The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  “Are you here for the doctor?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “The baby is just crying because he’s hungry.”

  “Well, then why don’t you feed him?”

  “He won’t take the breast. Do you have any milk I could give him? I have a pap feeder.”

  A moment’s silence. Then she said, “Just a minute.”

  She didn’t ask me inside and she didn’t tie up the dog. The dog and I watched each other warily. He was bigger than Oliver, with short brown fur and a deep, throaty bark—rather like his mistress—and looked as if he’d been bred for rat catching: jumpy and wiry and probably fast. I gave the baby my finger to suck but he had cottoned on to that trick. I got out his feeding bottle and warmed it in my hands.

  After a minute the woman came back with a small glass jar of milk. But when she pulled away the side of the sling to look at the baby, she stared at his face. His eyes were open and wet and his little raspberry lips were stretched wide. For a moment she did nothing. Then with her index finger she gently pulled his blanket away from his chin to see more. After a moment she stepped back, still holding the milk.

  I don’t know why I let her look at the baby; I’d been careful with the poacher. But I was tired and I didn’t think fast enough. And she had a northern accent. And her husband was a doctor. The woman looked at me and then she looked at her dog and then she looked at the baby again. She picked up the dog’s lead and held it. Her face was shaped like a beautiful pale pear, and her cheekbones were as fine as ice.

  “Get off my land,” she said evenly. She did not look angry. She was too poised for that.

  “I didn’t want to come here,” I told her.

  “You get off.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said, going down the porch steps sideways so as not to turn my back on the dog. Well, of course I had done something wrong, but I wasn’t thinking about how I came to be carrying this baby, I was thinking how there was nothing wrong in asking a doctor’s wife for milk. There was nothing wrong with that.

  She watched me cross the yard while the baby cried and cried, her hand holding the dog’s lead very loosely as if she was determining the best moment to let go. I kept looking back, half expecting each time to see the dog running after me, even after I passed the line of apple trees and could no longer make out the woman’s shape or the dog’s.

  The baby cried his weak, young cries all along the road. Having nothing else, I gave him my pinkie finger again and again until at last, exhausted from crying, he fell asleep with it in his mouth.

  The poacher, thank goodness, was nowhere in sight. Stands of scrub trees to my right hid my view of the river, but nevertheless I could hear it moan and stir like a conversation held behind a closed door. The moon gave up and let itself be completely hidden by the clouds, and the darkness seemed to get both darker and warmer as I walked along the high berm of the road. I was beyond tired; I was like something moved on a pulley, mindless, worked by levers. My head felt like a wooden puppet head. When at last I got to the Floating Theatre, I saw that a lamp was lit in the auditorium, which meant Leo was awake, but he wasn’t yet out on the deck, nor was Hugo. A dark carriage stood in the road just above the pier.

  As I approached it, the driver climbed down. It was Donaldson. He said nothing, of course, as I handed the baby over to him along with the basket. The baby woke and began crying again, and I told Donaldson he was hungry but I had no more milk. Donaldson pulled a bottle from under the seat and filled the pap feeder. But before he fed the baby, he took from his pocket a cylindrical tube no wider than my thumb and shook out a drop of liquid onto his index finger, and then he put his finger in the baby’s mouth. The glass tube had a brown paper wrapper that I recognized from apothecary shops: opium. I have learned since that this is a common practice for keeping slave babies quiet, but at the time, even in my exhaustion, I was astonished.

  Donaldson looked at me pointedly: my part of this business was done. I knew I would not see the baby again—his little raspberry lips and his coughing cry. I hoped he would be safe, and I hoped that Donaldson had plenty of milk. As I walked toward the Floating Theatre, I could hear the faint squeak of the carriage wheels starting up and rolling away behind me down the road. I went straight to my room, thankful not to run into Hugo or Leo. It was not until I had pulled off my boots and was lying down on my cot, still wearing my dress, that it occurred to me that I had lied many times that night without once using my Greek. I had lied to the poacher and I had lied to the doctor’s wife and I didn’t even think about it. That, I guessed, was fear.

  15

  To hear Leo say it, boys in short pants caused all the evil taking place on this earth. They climbed up trees along the riverbank when they saw our boat coming and yelled and hollered and threw down apples in their excitement. They tried on “the Cap’n Hat,” as they called it, and let it fall into the muddy dirt. They let their ponies loosen their bladders just off the stage plank, making pungent puddles where the ladies would walk. As day turned to night they became worse, trying to sneak into the show without paying or waylaying our customers afterwards with quack concoctions to remove freckles or moles or promised relief from rheumy eyes, which they hawked for a dime a dose. They wore their caps backwards and their faces were as muddy as their hands. They were lazy, mischievous, disrespectful, ignorant . . . Leo had countless insults that he hurled at them one by one. Sometimes they were cowed by his large, hulky frame and ran off, but not always. Once last year, I was told, in the middle of a performance, some rascally boys cut the boat’s mooring lines and the boat drifted a half mile downstream. The audience was good-natured enough to walk the extra distance back home after the show, but Leo was furious.

  Naturally he blamed boys now for the missing rowboat.

  “Untied it, took it for a pleasure ride, left it to rot somewhere. My only wonder is why Oliver didn’t bark.”

  He was talking to Hugo at the guardrail. I could hear them from my stateroom even with my door closed. We were still at the same landing as yesterday; Hugo didn’t want to leave without the rowboat. Maybe Leo could hire a mule and go look for it? Hugo suggested. “Could be just a little ways downstream. Up on the bank or in the mud.”

  “Now I got to go do that, too, today,” Leo complained.

  “I know. But it’s a good boat. Set me back some to get another.”

  “Those boys are bad boys. You shoulda never gave them no tickets.”

  “Oh, now, Leo,” Hugo laughed. “We don’t know which ones did it. You want me to never let any young boys into the show from now on?”

  Leo grumbled something I didn’t hear.

  “I have a feeling we’ll find it,” Hugo went on pleasantly. “We’ll get a mule to tow it back. I can beat my way down the river myself if you can’t get to it.”

  No, Leo said, he would do it. Hot as it was today, he would do it.

  In the dining room the actors seemed only mildly interested in the missing boat.

  “Coulda come untied in the middle of the night,” Pinky said. “Didja hear that wind?” He turned his attention to the pancakes and eggs that Cook was dishing out.

  “A wind untying a boat?” Jemmy laughed, pouring molasses with a slow spiral motion over everything on his plate, even the eggs. “How about a ghost, eh? Or one of the willow trees on the bank? With its long, fingery branches?”

  Pinky paid him no attention but began cutting up his pancakes with the side of his fork. “Now, May, listen. I was thinking, for Cecily’s costume, I use that old nightgown. What if I rip the hem a little? Think that would be more dramatic?” Pinky and the others had begun consulting with me over every aspect of their costumes, and naturally I was happy to talk about that for as long as they wished. But today I was feeling tired and remorseful.

  “You’ll trip on it up on stage,” I told him. “But a tear is not a bad idea. Maybe your sleeve.”

  “The sleeve—that’s good, that’s good. Thanks, May! Say,” he
said as I pushed my plate away and stood, “aren’t you going to eat that?”

  I felt terrible that Leo had to go out of his way to find the rowboat I’d lost, and I decided I should go with him to get it back. Besides, I was the only one who knew where to look for it. The problem was I didn’t know how I was going to tell him where it was without giving myself away. In town, Leo and I were directed to the coffin maker, who sometimes hired his mule out if there was nobody at the moment who needed burying. We were in luck: the coffin maker was idle and he let us use his mule—a squat gray beast with long eyelashes—for a dime.

  The mule was used to pulling a wagon with a nailed coffin to the graveyard while the coffin maker led him by a short rope and the family walked behind. With Leo and me, the mule kept stopping and putting his head down, confused about the turn of events. This wasn’t the way to the graveyard and he knew it.

  We were walking down a little hog path that ran alongside the river, which the coffin maker showed us. If I had known about this path last night, I thought, what a lot of trouble I might have avoided. I looked at my father’s watch. I knew I’d walked for about thirty minutes last night, which was all I had to go by. It was still morning but the air was heating up and moistening into a hot, sticky day.

  “We got ourselves an unhandsome fix here,” Leo grumbled. He kept taking off his hat to wipe his head with his handkerchief.

  An acrid scent like dying flowers in a vase wafted in from the water, and I turned my nose from it. My shoulders and neck still hurt from last night, and even in the bright sun I found myself yawning. The mule stopped every few yards to try to eat the white buttonweed flowers along the path until Leo smacked him on the rear with the palm of his hand. The path dipped closer to the river, and we came to a shanty boat tied to a cottonwood tree with clothes and sheets hanging off the rail to dry. A group of skinny children were wading in the water around the boat, and Leo scowled at the boys. A couple of them were wearing shirts with nothing but holes cut out of the material for their arms.

  “Boys are trouble,” I said carefully to Leo as we passed. “But girls aren’t so bad.”

  “Hunh.” The mule stopped and Leo slapped him going again.

  “And babies . . .” What were babies? I wondered. “Cute, aren’t they?”

  “Some people like ’em, I guess.”

  “Of course, slave babies . . . well, that’s just wrong, don’t you think?” I had two doughnuts wrapped in a handkerchief in my pocket that I’d taken from the dining room before I left, and now I took them out and gave Leo one. He took a large bite and chewed it.

  “Little slave babies?” I prompted, hoping to get a response.

  He pushed the rest of the doughnut into his mouth, chewed it a couple of times before he swallowed, and then wiped his hands down his trousers.

  “Ain’t gonna cross this river with you,” he said. “Not at night nor in the morning, neither.”

  I stopped and looked at him but he tugged on the mule’s halter and kept walking. I said, “How did you know?”

  “Oh, Lord, Miss May, I’m not both sides of a fool. Now, come on and tell me where my boat got left.”

  “Does Hugo know?”

  “Not from me.”

  “But does he?”

  Leo shrugged. “I guess not.”

  “I need help, Leo. They’re giving me babies. I can’t row a boat with a baby in my lap.”

  “I don’t set foot on that side of the river, you know that.”

  I’d been thinking about this. “What if you stayed in the water? I’ll just wade in by myself, fetch the baby in my arms, and wade back to the boat to meet you.”

  But even as I was still speaking he was shaking his head: No, no, no. My heart sank. I needed help, last night taught me that if nothing else, and I knew I could trust Leo. But he wouldn’t do it.

  “Best I’ll do is turn a blind eye when I see someone fussing with my fishing boat in the middle of the night,” he told me. “And I’ll go to fetch it back on a hot morning, taking along with me an ornery mule. That’s as far as I aim to go.”

  He slapped the mule’s backside again.

  “This heat gonna kill me,” he said to the mule, “and I guess you’d think that was fine, wouldn’t you, so you could pull my poor old body along behind you just as you like. Now, where is my boat?” This last was to me.

  I pulled out my father’s watch. “We’re just about there,” I told him.

  • • •

  My next idea was Thaddeus. I hadn’t heard Mr. Niffen speak enough to know his opinion on slavery or anything else, and although I’d had more conversations with Pinky and Jemmy, they mostly spoke about acting and what they thought of Cook’s food and the fluctuating price of cigars.

  After Leo and I returned with the rowboat, Hugo moved the Floating Theatre across the river to a little village on the Kentucky side, and that night we played to a scant audience there. Normally we would never stop at such a small landing, but it was the best we could do. After counting up the ticket sales, I calculated that we had lost a good three dollars by my folly.

  The next morning we continued our way downriver as usual and landed in Fairview, Indiana, a sizable town with a gristmill, a tanyard, and two warehouses facing the river. Here we could expect a larger crowd, Hugo told us at breakfast, “so no fussing about”—a reference, I supposed, to Jemmy and Sam’s lackluster performance the night before.

  “Hard to make a crowd of twelve laugh,” Jemmy said under his breath.

  “Playing to an empty room,” Pinky said.

  Sam, as usual, contributed his one syllable: “Yup.”

  Thaddeus didn’t come in for breakfast that morning. I found him in his stateroom holding a dose of castor oil and turpentine that he told me he’d gotten from Cook. His hands looked yellow and his face looked yellower.

  “Bad clam last night,” he said. “Have to fix up the insides well enough to stand up tonight.”

  He was sitting on the edge of his cot with a bucket between his feet. His shoes were off, and his straw hat was on the antler of a stuffed elk head he’d found in a little curiosity shop somewhere in Ohio and paid good money for. The head was so old that the eyes had been replaced with yellow marbles, which gave the poor creature the look of a child’s toy, and the fur on one side of the neck had been so rubbed down that it looked like brown cloth. The elk faced the river, as though contemplating how to cross it without body or legs, and if you stood in the right place it seemed to be staring right at you.

  I always turned my back to it, and I did so now.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked. “A piece of bread or some crackers?”

  Thaddeus groaned. Even sick and in stocking feet he dressed in his usual foppish style, with a bright blue cravat tied around his neck.

  “I’ll fetch you some lemon water and soda,” I said. “That will help your stomach better than castor oil.”

  He groaned again and put his hands up over his ears to hold his head. He was in no condition to agree to anything; I could see that. I helped him stretch out on his cot, his face toward the bucket on the floor, and I remembered how lazy he was. After we left Cincinnati I never again saw him help move the boat in the morning, probably because he slept later than anyone else, and while he slept he wore cold cream on his face like a woman; I’d discovered this once when I called on him before he’d risen, wanting him to try on the vest I’d finished sewing. Now, seeing him stretched out in bed, I realized how unlikely it was that I could convince him to get up in the middle of the night to do any physical labor, like rowing a boat.

  “This river life is too rough-and-tumble,” Thaddeus said, looking up at me with watery eyes. “Oh, May. What I really need is to find a wealthy benefactress like your cousin did. Or a young widow in the country. Remember that idea? And my pair of hounds. Yes, I’d like that.”

  That’s when I got the idea of money. Thaddeus always spent more than he had, and he often complained about it. He dressed too well f
or his income and he bought ridiculous items like the elk head on whim.

  After I brought him the soda and lemon water I went back to my stateroom and wrote the following letter:

  Dear Mrs. Howard,

  I hope you are well. I need more money. Will you send some, please? Ten dollars will be fine.

  Yours very truly,

  May Bedloe

  I didn’t want to say too much. She would know what it was for, I reasoned. After reading it over and feeling satisfied, I sealed it and put it in my pocket to post.

  • • •

  A short while later Hugo walked with me into town. Although it was not yet midday, the sky looked baked and still, and it was already too hot for my shawl, which I folded into a rectangle and carried under my arm like a book. Hugo was in a good mood, whistling as we walked. He spoke continuously about The Midnight Hour, which was very nearly ready.

  “We want a packed house for the premiere. After that, we’ll have word of mouth to keep us going. No one does a full play on the river. No one. We’ll be the first.”

  It was a refrain he kept coming back to—how we’d be the first boat to do a three-act play—and I could tell this pleased him almost more than anything else about the endeavor. He smelled, this morning, like cake batter; he’d been helping Cook in the kitchen while I spoke to Thaddeus. It was a comforting smell. We passed two men engaged in nailing clapboards over the log frame of a house, and just beyond them stood a grand oak tree that shot straight up without a single branch for fifty or sixty feet.

  The oak was so large, we could post three notices around its trunk. While we were engaged in this, two passing gentlemen stopped to tell us about a family of raccoons that lived in its hollow. They were known affectionately as the Shakentales, and were pets or mascots of the town.

  “Mrs. Shakentale were out late last night lookin’ for berries,” the taller man informed us, pronouncing “late” like “light.” Although we were in Indiana, he and his friend both spoke with marked Kentucky accents. He wore a low straw hat, and the shape of its crown mirrored the long shape of his nose.