“More than the last trip.”
“Put your arms around me.”
He kissed her nape, the backs of her pale ears.
“Lucky, when I walk up the street I see these nice houses with porches and big backyards. Sometimes I ask myself how anybody can afford to own a house, you know? To keep it up? Everybody I know rents.”
He took in a slow breath. “There’s a lot of businessmen in town, I guess. Store owners. Superintendents.” Out on the sidewalk someone passed by bouncing a basketball, the pneumatic pings rising for a time and then diminishing up the street. “I thought I could work my way up at Krine’s,” he said absently.
“This kidnapping dragged us down, baby.”
“I know.”
“I thought it would be over, but it isn’t.”
“I know that, too.”
She took in a sudden breath. “When do you leave?”
“Probably day after tomorrow.”
“Do you still have your nice Hamilton watch? The one Uncle Claude gave you for a wedding present?”
“Sure.”
She turned to face him. He thought she might want a kiss, but when she gave him a sad, complicated smile instead, he knew what she would say, and he looked away. “You have to sell it.”
***
THE AMBASSADOR wasn’t ready to steam for a week. The day before he was to leave, Sam received a call from a New Orleans assistant district attorney summoning him downtown to be deposed for an upcoming trial of the Whites in Kentucky. In an office of the federal building he met a slim young lawyer who asked him to write out a statement. He labored over four pages for an hour, signed off on them, and waited for the lawyer to step back into the room. Trying to imagine what would happen to the Whites was beyond him, but he had a dim notion that such people never saw the inside of a jail. He hoped, however, they could be fined enough to keep them away from anyone else’s children.
The glass in a mahogany door rattled, and the lawyer came in and reached for the deposition as he walked by.
Sam looked up at him. “Has the boy been in yet?”
“We took his statement yesterday. How’s the little girl doing?”
“I haven’t seen her again. I go to work tomorrow, and I guess she’ll be on board.” Sam stood and shook his pants legs loose. “They trying those people in Kentucky?”
The lawyer, who wore a thin mustache, turned it up on one side. “Well, I don’t know. The jurisdiction’s rather confused.”
“I figured they’d get out of it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. They’re still in a county jail in Mississippi. The sheriff there’s got his own juice, as they say, and the Whites threatened him in several ways, then offered to bribe him, so there are two or three new local charges against them. Mrs. White’s in the regional female prison wearing denim clothes along with the whores and lady pickpockets. Not doing too well, I hear. Mr. White’s still in the Woodgulch pokey.”
Sam thought about this while the lawyer examined his handwriting. “I guess it might bother them more than it would some other folks.”
“Let’s just say they’re not used to such accommodations. I got a telegram from Graysoner, Kentucky, that said the local paper has the story all over the front page, and the reporter didn’t gild the lily, if you know what I mean.”
“I’d have guessed the local paper would’ve taken their side.”
“Me too. But the reporter has a young brother on the police force who gave him some interesting details.”
Sam grinned. “Sometimes a criminal gets his justice just because of bad luck?”
The lawyer opened the door into the marble hallway. Down the broad stairs Sam heard people talking and quick footsteps, and someone dropped what sounded like an armload of file folders. Throughout the building people were trying to propel the lumbering steamroller of justice forward in a straight line, but it seemed to him a complex business, both noble and imprecise.
The lawyer clapped a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “As for bad luck, I think the Whites have rolled snake eyes.”
***
THE AMBASSADOR ran three trips on a Saturday in New Orleans, breaking in the new band, the repaired machinery, and a revolutionary speaker system mounted on the roof and dance floor. On Sunday, Sam went to Mass at the cathedral with his wife, and at noon the boat departed, banners flying, bunting set, and twin clouds of coal smoke rising skyward. It would run a meet-the-boat trip, carrying excursionists upriver about forty miles and then exchanging the whole crowd with that from the Buckeye Deluxe, a big sidewheel excursion boat tramping south. The Ambassador would then paddle upriver to Donaldsonville and drop off the sidewheeler’s tired load.
Sam caught a glimpse of Elsie through the crowd boiling around the decks, but the captain caught his arm as he was making his way to her.
“Lucky, we’ve got a new generator in the engine room, and Bit says he can’t watch it all the time, so you’re elected to learn how to operate the thing and just check its meters every couple hours. It runs all the new bulbs on the rails, plus the loudspeaker thing.”
He made a face. “A generator?”
“Go on. It’s not like learning piano, for gosh sake.”
He went down to the engine room and sat amid the hissing machines and worried through the manual, testing the circuits and learning the Bakelite control board and its tangle of fuses, rotary controls, and knife-blade switches. It was impossible to learn the manual because all he could think of was Lily and her mother. He gave up and walked forward to the main deck. After the boats tied up side by side and exchanged passengers, the purser discovered that the Deluxe had overbooked, and excursionists were stacked on the Ambassador’s forecastle trying to get up to the good music. The deck speakers were meant for colorful commentary on things the boat passed by, but the captain found Sam and directed him to figure how to connect the stage microphones to the on-deck speakers so he could forestall a riot. The Donaldsonville crowd had been floating south all morning listening to a dull hotel orchestra while sipping radiator-made shine and were primed to try the hot tempos of this New Orleans band. An hour upriver Sam figured out the crossovers, and people began to dance up on the hurricane deck and in the lower lounge. He walked up to the Texas roof and looked down on hundreds of dancers, feeling the thin lumber of the old boat rumble under him like a wooden bridge bearing a cattle drive. When he turned to look aft, Elsie was standing next to him, her little waitress crown sunken down into her sweaty hair.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “The crowd’s going to bunch into the café in a minute, so they sent me out on a break. It’s been a crazy house since noon. I was almost killed over a ham sandwich.”
She had aged two or three years in the few days since he’d seen her, her face flushed and shiny with both labor and grease from the kitchen ranges. “How’s Lily doing?”
She gave him a look. “Not so damned well. She asks me for baby dolls every hour on the hour.” She turned and watched the darkening river as if she might jump into it. “I don’t think she understands where and what she’s come back to.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one with Ted’s military lighter. “The other night we were eating in the back of the café and she asked me for roast duck.” Her eyes grew wide, incredulous. “What kind of little girl did you bring back to me? She thinks she’s a rich kid.”
“Give her some time to fall back into your routine. She’ll come around.”
“I don’t know. I tried to spend some time with her by teaching her a new song, ‘Ma, He’s Makin’ Eyes at Me’? She said it was nasty.” Her voice rose. “She said her mother was teaching her a nasty song.”
Sam thought of the White’s many-roomed house, its manicured hill, guessed at what those people had taught her. “She’ll get used to things.” As he said this he knew he didn’t believe it.
“She’s just a baby. She’s been gone from me for ten months. That’s a big part of a baby’s life.”
They
talked until Mrs. Benton called down to them from the pilothouse. “I’m fixing to blow for a descending tow, so unless you enjoy getting splashed with hot condensate I reckon you ought to move.”
***
THEY RAN three trips at Natchez against a competing boat come down from Davenport and did well. Jazz was still rare along the river, so the sports, the young people, the heartstrong dancers-whether swells or hillbillies, sawmill bucks or plantation beauties-came down the bluffs at late dusk to board the light-lavished steamer and glide out into the dark, taking on the breeze and moving their feet, or rather, having their feet moved by this strange, powerful sound come up from New Orleans against the currents.
Sam watched Lily as much as he could, talked to her as much as she’d allow. She seemed a closed vessel, not showing who she was, perhaps not even knowing, not anymore. At rehearsal, when she sang a novelty number her mother had taught her, her voice lacked energy and rhythm. She remembered the words, but seemed to have forgotten how to form or phrase them. The intelligence of her voice had been robbed away. What had stolen it, Sam couldn’t guess, at least not at first. Then one night, lying in his bunk above a snoring Charlie Duggs, thinking about how children change, he figured it out. Her father had been the teacher in the family, the one with the big musical spark that could go all night, set after set without burning out, who could guide the fingers and vocal cords of the children he himself had made with his wife. Elsie taught the words, the dances, but Ted was the bearer of the notes, the lilt, the sass, and Ted was forever gone. Sam understood that Lily would still sing, but she might never again perform.
Chapter Thirty-three
THE RIVER NORTH OF VICKSBURG was running high and the Ambassador strained against the current to make its shore dates. The crowds were civilized, even appreciative, but at one malignant landing called Hurricane Slough, the boat filled with lumbermen and their whores and also the entire congregation of a Baptist church. The night trip was a brawl from landing to landing and ended with a shoreside religious war by torchlight, a hollering slugfest out on the dark bank. The crowd dissipated as slowly as a stinking smoke, and the crew was so exhausted and the boat so filthy that the captain sent the advance man on horseback to the nearest telegraph office to notify the town above that the morning excursion would be canceled. All night the boat leaned against the bank, as if the very planks and machines had lost all strength. Some time before dawn, the crew began to stir and Mr. Brandywine backed her out and turned her toward Greenville, the river running ponderous as molten lead against the hull. The old pilot spotted a sandbar and figured how to steer around it, and later decided which side of an island to choose for passage as he walked spokes on the wheel. When the full disk of sun lay over the bunched pines of the eastern hills, he reached up and pulled on the whistle cord, letting the ring slip through his hand, and the big whistle grumbled half a word.
In less than a minute, Sam opened the narrow door to the pilothouse with Lily on an arm. He sat her on the lazy bench, and she looked around at the windows, then through them.
“Saul’s bringing up your coffee,” Sam said.
The pilot stole a glance at the child. “Hello, little miss.”
“Good morning, Mr. Brandywine.” She fluffed her dress around her dangling legs.
The pilot nudged the Ambassador out of a thread of current and peeled away from the head of the island. He pulled an engine-room bell and turned his head for the western shore, watching the trees roll past. “You being nice and quiet like you should.”
“I know.” She nodded.
Saul, a retired Pullman porter too old for railroad service, tapped at the door and Sam waved him in. He carried a bright, triple-plated tray and sat it on the cold pilothouse stove. “I brought you a biscuit with your coffee, sah.”
“Thank you. I’ll eat it when I go off in an hour.”
Saul turned the cup handle out on the tray, and when he swung around to leave, he noticed Lily for the first time. “Little ma’am, would you like me to go and get you one of those cookies they’re bakin’ fresh down in the kitchen?”
She looked at him squarely. “I’m not supposed to talk to niggers.”
Sam looked at the old porter and his face was unmoving, hardened by a lifetime of blows. Saul kept his smile and said, “Yes, little ma’am.”
Mr. Brandywine slid a hand from the wheel. “Sam, come over and just stand here and hold her steady. Don’t do anything but hold it in one spot.”
He hesitated, looking out at the water sliding by. “I’m no wheelman.”
“Just for a minute.”
They changed places, and the pilot walked over to the lazy bench and gave Lily a serious look. “Little miss, would you hurt someone’s feelings on purpose?”
Lily shook her head.
“Well, lots of people use the word ‘nigger,’ and I know you’ve heard it thrown around by those folks who stole you, but let me tell you, it hurts people’s feelings. Would you want Saul here to call you something like ‘nasty grits’?”
She began to get the idea she’d done something wrong and straightened her back. “That’s ugly. I’m not nasty grits.”
Mr. Brandywine put his many-creased face close to hers and trapped her with his glossy little eyes. “It hurts your feelings to be called that, does it?”
She nodded.
“So it’s ugly to call Saul here a ‘nigger.’ That pretty young mouth of yours should have nicer words come out of it. You can refer to him as a Negro or a colored man.”
She looked at Saul, whose expression was still unreadable, and he was waiting, as he had all his life. “I’m not supposed to talk to a Negro,” she said.
Saul laughed, and no one in the pilothouse could tell exactly what the laugh meant. He turned for the door and was gone.
Sam called out, “Mr. Brandywine.”
The pilot was watching the porter through the aft glass. “What?”
“There’s a towboat rounding the upper end of this island.”
The pilot still didn’t turn around. “Do you not see a big white house with green shutters and a gallery sitting on the bluff over the next bend?”
Sam scanned the east side in a panic. “I think so.”
“Well, put the flagstaff on the front door.”
He turned the wheel and began to sweat as the boat swung a few degrees, then began to drive at the hallway of the farmhouse three miles away. Behind him, he heard Brandywine say, “You feel the weight of my hand on your shoulder, girl?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“When you insult someone it puts a weight on you. Oh, you don’t feel it until you get older, like me, but that’s when you get to thinking and thinking about all the hurt you caused people in your life with your smart little mouth and your wise little cracks. Now, do you feel this hand on your other shoulder?”
“Yes.”
“Each pain you cause people, little miss, is a weight, and the older you get, the more they burden you like stones until you’re bent over and near buried by them all.”
The shore was coming up, and the towboat had fully materialized on the port side pushing ten loads of heaped block coal. “Mr. Brandywine?”
But he was staring intently into Lily’s sharp blue eyes. “Do you not see the big gray rock some lovesick fool has painted a heart on off to your right about five hundred yards?”
Sam swung his head in several quick scans of the riverbank. “I see it.”
“One hundred yards this side of it, split the difference between it and that descending tow.”
“But-”
“It’s all water in this spot, son, and this here is a boat,” he snapped. The girl’s eyes watched his own steadily, and Brandywine knew what he told her would stick. She was too smart, young as she was, for something not to stick. “Somebody has taught you it’s all right to hurt people’s feelings, to try and make them less than you are. And I’m here with my bent-down shoulders to tell you for a fact that it’s not.”
***
A WEEK LATER above Cairo, Sam shared a table with Elsie after the last trip of the day. Her color wasn’t good, and the corners of her mouth branched with the start of wrinkles. She ate her food with a habitual motion that showed she enjoyed none of it. More than once she began a conversation by blaming him for all her troubles, saying things like, “You brought back my child, but it wasn’t the same child.” At this meal she told him, “Those people made her different. She’s not sweet. She’s less mine.”
Even Sam realized he was the worst person to talk to like this, because accusations stuck to him like beggar lice. “I’m sorry about everything,” he said this time.
She wiped her mouth with a napkin and threw it in her lap. “And August isn’t the same. He’s still using his talent, at least, but he doesn’t talk to me anymore. He used to tell me jokes, one a day, and say how much he liked to hear me laugh, and Ted used to say the same thing.”
“He’s doing well with the band. He’s off the boiler gang.”
“He’s learning, all right, but it’s as if he’s gone from kid to old man overnight.”
Nothing was good for her, everything had changed for the worse, and he could tell that no matter what happened for the rest of her life, she would blame her misfortune on the fact that a department-store floorwalker had allowed himself to be bested by a pair of back-woods thugs. He knew that event followed event, and that it was his bad luck to be first in a string of bad fortune. But once or twice some little spark of resentment flared up at her badgering, and he was tempted to ask what she and Ted were doing the moment the child was spirited away from them. How long had they been distracted while looking at men’s coats or women’s dresses while Lily was swept into a topcoat or lured away with a handful of candy? And hadn’t he begged Ted not to go after Skadlock? He tightened his finger in the handle of his cup as though he wanted to break it off.
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