The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  “This one came yesterday,” the man said. “Had a time of it hiding her all day. Lucky she slept so much or we’d have been found out for sure. My man thinks I’m off drinking, so now I’ll have to get the smell of alcohol up on me.” I supposed he meant the farmer he worked for. I checked for the pap feeder and milk, and then I took up the basket in one hand and my skirt in the other and waded carefully back to the rowboat. My boots were soaked through and would smell like river mud in the morning.

  Thaddeus held the basket while I climbed in. “Tiny mite,” he remarked, looking at the baby’s face, and I told him the last one had been even tinier. “I like babies, you know,” he said, and the way he was looking down at the basket made me believe him. “They don’t hide anything. They can’t.” When I was settled, he handed me back the basket and checked the oarlocks before steering the boat around.

  “Some weather coming,” he told me, pulling back on the oars.

  I looked out over the river. In the few minutes I’d been gone to get the baby, the current had gotten choppier. The water was pushing us farther west than we wanted to go, and Thaddeus had a time of it. After a few minutes, growing hot with the effort, he stopped rowing to take off his cape and at once the wind thrust us heavily downstream as if it were a hand just waiting for this opportunity. Now I could see tiny forks of lightning to the east. The wind blew off my bonnet and my hair whipped around my eyes. The sky was getting worse by the second.

  I checked the baby, who was still sleeping. Despite Thaddeus’s efforts, we were moving west as much as we were moving north. I wedged the baby basket under the thwart and turned around to sit next to him, taking up one of the oars with both my hands, and after a few pulls Thaddeus began counting aloud so we could find a rhythm together.

  “One. And two. One. And two. That’s it, May.”

  Together we rowed hard, trying to get to the shore. The sky was very dark now and the lightning moved nearer, but the rain had not yet reached us. Every so often the wind dropped for a moment as though catching its breath, and when it came up again, sprays of water hit our faces and chests. At one point the wind tipped the rowboat dangerously, and a rush of water came over the side.

  “May, get the bucket!” Thaddeus shouted.

  I found the bucket, knocked Leo’s bait over the side of the boat, and began scooping water up and throwing it out while Thaddeus took over both oars. The boat seemed smaller to me now and made of the thinnest pieces of scrap wood imaginable. At any moment it would tip over and sink, or the boards would split and the whole thing would fall apart. The baby was still wedged in her basket under the thwart. While I was checking on her, more water came in, and I knelt on the bottom using the bucket like a shovel. I couldn’t see the Floating Theatre or anything else along the bank. But when I looked a second time I saw a light flicker and catch, maybe on one of the mussel boats: someone looking for something in the storm.

  “I can’t read my compass,” Thaddeus shouted above the wind.

  “I see a light. Veer a little more to the right.”

  By this time the water on the bottom of the boat was only about a couple of inches deep. I got up again to help row. My shoulders were numb and the back of my dress was soaking wet. I was shaking with cold and fear and I hoped the baby was all right. I could see the outline of her basket still upright under the thwart, but sitting in an inch of water. Would she get wet? Every so often I turned my head to check our progress.

  “Too far to the left!” I shouted.

  “One. And two. One. And two.”

  His voice was getting hoarse from shouting. More twigs of lightning flickered above us.

  “It’s the Floating Theatre!” I shouted.

  “What?”

  A lantern was lit in the office window. Leo. He must have looked out and noticed the weather; I wondered if he always lit a lantern in the rain to mark the boat’s presence, or if the light was for us. When we hit the river bottom, Thaddeus and I jumped out into the water, me with the basket, Thaddeus with the boat line. The baby was awake now and crying. I pulled the little bottle of opium from my pocket while Thaddeus began dragging the heavy, waterlogged boat up the bank. As I let the baby suck on the drop on my pinky finger, I saw Donaldson scrambling down the bank, half falling. I’d never seen Donaldson do anything undignified before, and that surprised me as much as anything else. But he righted himself soon enough and helped Thaddeus get the boat up. Donaldson’s clothes were so heavy, the wind hardly wrinkled them, and he wore no hat. He was too far away for me to see his expression but I could imagine it: stern and respectable even after nearly falling down a muddy bank. A servant doing the next thing that had to be done without complaint.

  Meanwhile my dress was wet through and my hands and arms shook with fatigue. I could not even hold the basket properly. I thought about climbing up to the road so I could sit on the carriage step with it, but I knew at once I would not be able to manage that, so I stayed where I was, rocked by the wind. When at last the boat was secured, Donaldson came for the basket and then he picked his way back up the bank toward the road, holding the basket’s handle with one hand and grasping a low tree branch with the other to help pull himself up. Just as the rain started, Thaddeus and I got to the stage plank and ran up in our squelching boots. To my surprise, I saw from the light of the office lantern that Thaddeus’s face was bright with exhilaration.

  “What a team we are!” he said when we got under the roofed deck. He shook out his wet cape behind him.

  I didn’t understand his reaction but I wasn’t going to stand there and talk. It was raining in earnest now and the sound was like horses cantering over our heads, with a separate patter of articulate drops on the wooden deck. It quieted a moment as if listening for a signal, and then it gathered its strength and let down in an absolute fury. I lifted my wet skirt and took the stairs up to my stateroom two at a time. All I wanted was to take off my dripping clothes and get under a blanket. The rain knocked against the boat, making a noise loud enough to drive off thought or fear, and I wrapped myself up in my blanket as if it were my shroud and fell on my cot the wrong way around, with my head at the foot and my feet on the pillow. But I was too tired to shift myself. My arms and shoulders ached, and my backbone hurt from all the twisting I’d done. I pushed my feet under the pillow to warm them, and in all of two minutes, even as the boat rocked and creaked in the storm, I was asleep.

  • • •

  It’s one thing to float on water that is as smooth as a bedsheet, once in a while riding a small wave as though a great hand has taken up the fabric to give it a gentle shake before smoothing it out again. It’s quite another thing to have a man shouting over a screaming wind to bail out the water that is rushing into the bottom of the boat as it reels from side to side. One thing I knew for sure: I’d been right to engage Thaddeus. I could not have handled the rowboat alone in the storm, and we would have capsized and drowned, both the baby and myself. It would be too much to expect that I could swim the river twice with a child. My nightmare that night was so intense that I made helpless groaning noises in my throat that woke me, and yet when I opened my eyes I could not remember what, exactly, I’d dreamed.

  It was still early but I did not want to go back to sleep. I could feel the boat moving in the water, so I dressed and wrapped two shawls around me and went out to the guard. The sun was not yet up and the sky was still bruised from the storm, although it had stopped raining and the air was still. Below me, Hugo stood on the deck with his little enamel coffee cup, and as I watched he lifted the lid, blew on the coffee, and took a sip. He shouted some instruction to Jemmy or Leo and picked up the gouger. Thanks to the storm, the river was clogged with more snags and driftwood than ever. Nevertheless a steamboat was already chugging past us, lights shining out from the bow and the stern, and another one was not too far behind.

  The chill morning air felt its way through my two shawls and into my shoulder blades. Compared to the rowboat, the Floating Theatre was hea
vy and solid and perfectly safe, but some of my fear from the previous night lingered like a clammy layer of gauze over my skin. I wanted the assurance of a strong hand, some confidence that for the moment I lacked. When Hugo put down the gouger—satisfied that the boat was where he wanted it in the current—I fetched a few doughnuts from the dining room and went down the stairs to see him.

  I wished him good morning and handed him one of the doughnuts. When I looked back, I could make out Leo’s rowboat tied to the stern and floating behind us in our wake, as usual.

  “Surprised to see you this morning,” Hugo said.

  I looked at him quickly, worried about what he meant by that. It was true that I’d gotten very little sleep, but I hoped he didn’t know the reason.

  “Why is that?”

  “You haven’t been out here much lately. Thought maybe the magic was gone.”

  “What magic?”

  He grinned. “I mean the thrill of watching the boat leave the bank. Maybe ‘thrill’ isn’t the right word, either. Have to be careful with you, don’t I? I like how you keep me exact.”

  “I still enjoy watching you all move the boat,” I told him, but I didn’t offer any explanation for why I hadn’t been up to see it lately nor why I was up to see it now. To say that I was plagued with nightmares would surely only invite more questions.

  Hugo leaned against the rail with me as he ate a second doughnut from my offerings. A dusting of deep-purple light spread out over the water, proof that the sun was on its way up, and there was a dewy, mineral tang in the air. I’d forgotten how good the soft wind of movement felt on my face. The river traffic was picking up. Heavy steamers pushing out smoke passed flatboats and long barges laden with barrels. I felt a sort of intimacy with them as we all started the day’s journey together, everyone heading west, everyone hoping for good weather and prosperity.

  I thought about my first day on the Floating Theatre, which seemed like a hundred years ago.

  “Why did you face west in Cincinnati?” I asked Hugo.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the bells rang out for the victims of the Moselle. Everyone else turned east toward the sunrise, but you turned west.”

  I watched the side of his face, which tightened a little. He was still looking at the water. Finally he replied, “For my sister. For Helena.”

  The morning fog was lifting and I could make out a narrow island near the opposite bank, or maybe it was a sandbar. I waited for him to go on.

  “Helena loved going west,” he explained. “She loved going west, and she hated coming back.” Never mind the barely populated towns, he told me, or the lack of culture. No theaters, no lending libraries, and not one proper cup of tea to be had between Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

  “But Helena loved it. She loved life on the river. She liked to watch the birds and she liked fishing from the guard. Every summer she competed with Leo over who could catch the biggest catfish. They had a standing one-dollar bet.”

  She was learning how to shoot a gun, and last August she’d shot three ducks on the wing; she considered it poor sportsmanship to shoot something in the water. Her dream was to buy a little cottage in the country where she and Hugo could spend their winters, he said, instead of the hotel in Pittsburgh. They were saving up money for that.

  “I thought you were saving up for a small steamboat?”

  “That’s right: first the steamer. With a steamer we could make twice as much money, because we could do twice as many shows. Six weeks down the Ohio and six weeks back up. We’d change our bill of fare after Cairo, when we turned around. Maybe we’d go up the Illinois River. We definitely wanted to make jumps up the Wabash, and the White River, and the Green.”

  His face was shadowed with a fine stubble of beard, thicker on his chin. “Was that your dream, too?” I asked. “A cottage in the country?”

  Leo shouted to Jemmy to bear hard against the bank, and Hugo looked over but he didn’t add any instructions. The boat clipped along now, gaining speed.

  “Well, I guess not,” he finally said. “But it seemed fine. It seemed a good plan. There was a man we knew in Golconda. Raised horses just outside of town, came to our shows every year. I thought maybe between him and Helena there was an understanding . . . I wrote to him about what happened, of course. Edward Case. No reply. Maybe it was my imagination. But she might have settled down with him or someone else, and as for me, well, what I really wanted to do was set up a little theater somewhere with a permanent company. Do real plays, three-acts. But on a theater fronting the river, you know, so that passengers from the steamers could come in for the show.”

  “And Helena could fish.”

  “And Helena could fish,” he agreed. A gust of wind came off the water and blew against his blanket coat so that it looked like he was shrugging his shoulders. “Well,” he said. That was that.

  I could easily imagine Helena, because she sounded like Hugo, all movement and energy: shooting ducks, fishing, laughing with Leo. I remembered her energetic conversation with the violinist after she finished singing on the Moselle. And then there was me, sitting still enough to fit in a box while I sewed. I’ve never thought much about being anyone other than who I am, and to be honest I didn’t much think about it then. But I did see how Helena’s energy would be exciting to a man—to Edward Case. Just as Hugo’s movement and energy were exciting to me.

  The thought took me by surprise. But as soon as I had it, I knew it was true. I did like that about him. I liked his intensity and the great care he took of his boat. I liked the way a shock of brown hair curled down over his forehead, and his woody smell, and the slant of his eyes, and how his accent became more pronounced when he was upset. A rush of details came at me, and for a moment I felt a couple of hard heartbeats crash against my ribs. When I looked down I saw that I was pinching the inside of my wrist, something I hadn’t done for a long time.

  Hugo was looking downstream, which is to say west, and for a moment I stared at the back of his head. I had the strangest compulsion to touch him. I wanted to say: I’m breaking the law. I’m afraid. I need your help. The fact that I didn’t blurt all this out immediately upon thinking it is a measure of everything I’d learned in those few short weeks.

  “Well, now, what’s she doing up so early?” Hugo asked. I followed his line of sight and saw that Liddy, still with her hair in a messy braid down her back, was standing at the rail on the upper deck looking out at the river. She raised her arm in greeting to someone, and Hugo and I looked out to where she was waving. A small black-and-red passenger steamship was just then passing us, and I could see a man standing on its upper deck facing Liddy, his right arm raised in greeting. The steamship blew its high-pitched whistle three times. On the third whistle, the man took off his hat and waved it. The hat was brilliantly white.

  “It’s Dr. Early,” I said.

  17

  All the rest happened in less than a week. Looking at a calendar later, I had to check and recheck the dates, because at first I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes your life moves slowly and sometimes it whirls like a spinning wheel under the guidance of a very skilled hand, the hand of a woman who is not necessarily kind. I remember having a sort of frozen feeling in my chest that week, and although I planned and plotted and tried with my very best reasoning to find a way out for everyone involved—well, almost everyone involved—at the same time I suspected that reason would be of no earthly use against that fast-spinning wheel. Whatever happened in the end would come about through good luck or its reverse, and not as the result of my efforts.

  But still, I did try.

  Dr. Early’s passenger steamer stopped at a larger landing a few miles downstream from where we tied up for the day, so that Dr. Early needed to hire a horse to carry him back to us—or, more precisely, back to Liddy. Meanwhile, Liddy had time to pin up her hair and eat breakfast and tell us all what had happened.

  He had given up hunting for runaway slaves, and she had reconciled wi
th him. He’d sent her a note two days earlier that she did not answer, although it was a very pretty note (“I couldn’t help but read it once I broke the seal,” Liddy said). Then, to her surprise, he showed up the previous evening for our performance (“Did you not see him in the back row?” she asked), and he was very unhappy to see her sing that last love duet with Thaddeus, for all that he knew there was nothing between them. Afterwards he waited for her outside and she consented to walk out with him, and as they went along the river Dr. Early assured Liddy again and again that he would never have anything to do with slaves if it upset her, and that he meant to have her always with him. In short, he proposed.

  “I didn’t see him sitting in the audience,” I said, although I recollected that at the time I was nervous about going out that night, so I did not much look up from my piano.

  “You didn’t? I saw him straightaway!”

  Her eyes were shining. We were gathered in the dining room, and as she told her story Liddy shyly drew her hand out from under the table to show us her ring.

  “That’s a pearl! A big one!” Celia cried out. She was bouncing with excitement. Two small diamonds flanked the pearl, and when Liddy waved her hand, the diamonds sparkled.

  Cook poured us all a finger of whiskey to celebrate, even one for Celia. As he poured mine I glanced at Hugo, who was across from me and down at the other end. He was smiling with the others, all except Pinky, whose face seemed like a crumpled piece of discarded paper.

  “To Liddy!” Hugo said, raising the thick white coffee cup in which the whiskey was served. “To good fortune and happy days ahead.”

  Dr. Early arrived not too much later on a large roan horse wearing his impeccably clean white hat and a straw-colored suit. Jemmy and Sam went up the bank to see the horse, whereas Mrs. Niffen and Celia and I accompanied Liddy to see the doctor. For my part, I was curious about how Dr. Early would account for his actions, if at all. He came with a present for Liddy: a sweet leather pouch that he had bought, he told us as he tethered the horse to one of the trees, from a native man who set up shop between two enormous oaks.