I had to row backwards, of course. For a long time I could still see the squat chimneys of the Floating Theatre that ran up every two staterooms—my room shared its chimney with Hugo’s—each like a little neck topped by a Chinaman’s hat but no face. They seemed to be waiting for something. I pulled the oars back and then back again, making a neat swoosh in the water like scissors cutting through fabric, and when I guessed that I was just about in the middle of the river, I turned the boat around so that I was facing Kentucky and took out my father’s watch.
The warm air settled palpably on my shoulders like a short felt cape while I waited for the last few minutes to pass. When it was exactly midnight, I got the lantern I’d brought along out from under the thwart and lit it. Then I counted to sixty and doused it.
My dress was damp and sticking to my skin from nervous sweat. Under the round melon of a moon—still bright—I could just make out the Kentucky bank, although the land above it was a long black shadow. I counted to sixty, lit the lantern again, and then doused it. Still no answering light from the shore. The water lapped around me and I heard a fish flop over its surface. The rowboat was drifting downstream and I pulled on the oars to correct it. I wasn’t sure if I should go back or go on, when at last I saw a flicker of light that blinked once or twice before it caught. Sixty seconds later it went out.
Turning the boat around again, I picked out a treetop on the northern bank that was, I thought, more or less opposite from where the light had come from, and I rowed away from it in a straight line. If I’d had someone with me they could have directed me, but I was alone, and my neck began to hurt from looking back so often. When I felt the first scrape of the rocky river bottom, I was convinced that I was way off course. There was no town and no pier on this part of the river, nothing at all to tie the boat to, since the trees here did not come all the way down to the water, so I had no choice but to get out and pull the boat up the bank. The tall trees in front of me hid the moon, and the scraping of the hull against the pebbly dirt sounded overly loud, both out of keeping with the other noises and amplified.
I thought about calling out but I’d heard there were lookouts along the river. As I was trying to make out the face of my watch again, a figure stepped out from behind the trees, and although I was waiting for just exactly this, at the sight of him my body lurched back a little in surprise. He was a white man carrying a large basket and he was alone. He probably wanted to make sure of me before he brought out the children. He was shorter than I imagined he would be, and dressed like a farmhand. When he came closer I could smell barn animals and hay.
“Friend of Mizz Howard’s?” he asked. I affirmed this. “This your boat?” I nodded again and then said yes. My voice came out in a whisper, which I hadn’t intended.
“Here,” he said. He handed me the basket, which had a rumple of clothes inside. When he drew back I saw a long gun tucked into his trousers.
“There’ll be a light on the other side,” he said, “once you land your boat. Walk along the road until you see it.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere on the road.”
“Which road?”
He shook his head at me. “I don’t know—main road!” Even in a whisper he sounded exasperated. “Just keep your eyes about you.”
“How many children?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You can see how small the rowboat is.”
“Just the one baby boy,” the man said.
For a moment I was confused. Then I looked down at the basket of clothes. I pulled back the edge of a pair of trousers and saw an infant’s tightly sleeping face.
“I thought . . . I was led to expect children.”
The man shrugged. “We hear about a baby coming, we approach the mother. She sends for us when her time comes. Easy enough to say the baby was born dead. Most of the land agents turn a blind eye; they mostly want their women back at work. Or maybe they believe it. I don’t know. Course, some of them never even know a baby’s coming. The women conceal it.”
The baby’s head was hardly bigger than my fist. His hair was still wet. When I asked how old he was, the man looked at his watch. Eight hours, he told me.
“Oh, aye. I almost forgot. Look here now.” The man pushed aside the clothes at the bottom of the basket and produced a feeding bottle made of clay, shaped like a little upright boat with a goatskin nipple at the top. I’d seen these devices before, once in Oxbow and once in a theater in New York: a young actress gave one to her husband to feed her baby when she needed to be on the stage. I remembered how the husband cradled the infant’s head on his elbow, the rough woolen material of his coat itchy, I thought, against such sensitive skin, but the baby sucked down the milk without pause. Afterwards the baby burped a lot and the man laughed as though this was the greatest of jokes. He wasn’t an actor, the father, but shifted sets and acted as general carpenter.
“They call it a pap feeder,” the father had explained. “Bad thing is, air comes in through this thing and that makes him burp. But better than nothing, am I right?”
After he tucked the feeder back in among the clothes, the farmhand showed me the jar of milk that was also nestled there. Then he pulled the boat back down into the river for me and held the basket while I got in. “If anyone asks, this is your laundry.”
“In the middle of the night?”
He looked back at the line of trees. Anybody could be hiding there, watching us. I wedged the basket under the forward thwart next to the lantern, and when I looked up again he was wading back to the bank. Leo’s rowboat, freed from his grip, began rocking a little downstream. I fitted the oars to the oarlocks as the farmhand lifted his arm in farewell without looking back.
I rowed as hard as I could and kept my good ear trained on Kentucky. Thick clouds were beginning to roll in, masking the moonlight, but the river itself was calm. We were about halfway across the river, when strange noises began coming from the basket, like a small coughing pig. I lifted the oars for a minute but the noises didn’t stop. Although they didn’t seem loud enough to draw attention, that might change if we got closer to shore, so I felt around in the bottom of the basket until I found the little pap feeder and the jar of milk.
The jar was warm at the bottom from the clothes and cool at the top from the night air. I held the feeder upright and poured some milk into it, and then I tried to feed the baby as he lay there in his nest of shirts and trousers. That proved impossible. Milk spilled down his cheek, and he cried his coughing cry even louder, turning his face this way and that so I couldn’t keep the nipple in his mouth. I needed to hold his head straight, so I pulled the oars up into the boat and lifted the baby from the basket. His lips were dark raspberry and reminded me of candy I had eaten as a girl, and his wet little eyes were scrunched tight. He had waterlogged cheeks and a smooth, curved forehead that led gracefully up to his damp dark hair and dark rounded skull. I gently held his little head and tipped the milk into his mouth, and soon he began sucking and swallowing in even beats.
Meanwhile we were drifting farther and farther west with the current. When I looked up, the clouds had completely covered the moon and I could no longer see anything at all to the north. For a moment my chest tightened in panic as I saw how easily I could lose my bearings and row back to Kentucky. I put the baby back down in the basket a little more roughly than I meant to and covered him up and secured the pap feeder. The jar of milk was empty. Now the river was beginning to roll a little higher and the wind grew heavier.
I remembered that, before I stopped to tend to the baby, the wind had been blowing on the right side of my face, so I turned the boat with one oar until I felt the same sensation. The clouds thinned briefly, enough to see the outline of the moon, and looking over my shoulder I saw what I took to be the stern light on the Floating Theatre.
It wasn’t, but I made my way to it anyway until the light flickered off and then I made my way to the spot where I thought it had been. By this t
ime I was looking over my shoulder so often that the muscle in the back of my neck began sending out fiery flames, and with every pull of the oars I could feel my left arm bone moving back and forth within its socket like a mortar and pestle. But finally we reached the bank, and, with the last of my strength—or so it seemed at the time—I pulled the boat out of the water with the baby inside it.
I’d landed us in some very wet, overgrown countryside: we might have been in an African jungle for all the humid green growth and the variety of insects, all of them hungry. A swarm of gnats hit my face like a welcoming party as soon as I picked up the basket and stepped toward the trees, but with my hands full I couldn’t wave them away. When I looked down I saw that the baby was sleeping with one arm out of the clothes and his hand at his face, for all the world like a little old man annoyed at the noise of the world and trying to shut it out while he dozed.
My good ear was still trained on the river, and happily I heard no voices, no sound of oars. But the Floating Theatre was nowhere in sight, nor was any other boat. I began looking for a road. After only a few steps, however, I didn’t think I could carry the basket any longer—my arms were that tired from rowing—so I put it down and made a sling out of one of the shirts. When I was a girl I had once seen a short Indian woman carry her baby this way, though at the time what struck me was the beadwork at the hem of her dress and her wide bare feet in October. Whoever this shirt once belonged to had long arms, for which I was grateful; I was able to tie the sleeves into a knot behind my neck. Then I wrapped the baby in the shirt sling and pressed the side of his warm, new body against me, holding on to his back. I tucked the empty jar of milk and the pap feeder into the sling and then with my free hand I picked up the basket, light enough now, and looped its long handle over my arm.
I felt I could just about manage.
It was so dark that my eyes couldn’t make out anything but shapes. The weeds and brush that began at the edge of the bank seemed to spread out indefinitely in the darkness. I stumbled and put my arms under the sling to hold it steady. I could feel the baby’s round bottom sagging down like a little ball, and I moved my hand under the small curve of his back and up to his tiny, hard skull. Then I checked the other end for the feeder: still there. But where was the road?
“Heyya, who’s that?” a deep twangy voice rang out.
I was so surprised that I made a short, sharp noise before I could stop myself. A shadow ahead of me moved and formed itself into a tall man wearing a fur hat made from the whole of some animal: the furry head was over one of the man’s ears and the tail over the other. In the darkness I could not tell whether it was raccoon or possum. The man wearing it carried a broken hunting rifle over one arm, and a potato sack heavy with some kill was slung across his back. As he came up to me he brought with him the smell of gunpowder and wet leaves.
“Well, it’s a lady now. Hello, ma’am. What have you got there?” he asked me in a voice that seemed at once both friendly and mean. He had a strong southern accent, but a lot of people on both sides of the Ohio spoke like him; he might be a northerner for all that. Still, I couldn’t take the chance that he would help me.
“A baby,” I told him. “He’s sick.”
“He breathing?”
He took a step closer, as if he wanted to check for himself. He was as thin as a string bean and a little bent at the neck as some string beans are. I didn’t know how much he could see in the moonlight, but the baby was certainly a little Negro baby, which he might notice if he looked closely.
I stepped back. “I’m looking for a doctor,” I said. “I’m trying to find the road.”
“You one of them river people? Got yourself a shanty boat or some such?”
I said that I was.
“Where’s your boat docked? Not on my land, I hope.”
“I don’t know. It’s back there a ways.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, this ain’t my land.” So, I thought, a poacher. “You a panicky woman,” he told me. “Shouldn’ta come out here without knowing which way to go.”
He took off his hat by the snout of the animal and rubbed his forehead with the crook of his arm. Then he replaced the hat at an angle. “Jes’ keep goin’ the way you’re goin’. Up at the road go left. You see a stile on the right, and after that’s the doctor’s donkey path. You can take that on up to his house.”
I needed to turn right to get back to the Floating Theatre and, hopefully, to whoever was waiting for the baby on the road nearby, but I thanked him and started walking, hoping that this was the end of it. It wasn’t. He followed me through the brush, and when the trees cleared and the road presented itself he said, “There it is, ma’am. Go that way ’bout a quarter mile.” I turned to see him pointing west. Then he took off his hat again.
I could feel him standing there, watching me walk, and when the road turned I stepped to the side, out of sight, to listen with my good ear. Sure enough, I heard the faint clop of boots following along down the road in my direction. I hitched up the baby in his sling and kept walking. The one good thing about this poacher, whoever he was, was that he kept me in such a state of nervous fear that I could not fall from exhaustion even though I knew that every step I took I would have to retrace and then walk even more to get back to the Floating Theatre.
Leo would get up around three to unmoor the boat. I had to get back by then. I didn’t know how far downstream I’d drifted in the rowboat. As I walked along the road—avoiding as best I could in the darkness the deep grooves made by wagon wheels and the rocks that seemed to jut up between them out of spite—I was aware of my own swaying walk, which put me in mind of my cot as it rocked gently on the tide. The baby could wake at any time and want more milk, but there wasn’t any. My stomach grumbled, wondering at the many hours on my feet and not understanding that by rights it should be shut down for the night.
At last—it may have only been a few minutes but it felt like an hour—a low gray stone wall cropped up on the right side of the road with trees behind it pushing branches out over the top. I came to a stile, just as the poacher said, and then a donkey path. I turned my head again so I could listen with my good ear. The poacher was still walking behind me. A thin frosting of clouds drifted over the moon, but up the path I could make out a long pointed roof behind a line of spindly fruit trees. My thought was that I would go near enough to the house so that the poacher couldn’t see me anymore, and then I would wait him out.
But as I got to the top of the donkey path, I saw that lights were blazing inside the house. Through the half-curtained windows I could see two people moving back and forth in the rooms—a man and a woman. As luck would have it, the woman glanced out the front window as she passed, and although I’m sure she could not have seen me in the darkness, she stopped, moved closer to the window, then pushed the curtain back farther to look.
I stepped backwards on the path and a twig snapped under my foot. A dog that I’d not seen on the porch stood up and started barking, and I felt the baby stir against me.
The woman went to the front door and opened it.
“Someone there?”
I held my breath and rocked the baby, one hand on his head and one on his small ball of a bottom, while the dog kept on barking. I couldn’t see a rope but I saw that the dog was straining against something; I guessed he was tied to the porch.
A minute later a man came outside and hushed the dog. He must have been the doctor; he carried a doctor’s heavy bag. Now the baby began making soft mews and I stepped back behind an apple tree. The woman went inside and came back with a hat, which the doctor put on his head. His horse was tied up to a post in the yard, already saddled.
He was about to ride down this path, I realized, so I went farther into the apple trees to conceal myself. The trunks were no higher than my waist and split into long fingers of skinny branches, none of which were thick enough to properly hide me. But it was still dark, and I tried to stand very still. The air felt moist and sticky under the
trees, as if the sugary liquid of the budding apples rose and congealed there. I listened to my pulse pound in my ears.
The woman had come down off the porch and I heard her talking to the doctor as he mounted his horse. She did not have the poacher’s southern accent; it was more like New England, I thought. I rocked the baby and put my little finger into his mouth to suck. The doctor nudged the horse into a slow walk and the woman watched him leave with her arms folded over her stomach. As he went by, I saw his straight back and the good seat he kept on his mount. The dog started barking again.
When I heard the horse break into a trot on the road I exhaled, not realizing I’d been holding my breath. But the woman was looking at the apple trees now, a little to the left of where I was standing.
“Is someone there?” she called out again. Her voice was throaty and confident, unafraid. Educated, I guessed, and definitely from New England, maybe Boston. I could imagine her reciting poetry in front of a roomful of schoolchildren; no one would dare fidget under that voice. As luck would have it, while she was still scanning the apple trees, the baby pulled his mouth away from my finger and started to cry, the same weak spurts as before, like a small wild creature coughing out something in the back of its throat.
She walked up to the porch and untied the dog. Then she stood there holding his lead. “Come on, now, out of my trees,” she ordered. “What are you, hungry?”
I put my hand to a gnarly tree branch, which felt like something had been taking tiny bites out of it. The problem was I didn’t know friend from foe.
“I hear your baby,” the woman said.
She had a New England accent, it was true. And her husband was a doctor. I was suddenly very tired and I felt it in my temples, a heavy throb that spurred me into concession.
As I walked out of the trees I must have looked to her the way she looked to me: a dark shape with details slowly emerging as I got closer to the light of the house. The woman was not tall but she held herself very straight. When she turned to pick up the lamp inside the door, I saw that her hair was in a long braid down her back, messy from sleeping on it. Turning back, she held the lamp up to look at my face and then she looked at the makeshift sling with the baby.
The Underground River Page 21