The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  One of her braids had come undone and was more of a pigtail than a plait. She was wearing both of her dresses and some slippers I’d found for her among the costumes. Leo stood at the door to the green room that led to the stage.

  “That raccoon is gonna burn down this boat,” he said, looking out the door.

  “Go on,” Hugo told him. “You go catch it. We can do this.”

  I could hear pounding above us. Thaddeus and the others had discovered my trick and were trying to get out of the room.

  “Where will you take her?” Hugo asked me.

  “There’s someone waiting for her on the road.”

  I grabbed a costume dress from the rack and put it on over Pinky’s nightdress. Then I covered her up with a dark cloak we used on the stage for messengers.

  “What’s your name?” I heard Hugo ask.

  “Lula,” Lula said. She looked at his face quickly, then down at his boots.

  “Lula, do you have anything you don’t need, a coat or a cape, a bonnet?”

  “No, sir. Just my two dresses I have on. Why?”

  “They know that you were on this boat. They’ll keep looking until they find something.”

  I pulled on Mrs. Niffen’s bright red wig, the one she had decided not to wear, and found a costume bonnet for Lula. I didn’t know what Hugo was getting at. “We have to go,” I said.

  “How about shoes?” he asked.

  I remembered the boots that had made her feet bleed. “In the black trunk.” I hadn’t wanted to leave anything of hers in my room.

  Hugo said, “Good. Those will do. Now, May, come back quickly if you can. May—” He took my left hand and then my right. He pulled me toward him. When his lips met mine, I was so surprised I almost started to speak, and indeed for a moment I felt as though my unspoken words had found physical expression in the movement of his bottom lip under mine, my mouth moving in response, a sudden heat in my chest. It was over in the time it would take to say two or three words. When he drew back and looked at my face, I felt my own face grow warm and I stared at him, thinking he would explain something—what he felt, perhaps, or something about me.

  Instead he just repeated, “Come back as quickly as you can.”

  I was filled with something light and wonderful, one more emotion to pack into my crowded heart; but still I tried to isolate it, because I knew I would want to examine it later and feel it again, the surprise of it and the lovely joy. People continued to make their way off the boat, and I realized that not all that much time had passed from when I interrupted the show, even though it felt like hours and hours.

  “I will,” I said to Hugo. “As soon as I can.” Then I looked at Lula. “Ready?”

  She nodded, pressing her lips together in a twitch. Somehow my legs carried me forward out the door and onto the guard with Lula beside me. Her large costume bonnet half hid her face, which was good. Ahead of us, men and women spoke to each other in loud voices, most of them sounding scared or shocked, although one man holding a straw hat in his hand was laughing. I looked for Mrs. Howard and Comfort, hoping they could lead us to whoever was waiting on the road, but I could not spot them in the throng. No one noticed us, not even Celia and Liddy, who were exiting the boat up ahead alongside the man in the green quilted jacket. Liddy was carrying Oliver, who looked back at me over her shoulder. He was wearing the ruff I had made for him that first day, when I felt so ill. Then the crowd closed up between us, and I didn’t see anyone else from the company for many weeks after that.

  Lula took my hand and squeezed it, and I squeezed back. One of us was sweating, or maybe it was both of us. Our palms were slippery but we did not let go.

  Down the stage plank, onto the pier, up toward the road, just two more people in the crowd of people leaving the boat. I still could not spot Mrs. Howard. When a gunshot rang out above us, the crowd panicked and pressed forward recklessly. The men had found Helena’s hunting rifle, I guessed, and were trying to shoot the door lock open. I tried to turn my good ear away from the clamor, but this proved impossible since the clamor was everywhere. I looked back at the boat at the very moment that Thaddeus or one of the men—all I could make out was a smudgy figure—burst through my stateroom door, breaking the lock. It was then that I felt something in me shift from urgency to alarm.

  The crowd surged up onto the road and we followed. Lula let go of my hand.

  “You have to treat me like a slave,” she said.

  “How do I do that?”

  “Don’t look at me, not direct.”

  We kept walking, trying to push ourselves ahead. When we got to the road, people peeled off in different directions and horses started pulling carriages away, one before its door was even properly closed. Everyone was in a panic to leave whatever mischief was going on. Lula and I turned our backs on the Floating Theatre, following the road that ran alongside the long pier and the river. I could feel pinpoints of sweat on my scalp, bringing out a woody scent in my hair, and my breath felt like a cold, hard coin in my throat. I looked up at each waiting carriage, hoping to see Donaldson or Mrs. Howard or Comfort, or a stranger who was also on the lookout for us. It was fully night now, but the moon was high and full. Lula walked behind me and the dark horses snorted or stamped as we went by as though they, too, were eager to leave this place behind.

  We came to the end of the carriages. I could see that there was nothing farther down the road but trees. Although the Floating Theatre was at some distance behind us now, I didn’t want to turn around and recheck the carriages for fear that by this time Thaddeus and Dr. Early had finished searching the boat and were now looking for us along the road, and I did not dare look back for fear of seeing them. So I kept walking with no plan in mind except to look like a woman going somewhere and not a woman with a runaway slave she had no idea what to do with, and I carried a wild hope that Donaldson was here somewhere and would find us. Other people were carrying on down the road, too, ones like us with no carriages or wagons. The moon was so bright that even without all the men and women carrying lanterns I would have felt exposed. One man looked at me a little too long as he approached us, and then he looked over at Lula.

  I said to her, “Hurry up, now,” hoping to sound like a slave owner. The man walked up to one of the taverns fronting the river and went inside.

  Lula said, “You got some lines across your head. That’s what he was lookin’ at.”

  I remembered the wrinkles Liddy drew on me. I licked the cuff of my sleeve and rubbed it over my forehead. “Better?”

  “A little. Do it again some.”

  As I rubbed my forehead again, I saw the steamboat I’d noticed earlier tied up at the very end of the pier. It wasn’t a good place to hide—I thought of the runaway Jackson who’d been caught behind a boiler—but it was better than being on the open road. Above us was the town, but I didn’t want to go there. They would check all the inns. I looked at the boat again. I could try to bribe the captain, I thought, and then I remembered I had nothing with me: no money, only my father’s watch, which I wore tucked under my shift. Maybe he would take that.

  “Ever been on a steamer?” I asked Lula.

  She looked over at the boat. “Won’t they look for us there?”

  “They’ll look for us everywhere.”

  The boat was small for a steamship, and coming up to it I saw tight bales of paper loaded up and stacked on its lower deck. So, a packet boat, but it might take on a few passengers, too. I hoped the captain would not ask too many questions. As we walked up the gangplank the steamer’s whistle unexpectedly blew, and two men wearing caps and smoke-stained jackets got ready to pull the gangplank up.

  “The boat’s leaving?” I asked.

  “Captain’s orders,” one of them said.

  “At night?” I had never heard of a steamer traveling at night.

  “Moon’s bright enough. Captain thinks it’s safer.”

  “Safer than what?”r />
  He pointed behind me. “Don’t want to catch fire if it moves up the dock.”

  I turned around. Down at the other end of the pier, a boat was on fire. I saw its flames leap up over the water and lick at the wooden dock. It was the Floating Theatre.

  “All this paper—we’d be gone in a wink,” the man said, nodding toward his cargo.

  I looked at the bales of paper. Then I looked back at the fire. It was simple addition but I could not do it.

  “Our boat!” Lula breathed. I couldn’t answer, couldn’t even nod.

  “You two can go up top if you want,” he told us. “Less noise.”

  But Lula and I stayed where we were on the lower deck, too shocked to do anything but watch the Floating Theatre burn, while behind us the steamship’s boilers started up and the paddle began its first slow rotation. Liddy had left the boat, I knew that, with Oliver and Celia. But the others? Hugo? Did Hugo get out? From where I stood, I could see only hot, bright destruction. Shoots of orange flame began wrapping themselves in a tight embrace around the boat’s wooden frame, and now I could smell the pungent scent of smoke drifting toward us in the air.

  I felt the steamer lurch as it began backing away from the pier. My throat felt thick, as though already filled with ashes from the Floating Theatre, but I didn’t cry. Lula and I were holding hands again, and even though I normally hated anyone touching my skin, I believe it was I who first reached out to her. The two men went off to help with the boilers, and Lula and I were left to ourselves to watch the Floating Theatre burn up. It hurt my throat to swallow. It hurt almost to breathe. The steamer slowly crossed the river, and the men tied up at the first landing we came to on the northern side. But even there, half a mile away, I could still see a spot of bright white flame against the night sky.

  20

  It was nearly August by the time I found a job at the American Hotel in Cleveland on Superior Street, a street that had sixteen-inch-wide sidewalks and, by law, no pigs. Cleveland, like Cincinnati, hailed itself as an up-and-coming modern city, but the canal boat that I took to get there was as slow as a farm cart, with clumps of sheep congregating beside the locks and weeds clogging the culverts. It took me five days to get to Cleveland, two weeks to find a job, and two weeks and a day to secure lodgings in a run-down brick house that was somehow forgotten when the neighborhood turned from residence to commerce. But I didn’t need anything better. The rooms were cheap, they were close to the hotel, and I had a door key the length and width of a rat’s tail.

  At the American Hotel, I worked in a square, low-ceilinged room behind the kitchens, with one cracked window looking out over the back alley. Housemaids brought me trousers with buttons off of them or dresses with hems coming undone, given over by the hotel guests. I was paid very little but I was given dinner and supper every day that I worked, which was six days a week. Once in a while I was called on to go up to a guest’s room and perform some alteration there. I knelt on the carpet with pins in my mouth and my fingers on the hem of a lady’s silk skirt while she spoke to someone else in the room. Some days I did not get much work, and other days I had more than I could do myself. On those days a young Negro girl named Bella helped me, and afterward, if we had time to spare, I showed her some embroidery stitches. She wanted to set herself up as a “fancy dress maker,” as she called it, on the street where her family lived. Her father owned his own barbershop and had come to Cleveland when he was twenty; Bella told me that he had been born to free parents in Virginia. Bella told me quite a lot while we worked. She had a pleasantly high, light voice and spoke without pause, changing subjects here and there like a bird flitting from branch to branch. I learned about her family, her father’s family, the church regulars, and “that bold boy Simon across the way” who had taken a liking to her.

  After work, Bella turned right to go home—sometimes bold Simon would be waiting on the corner to walk her there—and I turned left, but I did not go back to my rooming house right away. Cleveland had been bitten by “the theater bug,” as one newspaper put it, and there were many options for an evening’s entertainment. Newly formed companies performed Shakespeare or French melodramas; or I could see American comedies at Cook’s Theatre, built by the brothers Cook, or I could see musical productions at the Italian Hall on Water Street. I went as often as I could and studied each playbill for names I knew: Miss Lydia Fiske, Mr. Sam Trotter, Mr. James Grieve. Captain Hugo Cushing. Usually I didn’t even wait until I was sitting down but stood in the aisle near a gas-lit sconce holding the playbill with two hands—two, because I found that just the act of the usher putting the bill in my hand caused me to shake. There was always a moment before I looked at the print when my heart seemed to take a step back in my chest.

  Mrs. Margaret Russell, I read. Miss Mary Skapek. Mr. Gregory Roscoe.

  And other names like them—names I did not know. But, of course, why would anyone from the Floating Theatre be there, playing in Cleveland? It would be too much of a coincidence. I checked the names again.

  “Can I help you, Miss . . . ?” the usher asked as people brushed by me on their way to their seats.

  “Sinclair,” I told him. “Mrs. Jasper Sinclair.”

  “Can I help you find your seat, Mrs. Sinclair?”

  “No, thank you.”

  It was unusual, if not disreputable, for a woman to attend the theater alone, but I didn’t care about that. I tended to roll the playbill up like a scroll after I sat in my seat and, just as Hugo had once predicted, after a minute or two I forgot everything but what was happening on the stage. It didn’t matter that I saw the same roles time and again—the low comedian, the singing servant, the blithe ingénue—I was captured by their plight, and glad to be captured. Watching a play, I forgot what I had done, who I had hurt, and who I had helped. I forgot myself, and I suppose that was the main thing.

  Afterwards I went back to my two small rooms, stuffy with the humid summer air, and tried to sleep.

  Of course I sent Mrs. Howard my Cleveland address and told her to “please forward it to Captain Cushing,” but I had no idea if she knew where he was or if she would write to him if she did know. I did not even know if he was alive. The only news I could find about the fire on the Floating Theatre was from a small notice in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, which I read at Mrs. Howard’s house a few days after the event.

  RIVERBOAT THEATRE

  Burned on the Ohio River where it was docked at the Paducah landing last Friday night. Dr. Martin Early, physician and poet, and one member of the company were killed in the blaze. The brave citizens of Paducah extinguished the fire before it could damage the town.

  One member of the company. That was all the information I had. There was no mention of Lula—nothing about a runaway slave. I had no idea where anyone from our boat might be, so I had no one to ask. I considered sending a message to the Paducah post office advertising my address, but then thought better of it. I didn’t know if the law would be looking for me, and Mrs. Howard didn’t, either, but to be safe, she told me, I should use a different name for the time being. And so I became Mrs. Jasper Sinclair.

  • • •

  After our moonlit escape on the packet steamer, Lula and I traveled for three more days before we reached Mrs. Howard’s house. The steamer took us nearly all the way to Cincinnati, and might have gotten us the whole way there if I hadn’t caught the captain looking at Lula too many times in a thoughtful manner. We skipped off at a smaller landing while the men were loading up barrels of nails to be carried with their cargo of paper, and I found a coach to take us the remaining miles. The driver accepted my father’s watch as fare, probably ten times the value.

  We had slept very little on the steamer, just an hour or two here and there, but Lula slept heavily on the coach. I kept myself awake in case she had a nightmare and I needed to wake her, and I watched her closed eyelids for signs of distress. There was moisture at the corners of her eyes, but I don’t think she was crying. I told the couple trave
ling in the coach with us that my sister in Cincinnati had just had a baby and that I was lending her my girl here—I nodded toward Lula—for a few weeks to help out. They had their own “girl” with them, a woman wearing a blue headscarf who was a good number of years older than themselves. “My sister’s baby is a boy,” I told them. “His name is William.”

  We arrived in Cincinnati at last in the late afternoon under a gray sky threatening rain. Not knowing if anyone might be looking for us—if notices had already been printed up with our descriptions and a reward set for our return—we walked the rest of the way to Mrs. Howard’s house, skirting the busiest streets. It was muggy and hot even under the trees. We shared a ham roll that the lady on the coach had given me, and talked about what Lula would do after she found her baby. She liked the idea of dressmaking. Maybe she could make little novelty pincushions, like my steamboat pincushion—lost now, like everything else.

  But I couldn’t think about what I had lost. We were in the North, to be sure, but still I couldn’t shake the fear that at any moment someone might appear before us with a whip or a pistol. I remembered too vividly the look on Dr. Early’s face in Paducah as he jumped up to show the justice of the peace where to find Lula: the eager, even joyful look of a hunter. He was going to capture something weaker than himself, a creature who had committed the terrible crime of trying to be stronger than she really was. That was Lula, but it was also me.

  When the rain began, Lula and I stopped for a moment and lifted our faces to feel the cool drops. Lula took off her costume slippers, which by now were torn and dirty, and stood in the grass.

  “You’ll catch cold,” I told her. “Why are you smiling?”

  “Free soil.” She picked up a stray blue jay feather from the ground and twirled it between her fingers. I remembered the bluebird picture she liked so much from Hugo’s bird book, with its detailed caterpillar. Raindrops sparkled in her dark hair.

  By the time we came to the house, the rain had tapered off and great puddles spotted the drive. We went around to the garden and I opened the back door, which was kept unlocked. Then for a few minutes we stood just inside and waited, wet and dirty and for my part nurturing the new mistrust I felt for every soul—housemaids, who might be anywhere in the house, or errand boys, who would use the back door, too—until Donaldson came through and saw us. He quickly took us down to the cellar, which had a straw pallet and a basin of water among the old furniture and crates. We dried off as he fetched Mrs. Howard, who suggested we both “lie down for a while”—me upstairs and Lula on the pallet. But I was so exhausted that I slept all night, and by the time I woke up it was almost noon the next day. There was a blue jay feather on the pillow beside me—the same feather Lula had picked up the afternoon before. I didn’t understand that it was a good-bye note until Mrs. Howard informed me she was gone.