They followed the river downstream, because that felt easiest. They were aimless, heartsore, without desire or design. After a few weeks, it rained nearly all the time. They moved on, because they could not turn back. Even when it did not rain, the water was high, angry, impossible to cross. Sometimes it seemed the river was following them. Soup thick and dark, the noise it made to their grieving ears was like a great roar of sorrow. It suited them. They ran out of money. They had no shelter. They slept under the best tree cover they could find.
It wasn’t long before the fungus got to Horace’s head, so they shaved the hair from it. It didn’t grow back. Horace thought he’d become Bald Horace because they’d stolen a bottle of camphor oil from a storage barn they’d come across to treat his naked, sore-covered scalp. A curse came with stolen goods. Aurora Mae always said that. Bernard consoled the man.
Now, I don’t want to contradict Aurora Mae, he said. But it ain’t pure stolen when you’ve got as powerful a need and as pitiful a purse as we two. Give it more time. We might see a follicle or two sprout anon.
Whenever his sister’s name was invoked, Bald Horace’s eyes welled up. He was silent until they overflowed. Tears mixed with the rivulets of rain splashing over his cheeks.
It hurts my heart so to wonder where she is, if she is.
Bernard, tearing up himself, found confidence the way lovers do when all is lost but defeat is inconceivable for reasons known only to them and God.
She is. I know it. And we will see her again. We will be reunited.
Oh Bernard. I fear you are dreamin’.
And what’s wrong with that? A dream is a useful thing. Without a dream, Joseph would still be rottin’ in Pharaoh’s prison. Without a dream, Jacob would not have seen the way to heaven.
Bald Horace fluttered his fingers in the air as if playing a flute.
Up a golden ladder.
Yessir. Up a golden ladder.
Whenever he had his mind to himself, Bernard conjured up scenes in which Aurora Mae escaped her captors. He saw her running barefoot through the woods, hiding out in the same way her men did, under trees, in abandoned farm buildings when she could find one, scavenging, hoping for a run-in with a sympathetic stranger. Other times, he saw her thumping the head of whoever kept watch over her in the night with whatever heavy object came to hand. He saw how she’d pick her way quietly through the house and yard, silent as her warrior ancestors stalking foes through jungle and swamp. She would reach the stable where she’d leap on a horse and ride the wind to freedom. He saw her working cotton fields where she found the roots and weeds required to brew a poison that would kill every one of the monsters who took her. He saw how she’d use what she had to until one of them fell in love with her and gave her gold to buy her way out of captivity, but not before she’d plunged a farewell blade into the bastard’s chest as he deserved. This was his least favorite conjuring, for it made a whore of her and his respect for Aurora Mae had not diminished. He still enjoyed tremendously the picture of its final scene: his enemy writhing, suffering, his features twisted in agony that lasted hours, even days, before fire-breathing demons carried him off to hell.
He had no hero fantasies in which he retrieved her himself with or without the aid of Bald Horace. He considered himself a failure in that regard. He’d let her down. He’d not protected the woman he loved from harm. In his worst moments, he figured he was no kind of a hero, no kind of a man at all and never would be. But she! he thought. She was a goddess, an archangel, a queen of the earth and sky! She’d save herself. He knew it. He knew it as hard, plain fact.
They crept downriver. They didn’t pick up the volume or type of work they’d expected on account of the rain. What there was amounted to recovery work. They recovered what was left of drowned crops, rebuilt washed-out stone walls, fences, and collapsed roofs, transporting what was saved to where it could be bartered for what was going scarce. Sometimes they caught work shoring up the levees. Everywhere they stopped, the conversation turned to the rain, if people were in the mood to talk at all. They asked how high the river was upstream, did it crest, and speculated on the health of the levees. In general, the consensus was that the levees would hold, they had so far during wretched rain times. There’d be a few breaks here and there, but everyone who studied these things from the local bosses all the way up to President Coolidge said they’d survive. Everyone except crazy old black women, people said, those Obeah Negroes who thought they were smarter than the entire governments of the United States and Canada combined, and maybe a preacher or two, but most of ’em hereabouts been preaching end-times are comin’ since Methuselah wore diapers.
As summer bowed to fall, it seemed the whole countryside was on the move. There were days when the river was thick with barges, manned by gunmen fore, aft, and in between, loaded with mysterious cargo, boxed then wrapped in tarpaulin, hiding as much from observation as the rain. There were government boats, packed with surveyors and Army engineers, men who stood on deck under makeshift tents holding their instruments at the ready like rifles in a war. On land, there were the wayfarers, frightened-looking men, white and black, alone or hauling a family, men who believed the preachers and the Obeah women, men who searched for a low watermark along the river near the places where tributaries might drain her off, and wiser men who headed west to high ground. With all the wayfarers about, competition for what jobs might be had was fierce. Even when they reached a big town, no one wanted to hire a funny-looking, little white man traveling with a bald, mournful black, not when there was more respectable-looking labor to be had. As a result, the two friends were almost always on the move.
By then, Bernard and Bald Horace were old hands on the road. They’d set out before the rain started in earnest, when it was just a bother now and again, not the steady, unyielding torrent it had become. They knew how to find the critters who did not flee the waters, the skittering things that made poor eating unless you caught a whole mess of them at once. Sometimes, this took all day, but at least they did not starve. Bald Horace would sit high up a tree. He’d pound and shake a branch while Bernard dashed about in the mud tossing whatever fell down into a sack for sorting out later. Much as water was all around them, there were no fish to catch, not fish they could see, anyway. The river got so dark and brown, they might as well have been looking into the pitch-dark night as the great mother Mississippi. There was refuse floating in it, wagon wheels, window frames, chickens bloated up with drowning, dogs, cats, and donkeys in similar states. Even if they could catch them, they wouldn’t want to eat fish from such a source. They tried robbing fields, but most everything cultivated was picked already or rotted under the rain. They got to a point where they would have done almost anything for a job, a hot meal, a spot of dry floor to make their beds. It was October of the year 1926 when Bernard and Bald Horace got to Memphis.
My family’s here, Bernard said. They’ll help us out.
When they arrived at his granddaddy’s store, it was burned out and abandoned. The neighbors told him his mama had gone on a rampage one night years before and torched the place. The flames climbed high, attracting notice. Folk found her before the fire, dancing with a jug and laughing. When they attempted to restrain her, she started in to yell, yell like a backwoods banshee, and she yelled his father’s name. Harvé! Harvé! With the strength of ten madmen, she tore away from those who held on to her. She ran directly into the conflagration before anyone could stop her, still screaming, Harvé! Harvé! and she burned up and died. His grandparents passed of heartbreak within the year, one after the other. The county took both the family homes for back taxes and funeral expenses. There was nothing left, neither kin nor inheritance. He might as well have never existed.
Numbed by the news, Bernard told Bald Horace if he didn’t mind, he’d just as soon leave Memphis directly after they had a little money put by. Don’t get to likin’ it too much ’round here, he said. There’s bound to be some kind of work down the docks, but I can’t think I ca
n stay here in this sorry place, not with times gone by stalkin’ me everywhere.
We’s both of us orphans now, Bald Horace said. He put his arm around his friend and let the man discretely weep a bit against his chest, but that was only the one, brief time he did so. Neither man could bear to let too much sadness come to the surface or it might bury what was left of their resolve.
There doesn’t seem much to live for, does there, Bald Horace remarked when they set off for the docks to look for work. No sun, no work, no people.
There’s her.
If you say so, Bernard. If you say so. Oh my. Lookit that.
The Delta is flat everywhere, so they’d scrambled up to the summit of the levee to get their bearings. The docks were below them. Despite the high water, their perch gave them a panoramic view of a bustling, hectic port. Ships, boats, and barges were moored everywhere with their gangplanks stuck straight out. Men swarmed up and down gangways, carrying heavy burdens in both directions. Overseers of warehouses barked orders directing traffic. Ships’ captains conversed under umbrellas with men in rubber capes and coats. Papers were signed, moneys exchanged. Behind a row of warehouses facing the docks were men in clusters of twenty or thirty each, crowding about other men with clipboards, who stood under cover from the rain to write down their names, one by one, and send them scurrying into this building and that for a day of labor hauling goods into and out of the ships, boats, and barges cramming the docks.
Work! Bernard cried out joyously as if the word were the name of God. Work!
They scurried down to the docks and took their place in the clusters of men. Their group stood in a jumble in front of a burly man of medium height dressed in a yellow slicker and bonnet of the kind fishermen wore to ride out a storm. His great black rubber boots disappeared beneath the hem of the slicker. All that was human about him poked out of the bonnet’s face hole, a grump’s mug with fleshy lips and a nose pocked like a pinecone.
When it came their turn in line, the boss asked Bald Horace his name, and he said, Bald Horace. The man wrote it down without asking for a surname, probably because he didn’t think Negroes needed one.
Then he asked Bernard his name and Bernard answered, Bernard Levy. The man just about dropped his clipboard.
What? he said. A look of disbelief crossed his stubbly face. What’d you say?
Bernard opened his mouth to speak, but the boss held up a hand to delay him. He called to the other bosses taking names. Hey, Franklin. Get over here. You gotta see this. Eustis, come here! Newel!
While Franklin, Eustis, and Newel disengaged themselves from their respective queues, Bernard’s boss gestured for him to stand next to him under the warehouse awning where it was more or less dry. The four bosses squared up around them. Bernard’s boss said, Tell these men who you are.
It didn’t take Bernard three times to learn a thing. He prepared himself for the derision sure to follow the enunciation of his name. He thought it wouldn’t hurt to embellish the revelation. If he gave these men an especially good laugh, it could result in a better detail for him and Bald Horace, a higher-paying one maybe. So he stood straight and tall as he might, scrunched his close-set features up even tighter than nature had done at the moment of his birth, and bowed from the waist with a flourish of arm, the way he’d seen many a dandy bow during his pleasure boat days.
Bernard Levy, he said. At your service. For good measure, he clicked his boot heels.
There was a moment of silence. Then great bellows of laughter, hoots, hollers, and guffaws. Bernard bobbed up and down again, moving his hands in clever arcs then sticking them behind his ears to make those sizable handles look yet bigger while he spouted the pleasantries of swells in theatrical voice. I am enchanted to meet your acquaintance, he said, on this lovely day by this sparklin’ shore. The bosses doubled up, holding on to one another’s shoulders to keep from falling over. The more they laughed, the more he bobbed. The men from the various queues moved over to see what riotous commotion was going on, and they whooped and whistled as well, though most of them didn’t know what the joke was. All they saw was a tattered, dirty man bowing and scraping with a dopey expression writ over an odd assemblage of nose, eyes, ears, and mouth saying things like “I don’t mind if I do” and “If it were your pleasure” in an accent none had heard before, but which they would describe later on to those absent as “hoity-toity.”
The laughter petered out. The other bosses drifted off, shaking their heads, wiping their grins off with handkerchiefs. Bernard’s boss said, I’ve got a special job for you. Go get in the truck there, and we’ll be off soon’s I take care of the rest of these here men and square up with the foreman.
Bernard said, May Bald Horace go with us, Boss?
That stopped the other man dead in his tracks. He looked at Bernard as if he were plain crazy. Why? he asked.
With nothing else to say that the man might believe, Bernard said, He belongs to me, sir. He goes where I go.
The boss slapped his head. He looked to be restraining another fit of humor with difficulty. His pocked-up nose wrinkled with the effort. If that don’t beat all, he said. Then he shrugged. Yeah, sure. We’ll take him in the back. You ride up front. Where we’re goin’, the big man keeps his own personal niggers. Only his a sore lot luckier than yours, son. I’m willin’ to bet they eat and sleep a load better’n that ’un.
While the boss bent over the grille to crank up the engine, Bald Horace climbed into the bed of the truck and wedged himself between two stacks of pallets tied to it. Bernard freed a piece of tarp from a bundle anchored under a sledgehammer and tented it over his friend’s head against the rain. You’ll be alright back here, he said. I think our luck has begun to change.
They stopped first at the rear entrance of a stately pea-colored house in the city where a uniformed light-skinned black woman handed the driver a pile of letters tied up with string. Then they rode along the river into the countryside north of Memphis. Bernard didn’t know the territory very well. He hadn’t spent much time in the north country as a child. He lived farther downriver on the south side of town in those days, and what he knew of the places they passed was from leaving home all those years ago and returning with Bald Horace. It was plantation country, some of them kept up with acres of fields and pastures that must be somethin’ gorgeous, Bernard thought, in the dry times. The rest crumbled into the earth under the weight of water, time, and neglect.
To his surprise, the boss turned into one of the latter, driving through a rusted wrought-iron gate coming off hinges barely attached to a brick wall riddled with chips and holes. The loblolly pine and red maple at its entryway dipped forward so low from a lack of proper care and abandonment to the wind that their branches brushed the cab of the truck and battered poor Bald Horace about the head. The only element of the place that looked kept up was the road. Planks of fresh wood were laid out over the widest ruts where rainwater flowed through deep trenches as if from underground springs.
Up to this point, the boss was taciturn. A couple of times, Bernard tried to engage him in conversation, indicating that he’d grown up thereabouts, a fact he felt might help warm the man up. The boss replied he was from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, himself, where it didn’t goddamn rain like this ever, though they got plenty of goddamn snow in the winter months. That prompted Bernard to launch into a story about the rare qualities of mountain snow, a story told him by a Frenchman from Switzerland he’d met in a railcar. He wasn’t half through when he noticed the boss wasn’t paying attention. The man didn’t care at all what he said no matter how entertaining the tale. Bernard shut up.
There wasn’t another word between them until they turned off the entry road into a clearing of squared-up cultivated bushes and shrubs swimming in mud. This here’s what the big man calls his puzzle garden, the boss said, but it ain’t goin’ too good. They rode a short distance more, made another turn. And there it was.
The big house. Bernard had never seen such a house and by
this time, he had traveled some between the pleasure boat and his wanderings with Bald Horace. The house was raised high up off the ground on a brick foundation and had two staircases, one from the north corner and one from the south, meeting up in the middle of a wide veranda that went all the way around to the back. It stood three stories and had balconies from every window, balconies of wrought iron twisted into fanciful shapes that maybe were flowers, maybe animals, he couldn’t tell which. It had columns, of course, every plantation house needed columns, and these were thick, fluted, and well spaced. Everything was painted a shining white except the wide oak planks of the veranda floor and the jalousie shutters, which were a dark green. The whole structure looked as if it stretched back all the way to Illinois. Maybe that was it, Bernard thought. Maybe it was the size of the thing that took his breath away. He was taken by the way light radiated from within, light so abundant, so bright, it made him wonder where the dynamo was, how it could be big enough to generate all that light and still hide itself from the eye. There were three chandeliers wired up on the veranda, and these burned brightly, too, so that the house glowed in the rain against the gray sky like a holy place or a magical one.
The boss from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, left the truck and mounted the stairs on the south side. As he did, the front door with its brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head opened, and a man stepped out in the company of two liveried Negroes. The boss removed his rain hat and stood holding it at his waist. He presented the bundle of letters they’d retrieved in town to the gent, who barely glanced at them and handed them off to one of the Negroes. Obviously, this was the big man. He was dressed in jodhpurs and riding boots paired with a black leather jacket and a turtleneck sweater of the same camel color as his britches. Everything about him was crisp and clean. There was no possibility he had gone riding in a downpour in such an outfit, and it was unlikely he intended to. He was a dramatic type, Bernard assessed, dressing for effect rather than use. His theory was borne out by the man’s posture. He stood languidly with a crop in one hand that he beat lightly against the palm of the other as if marking the time of a waltz. His features were undeniably handsome. He had a straight nose, wide-set eyes, chiseled jaw, well-shaped lips coming to a bow at the center. His thick black hair was pomaded to curl over one side of his brow in a studied, graceful dip. In fact, he was so remarkably good-looking and well turned out that Bernard was reminded of an actor on a showboat playing master in some antebellum play. He half-expected an actress in banana curls and hoop skirt to step out on the veranda after him. He rolled down the truck window to achieve a clearer look.
One More River Page 15