' she got a couple glasses of plum brandy in her, singin' about the three old whores from Winnipeg. He'd wonder what finishin'-school she went to, to learn
that
.”

“And I suppose that if she
did
go to a finishing-school,” sighed Rose later, after January had ascertained that no more damage had been done to Julie's ear by her mistress's blow than nail-scratches, “she still would not be able to support herself in anything but poverty or prostitution. For Miss Skippen was right, you know, when she said that the world is unkind to girls who find themselves alone in it.”

She settled herself against the heaped cordwood in the shade, watching the deck-hands as they walked along the rail, long poles in their hands. As the river shallowed with summer, the bars that the current laid down before every point, on every bend, went from annoyances to be edged around to outright perils. Though noon was far past, Kevin Molloy remained in the pilot-house, and January could hear his voice bellowing curse-riddled instructions to the little crew of leadsmen who had rowed ahead of the
Silver Moon
in the skiff.

Their shouts echoed over the flat brown water, above the engine's slow throb:
“Half one . . . half one . . . quarter one . . .”

“Move along port there, y'idjits! Is it blind y'are?”

“Half one.”

And ahead of the boat—January could see it when he walked to the rail and squinted along the 'tween-decks at the glaring water—the water lay glassy over the bar. Behind it was the dead water, where no current stirred the stagnation, like the poverty that trapped him in New Orleans, when there was not enough money to float him over the bar.

In the low water of summer, even the smallest logs and drifts and reefs became objects of endless slow negotiation, of wearily muscling through, as the deck-hands even now were readying themselves for the chancy prospect of “walking” the boat over the submerged wall of gravel and mud that blocked further passage up-river. And he shivered at the thought of years ahead of doing just that: laboriously pushing through small illnesses, minor catastrophes that even a few dollars in the bank would solve.

People lived like that, he knew. Some even held on to their joy while they did it.

He walked back to Rose. “Do you think Miss Skippen would have appreciated a chance to learn Greek and mathematics, instead of fancy sewing and dancing, at your school?”

Rose sighed. “Probably not. And I suspect our pupil Cosette's mother, and Germaine's, are right, too, when they say they'd rather their daughters learned something that will be ‘of use' to them, to make them more ‘fascinating' to men.”

“You,” said January, “are fascinating to
this
man, Greek and mathematics and all. And I can tell you Cosette and Germaine love what you teach them, even if it is difficult. At least I found someone had taken the French copy of the
Iliad
from the study, and is reading ahead of where you're taking them through the Greek.” He sat beside her again, gathered her into his arm. “I'd like to take that knot-head Quince to your school, and let him preach there about sending ‘savages' who will ‘never be able to make a living' back to Africa because it's all they're mentally fit for.”

In the end, unable to find any place on the bar that had twelve feet of water, Molloy ordered the engineers to build up steam and rammed the bar head-on, the bottom scraping on the soft sand while the deck-hands heaved and shoved with their poles, to literally flounder the
Silver Moon
to the other side. Then the slow process was all to do again, with the leadsmen rowing ahead in the skiff, and the monotonous calls ringing over the water:
“Half one . . . half one . . . quarter less twain . . . mark twain.”

Mark Twain
was the magic word,
safe water
. . . barely . . . enough for the boat to get over the next bar. They stopped at Futch's Wood-Yard, and at Home Plantation to drop off bolts of cheap calico and osnaberg and some New Orleans newspapers, after making a wide detour around Claiborne Island—the chute behind the island, navigable in high water, was nothing but a slot of mud now—and reached Baton Rouge slightly after nine that night.

The entire population of the Grand Saloon, who'd been listening to January and Hannibal play, streamed out en masse in the humid night air to look at the torches and movement on the landing. Though he didn't think Weems would disembark here any more than he'd get off in Donaldsonville, still January kept watch, while Tredgold had another quarrel with Molloy over damping the fires long enough to collect passengers.

“Who the bloody hell will be about at this time of the night fixin' to go up-river?” bellowed the pilot, and Mrs. Tredgold sailed into the argument with: “As long as you're in the pay of this boat, you'll do as my husband orders. . . .”

Most riverboat pilots January had ever met would have walked off at that point, with some choice curse shouted over the shoulder. That Molloy didn't confirmed in January's mind that the pilot was, in fact, a fellow depositor in the Bank of Louisiana and suspected Weems of absconding with some or all of its funds.

“But whether the man intends to return the portion of them that aren't his, if he manages to locate Weems's trunks before we do,” said Hannibal, leaning his bony elbows on the rail and looking down at the landing in the torchlight, “is, as they say, another story.”

After a screaming-match of Olympian proportions between Molloy and Mrs. Tredgold, the
Silver Moon
remained in Baton Rouge until midnight. Tredgold went ashore—propelled by his wife—as did Ned Gleet, to prowl the barrooms of the waterfront district in quest of human bargains. He came back empty-handed and angry, and tried again to talk Jubal Cain into selling some of his slaves to him. This provoked a scene that was discussed in whispers on the stern deck the following day—since every body-servant on the boat had a wholly understandable loathing for both dealers.

“I never heard one man, black or white, lay out another so flat without raising his voice,” whispered Jim at the water-butts in the morning, as the
Silver Moon
steamed away from a brief stop at the sordid little settlement of Bayou Sara. “He called him a pusillanimous slime-trail an' I don't know what-all else, and Gleet backed down from it.” The gray-haired Davis valet glanced in the direction of the piled wood that hid the male slaves from the servants' end of the promenade. “And I tell you, if I was a white man and he called me that, I'd just say ‘Yes, sir' too.”

January nodded, and rubbed his eyes, gritty with the exhaustion of having stayed up most of the night watching for another chance to break into the hold. But either because of yesterday's incident, or because Thucydides had discovered the evidence of Queen Régine's presence on the boat, both the bow and the stern doors down into the hold were not only double-locked but, January suspected, unobtrusively watched as well.

Through the day the steamboat pecked and slogged and struggled its way upstream, sometimes seeming to become mired in sunken forests of flotsam and snags. They bulled their way over bars below Dead Man's Bend and Esperance Point, and for a time hung up on a bar below Palmetto Point so badly that it looked as if every male on the boat would be required to help “spar” over—literally lever the boat by means of mast-like poles chained to the capstans on the bow, like a wingless locust shoving itself along the ground. When they entered the horrendous mat of snags and driftwood around the mouth of the Red River, in the final slanting light of the hot evening, it seemed to January that they would be trapped there forever.

“Goddam snaggiest stretch of the river, bar the reach below Vicksburg,” panted the old pilot Lundy, whom January found at the bottom of the stern-promenade stairway, clinging to the bannister in exhaustion. “It's like they got a patent snag-makin' factory up at the top of the Red River, and they just dump 'em in and let 'em float down. Never seen the like.”

January watched a second night, to try to slip into the hold, but Thucydides seemed always to be walking around the decks with a lantern. In the end, in exhaustion, he bade Rose good-night and returned to Hannibal's stateroom to sleep on the floor. Since discovering the poison and the juju-bag in the hold, he had felt uneasy anywhere on the lower deck at night.

He dreamed of poverty, of sharing a single room with Rose in the house of some aging former plaçée, and teaching piano lessons in the parlor to pay the rent. In his dream it was night, and Rose sat in silence by the window, a book open on her lap and her long brown hair lying in soft curls down her back, but no lamp beside her. January kept asking her in his dream, over and over,
What is it? What's wrong?

And she would neither look at him nor reply.

Then he dreamed that the
Silver Moon
was sinking, that the juju-bag hidden deep in the hold was burning a hole in the bottom of the boat, was calling out into the darkness of the waters. And from the darkness of the waters great twisted hands reached up, snagging at the paddles, tearing at the fragile boards. He and Rose were in the dark of the hold as the planks began to break apart, she much farther in than he, and running away from him, running into that dark nightmare corridor. Running in the wrong direction, away from the safety of the door. He shouted her name, tried frantically to catch up with her, to pull her back to safety, but her hand slipped out of his, and the water took her. He groped for her in the darkness, holding his breath, fighting the dark water that closed over his head, while huge floating trunks and boxes slid and nudged at him in the blackness, and he heard Queen Régine laughing.

Your woman will be torn from your arms
. . . .

He woke panting, drenched in sweat, to find Hannibal kneeling beside him on the straw matting, his long hair hanging down around his face by the light of the single candle.

“Are you all right?” asked the fiddler softly.

Night was black outside the windows. The
Silver Moon
could have been steaming through the depths of interstellar space for all that could be seen.

January sank back down on his rolled-up coat that he was using for a pillow; he was shaking.

“Or I suppose I should ask, is Rose all right?” Hannibal settled with his back against the bunk and his skinny knees drawn up under his immense white linen nightshirt. “You were calling her name.”

January shook his head. “It's the same dream,” he said wearily, and ran his hand over his face. “Always the same dream, since before we were married. I want to save her, and I can't. Sometimes it's from one thing, sometimes another—once I dreamed she was being carried off by a Roman legion, God knows where I got that idea from. . . .”

“Was she grading Latin papers that week?”

And January laughed. The iron reality of the fear retreated a little. But it watched him like a rat from the shadows.

“I suppose I should be grateful it's Rose I'm trying to save,” he said. “I can wake up, and there she is, sleeping beside me and dreaming about planting sweet-peas. Sometimes I used to dream about running through the streets of Paris, knowing Ayasha was dying of the cholera, back in our rooms. . . .” He flinched at the memory of those dreams. Of the way the streets of the river-side district lengthened and tangled into bizarre labyrinths, turned back on themselves, while he could hear his first wife's desperate breathing, her sobs as she lay on the bed. Could hear her calling his name.

“And I'd wake up,” he said softly, “and know that she actually did die.” He didn't add that sometimes it was Rose dying while he ran through the streets of Paris in that sweltering cholera summer, trying to find the way to her. To save her.

So that he would not have to face the rest of his life alone.

“I suppose that is what it is,” said Hannibal, “to be a knight-errant at heart. God knows what Sir Galahad dreamed about. It couldn't have been terribly interesting, fighting to rescue a cup. And an empty cup, at that. I think the worst part of trying to give up opium was the dreams—although mind you, I wasn't terribly keen on the throwing-up part either.”

Or the ghastly blackness of depression that had followed hard upon the physical symptoms, January reflected, considering his friend's gaunt face in the tiny seed of orange light. That Hannibal had, with an improvement in his health last winter, actually attempted to break his opium habit had astonished January; that he had ultimately been unable to do so surprised him not at all. To the girls among whom Hannibal lived, in the attics and back-sheds of the whorehouses and saloons of the Swamp, his resolve to give up laudanum and liquor had appeared merely quixotic in the face of the devastating symptoms of withdrawal: “Just have a bit until you're feeling better” had quickly collapsed the whole effort, leaving him, January thought, more fragile than before.