I noticed that she did not write, Come to me if he troubles you.
Florid added a postscript in brown ink:
May, we will be staying at the Gladwell Arms in New Paul, Indiana. After that at the Creekside Inn at Roseville. I am always in my room at teatime.
This, I understood, was a summons. But I didn’t know what I was going to say to her. I had never broken the law and I wasn’t sure I could do it even if I wanted to. I could perfectly picture myself blurting out something unwise, Greek alphabet or no. What I kept thinking was that it was foolish of Mrs. Howard to ask me, but I’d already seen what happened when she was called foolish.
As I was rereading the letter, Thaddeus came up to where I was sitting in the dining room. “Is that from your cousin?” he asked. “She was looking very well the other day, I must say.” He had a pair of trousers in his hand and asked if I could alter them for him.
“They’ve gotten a bit tight—too many pieces of Cook’s pecan pie, I suppose.”
Like Comfort, Thaddeus came to me for all his little needs; he couldn’t so much as sew on a button, unlike Hugo or Pinky. Pinky even mended his own ripped shirts. We went down to the green room, where my sewing things were, and as we walked along the guard I couldn’t help but look out at the river as though I might see Mrs. Howard come sailing up to us at any moment, although as far as I knew she was traveling only by coach. Meanwhile, Thaddeus was prattling on:
“I wonder, did Comfort say anything about me? About my performance? How we used to laugh together at the other actors in Pittsburgh! Do you remember old Mrs. Goulder? Always trying to get her voice up, poor thing. And her brother—blind as a bat! He oughtn’t to be allowed near a stage. Oh, well, these old actors, you know, they’re like old horses, and you can get them to go neither with begging nor beating, ha-ha! Or so the saying goes. I’ll be there soon, I suppose.” He didn’t look as though he believed that for a minute. “But the worst,” he said, holding the door to the green room open for me, “are the ones who think they’re above you. Second-rate. That’s what one chap called me, just because he understudied for Kemble.” He eyed the letter still in my hand. “Did Comfort say anything about the play at all?”
I had the feeling that Thaddeus wanted to read the letter for himself, and although I couldn’t say that at that moment I felt my first twinge of danger, I did realize that I now had real secrets. I couldn’t let anyone see the letter, carefully worded as it was, and so I opened the cigar box I still used for my sewing supplies, and while I was taking out pins I tucked the sheet of paper inside.
“I don’t think you’re second-rate,” I said, though I didn’t know very much about it. Comfort was always worried about that, too, even though for the most part she received lovely notices. Looking back on it, I’m sure this added to her haste to take up Mrs. Howard’s offer and abandon me to look after myself. Thaddeus was just as pragmatic. I looked at the center back seam of the trousers he had given me and began to unpick the thread.
“Yes, well, at least it’s not farm work,” Thaddeus went on. “That I couldn’t abide. I suppose one of these days I’ll have to find a rich young widow to marry. Someone whose late husband kept a good cellar. But what I’d really like is to live in the country with some money to my name and a good pair of hunting dogs. I had a bitch in my youth who never left my side until the day my father kicked her in the stomach when he was three sheets to the wind. Annie, her name was. I still dream about her.”
What would Thaddeus do, I wondered, when the summer run was over? What would I do, for that matter? I took a pin from my new steamboat pincushion and angled it into the trousers’ waistband. Well, I couldn’t worry about that now; Mrs. Howard and her proposal was all I could think about. And since she was such a large woman—or “somewhat troubled with flesh,” as Pinky always delicately put it—that seemed fitting.
• • •
But there was no chance of meeting Mrs. Howard anytime soon, for we stopped in three Kentucky towns in a row, and she and Comfort kept to the North. They never lectured in the South, as Thaddeus had predicted back in Jacksonville, and now I had Comfort’s list to prove it. So I was safe from making any decision for a while.
When we finally landed in New Paul, Indiana, we were too late to meet up with Mrs. Howard, who had already moved on. Instead I spent the afternoon cutting shad for Leo, who liked to use it as bait. I wondered if I could just avoid Mrs. Howard altogether. But, I reasoned, she would then probably come looking for me, and the Floating Theatre was easy to find—indeed, we advertised our presence.
A few days after that we landed in Carney, Kentucky, a town that was either dying or already dead, depending on your level of optimism, and not a place you would think could fix my purpose, though that is just what happened.
No little boys met us at the landing, and, walking up to the town, we saw only a couple of women out shopping with their baskets. Storefront after storefront was boarded up and abandoned. Even the horse manure in the middle of the road was old and dry, caked in the sun. The postmaster told Hugo that coal was being dug up ten miles to the south, and what with the run on the banks last fall and the bad tobacco crop three years in a row, half the able men had gone off to dig in the pits. But even without his explanation I would have known that we’d draw a small crowd. The town felt like a dead eye with no mind behind it.
“Damn coal,” Hugo said as we left the post office. “They told me about it last year but I didn’t think anything of it. If I had my steamboat, we could steam up there and back in a day. What town did he say? Those miners deserve a show. What’s our earnings at, May?”
“A hundred and two dollars and fifty cents, less whatever you spend today.”
“By the end of August, God willing, I’ll have enough for that steamer. But not if our audiences all go inland before then.”
We made our way toward a cluster of farm buildings where Hugo, as if intent on reaching every single body that still remained, wanted to put up notices. After we plastered up a few, Hugo noticed an old tobacco barn on a little rise in the distance, clearly not used for years.
“We should get a can of paint. Paint our name up on top there so everybody can see it. That’ll get the word out. Maybe even the miners’ll see it.”
“Won’t the farmer mind?”
“We’ll give him a couple of free tickets. He might have the paint, too, or some whitewash.”
Clouds coiled above us like dark puffy snakes. I could feel the rising wind push the skirt of my dress against my legs as though trying to keep me back, but even so, Hugo just kept walking across the spongy pasture, which had once been planted with tobacco. Some of the old plants were still struggling to live, not taking to their abandonment. Their thin leaves were yellow at the edges and spread closer to the ground than to the sun, and the dewy stalks found ways up under my skirt, wetting my stockings. The long gray tobacco barn, listing to one side, looked more dilapidated the closer we got, and I wondered why Hugo didn’t give up on his plan. But, like me, once he set a course for himself, he had to see it through to the end.
“I don’t see a farmhouse anywhere,” I remarked.
While Hugo inspected the back, I went around front to look inside. The barn was built with no windows and only one door, which was off its hinges and propped up against the outside wall. What prompted me to step in I don’t know, for the roof beams were half-rotted and the unevenly planked walls with their dark-eyed knots felt like ghosts watching me with disapproval. An old smell of tobacco and wet wood mixed with the earthy scent of whatever wild creatures lived there now.
If the town behind us felt like gloom, this place felt like despair. I heard Hugo come in behind me. I was about to step back when I noticed something at the far end, a little structure built out of rough-hewn logs and fitted with barred windows, a kind of animal cell, but it was too narrow for a horse and too tall for a pig. As I got closer to look at it, I could see iron rings fastened to one of the thick wooden joists.
/> Hugo followed me. I heard him take a sharp intake of breath. “Look at the irons. Jesus Mary. That’s a slave hold.”
“A what?”
“They must have chained them up here while they waited to sell them at market.”
For a moment I didn’t understand him. Then I did. Something cold settled on my shoulders, and I heard a noise like a broom sweeping back and forth between my ears. I look back at that now as my first real moment of understanding. The ghosts in the knotted wood and the dark, rotting, windowless walls shifted from details to setting, and I felt that just by looking at the iron fetters I was somehow a culpable witness to all the dark deeds that had happened here. The cell was too small for a person to lie down; in fact, the fetters might even have been too high to allow for sitting. I noticed there was a pair of smaller iron rings farther down on the thick wooden beam that divided the cell in two.
“To shackle the children,” Hugo said.
The silence in the barn was suddenly overwhelming. The small irons rings had been made to fit the tiniest wrists, and the splinters of rust speckling them were the color of dark, dried blood. I spied a second pair of small rings attached to the other side of the beam. Manacled, the children would have been facing away from each other. There was a small mound of very old, very dry human feces on the compacted dirt, and I thought of the little Negro boy with his frog named Happy. I tried very hard not to picture him there.
Hugo’s face was half in shadow. I wanted to say, Do you still think we should wait for the law? Only I was afraid of his answer. He was English, after all. I didn’t know if that gave him license to withdraw himself from the issue or not.
“Doesn’t look like they use it anymore. There’s that, at least.” He reached out as if to take my arm but I turned away; I couldn’t speak. As we walked back across the tobacco field, Hugo thrashed at the dying plants with his stick. We didn’t paint anything on that barn, or look for whoever owned it. All I wanted was to leave it behind me, and I walked in front of Hugo listening to the rhythm of his thrashing.
That night, as he predicted, only a handful of people came to the show: eight men, six women, and two children. The women’s pale faces were gaunt but freshly scrubbed, and the men sat with their hats in their laps. After the show they brushed off the brims with the open palms of their hands and then offered their arms to their wives. Each one of them was a storekeeper or a farmer. Maybe one of them owned that barn. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that, in spite of their small number, they looked like every other audience we played to, both north of the river and south.
13
Mrs. Howard began unpacking the most extraordinary little bronze-colored box—Japanese, she told me—that had within it a miniature tea service: a silver hot-water pot the size of a shaving mug, an equally small silver tea scoop and tea canister, two silver cups without handles, a silver creamer, a silver teapot, and a wool caddy in the shape of an Elizabethan country cottage. I watched in amazement as each tiny item came out, feeling like a doll at a tea party.
“The teapot was an English invention,” she was saying, “though it was based on a little pot that the Chinese use for drinking hot wine. I always take this set with me when I travel.”
We were in her rooms in Kenilworth, Indiana. Comfort was standing near the window wearing a pretty forest-green dress, and when I first walked in she’d said, “Oh, Frog, I’m so glad you’ve come!” Hearing that, a sour feeling spread beneath my ribs. I had wanted her to say this in Viola but she didn’t, and now it was too late. She came to embrace me but I kept my arms at my sides. Mrs. Howard noticed.
“Girls,” she said in her thunderous voice, “let’s begin all over on a friendly note. What’s done is done. Today is another day, a beautiful day!” she said, although it was humid and overcast. “Now, let’s see, where are my tea things?”
Once the tea things were laid out on the little table before us, they seemed too numerous and large to fit in the Japanese box; but I had seen them come out, so I knew it was possible despite appearances. Likewise, Mrs. Howard seemed generous and friendly today, an appearance that did not reflect what I knew to be true.
When Comfort went downstairs to fetch hot water, I asked, “So this is all a ruse? Comfort’s lectures? What you really do is help runaways?”
“Not a ruse, precisely, no, not a ruse. Two with one stone, you know. But it’s a good cover in its way, a very good cover.”
“Does she know?”
“Of course! However, I may have exaggerated her importance somewhat.”
Mrs. Howard was a shrewd woman, but I knew that already. She leaned forward, her silver chains rocking over her bosom, her piercing blue eyes narrowing. “Now, then, May, let’s talk about what you will do for us.”
I will not bore you with the long preamble Mrs. Howard indulged herself in before getting to the point a good twenty minutes later—the stories she told about runaways and their midnight departures and how in two cases Donaldson himself had outwitted their would-be captors (in one instance he ran off their horses and cut up their boots while they slept). Early on in this narrative Comfort came in with hot water and promptly left again, this time with her basket, to go to a shop. I drank tea from Mrs. Howard’s miniature teacup, which held about three sips of liquid, and was offered but declined some shortbread, red grapes, the end piece of a cherry cake, and a plate of sliced smoked trout.
Mrs. Howard ate a little of everything but food did not slow down her speech. However, when she opened her mouth for a larger-than-usual forkful of cake, I took the slight pause as opportunity.
“How much am I to do for twenty-five dollars?” By now I was tired and I wanted to get the instructions I needed and leave.
Mrs. Howard shifted the cake in her mouth and said without swallowing. “Oh, my dear, don’t be so mercenary! You can’t sell off good deeds.”
“But that is just what you asked me to do,” I reminded her, “back on the boat. However, if you’ve changed your mind . . .” I stood, knowing she would not let me go so easily.
She lowered her voice. “If you would just deliver some packages,” she said. “That’s all.”
“By ‘packages,’ do you mean people?” I asked in my regular voice.
She hushed me and then stood up and went to the door. After listening for a moment, she opened it suddenly. No one was there.
“We have to be careful,” she said, coming back to her armchair. “I told you those stories as warnings. We have to watch what we say.”
“I think you know by now that that’s hard for me to do.”
“I trust you, my dear.”
“It’s not a matter of trust.”
“Just deliver a few packages as you go down the river,” she told me. “They may be small packages. You understand.”
“Children?” I thought of the tiny manacles in the slave hold. “What do I do with them?”
“You pick them up in the South, of course, and take them across the river. Donaldson will be waiting with the carriage on the road; you find him and give him the package. That’s all. He’ll take it from there.”
I had more questions but the first bell was ringing, signaling that supper would be served downstairs in a quarter of an hour.
“How will I know when there is someone waiting for me to cross them?” I asked.
“I’ll see that you know.”
She stood and began brushing the crumbs off the bosom of her dress with wide sweeps.
“But where do I row to?” I asked. “And how will I know where to find Donaldson?”
“You’ll be told when the time comes,” Mrs. Howard said, rearranging the chains on her neck. “The less you know the better.”
“Better for whom?”
“Why, for everyone, my dear. None of us knows very much. It’s a piecemeal affair. You’re one of the pieces.” The second bell began ringing. “Now, where is your cousin? I wonder. You won’t stay for dinner, of course; I don’t think the inn allows guests. Besides
, we should really not be seen together now.”
You would think that thought would comfort me, but it didn’t.
• • •
The designs I was embroidering on Liddy’s costume were complicated enough to hold my attention for ten minutes at a time. But when those ten minutes were finished, or when my length of yarn ended and I had to unwind a new length, or turn the cloth over to knot the end, or hold the costume up to make sure the line of embroidery was straight, then my mind went right back to Mrs. Howard and her small “packages.”
On the one hand I did not want to know too much, because if anyone asked me anything, I was in danger, even with my Greek, of blurting out whatever I knew. On the other hand I did not like to undertake any activity without specific directions. Push the needle up, wind the yarn around the stitch, push the needle down. Step A, step B, step C. This was how I liked my instructions. Mark the cloth at one-sixteenth of an inch. Start the stitch and measure it again; if it’s in line, then pull the yarn taut and begin the next stitch.
Several days passed and then it was Sunday. In the afternoon I sat outside as I usually did on one of Hugo’s canvas chairs next to Leo, who was fishing off the pier, while Hugo sat on another chair next to me. The Floating Theatre was tied up behind us with the little rowboat attached to its stern, drifting slightly against the mossy edge of the river. I noted to myself that the line was knotted around a hook on the stem post. Could I figure out how to untie the knot and then, more importantly, re-knot it? Would there be enough moonlight to see? Or should I bring a lantern? I hadn’t heard anything from Mrs. Howard since I left her in Kenilworth. Waiting was safer than the not-waiting would be, but I did not like the uncertainty.
“That for Miss Liddy?” Leo asked me, unhooking a small brown fish that was trying to wiggle its way back into life. He put it in a separate bucket for me to gut and clean when I was ready to take a break from my work. I told him that it was.
The Underground River Page 19