I suppose she thought “Miss May” was too familiar for a boatman, but Leo ignored the implied reprimand. He just touched his hat and went back into the office.
“What was the piece of news you had?” I asked Mrs. Howard impatiently.
“Just what I said. I expect you to repay my loan.”
So. No news about my family—that was only a trick to get me out here. “You told me that money was a gift.”
“It was meant to get you home. You used it for another purpose entirely. I don’t know what you used it for, but that means less to me than how you plan to pay me back.”
From the galley above us I could smell a warm floury smell: cake. Birthday cake. Underneath the rattle of cutlery in the dining room I could hear voices, and I knew they were all waiting for me. All at once I was tired of Mrs. Howard. I started to go around her to the stairs.
She put a hand on my arm. “Wait a moment. Where are you going?”
“To get you the money. I have almost ten dollars. I can send you the rest a quarter a week.”
“Forty weeks,” she calculated. “That’s a long time for me to wait.” I noticed a shrewd expression on her face, or maybe that expression was always there. I took a step back so that her arm fell away from me. At the same time a wind came up as it will suddenly on a river, and she put her hand on her hat, still watching me. In the play I’d just seen, The Midnight Hour, bets are wagered. “Half my estate to half yours,” says the Marquis to the General, “if I can carry Julia off tonight to marry her with her consent.” Mrs. Howard had the same look about her, braced as she was against the wind. The look of someone about to place a wager. I put my arms around myself as if to hold my whole body down.
“I’ve come up with a better idea,” she said.
12
There is an embroidery stitch I used once on a costume of Comfort’s called the spider web, which is really only a complicated backstitch but still very striking. You begin by making two or three long stitches that will be hidden, eventually, by the finished embroidery, and then you lay your yarn across them in an imaginary circle, like a line of spokes. When the spokes are all laid out, as many of them as you want, you tie them together at the center. The tricky part comes next: weaving another strand of yarn under and around the spokes in order to make spirals. The spirals should be worked close together, and the ridges should be even and stand out. The first time I made one I thought, once the design was finished, that it looked less like a web and more like a golden sun with bent rays. But I certainly felt like a spider when I was making it, weaving the yarn in and out.
On the day of my birthday play, watching Liddy on stage in the costume I’d recently finished, I could see that her dress needed something more. And as Mrs. Howard outlined her plan for how I might repay her loan, the solution came to me: the spider web.
“It really will be quite easy for you, traveling down the river as you do,” Mrs. Howard was saying. “No one will suspect a thing.”
I didn’t answer. Her proposal unsettled me, and when I’m unsettled I like to think of something complicated to distract myself. I envisioned a line of these little embroidered suns the size of silver dollars on the wide Italian collar of Liddy’s costume. But the spider web requires a tapestry needle with a long, flat head, which I did not have.
“I’ll send you a note with our itinerary,” Mrs. Howard told me. “We can talk about the details later, in a more private setting.” She put her finger to her nose, signaling secrecy.
“What happens if I say no?” I asked as she started down the stage plank.
“You won’t say no,” she said without turning her head. “You’re a compassionate girl.”
I wasn’t sure that I was. Like Comfort, mostly I thought of myself. After Mrs. Howard left, I went up to the dining room, and Cook brought out a frosted cake and two strawberry whipped-cream pies to celebrate my birthday. Hugo produced a bottle of mulberry wine and another bottle of apricot wine, and we ate slice after slice of cake and sipped the sweet wine and talked about the play. The tables were all pushed together and no one was in a hurry to leave. It should have been a happy, relaxed evening, but it wasn’t for me. I was sitting at the far end of our long makeshift table, and my temples felt as though I’d pulled my hair back too tight. I wondered if a headache was coming on.
“May, give us a smile! Weren’t you surprised?” Thaddeus asked. He looked at me sideways as if assessing me. “A good birthday treat, eh?”
“I saw you laughing,” Liddy told me. She squeezed my arm.
“You were very good,” I said, trying to push my worries away. I wanted to tell Liddy how much I enjoyed it; her face was shining like a young girl’s. “I completely believed you.”
She laughed. “Well, now, that’s a great compliment!”
“But weren’t you surprised, May?” Thaddeus asked again. “At least tell us you were surprised. Tell us you had no idea what we were up to.”
His cheeks were pink from wine and he leaned forward across the table at me. “It was all Captain Cushing’s idea.”
“Needed to rehearse the act straight through anyway,” Hugo said roughly, but his eyes were smiling.
“Thank you,” I said. I told them all it was a very nice surprise.
“That’s all you have to say about it?” Jemmy asked. “ ‘Very nice’?”
“It was lovely. I enjoyed it.” I did enjoy it, but they wanted more. “I forgot that I was watching a play.” I looked at Hugo, who smiled a small, private smile at me, a smile for me alone, although everyone was watching.
Leo brought me a present: a pincushion in the shape of a steamboat. “From us all,” he said. “I found it a few towns back.” It was lovely, about the size of my hand, though the white fabric would get dirty in no time. I stopped myself from saying this, however, and just thanked him with all the emotion I could muster, which was quite a lot. For a moment I forgot about Mrs. Howard as I turned the pincushion over in my hand.
“What did you think of my costume, huh, May?” Pinky asked. “Stole it from our Mrs. Niffen here.” He put his hand next to his mouth and said in a stage whisper, “Her nightgown!”
“And who let you into my trunks, I’d like to know?” Mrs. Niffen replied, staring at her husband. Mr. Niffen, naturally, continued eating his cake without looking up.
“But you know,” I said to Pinky, “you didn’t really look like a woman.”
“Hah-hah—har-har-har,” Pinky laughed, as though I had just made a joke.
He kept stealing glances at Liddy, who seemed not to notice, but I saw that tonight she did not take any letters out of her purse to read under the table. Her face was rosy—glowing, I would almost say—happy with her performance and with the play as a whole. An outward face, although I could hardly explain what I meant by that—perhaps that she seemed like a person who had no secrets, although of course she did. In some ways she reminded me of Comfort, but when Liddy looked at me, it felt like she saw me as someone she was getting to know, not someone she already knew through and through, which was how my cousin always looked at me. But Comfort did not know me through and through, and I fell back to thinking about Mrs. Howard. Was breaking the law the same thing as lying? I wondered. For that was what Mrs. Howard was asking me to do.
Mr. Niffen took out his violin and played for us between sips of wine, and when the wine ran out he pulled out a flask, and when the flask was empty he put down his violin and sat with his long legs stretched out before him and his hat over his eyes. But even with the hat partially covering his face, I could still see his faint smile as if pleased with himself—perhaps for remembering so many lines, I thought, for he was back to his usual reticence and hadn’t said five words all together since the play ended. Leo gave Oliver his own little piece of cake on the floor and then sat with the dog on his lap, both of them listening to Mr. Niffen on his violin until Oliver let out a wheezy snore. Then Leo said good night and took Oliver downstairs. A short time later Hugo put his arm around L
iddy and said, “When are we going to meet this beau of yours, eh?” Later still, Celia—unused to any wine, let alone two half glasses—fell out of her chair and had to be carried by Pinky to her cot. Liddy soon followed, and I said good night when she did, although I did not go to my room straightaway.
“Swim tomorrow?” Liddy asked me.
“Of course,” I told her. “If it’s fine.” Then I said what for years I’d heard actors say easily, blithely to each other, without ever once saying it myself—“Good show tonight”—and I meant it. It seemed to me then, and now, as though that little phrase coming from my mouth, almost unbidden, cemented my feeling more than anything else that I was one of them. I had endeavored to fit in and live with them—with them, not among them—on that little boat, and I had succeeded. I thought of the moment when Hugo and I had clapped together at the end of the play, before Mrs. Howard interrupted. Those few moments of happiness. But then Mrs. Howard roared in.
Liddy smiled broadly and yawned, and I watched her go into her stateroom. When the door closed behind her I went quietly down the stairs and stood on the port side of the boat, where in the purple light I could just make out the other side of the river. The boat rocked gently with the tide, and below me the ever-present geese slept in a feathery group with their sides pressed together. From where I stood, Kentucky did not seem so far away. If Hugo took a sudden fancy to move the boat, Leo could pole us over in half an hour in calm water. I heard soft splashes as some night critter swam about looking for food, interspersed with the creaking of the cottonwoods.
“Rain coming,” I heard behind me. Hugo came up to the railing next to me and stood so close that I could smell wine and cake and the damp linen scent of his shirt.
“I love that smell,” he said. For a moment I was confused—how could he know that I was thinking about his shirt?—before I realized he meant the coming rain. I looked out at the river.
“So you had a good birthday, eh? You enjoyed my play?”
My play. I liked that he felt so personal about it.
“You’ve convinced me.” I meant about plays in general, and he understood.
“I knew I would,” he said with a smile in his voice.
Our hands were on the rail, nearly touching, my right next to his left. Sudden strong laughter came from the dining room as someone began playing Mr. Niffen’s violin, not very well. When Hugo turned at the noise, his finger briefly brushed against mine, and I thought again of the sensation I felt when he put the key in my pocket. As if he could read my thoughts, Hugo said:
“How’s that key working out? Any more break-ins?”
I smiled. “It’s doing its job brilliantly.”
He laughed, and this time he did touch my hand on purpose with his own. But he covered my fingers so briefly that I didn’t have time to feel uncomfortable.
“Well, I’ll say good night, May. I’m glad you had a good birthday. Don’t let yourself get rained on,” he said.
I watched him go up the stairs, my heart pumping strangely fast. Then I looked out toward Kentucky again. I could no longer see it. After a moment I walked over to the auditorium and opened the door.
Although it was too dark to see, I knew that Leo must be stretched out on his bedroll up on the stage with Oliver beside him. He had doused all the lanterns, but the smell of hot glass and lamp oil still hung in the air.
“Who is that?” Leo asked in a thick voice from the stage floor.
I closed the door behind me. “I’m sorry. I woke you up. It’s May.”
“What do you need, Miss May?”
“Nothing. I just had a question for you.” I hesitated for a moment. “I was wondering: How hard is it to get across the river? I mean, if you rowed.”
“What d’you mean? In a rowboat?”
“That’s right.”
“Not hard. Depends on the tide,” he told me. “Why you ask?”
Alpha, beta, gamma, delta. “No reason.”
“Don’t row across this river ’less you know how to swim. You know how to swim?”
I told him I did.
“Good. That’s good. Now, I have to get up very early tomorrow. You need anything else?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing else. Thank you again for my birthday play and for the lovely pincushion.”
Outside, the rain had started: hard, heavy drops that I could hear on the surface of the river. I felt my way up the stairs with my left hand on the guardrail, raindrops bouncing onto my head. The spider web stitch, I remembered, had a variation in which you wove the thick yarn loosely without any fill. You still needed a tapestry needle to slide the yarn crosswise under the spokes, but if you took care to space the strands out evenly, it would look less like a sun and more like a trap.
• • •
There were no tapestry needles in the next town, Delmore, which was on the Kentucky side of the river. Nor did they have any regular sewing needles with large enough eyes. The following day we crossed back to Indiana, where I had more luck. The morning was moist and hot, and chalky-blue clouds patterned the sky. The general store was lodged in the first set of buildings after the wharf, and the proprietor found a box of tapestry needles in the back room. She also brought out an array of silk thread: one a beautiful gold that I couldn’t resist. Yellow was unlucky on stage but gold was not considered yellow.
There were a few notices pinned to the wall next to the door, but nothing about fugitive slaves. As I was paying I said, “Do you get many runaways here?”
The shopkeeper gave me a sharp glance but said nothing. She was very fair, with thin hair, and with the light behind her—she stood in front of the window with her cash box on a desk—she looked like a young girl. Maybe she did not understand me.
“I mean runaway slaves,” I told her.
At that, she pursed her narrow lips and suddenly looked older. She shut the lid to the box with a sharp crack. “I know what you mean. You an abolitionist?”
“I just wondered.”
“Because we don’t take kindly to abolitionists around here. We need our Kentucky business.”
Like the innkeeper, William Whitlock, she put the slavery question in the context of business. I was not sure how they fit together, and I asked her.
“Oh, really. You people. It’s simple!” She was holding the change from my purchase in her hand without giving it to me, and she looked me over as if I were a simpleton. “If those farmers are paying out wages to every man working their fields, they won’t have money to come to my store and buy what I’m selling. Not only that, if they let go their slave men, who’ll work their fields?”
“Who works the fields up here in the North?” I asked.
“May.”
I looked over and saw Hugo standing in the doorway. He did not look angry, but he wasn’t smiling, either.
“Have you made your purchase?” he asked me. “I’ll walk you back.”
He took the tissue-paper package containing my tapestry needles and thread, and opened the door for me. I was beginning to understand his moods a little more, and I’d figured out that when he was excited—angry, passionate, afraid for the safety of the boat—his English accent became more pronounced.
It was very pronounced now. “May,” he said as we started back along the narrow dirt road, “I want to tell you a story. No, no,” he went on as I started to protest, “it’s a short enough story, and it’s just this. When my father was a boy in England, he once saw slave ships along the coast of Dover. He was quite young, my father, and on holiday, and as he ran along up the coastline with his sister collecting shells or some such nonsense, his sister spotted the ships, three great big beasts beating along against the waves out in the sea, but not so far out as you’d think they would be. And my grandmother said, ‘Those there are slave ships. They’ve got black men in their hold instead of honest English linen.’ ‘What’s honest English linen?’ my father asked her. ‘Something meant to be sold,’ she told him. Not men.”
Hugo began bea
ting his walking stick against the heads of long barley grass beside us. The river rippled below us, the color of thick green milk.
“My father never forgot that. He told my sister and me about those ships many times. It made a great impression.”
I said, “I was curious, that was all. That’s why I asked her.”
“It was a deplorable sight, those ships. I understand that. Uncommonly bad. More than bad—unjust and ungodly. Sinful. Yes, I do, I think it’s sinful. But the English slave trade did end, you know. It ended by law. Nothing to do with my father or my grandmother. What could my father do, anyway, a boy of six?”
“I’m twenty-three.”
“We will not be the ones to change the laws,” he told me. “We’re here to give a little entertainment to the people, these hardworking people, you understand? Give them a bit of a holiday. They don’t want to look out at the slave ships, no more than my father did.”
“Some of them do.”
“They come to us for a rest from all that. We’re not to get involved.”
I glanced at him. His jaw seemed very set. We were coming to the first boats tied up to the shore, most of them already unloaded and ready for new cargo. For once, the Floating Theatre seemed stately and calm, heavy in the water.
“Why this curiosity now? Is it because of that woman?” Hugo asked as walked down to the boat.
I understood which woman he meant. I thought about lying and even started my Greek to myself, but instead I just said, “Yes.”
“Don’t get mixed up with her, May,” Hugo said in his strongest accent. He stepped aside to let me go up the stage plank first, and his eyes narrowed as he looked at me. “She’s trouble.”
I thought to myself: That’s the very thing Florid said about you.
• • •
A few days later I received a letter from Comfort addressed to general delivery, Anderson, Indiana. She listed the towns where Mrs. Howard had booked lectures, mostly places on the Ohio River until they reached Missouri.
I’m sorry we ended on a sour note, but Flora says that you are not to be blamed. It was simply a misunderstanding, and really if you think about it Captain Cushing was the real villain. He was so very rough! And he did not at all allow Flora time to explain, as a gentleman would have. Take care of yourself, Frog, and take the first steamer out of there if he troubles you.
The Underground River Page 18