The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  “Is the boat on fire?” the woman with the child asked.

  “Let’s get up on deck,” I told her. “Surely some boats will come to come help us.”

  My voice seemed to come from my ears and everything looked like it was outlined in black: the doorframe, the edge of the steps. We were all trying to get out of the cabin now, and for the moment everyone was still orderly, although later I found bruises on my arm that I couldn’t account for, sharply yellow and round as buttons. In all this time I did not think of Comfort—that’s how dazed I was. I thought only of myself, the Malvern lady, and the lady with her child. But once we got up to the deck we were separated, and I don’t know if in the end they were saved or not, if the elderly lady ever got to Malvern, or if the mother drowned with her child.

  On the deck I was pushed all the way to the rail by people coming up behind me, and when I finally could stop and look around, I saw that our situation was even bleaker than I had imagined. There were still several hours of daylight left; that was one good thing. But the upper deck of the vessel in front of the side wheels had been blown to splinters. Anyone unlucky enough to be standing there when the boilers exploded had almost certainly been killed, and I could see a dozen charred bodies floating in the river. So far there were no boats coming out to save us, although where I stood, on the lower deck behind the wheels, was crowded with people scanning the banks.

  I searched for my cousin in the throng but could not immediately spot her. One man, someone in uniform, was trying to give directions: ladies here, gentlemen there. He had a moustache like wet straw and a blue coat, and his stiff collar was spattered with blood. I’m not sure anyone was paying him attention. It was hard to know what to pay attention to. Without steerage, we were drifting with the current, moving farther and farther away from the Ohio embankment. Kentucky, on the other side of the river, was even farther away. A dry, gunpowdery smoke hung above us, and I could see several fires burning in the bow of the ship.

  How long could we remain afloat? That’s what people were asking each other in high, frightened voices, and there was a good deal of jostling as people tried to move as far back from the front of the boat as possible. Some of the wounded in the river were trying to climb back on board, and, looking down, I saw a man’s burned hand, unattached to a body, in our wake.

  My stomach turned over. “Comfort!” I shouted.

  The hand had an emerald ring on its pinkie finger.

  “Comfort!”

  The man in the blue uniform said sharply, “Keep calm.” He had a thunderous voice, and even just speaking it carried farther than my shout. A moment later the boat, which had been drifting toward Kentucky all this while, stopped abruptly as if it had caught on something. Everyone turned and looked out to see what it was.

  For a moment, nothing. Then the boat tipped. Only a slight tip, but we all felt it. Leaning back instinctively as though my body could right this imbalance, I felt a powerful urge, like a trapped animal, to get away, to be elsewhere. On the Kentucky side of the boat people began to shout, and on the Ohio side there was a lot of shoving and movement. I gripped the railing hard every time a person pushed against me in their effort to cross to the other side, where, anyone could see, the situation was no better. I turned my deaf ear toward Kentucky and watched the crowd on the Ohio side swell and pulse like a heart. Sweat ran in a thin line down my spine. It had been a warm day, but the fires on the bow made the air positively hot.

  People began to panic and jump into the river. A few feet away from me a man stripped off his clothes and dove into the water holding his wallet in his teeth. Seconds later a young woman jumped in after him fully clothed. She never resurfaced.

  “Dov’é il mio papa?”

  I looked down. A girl in a clean brown-checked dress was looking up at me. She was Italian and must have mistaken me for Italian. It’s happened before—my black hair and black eyes. I could see faint lines where her hem had been let down, and there was a small cross-stitched patch near her shoulder. Comfort was twice in an Italian operetta, so I was able to reply, “Non so.” I don’t know. The girl was eight or nine years old and she held her hands in front of her like a supplicant or someone in prayer.

  To my right I heard another loud splash as someone else dove into the water. Besides the burned bodies from the initial explosion, the river was now littered with a second front of corpses: foolish women like the one I’d seen jumping into the water a few moments before without regard for their boots and their heavy dresses, their mutton-shaped sleeves floating out at their sides, their fleshy arms and legs hidden beneath yards of sodden cloth—striped, burgundy, checkered, a few tartans, some of the colors more visible than others. There were drowned men, too, a few of them faceup. The water near the boat had become very crowded with bodies both dead and alive, although the deck didn’t seem any less populated. Where were the barges to pick us up? All I could see were a row of warehouses on the waterfront and tall factory chimneys behind them. Although the Ohio River is almost a thousand miles long, it’s only a mile across at its widest, and we were more or less in the middle of it. A few men on the shore had waded into the water and were trying to reach the first set of people swimming for land, but still I could see no boats.

  Every one of us would live or die on our own; I understood that now. A woman a few feet away from me began to scream, and the noise was like glass breaking inside my ear. The front half of the boat, still aflame in parts, was tipping in small, jerky stages into the water. In a quarter of an hour we would be completely submerged, but it was the scream that finally spurred me to action. The little Italian girl was searching my face as if to say, What now?

  I looked again for Comfort—I shouted her name again—but it was useless: there were too many people, and I could not think clearly. When I glanced down I saw that I was still holding the pair of fabric scissors I’d been using when the boilers exploded. Had I been holding them this whole time? I couldn’t feel them in my fingers.

  I knew one more piece of Italian: “Io mi chiamo May,” I said. Then in English: “What is your name?”

  “Mi chiamo Giulia.”

  “Good,” I said. “All right, Giulia. Look. I have a pair of scissors here, do you see? I’m going to cut your dress off. We don’t have time for all these buttons. We need to cut off our clothes so they don’t drown us.” I looked at the riverbank again. I had swum across the Tiffin River near my girlhood home many times, and it was about as wide as where we were now from the shore. My mother taught me to swim, and it was something I did better than anyone else, even Comfort. When I was swimming, all the noise of the world receded and I was alone with the feel of water like silk against my skin. I liked that feeling. I thought I could do it.

  Giulia’s eyes were wet with fear but she didn’t cry, and although she opened her mouth to put her tongue between her lips, she made no sound when I began to cut her dress off, starting from her small pointed collar and proceeding down. The noise around us was getting louder, both wailing and shouting, and a group of women had knelt down with their foreheads on the railing and were praying aloud. Occasionally hot cinders from the bow fires floated back onto the deck, burning our hands and faces. I couldn’t take a deep breath for fear of them. After I was finished cutting the girl’s dress off, I began cutting off my own.

  When we were both in our muslin shifts, I tucked my father’s pocket watch, which hung from a silver chain around my neck, under the fabric. Then I looked for a place to ease our way into the river. If we jumped, we would go down a long way before coming up again, and Giulia might panic. Other people were climbing down the port side of the boat—their feet on the window ledges, then the latticework, then the edge of its muddy hull—and after looking for a better way and finding none, I did the same with the girl holding on to my neck.

  2

  My mother’s only brother had drowned when she was a girl, and for that reason she made sure that I knew how to swim at an early age. We lived near a small t
own on the Tiffin River about fifty miles southwest of Toledo. Our property was on raised land above the riverbank, but, even so, the Tiffin flooded us and everyone else every five or six years until at last funds were raised to build a levee. When I was six, one of our barns got swept away. I still remember the sight of its buckled and splintered wood leaning against a couple of mud-encrusted trees where it landed, a good half mile from where it had been built.

  I loved to swim. I liked feeling the slight pressure of the water like an eggshell around me, and I liked being at a distance from everyone else. My mother tied a red ribbon around my head so she could watch my progress. She always wore a faded blue wraparound dress with two cloth ties instead of buttons—the dress she cleaned in—and she sat on an old oak stump on the lowest part of the bank to watch me.

  The river ran behind our house and heavy white oak trees grew down nearly to the waterline, so she probably felt it was private enough for that dress. My mother cared quite a lot about privacy, as well as prompt housekeeping and regularly paid accounts. She liked everything to be neatly arranged and organized efficiently—“my German side,” she used to say. She was an excellent dressmaker, and her seams and hems were straighter than anyone else’s, although unlike me she never used a measure. I remember how she would touch a hem I was working on to show me where it had veered off a little. She had me touch it, too, as if the misalignment was something I could understand better by feel. Then she would tell me to pull it out and start again.

  I wanted to pull it out. I wanted my hems to be as straight as hers. I don’t know if I inherited my feelings from her or if I learned them, but I always took great pleasure in neat, straight lines and even seams. When I was older, my sewing became a matter of pride to my mother, something she showed people when they visited.

  “May did this when she was only six years old,” she said, passing around a gingham dress I’d made for my doll. “She learned how to sew buttonholes without asking one person.”

  What she didn’t tell people—what perhaps she did not even know—was how she lifted her eyebrows slightly whenever I asked her a question, as though she found it strange that I did not already know the answer myself. This was less about her confidence in my abilities than a general ignorance of what children learn by themselves and what you must teach them. My mother was forty years old when I was born, and I think that she never quite got over the surprise of having me. My father was one month shy of fifty-five. They had been married almost twenty years, and whatever thoughts they might have once had about children must have been long past when they found out I was coming. My father raised cows; he died when I was eleven. His hair was fully white by the time I was four, and by the time I was nine he walked with a cane. He had but one tease and that was to say when I did something careless, that he would send me back to work at the glass factory if I did it again. Then he would smile and pinch my arm gently to show he was joking.

  My mother’s father was from Germany, and from him she got the habit of drinking a glass of hard cider every night after dinner. Then she came up to my bedroom and sat on my bed. “Good night, May. God be with you,” she would say. Sometimes she said it in German, and I wondered if this was what her parents had said to her when she was a girl. I understood that the cider she drank each night from her father’s heavy yellow glass, cloudy with age, was her way of honoring her past, and that sitting on my bed and her words to me—the only time she mentioned God to my memory—was her way of telling me she loved me.

  Other than this, she did not show much emotion. She always dressed in dark blue or brown and moved quickly, erectly, and with concentrated purpose from the moment she got up until her glass of cider at night. One of her interests was the price of pig iron, and she kept a little book in her apron pocket where she recorded each day its fluctuating prices. It was my belief that she owned some shares of pig iron, and that belief I found out to be true when she died.

  My father took care of the animals and the outbuildings, and he constructed and repaired the light wooden wheels for the cheese. My mother oversaw the two dairymaids who milked our cows, and she also made it her job to teach them how to swim. And when Comfort and her mother moved to the little town near our farm the summer I was nine, Comfort was told that she must learn to swim also.

  It was the first time we met. I was just coming up to the house after visiting the cows—something I did every morning—and I saw her standing by the back door with my mother and a woman who looked like an older, thinner, unhappier version of my mother.

  “May, come meet your cousin and your aunt,” my mother called to me.

  Comfort was already grown up, at least to me, for she was sixteen years old and stunningly beautiful, while I was nine and still awkwardly growing. She and her mother had been living in Europe with Comfort’s stepfather, who was Dutch and a gambler, which meant they moved constantly from town to town. He died after falling from a horse late at night, drunk, and after that Aunt Ann took to the stage for a few years, playing the matronly roles that Comfort would come to despise. But Aunt Ann had quit that life now and was moving to America to be closer to her sister.

  “Comfort, do you know how to swim?” my mother had asked that first day. They would stay with us the entire summer and then rent a few rooms in the nearby town of Oxbow in the fall. My aunt Ann thought this would give Comfort “more opportunity” than living on a dairy farm. Opportunity always carried great weight with both of them, perhaps an effect of the gambling nature of their early days.

  “A little,” Comfort answered, looking at me and winking.

  For some reason her wink thrilled me.

  “I’ll teach you,” my mother said.

  • • •

  As I made my slow way across the Ohio River holding on to Giulia, however, I couldn’t think about Comfort. I could only think about the bank: how far away was it, could I reach it, and could I keep my grip on the girl? Only later did I remind myself that my mother had taught Comfort how to swim, hoping this meant that she was alive.

  With one arm crossed over Giulia’s little chest and under her arm, I paddled very slowly north toward Ohio. I can remember only a few things about that twilight swim: the feel of Giulia’s wet hair pasted against my neck, the sight of two men in the water clinging to the corpse of a mule, and the cries of those drowning around us. Also—but I might have dreamed this later in one of my nightmares—I remember seeing fragments of some silky material floating by me in the water. At first I thought they were the muslin tea sachets I’d been sewing on the boat, but then I realized they were bits of burned skin.

  I had to stop a number of times to rest and tread water. After the first time Giulia understood what I was doing and, holding on to my shoulder, scissored her legs alongside mine, both of us facing the bank. The water was cold and the slight current pushed us away from where we wanted to go. Treading water let me rest my arms and lungs but made me colder, and as soon as I could I pushed off again, which I signaled to Giulia by squeezing her arm.

  Her thin, barely clad body was a long, heavy sack that grew heavier the longer I swam. The slithery water fingered my skin and heaved itself against me, and I tried not to think about what was swimming beneath us: the whiskered catfish I’d seen fishermen haul up from among the rocks as the steamship trudged past them. My left arm grew numb and seemed to harden around Giulia’s little body while my right arm propelled us gradually forward.

  Our progress seemed impossibly slow, but when at last my foot found the river’s bottom, my relief was like a sob in my belly, and then I remember nothing more until Giulia and I were sitting side by side on newspapers that someone had spread out for us on a dry log on the bank.

  But even here, out of habit or in need of her warmth, I held her close, and she pressed her little body against mine. A woman gave us blankets and another woman took down our names. My relief melted into a kind of stunned exhaustion, and I looked out at the river we had just swum across as if I needed, even from here
, to make sense of it. Of course, there was no sense to be made. With my good ear I could still hear people in the water crying for help.

  Giulia moved her wet head from side to side, looking at every man who walked by us as the sun fell over the horizon. Small boats and rafts had finally begun picking up the swimmers, but more shouted for help than there were boats to help them. I looked for Comfort in the water but I was too far away to make out anyone’s features, and exhaustion held me in place. I had no sensation in my arms and legs, and my breath felt like a quietly wheezing animal inside my chest.

  Suddenly, Giulia shouted, “Papa!” with a voice strangely loud and deep for a girl so young, and she seemed to spring with one motion off the log and right into a man’s arms.

  The man was barefoot and hatless and wore only wet long johns under his blanket. He was not very tall and his shoulders were stooped, but he had Giulia’s nose and something of her bearing. There was no mistaking him for anything other than kin, and I felt then, as I feel now, that it was a kind of miracle that they both had made it off the Moselle alive, considering how many had not. Giulia’s father wrapped his wet arms around Giulia, and I felt the cold air come into the space under my arm where a moment ago I’d been holding her. I watched them embrace and cry. He was sobbing openly, something I had never seen a man do before.

  When Giulia led him back to me, he said something in Italian in a voice that cracked. He stopped and cried some more and then started again. I listened to him, not understanding a word, and I tried to look him in the eye as my mother always reminded me to do. I was glad they were alive and I was glad that they had found each other, but I was embarrassed by his attention. When he finished speaking, Giulia hugged me and I let myself be hugged, trying not to stiffen. After she let go I relaxed, and then I looked at her face carefully so I would remember it. I must have gotten a good image of it in my mind, for it often came back to me later in my dreams, but in my dreams she was not smiling; she was scared.