Show Boat (12 page)

The shifting colourful life of the rivers unfolded before her ambient eyes. She saw and learned and remembered. Rough sights, brutal sights; sights of beauty and colour; deeds of bravery; dirty deeds. Through the wheat lands, the corn country, the fruit belt, the cotton, the timber region. The river life flowed and changed like the river itself. Shanty boats. Bumboats. Side-wheelers. Stern-wheelers. Fussy packets, self-important. Races ending often in death and disaster. Coal barges. A fleet of rafts, log-laden. The timber rafts, drifting down to Louisville, were steered with great sweeps. As they swept down the Ohio, the timbermen sang their chantey, their great shoulders and strong muscular torsos bending, straightening to the rhythm of the rowing song. Magnolia had learned the words from Doc, and when she espied the oarsmen from the deck of the
Cotton Blossom
she joined in the song and rocked with their motion out of sheer dramatic love of it:

Three tremendous pulls accompanied those last three long-drawn syllables. Magnolia found it most invigorating. Doc had told her, too, that the Ohio had got its name from the time when the Indians, standing on one shore and wishing to cross to the other, would cup their hands and send out the call to the opposite bank, loud and high and clear, “O-
HE
-O!”

“Do you think it’s true?” Magnolia would say; for Mrs. Hawks had got into the way of calling Doc’s stories stuff-and-nonsense. All those tales, it would seem, to which Magnolia most thrilled, turned out, according to Parthy, to be stuff-and-nonsense. So then, “Do you think it’s true?” she would demand, fearfully.

“Think it! Why, pshaw! I know it’s true. Sure as shootin’.”

It was noteworthy and characteristic of Magnolia that she liked best the rampant rivers. The Illinois, which had possessed such fascination for Tonti, for
Joliet, for Marquette—for countless
coureurs du bois
who had frequented this trail to the southwest—left her cold. Its clear water, its gentle current, its fretless channel, its green hillsides, its tidy bordering grain fields, bored her. From Doc and from her father she learned a haphazard and picturesque chronicle of its history, and that of like rivers—a tale of voyageurs and trappers, of flatboat and keelboat men, of rafters in the great logging days, of shanty boaters, water gipsies, steamboats. She listened, and remembered, but was unmoved. When the
Cotton Blossom
floated down the tranquil bosom of the Illinois Magnolia read a book. She drank its limpid waters and missed the mud-tang to be found in a draught of the Mississippi.

“If I was going to be a river,” she announced, “I wouldn’t want to be the Illinois, or like those. I’d want to be the Mississippi.”

“How’s that?” asked Captain Andy.

“Because the Illinois, it’s always the same. But the Mississippi is always different. It’s like a person that you never know what they’re going to do next, and that makes them interesting.”

Doc was oftenest her cicerone and playmate ashore. His knowledge of the countryside, the rivers, the dwellers along the shore and in the back country, was almost godlike in its omniscience. At his tongue’s end were tales of buccaneers, of pirates, of adventurers. He told her of the bloodthirsty and rapacious Murrel who, not content with robbing and killing his victims, ripped them open, disembowelled them, and threw them into the river.

“Oh, my!” Magnolia would exclaim, inadequately; and peer with some distaste into the water rushing past the boat’s flat sides. “How did he look? Like Steve when he plays Legree?”

“Not by a jugful, he didn’t. Dressed up like a parson, and used to travel from town to town, giving sermons. He had a slick tongue, and while the congregation inside was all stirred up getting their souls saved, Murrel’s gang outside would steal their horses.”

Stories of slaves stolen, sold, restolen, resold, and murdered. Murrel’s attempted capture of New Orleans by rousing the blacks to insurrection against the whites. Tales of Crenshaw, the vulture; of Mason, terror of the Natchez road. On excursions ashore, Doc showed her pirates’ caves, abandoned graveyards, ancient robber retreats along the river banks or in the woods. They visited Sam Grity’s soap kettle, a great iron pot half hidden in a rocky unused field, in which Grity used to cache his stolen plunder. She never again saw an old soap kettle sitting plumply in some Southern kitchen doorway, its sides covered with a handsome black velvet coat of soot, that she did not shiver deliciously. Strong fare for a child at an age when other little girls were reading the Dotty Dimple Series and Little Prudy books.

Doc enjoyed these sanguinary chronicles in the telling as much as Magnolia in the listening. His lined and leathery face would take on the changing expressions suitable to the tenor of the tale. Cunning, cruelty, greed, chased each other across his mobile countenance. Doc had been a show-boat actor himself at some time
back in his kaleidoscopic career. So together he and Magnolia and his ancient barrel-bellied black-and-white terrier Catchem roamed the woods and towns and hills and fields and churchyards from Cairo to the Gulf.

Sometimes, in the spring, she went with Julie, the indolent. Elly almost never walked and often did not leave the
Cotton Blossom
for days together. Elly was extremely neat and fastidious about her person. She was for ever heating kettles and pans of water for bathing, for washing stockings and handkerchiefs. She had a knack with the needle and could devise a quite plausible third-act ball gown out of a length of satin, some limp tulle, and a yard or two of tinsel. She never read. Her industry irked Julie as Julie’s indolence irritated her.

Elly was something of a shrew (Schultzy had learned to his sorrow that your blue-eyed blondes are not always doves). “Pity’s sake, Julie, how you can sit there doing nothing, staring out at that everlasting river’s more than I can see. I should think you’d go plumb crazy.”

“What would you have me do?”

“Do! Mend the hole in your stocking, for one thing.”

“I should say as much,” Mrs. Hawks would agree, if she chanced to be present. She had no love for Elly; but her own passion for industry and order could not but cause her to approve a like trait in another.

Julie would glance down disinterestedly at her long slim foot in its shabby shoe. “Is there a hole in my stocking?”

“You know perfectly well there is, Julie Dozier.
You must have seen it the size of a half dollar when you put it on this morning. It was there yesterday, same’s to-day.”

Julie smiled charmingly. “I know. I declare to goodness I hoped it wouldn’t be. When I woke up this morning I thought maybe the good fairies would have darned it up neat’s a pin while I slept.” Julie’s voice was as indolent as Julie herself. She spoke with a Southern drawl. Her I was Ah. Ah declah to goodness—or approximately that.

Magnolia would smile in appreciation of Julie’s gentle raillery. She adored Julie. She thought Elly, with her fair skin and china-blue eyes, as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale, as was natural in a child of her sallow colouring and straight black hair. But the two were antipathetic. Elly, in ill-tempered moments, had been known to speak of Magnolia as “that brat,” though her vanity was fed by the child’s admiration of her beauty. But she never allowed her to dress up in her discarded stage finery, as Julie often did. Elly openly considered herself a gifted actress whose talent and beauty were, thanks to her shiftless husband, pearls cast before the river-town swinery. Pretty though she was, she found small favour in the eyes of men of the company and crew. Strangely enough, it was Julie who drew them, quite without intent on her part. There was something about her life-scarred face, her mournful eyes, her languor, her effortlessness, her very carelessness of dress that seemed to fascinate and hold them. Steve’s jealousy of her was notorious. It was common boat talk, too, that Pete, the engineer of
the
Mollie Able
, who played the bull drum in the band, was openly enamoured of her and had tried to steal her from Steve. He followed Julie into town if she so much as stepped ashore. He was found lurking in corners of the
Cotton Blossom
decks; loitering about the stage where he had no business to be. He even sent her presents of imitation jewellery and gaudy handkerchiefs and work boxes, which she promptly presented to Queenie, first urging that mass of ebon royalty to bedeck herself with her new gifts when dishing up the dinner. In that close community the news of the disposal of these favours soon reached Pete’s sooty ears. There had even been a brawl between Steve and Pete—one of those sudden tempestuous battles, animal-like in its fierceness and brutality. An oath in the darkness; voices low, ominous; the thud of feet; the impact of bone against flesh; deep sob-like breathing; a high weird cry of pain, terror, rage. Pete was overboard and floundering in the swift current of the Mississippi. Powerful swimmer though he was, they had some trouble in fishing him out. It was well that the
Cotton Blossom
and the
Mollie Able
were lying at anchor. Bruised and dripping, Pete had repaired to the engine room to dry, and to nurse his wounds, swearing in terms ridiculously like those frequently heard in the second act of a
Cotton Blossom
play that he would get his revenge on the two of them. He had never, since then, openly molested Julie, but his threats, mutterings, and innuendoes continued. Steve had forbidden his wife to leave the show boat unaccompanied. So it was that when spring came round, and the dogwood gleaming
white among the black trunks of the pines and firs was like a bride and her shining attendants in a great cathedral, Julie would tie one of her floppy careless hats under her chin and, together with Magnolia, range the forests for wild flowers. They would wander inland until they found trees other than the willows, the live oaks, and the elms that lined the river banks. They would come upon wild honeysuckle, opalescent pink. In autumn they went nutting, returning with sackfuls of hickory and hazel nuts—anything but the black walnut which any show-boat dweller knows will cause a storm if brought aboard. Sometimes they experienced the shock of gay surprise that follows the sudden sight of gentian, a flash of that rarest of flower colours, blue; almost poignant in its beauty. It always made Magnolia catch her breath a little.

Julie’s flounces trailing in the dust, the two would start out sedately enough, though to the accompaniment of a chorus of admonition and criticism.

From Mrs. Hawks: “Now keep your hat pulled down over your eyes so’s you won’t get all sunburned, Magnolia. Black enough as ’tis. Don’t run and get all overheated. Don’t eat any berries or anything you find in the woods, now.… Back by four o’clock the latest … poison ivy … snakes … lost … gipsies.…”

From Elly, trimming her rosy nails in the cool shade of the front deck: “Julie, your placket’s gaping. And tuck your hair in. No, there, on the side.”

So they made their way up the bank, across the little town, and into the woods. Once out of sight of the
boat the two turned and looked back. Then, without a word, each would snatch her hat from her head; and they would look at each other, and Julie would smile her wide slow smile, and Magnolia’s dark plain pointed little face would flash into sudden beauty. From some part of her person where it doubtless was needed Julie would extract a pin and with it fasten up the tail of her skirt. Having thus hoisted the red flag of rebellion, they would plunge into the woods to emerge hot, sticky, bramble-torn, stained, flower-laden, and late. They met Parthy’s upbraidings and Steve’s reproaches with cheerful unconcern.

Often Magnolia went to town with her father, or drove with him or Doc into the back country. Andy did much of the marketing for the boat’s food, frequently hampered, supplemented, or interfered with by Parthy’s less openhanded methods. He loved good food, considered it important to happiness, liked to order it and talk about it; was himself an excellent cook, like most boatmen, and had been known to spend a pleasant half hour reading the cook book. The butchers, grocers, and general store keepers of the river towns knew Andy, understood his fussy ways, liked him. He bought shrewdly but generously, without haggling; and often presented a store acquaintance of long standing with a pair of tickets for the night’s performance. When he and Magnolia had time to range the countryside in a livery rig, Andy would select the smartest and most glittering buggy and the liveliest nag to be had. Being a poor driver and jerky, with no knowledge of a horse’s nerves and mouth, the ride was
likely to be exhilarating to the point of danger. The animal always was returned to the stable in a lather, the vehicle spattered with mud-flecks to the hood. Certainly, it was due to Andy more than Parthy that the
Cotton Blossom
was reputed the best-fed show boat on the rivers. He was always bringing home in triumph a great juicy ham, a side of beef. He liked to forage the season’s first and best: a bushel of downy peaches, fresh-picked; watermelons; little honey-sweet seckel pears; a dozen plump broilers; new corn; a great yellow cheese ripe for cutting.

He would plump his purchases down on the kitchen table while Queenie surveyed his booty, hands on ample hips. She never resented his suggestions, though Parthy’s offended her. Capering, Andy would poke a forefinger into a pullet’s fat sides. “Rub ’em over with a little garlic, Queenie, to flavour ’em up. Plenty of butter and strips of bacon. Cover ’em over till they’re tender and then give ’em a quick brown the last twenty minutes.”

Queenie, knowing all this, still did not resent his direction. “That shif’less no-’count Jo knew ’bout cookin’ like you do, Cap’n Andy, Ah’d git to rest mah feet now an’ again, Ah sure would.”

Magnolia liked to loiter in the big, low-raftered kitchen. It was a place of pleasant smells and sights and sounds. It was here that she learned Negro spirituals from Jo and cooking from Queenie, both of which accomplishments stood her in good stead in later years. Queenie had, for example, a way of stuffing a ham for baking. It was a fascinating process to behold, and
one that took hours. Spices—bay, thyme, onion, clove, mustard, allspice, pepper—chopped and mixed and stirred together. A sharp-pointed knife plunged deep into the juicy ham. The incision stuffed with the spicy mixture. Another plunge with the knife. Another filling. Again and again and again until the great ham had grown to twice its size. Then a heavy clean white cloth, needle and coarse thread. Sewed up tight and plump in its jacket the ham was immersed in a pot of water and boiled. Out when tender, the jacket removed; into the oven with it. Basting and basting from Queenie’s long-handled spoon. The long sharp knife again for cutting, and then the slices, juicy and scented, with the stuffing of spices making a mosaic pattern against the pink of the meat. Many years later Kim Ravenal, the actress, would serve at the famous little Sunday night suppers that she and her husband Kenneth Cameron were so fond of giving a dish that she called ham
à la
Queenie.