by Lisa Wingate
Inside the cabin, Fern screams my name.
“Hold on! Hold on tight!” I yell. The tree pulls and rips, twirling the Arcadia like a spinning top, whirling her around, then breaking free and leaving us listing in the current. The wakes come over us hard, rushing through the shanty.
My feet slide out from under me.
The Arcadia moans. Nails bust loose. Timbers splinter.
The hull hits something hard, the porch post jerks out of my hands, and next thing I know, I’m flying through the rain. Breath kicks out of my chest. Everything goes black.
I lose the noise of splintering wood and yelling voices and far-off thunder.
The water’s cold, yet I’m warm. There’s a light, and inside it I see my mama. Queenie reaches for my hand, and I stretch for hers, and just before I can get to her, the river tugs me away, yanking me back by the waist.
I kick, and fight, and come to the surface. I see the Arcadia in the tug’s lights. I see a skiff coming our way. I hear whistles and yelling. My legs go stiff, and my skin’s icy cold.
The Arcadia hangs wedged against a huge drift pile. The Mississippi goes after her like the mouth of a giant dragon, slowly eating up her stern.
“Fern!” My voice gets lost in water and noise. I swim for all I’m worth, feel the swirl and the downward pull as I ram into the drift pile. The eddy tries to yank me back, but I fight against it, climb on top, and balance my way to the deck and scramble uphill to the door.
It falls inward with a crash when I open it.
“Fern! Fern!” I yell. “Fern! Answer me!” Smoke chokes my voice. The woodstove lays tipped over. Hot red coals roll across the floor. They sizzle on the wet deck and hiss under my feet.
Everything is turned around, and I can’t see. I go the wrong way first, end up at the table, not Fern’s bunk. The flour-sack quilt from Briny and Queenie’s bed swims by like a colorful whale, carrying a lick of flame. Nearby, fire flicks up the curtains.
“Fern!” Is she gone? Did she fall off into the river? Did Briny get her out already?
A wave rushes in, grabs the red coals, and sweeps them out the door. They pop and squeal as they die.
“Riiiiill! Get me! Get me!”
The searchlight sweeps over us, pressing through the window in a long, slow circle. I see my sister’s face, wide-eyed and terrified under her bunk. She reaches for me, and then the next second I’ve grabbed her hand, and I’m trying to pull her, but the water’s got us both. A chair skitters by and hits me hard in the back, knocking me onto the floor. Water flows over my face and ears. I cling to Fern for all I’m worth.
The chair tumbles on. I grab my sister, stumble and crawl across the cabin to the side door.
The searchlight goes through again. I see the picture of Briny and Queenie hanging on the wall with Queenie’s cross below it.
I shouldn’t, but I pin Fern there with my leg and grab the picture and my mama’s cross and shove them down the front of my nighty and into the top of my drawers. They bump against my skin and dig in as we climb out and shinny over the rail and make our way onto the drift pile, scrambling over the tangle of branches, plank wood, and trees. We’re quick as mice. We’ve done this all our lives.
But we both know enough to understand that a drift pile isn’t a safe place to be. Even when we get to the other end, I can feel the heat from the fire. I hold Fern’s hand, turn and look toward the Arcadia, and lift an arm to shield my eyes. Flames curl and stretch upward from the shanty, burning through the roof and the walls and the deck, skinning the Arcadia down to her bones, stripping her of her beauty. Pieces float on the air. Up, and up, and up they whirl until they fly overhead like a million new stars.
Cooled by the rain, they fall and settle over our skin. Fern yelps when one lands, still warm. I wrap a hand around the neck of her nighty, squat down, and push her into the water, tell her to hold real tight to the tangled branches. There’s too much current here for us to swim to shore. Her teeth chatter, and her face goes pale.
The drift pile is starting to burn. The fire’ll work its way to us soon enough.
“Briny!” The name rips from me. He’s here somewhere. Surely he’s gotten off the boat. He’ll save us.
Won’t he?
“Hold on!” somebody yells, but it’s not Briny’s voice. “Hold on. Don’t move!”
A tank explodes on the Arcadia. Cinders rocket out and fall everywhere. One lands on my foot, and the pain drives right through me. I scream and kick and stick my leg in the water and hang on to Fern.
The drift pile shifts. It’s smoldering in a dozen places now.
“Almost there!” the man’s voice calls out.
A small boat sifts out of the darkness, two rivermen with hoods pulled over their heads straining hard at the oars. “Don’t let go, now. Don’t let go!”
The branches crackle. Logs whine and whistle. The entire drift pile shifts downriver a foot or two. One of the men in the lifeboat warns the other that they’ll get swamped if the drift breaks loose.
They come on anyway, snatch us into the boat, and throw blankets over us and row hard.
“Was there anyone else on the boat? Anybody else?” they want to know.
“My daddy,” I cough out. “Briny. Briny Foss.”
Nothing feels quite so good as the shore when they drop us there and go back to look for Briny. I cuddle Fern close inside my blanket, the picture and Queenie’s cross between us. We shiver and shake and watch the Arcadia burn until finally the drift pile breaks loose and takes what’s left of her with it.
Fern and me stand up and move to the edge of the water and watch as Kingdom Arcadia disappears into the river bit by bit. Finally, it’s gone altogether. There’s not a trace. It’s like it never was.
Against the dawn gray to the east, I watch the men and boats. They search on, and on, and on. They call out, and their lights sweep, and they row.
I think I see somebody standing down shore. A slicker flaps around his knees. He doesn’t move, or call out, or wave at the lights. He just watches the river, where the life we knew has been swallowed away.
Is it Briny?
Cupping my hands around my mouth, I call to him. My voice carries through the morning mist, echoing over and over.
A searcher in one of the boats looks my way.
When I squint down shore again, I can hardly make out the man in the slicker. He turns and walks toward the trees until the dawn shadows cover him over.
Maybe he was never there at all.
I move a few steps closer and yell again and listen.
My voice echoes away, then dies.
“Rill!” When there’s finally an answer, it doesn’t come from downriver. It’s not Briny’s voice.
A jon boat motors up to the sandy bank, and Silas hops out before the Jenny even makes it to a stop. He tugs the line at a run, hurrying toward me until he grabs me in his arms. I cling to him and cry.
“You’re all right! You’re all right!” He breathes into my hair, squeezing me so tight the picture frame and Queenie’s cross push deep into my skin. “Zede and me and Arney was scared half out of our minds when we seen the Arcadia gone.”
“Briny cut us loose last night. I woke up, and she was on the river.” I sob out the rest of the story—Briny on the roof talking out of his head, the near miss with the barge, hitting the drift pile, the fire, ending up in the water, seeing Queenie, then coming back up and climbing onto the Arcadia as the river was eating her whole. “Some men pulled us off the drift before it broke loose,” I say, finishing our sad tale, my body shivering in the cold. “They went to look for Briny.” I don’t tell Silas that I think I’ve already seen him and that, instead of coming to find us, he walked away.
If I don’t tell anyone, it’ll never be true. It’ll never be the way Kingdom Arcadia ended.
Silas then holds me at arm’s length to look me over. “But you’re all right. Y’all two are in one piece. Thank the saints! Zede and Arney will be bringin’ Zede’s
boat downwater soon’s they can. We’ll find Briny too. You’ll all be with us. We’ll go where it’s warm and the fishin’s good, and…”
He chatters on about how Zede and Briny will gather boards and scrap from the riverbanks and build us a new boat. A new Arcadia. We’ll start all over again and always travel together from now until forever.
My mind wants to color in those pictures, but it can’t. Zede’s boat is too small for all of us, and Briny’s gone. Zede’s too old to run the river much longer. He’s too old to raise Fern. She’s just a baby yet.
Hanging on my leg, she burrows under the blanket and tugs my dress. “I wannnn’ Mom-meee,” she sniffles. Her fingers almost touch the edge of Queenie’s picture, but I know that’s not who she means.
I look Silas full in the face as the dawn rays catch him. My heart squeezes so tight it hurts. I wish we were older. I wish we were old enough. I love Silas. I know I do.
But I love Fern too. I loved Fern first. She’s all I’ve got left of my family.
Just down the bank from us, the search for Briny is simmering down as the early sun sheds its glow on the river. Any minute, the men will see that there’s no hope of finding another survivor. They’ll come back for Fern and me.
“Silas, you’ve gotta take us out of here. You’ve gotta take us now.” I pull away from him and move toward the jon boat, dragging Fern along.
“But…Briny…” Silas says.
“We have to go. Before the men come over here. They’ll take us to the children’s home again.”
Silas understands then. He knows I’m right. He gets us in the boat, and we move off quiet until we’re far enough away that no one notices the motor revving up. We keep to the shore on the other side from the cotton warehouses and docks and Mud Island and all of Memphis. When we get to our little backwater, I tell Silas I don’t want him to carry us to Zede’s boat except long enough to say goodbye.
I have to bring Fern back upriver and hope the Seviers will take her in again. It’s not her fault we left. It wasn’t her idea to steal things. It was mine. What happened wasn’t Fern’s doing.
If we’re lucky, they’ll let her come back…if they haven’t already got some other little girl from the children’s home. Maybe even if they have, they’ll still keep Fern. Maybe they’ll promise to love her some and keep her safe from Miss Tann.
What’ll happen to me after that, there’s no way to know. The Seviers won’t want me for sure—a liar and a thief. I can’t let Miss Tann find me again. Maybe I can get work someplace nearby, but these are lean times. I won’t come back to the river. Old Zede can’t feed any more mouths, but that’s not the real reason I can’t stay.
The real reason is I have to be close to my sister. We’ve been stitched together at the heart since she was born. I can’t breathe in a world where she isn’t near.
I tell Silas what I want him to do for us. He shakes his head, and his face gets longer and longer the more I talk about it.
“Take care of Arney,” I tell him finally. “She hasn’t got anything to go back to. Her people treated her in a bad way. Find her a place, all right? She don’t mind workin’ hard.”
Silas looks down at the water as it passes, not at me. “I will.”
Maybe Silas and Arney will marry in a few years, I think.
My heart squeezes again.
Everything I wanted my life to be, it won’t be now. The path that brought me here is flooded over. There’s no going back. That’s the real reason, when we find Zede’s boat, I tell him that the Seviers will sure be glad to get Fern and me back. “I just need Silas to take us upriver.” I don’t want Zede to come along. I’m afraid he won’t let us go when it gets right down to it.
He looks through the open door into his shanty like he’s trying to decide if he can keep all of us for good.
“Fern’s got lots of nice clothes and toys back at the Seviers’. And Crayolas. I’ll start up with school pretty soon.” My voice quivers, and I swallow hard to steady it.
When Zede’s eyes turn my way, it feels like he’s looking right through me.
Fern reaches for him, and he picks her up, tucking his head over hers. “Li’l bit,” he chokes out, and then pulls me in and hugs us both hard. He smells of ashes, and fish, and coal oil, and the big river. Familiar things.
“You ever need me, you get word to the river,” he says.
I nod, but when he turns loose of us, we both know this is goodbye forever. The river is a big place.
Sadness lines his face. He wipes it away before he nods, then sets his mouth and puts Fern in the Jenny so we can leave.
“I oughta go along, seein’s you don’t know the slough,” Arney says. “But I ain’t stayin’ once we get there. I’ll take my pa’s jon boat and leave it tied up someplace near. You can let him know where to find it. I don’t want nothin’ of his.” She doesn’t wait for an answer but goes after the jon boat. Even with all her family’s done to her, she’s been worried how they’d get by without it.
I don’t cry when we shove off again. The Waterwitch has to fight our way upstream, but eventually we make it to the mouth of the slough. The trees lean close after we turn, and I take one look back. I let the river wash away something inside of me.
It washes away the last of Rill Foss.
Rill Foss is princess of Kingdom Arcadia. The king is gone, and so is the kingdom.
Rill Foss has to die with it.
I’m May Weathers now.
CHAPTER 25
Avery
“And that is where my story ends.” May’s blue eyes, clouded and moist, study me across the lamp table in an alcove of the nursing home. “Are you happy that you know? Or is it only a burden? I’ve always wondered how you young ones would feel. I expected that I’d never find out.”
“I think…it’s a little of both.” Even after taking a week to think about it since our visit to the river cottage and Hootsie’s farm, I’m still struggling to assimilate this history with my family history.
Over and over, I’ve weighed Elliot’s admonitions that I’m playing with fire—that the past should be left in the past. Even the startling revelations from my visit to the Savannah River cottage haven’t changed his opinion. Think about the repercussions, Avery. There are people who wouldn’t…see your family the same way anymore.
By people, I have a sense that he means Bitsy.
The sad thing is, Bitsy’s not the only one. If all of this became public, there’s no telling what would happen to political futures, reputations, the Stafford name.
Times have changed, but the old doctrines still apply. If the world were to find out that the Staffords aren’t really what we’ve claimed to be, the fallout would be…
I can’t even imagine.
That scares me in a way I don’t want to contemplate, but the truth is that I can’t bear the thought of my grandmother and her sister spending the last of their lives separated from each other. Ultimately, I have to know I did what was right for Grandma Judy.
“A time or two, I’ve considered telling my grandchildren,” May offers. “But they are settled in their lives. Their mother remarried to a man with children after my son passed away. They’re wonderful young people raising their own broods among gaggles of aunts, and uncles, and cousins. It’s much the same with my sisters’ families. Lark married a businessman who built a department store empire. Fern married a prominent doctor in Atlanta. Between them, there were eight children and two dozen grandchildren and of course great-grandchildren. They are all successful and happy…and busy. What can ancient history give them that they don’t already have?”
May looks at me deeply, watches me teeter on the dividing line that has shifted from her generation to mine. “Will you share the story with your family?” she asks.
I swallow hard, at war with myself. “I’ll tell my father. It’s his decision more than mine. Grandma Judy is his mother.” I have no notion of how my father will respond to the information or what he’ll do wi
th it. “Part of me thinks Hootsie is right. The truth is still the truth. It has value.”
“Hootsie,” she grumbles. “This is the thanks I get for selling her that piece of land next to my grandmother’s old place so she and Ted could have their farm on it. After all these years, she tells my secrets.”
“I really think she felt it was in your best interest. She wanted me to understand the connection between you and my grandmother. She was thinking of the two of you.”
May swats at the idea like it’s a fly buzzing around her face. “Pppfff! Hootsie just likes to stir the pot. She has always been that way. You know, she was the reason I ended up staying with the Seviers at all. By the time we reached their home, Silas almost had me talked into taking to the river with him. He stood on the shore and grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me. The first time I’d ever been kissed by a boy.” She giggles, her cheeks reddening and her eyes taking on a childlike glitter. For a moment, I see that twelve-year-old girl on the banks of the oxbow lake. “ ‘I love you, Rill Foss,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll wait here an hour. I’ll wait for you to come back. I can take care of you, Rill. I can.’
“I knew he was making promises he couldn’t keep. Only a few months before, he’d been hoboing trains, trying to survive. If there was one thing I’d learned from watching Briny and Queenie, it was that love doesn’t put food on the table. It doesn’t keep a family safe.”
She nods at her own conclusion, frowning. “Wanting to and doing are two different things. I guess in a way, I knew it wasn’t meant to be for Silas and me. Not while we were so young, anyway. But when I started up the path with Fern, all I wanted to do was run back to that dark-haired boy and back to the river. I might’ve done it if it hadn’t been for Hootsie. She made the choice for me before I could choose for myself. My plan was to sneak to the edge of the trees, hide there, and watch to be certain the Seviers would take Fern in again. I was scared to death that if they caught me, they’d send me back to the children’s home or off to some sort of workhouse for bad girls or even to jail. But Hootsie was out digging roots for her mama, and she spotted us there near the yard, and she went to hollering. Next thing I knew, there was Zuma, and Hoy, and Mr. and Mrs. Sevier rushing down the hill, and the dogs bounding ahead. I had no place to run, so I just stood there and waited for the worst to happen.”