But as I walked back down the guard I could hear Mrs. Niffen’s loud voice coming from the dining room.
“I know it well. I used to have an aunt who lived here, though she died some years back of the diphtheria, poor thing. I could easily sell more tickets than there are seats. And you wouldn’t have to pay me anything, what with the repairs, the new pump, and everything so topsy-turvy . . . In short, I would be delighted to take on this job, and I know you’ll be pleased with how—”
I opened the dining room door to see, as I expected, that she was talking to Hugo. They were sitting at the nearest table, and Mrs. Niffen didn’t bother to stop when she saw me.
“Oh, May, there you are, and isn’t that lucky you have the posters with you. That’s Helena’s satchel, isn’t it? Let me take it. I was just telling the captain that I can go into town to sell the tickets—that is, if you’ve made them up? If not, I can easily write them myself; I know just where the paper is and I have my own ink, so no expense to you there, Captain. I always stock up in Cincinnati; I know a little shop . . .”
She wore a large white apron over her dress like a farmer’s wife and produced from its oversized pocket a stoppered inkwell.
“Always keep some with me,” she said.
I wondered what else she always kept with her.
“I’m sure Miss May will have no trouble,” Hugo told her.
“No expense to you,” Mrs. Niffen repeated. “None at all.” She held out her hand for the satchel and I looked cautiously at Hugo. Certainly I would have to do whatever he decided, but my heart sank slightly, feeling the reproof.
However, “Thank you, Mrs. Niffen,” he said, “but I’m sure Miss May will have no trouble at all today.”
He put a roll and a hard-boiled egg in his pocket and stood up from the table. “I have to see to the landing fees. If you want”—this to me—“you can come with me into town.”
I put a hard-boiled egg in my own pocket and followed him.
“Why does Mrs. Niffen want to do Helena’s jobs?” I asked when we got outside, having first stopped in the galley for a bucket of water and some flour so we could put up show posters before we got to the town.
“No doubt she wants the extra pay,” Hugo told me.
“But she said she would do it for free.”
“Oh, that. That means nothing. I’ve seen that trick before. Someone offers to start without pay and then later they come to you with a pressing need for money.”
We walked down the stage plank and started up to the bank through a dense jungle of hickory trees toward the road. Hugo gave me his arm as we climbed the muddy rise, our boots squelching with every step; and when I started to slip, I felt his fingers slide more firmly under my elbow and pinch the bone. I was walking the opposite way than I usually did, with my bad ear instead of my good one toward my companion, because I thought there was a chance that he would start up again about last night’s show. He hadn’t shouted last night but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t shout today thinking back on it. I cast about for something to say to distract him; however, all I could think of were the locked trunks with the old costumes inside and how I would get into them, but I didn’t want to bring up any mention of costumes. For once, I was trying to be strategic. It felt very uncomfortable, like the horsehair blanket against my wet skin that I was given after I swam across the river with Giulia.
“I was wondering if there was a key to my stateroom,” I said, landing at last on a topic. “The door has a keyhole but no key.”
“What do you need a key for?”
I looked at him. What did he mean? “To lock the door,” I said.
He moved the water bucket to his other hand and took hold of a tree branch to heave himself up the last bit of bank. Then he turned and held out his hand to pull me up, too. His touch felt as impersonal as if I were just something else—like his boat—that needed to be moved. That suited me. Comfort used to take any opportunity to raise her companion’s emotions; here she would have said something provocative or suggested that Hugo had led her here just so he could touch her hand. It always embarrassed me when she did that. As soon as I found my footing at the top of the bank, Hugo let go of me and began scraping the bottom of his muddy boot against the grass. I did the same.
At a sound he looked up. “Aha, and here they are,” he said, as if we’d been talking about someone. I followed his line of sight: four young boys were coming toward us, riding across the meadow on ponies, their legs dangling out of the stirrups.
“Mornin’, sir. Y’all from the showboat?” the largest boy asked Hugo after he reined in his horse. He had a squat-nosed, sunburned face and long yellow hair, and his Kentucky accent was so marked that it took me a moment to unravel his words.
“That I am! I’m the captain.” Hugo held out his hand. The boy took it a moment, looking down at him as if from a great height, but the pony was small enough so that he was nearly on eye level with Hugo.
“Where’s yer captain’s hat?” he asked suspiciously.
“Back on the boat. You’re a tall lad. How old are you, twelve?”
“Nearly,” the boy said.
“More like nearly ten!” another one shouted, this one almost an exact copy of the first with his long yellow hair and snub nose, only smaller.
“Well, that’s splendid. And don’t you have some fine ponies, here. If you go down to my boat, Cook’ll give you some carrots for them. You tell my man Leo there to show you up to the top deck. But first, stop a moment, let me see.” Hugo fished in his pocket and came up with a handful of boiled candy wrapped in twists of paper. “These might do better for you boys than carrots.”
The ponies came nosing up to his hand, but he reached around their bridles to give the candy to the boys one by one. A round of thanks came up from the group, but not until after the candy had been quickly unwrapped and lay safely inside their wet mouths. A snowfall of white wrappers landed on the grass, which the ponies bent forward to sniff.
“Coming to the show tonight?” Hugo asked the boys.
“I sure hope so!” “Yessir!” “Pa says we could might!” The fourth boy only nodded, moving the candy around in his mouth.
“It’s a fine show we’re putting on. This is Miss Bedloe, who makes our costumes, the best you’ve seen! Capes and fancy dress, you name it. We’re lucky to have her.”
I looked at Hugo in surprise, wondering if he meant it or if this was just part of his promotion.
“You tell your folks. Twenty cents for them, only a dime for you. And if you get there early, I’ll let you try on my captain’s hat. I think it’ll just about fit some of you.”
“Not you, Jackie!” the yellow-haired one said to his little brother, which made Jackie reach over to try to shove him off his mount, and then all at once the ponies took off together across the scruffy grass. The boys reined them in with the nonchalance of English lords and turned them toward the river. At the edge of the meadow they jumped off and, throwing the reins over the ponies’ necks but not bothering to tie them up, they scrambled down the bank in a shouting mass on their way to the boat.
“Do you always carry candy in your pocket?” I asked Hugo.
“Lesson one: Never underestimate the power of children. Those boys’ll be after their fathers and mothers all day, God willing, to go to the show.”
Boys, grocers, postmasters, and the justice of the peace, if there was one. I was amazed that Helena ever had time to do anything but give out tickets. No wonder the costumes all had a half-finished look—but I didn’t mention this to Hugo, who was whistling happily, his eyes squinting into almonds in the sunshine.
• • •
This was my first time in Kentucky, and indeed my first time anywhere in the South except for Baltimore. As Hugo and I walked into town I noticed a few dark-skinned figures on the road and in the yards we passed: slaves going about their masters’ business. I looked at their faces curiously. In Cincinnati there were all kinds of rumors about the slaves in the
South: how they were all in chains, or how in truth they were well treated, or how the abolitionist movement was all just a plot formed by England to try to destroy America. Having lived all my life in the North, I hadn’t seen many slaves before. Closer to town we passed a notice hanging crookedly on a tree:
Any SLAVE thinking of crossing the river — BEWARE! The yankee is not your friend and will send you to Cuba when you arrive, if you have not drowned first.
Whoever put it up used no paste but merely punctured the paper on the end of a dead tree branch, like a meat hook.
“You’ll learn to stay away from the emancipation fight,” Hugo said when he saw me reading it. “I’ve seen men come to blows more times than not over the issue. Tempers run hot, let me tell you. You’ll need more paste for that one,” he told me as I began to put up one of our posters on the opposite tree.
We walked by two slaves using a mangle in a yard, their faces hidden from me, and on the road we passed a tall woman, another slave by the looks of her, leading a small goat by a string. When the goat stopped to try to eat something along the road, she scolded it, and something about her firm but gentle voice and her very straight carriage reminded me of someone. A few steps later it came to me: my mother. In truth I don’t know what I had expected. I suppose, like Hugo, I felt it wasn’t my fight, but rather the fight of someone like Mrs. Howard and her well-organized Association for Slavery Abolishment for the Bettering . . . the Betterment . . . I couldn’t remember its long name.
Hugo and I came to the town square and pasted our show posters all around it so that people could see one, Hugo explained, from whatever direction they came from. Most of the main street consisted of narrow wooden stores, but, as in North Bend, there were a couple of log cabins still wedged in here and there. Farther up the hill I could see planted fields and orchards. Jacksonville was a typical little river town that kept itself going mainly by farming—“plantation” being too grand a word—and, more recently, river commerce. We stopped in at the grocer’s to give him free tickets. Back outside, an old white woman with a straw basket over her arm took the handbill we gave her and looked it over carefully through a pair of spectacles with yellowing glass, as if she were certain there must be a misspelling somewhere and she would be the one to catch it.
“Let’s hang the last one here,” Hugo said in front of the post office, “then we’ll go back.”
“What about the justice of the peace? Shouldn’t we give him a couple of free tickets?”
“Good for you,” Hugo said with a laugh. “You remembered. Now I won’t have to send you back to the glass factory.”
I looked at him, astonished.
“That was a joke,” he told me.
“I know. It’s what my father used to say to me sometimes.”
“Is that so? All right, then, I’m off to find the justice. Why don’t you take the post office yourself. After you give the postmaster his free tickets, ask him if you can put up the notice. And remember to smile.”
I must have looked uncertain, for he said, “Just spread your lips and show your teeth.”
The post office was a narrow two-story building with a dry goods store on the top floor. Inside it smelled like the lit oil lamps in the back, where a couple of men and one boy were busy sorting letters and magazines, and I could also smell paper and another odor like the inside of hats. The counter was unmanned. A stained white card had been propped up against a cloth-bound book with the message Postmaster Mundy back in 10 minutes. There was no time or date on the card.
While I waited for the postmaster, I stood looking at the notices already plastered along the wall near the counter. Jacksonville, although small, had a few lectures this week: “ ‘The Secret Nature of the Sun,’ by Astronomer John Findlay lately of Edinburgh, Scotland, which will prove by means of singeing tobacco that the Sun is a lens made out of ice”; and “ ‘Coronation Rituals Explained,’ for those interested in the upcoming ceremony for the new English Queen, Victoria.” But nothing about slavery or its abolition.
“You won’t find Comfort speaking here,” a voice said behind me.
I turned to find Thaddeus standing just inside the door with a rolled-up newspaper in one hand and a half-eaten apple in the other. Thaddeus was always eating; he was like a young boy in his second growth. A small belly was beginning to protrude from his shirt, which he took pains to hide, but I had seen it fitting him out for his costumes. I wondered how he knew I had been looking for her.
“She wouldn’t dare lecture in the South,” he told me. “The people here would string her up in a tree. Why, just last week a man was shot in the back not too far from here, and all he did was give food to a runaway slave girl. Look at this.” He pointed to a notice I had passed over, an advertisement for capturing a runaway slave named Hamp. Unlike Leo’s show posters, this was printed up professionally, with a black-ink drawing of a hand pointing to the bold $200 reward.
“ ‘Dark, about six feet high, wearing a swansdown vest. Plays well on the violin,’ ” Thaddeus read. “ ‘Payment made for information or return. Anyone assisting the runaway will be hanged.’ ”
He tucked his rolled newspaper under his arm and put the apple core in his pocket. “Hand me one of our posters,” he said, and he pasted it right over the one about the runaway slave.
“Are you allowed to do that?”
“You have to start thinking like a man of business, May. There’s no better spot for it. Now let’s be off.”
“I can’t go until I give tickets to the postmaster,” I told him.
“Is that right? Let’s see ’em.”
I gave him the tickets and he went up to the long counter and looked around. Then he rapped twice on the wood. “You there! Boy!”
The young boy working in the back came trotting over, his hands and face covered with newsprint ink. Thaddeus asked him if he knew the postmaster.
“What, you mean my pa?”
“Your pa! Terrific! Yes, Postmaster Mundy, your pa. Why don’t you come around here to me. Do you have a pocket on you?”
The boy came around the counter and stood before us, feeling his various pockets as if to show us how many he had.
“Hold one open for me, will you? I have a present.”
The boy looked at Thaddeus for a long moment as though not sure if he was friend or foe. He was wearing dark trousers buttoned at the knee with loosely knit gray socks tucked up underneath, and ankle-high boots that were so big, they must have been his father’s, though I could see why he wore them: they were made of good, supple leather. He cleared out one trouser pocket of its pebbles, penknife, and rawhide string and then held the empty pocket open with his finger and thumb while Thaddeus slipped two tickets inside, whistling their descent.
“Two complimentary tickets for your pa and your ma,” Thaddeus told him. “Now, what about you. You like dancing? There’s some very fine dancing on the program tonight. And I sing two songs with the most beautiful lady you ever saw; she has dimples and golden ringlets.”
The boy looked at me as though trying to transform what he saw before him into the picture Thaddeus was painting.
“Not me,” I told him. “I play the piano.” Then, remembering Hugo’s instructions, I opened my mouth slightly to show my teeth.
“We’ve got jokes, too, and a good scene at the very end that will make you laugh. You like dogs? Our show’s got the best actor on all of the Ohio River, and he’s canine.”
“He’s what?”
“He’s our dog! Now, you give those tickets to your pa quick as you can. You got any brothers or sisters?”
“No, sir, there’s just me. My mother had a deal of trouble and didn’t think she could have a baby, but I’m the angel sent to her by God.”
He said this most seriously, his hands clasped behind his back.
“And for this they have you working the store?” Thaddeus teased.
Still the boy was solemn. “My pa says he couldn’t do without me.”
“Charles Mundy.”
“Charles Mundy, what about I give you a complimentary ticket, too, eh? If I do that, will you tell all your friends and their parents to come? Only ten cents for boys, tell ’em. You can show ’em your ticket. But yours is a special one, specially marked.” Thaddeus looked at me and I fished in my satchel for another ticket. But when I held it out to him, the boy didn’t take it.
“What about magic?” he asked.
“What about magic?”
“Any magic tricks in your show?”
“Suuure!” Thaddeus said. He smiled showing his very white teeth. “Best magic on the Ohio. You do magic?”
Charles Mundy took the ticket from me and tucked it carefully into his pocket without bending the stiff paper. “I know a trick, but I need horsehair and a comb.”
“Now, don’t you go climbing trees with those valuables in your pocket,” Thaddeus warned him. He picked up his newspaper from the counter and slapped it playfully against his thigh.
“I won’t, sir,” Charles Mundy said seriously.
When we were outside on the street I said, “Why did you tell him we have magic? We don’t have magic.”
“May, May, what did I say before?” Again the gleam of white teeth. “Think like a businessman! You don’t want a repeat of last night’s performance—that weak crowd! Anyway, I liked that boy, that Charles Mundy. So solemn! I was never in my life as solemn as that; I even laughed when I was hiding from my mother when she needed wood cut. And isn’t that a wonderful thing for a father to tell his son? ‘Can’t do without him.’ That’s just shining. If I had a son, why, that is just what I would tell him. May! Do you have a pencil? I have to write that down.”
I wondered if, like so many other actors I knew, he was writing his memoirs. It was a common statement among them: “I’ll put that in my book” or “You’ll read that story in print one day.” I suppose that now I am the one writing a memoir, but I must rely on my memory, for on that afternoon, like most afternoons, I did not have a pencil with me. It didn’t occur to me then or for a long time afterwards that I had anything to memoir about, and I never used a pencil to do anything but mark cloth for a seam. So Thaddeus just took off his hat and scratched above his ear as if he could commit the thought to memory in that way.
The Underground River Page 11