The Last Girls

by Lee Smith

  In fact, Claudia could scarcely stand to visit, once flying into a little fit after Thanksgiving dinner upon observing, from her perch on the living room sofa, that the dining room tablecloth was uneven. “Do you think you could fix it, dear?” she’d asked Catherine, who was busy putting rain boots on the children. “Don’t you think you could just pull it down there on the left, dear?” with a high shrill note of hysteria creeping into her voice until finally Catherine went over and gave it a yank, who cared?

  But Claudia’s most telling moment came when she insisted on coming to “help” when Johnny, the last child, was born. Catherine woke in the night to nurse the baby, trying to figure out why she heard water running in the bathroom at that hour. Finally when she’d fed the baby and burped him and put him back down, she made her way into the bathroom blinking against the light to find Claudia in her threadbare white gown scrubbing the tiles with a toothbrush. “Hi,” she said sweetly, looking up. “You need to buy some Tilex.”

  “Oh Lord!” Catherine had stumbled back to bed. Better a belle than a cleaning lady, she thought later, comparing her mother to Steve’s, though there were times when she had felt differently.

  Something about herself in the mirror reminds Catherine of Mary Bernice and she leans forward, breasts swinging, to peer at herself more closely. It is her mother’s face this morning for sure, like that time years ago when she was so mad at Will and she heard her mother’s voice coming out of her own mouth saying those words she and Wesley hated most when they were kids: “You know you don’t think that!” Wesley used to run around in little circles, he’d get so mad at Mama. Catherine smiles, remembering. It’s a shame that Johnny never even met Wes, that her other kids scarcely remember him. She wonders if she’s the only person in the world who remembers his birthday: November 1. Scorpio. But she does look more like her mother than she used to, especially around the eyes. Catherine is determined never to drift off into euphemism the way Mary Bernice did at the end, denying everything, remembering nothing, refusing even to meet Wesley’s lover who came all the way from San Francisco after his death. Wearing all her makeup and that ratty yellow silk dressing gown, Mary Bernice looked ridiculous, like a character actress in a movie, at the end. At least Daddy had had the good sense to keel over dead on the golf course.

  Catherine read someplace that you never love your parents as much as you love your children, which is true. But isn’t it strange how you can carry on arguments with them for years and years after their death? And you can never win.

  Catherine steps into the tiny bathroom and turns on the shower which is nice and hot and has plenty of force, thank God. She shampoos her hair and then closes her eyes and leans back to let the water run all over her, down over her breasts and between her legs. She soaps herself good, pausing suddenly on her left breast—what is that? What the hell is that? She takes a deep breath and arches her back and lifts her breast so she can feel underneath it and all along her left side near the armpit. It’s perfectly obvious. She can’t believe she has never felt it before. It’s because of Russell, she thinks, the constant presence of Russell, he’s so loud, he’s so distracting. But she can’t believe that Russell hasn’t felt it himself, and oh God, what if she has to have a mastectomy? Breasts are really important to Russell. What if she dies? Two of her friends have died from breast cancer already. The question is not why me? she realizes suddenly. The question is why not me? Well, shit. Shit, shit, shit. Catherine puts creme rinse on her hair anyway, you might as well look good even if you’re dying. Might as well put on body lotion, too, life goes on even if you’re dying. And even after you’re dead. Oh, stop it. Maybe she’s more like Mama than she thought. Histrionic. But this lump is really big, actually, almost as big as a golf ball. Anybody with smaller breasts would have noticed it ages ago. And Russell will be gone all day long on that stupid tour. Catherine dresses as fast as she can, avoiding the mirror. It’s time to meet Harriet anyway, they’re supposed to walk into town together. Maybe she’ll tell Harriet. Catherine walks quickly through the hall on the flowered carpet past all these pictures of people who are dead, dead dead.

  “I REMEMBER VICKSBURG as being bigger than this, don’t you?” Harriet stops to catch her breath and look back down the long hill toward the river where the Belle of Natchez is docked right next to Harrah’s Casino, a juxtaposition that must mean something, though she can’t think what.

  “Yes. No. I mean, I really can’t remember Vicksburg very well at all.” Catherine stops too, crossing her arms so that she can touch her breast.

  “Ruth blew the bugle when we docked,” Harriet says.

  “Oh yes. That damn bugle!” Catherine kneads her breast. Now the lump feels huge, held up by her bra.

  “And the mayor came, don’t you remember, and gave us those little charms and Civil War minié balls, I’ve still got mine at home. Then they took us out to a restaurant and fed us hushpuppies and fried catfish which I remember especially well because we didn’t have to cook that night. And Ruth had never eaten catfish,” Harriet adds. “Then those people from the Mississippi River Commission took us to see that big model of the river the next day, before we left, and gave us sandwiches. We didn’t have to fix lunch that day either.”

  “The reason you can remember so well is because you’ve never had children. I’ve blown out whole lobes of my brain,” Catherine says. Her breast feels separate from her already. She has a sudden image of it rolling down the hill and then it’s as if she’s losing her whole body bit by bit, as if pieces are falling off and tumbling down the bluff to disappear into the river forever, and she can’t stop them.

  “Oh, but you have such a nice family,” Harriet says. “I’m envious.”

  “Don’t be. There are times when I wish I had no one at all.”

  Harriet stops and turns, shading her eyes, to stare curiously at Catherine. “You mean that, don’t you?”

  Catherine nods, still clutching her breast as they continue up the hill toward the austere old courthouse, now a museum, which sits on the highest point of the bluff, its columned porticos facing in every direction. Despite its grandeur, the courthouse is as seedy as the rest of Vicksburg. Run down. Grass straggles up between the marble slabs of the portico floor; the columns are streaked with dirt. But it’s really quite a view from here, like a lookout. No wonder Vicksburg was considered so strategic in the war. “The Wa-wa,” Catherine’s Gran-Gran used to say. Pops called it the “Silver War.” Catherine and Harriet gaze out at the whole town running away down the bluff to the river before them. A wind comes up. Clouds skid across the patchy blue sky. Being up here is like being in the sky itself. Catherine feels nervous, exposed. “We’d better go in before it rains,” she says.

  The inside of the courthouse is as stern as the exterior, damp and dim, with cast-iron stairs leading up to the courtroom on the second floor. Harriet and Catherine climb them and move forward to join a little group gathered around an ornate iron dais where the judge must have presided. “This siege was the story of moving forward inch by inch,” an ancient lady in a hoop skirt is saying in a whispery, cultured voice. They strain forward to hear her. “At the start, they were five football fields apart. By the end, they were so close they could speak to each other. The siege lasted forty-seven terrible days.” Her small voice shakes.

  “Oh, honestly!” one of the younger women from the Belle of Natchez says to her friend. This woman wears shorts with a matching sequined T-shirt and visor and that kind of fashionable mushroom haircut which looks just awful. “I swear, I don’t see why they all go on and on and on about the damn Civil War so much. I mean, I’m from the South myself—Knoxville’s the South, isn’t it?—but nobody in my family ever carried on about it like this. I just don’t get it.” Her nasal voice holds all of east Tennessee in it: hard times. And a recent, lucky marriage.

  “Listen!” Suddenly the little old guide lady is on her like an insect. “My father ate rats at the siege of Vicksburg! Rats!” Her filmy eyes a
nd yellow teeth are right in the younger woman’s face.

  “Damn, lady!” The girl breaks free, straightens her visor, and runs from the room with her friend following right behind her. They clatter down the iron staircase.

  “Rosalie, come along now.” Another old lady in costume leads her away. “Rats!” Rosalie spits back at them out of her puckered, furious face. “Rats!”

  “Let’s get out of here.” Catherine pulls Harriet down the stairs and out into the windy, changeable day. This courthouse gives her the creeps anyway, sitting up here on its hill in some kind of judgment, looking out—for what? You can’t see the worst things come. Catherine carries her breast down the hill like a chalice, and though they eat a fine lunch together, fried oyster po’boys and potato salad and wine at a little restaurant called the Biscuit, and though they talk about all kinds of things, she does not tell Harriet about the lump in her breast. She can’t tell Russell yet either. For it seems to Catherine, after her second glass of wine, that she has given her body nearly away already, to her children and her husbands, and now she wants to hold on to what she can.

  Mile 437.2

  Vicksburg, Mississippi

  Monday 5/10/99

  1600 hours

  FOR THE LONGEST TIME Harriet has been debating whether to attend the afternoon Riverlorian Chat or not. On the one hand, she wants to take the opportunity to learn everything she can about the river; on the other hand, it’s a good chance for a nap, since she hasn’t been sleeping—but then, she can always sleep when she’s dead, and the Riverlorian really is such an attractive man, she might as well admit it to herself, and his lecture starts in five minutes … Almost before she knows it, Harriet has taken a seat near the back in the Grand Saloon. She’s the only one of their party in attendance. There are plenty of empty chairs, she sees. Many of the passengers are still out sightseeing, while a surprising number of others are going back and forth onto the casino boat. Harriet can see them out the windows. She thinks she might try a little gambling herself, maybe in Natchez. Finally Pete Jones comes in wearing clean creased khaki shorts with a lot of pockets in them and a white shirt with still more pockets (a man like that shouldn’t have to do his own ironing). He looks like he’s on safari. His knees are square and cute.

  Harriet takes notes as he tells them about the Natchez Trace which she has never thought of before as actually having anything to do with Natchez, oddly enough. But the Natchez Trace turns out to have been the land route north through the wilderness taken by flat-boatmen after trading their cargo in Natchez, or even down in New Orleans. They sold their boats for lumber and walked home. And since they were known to be carrying cash, land piracy was a big problem. Harriet wonders why Pete says “land piracy” instead of “robbery.” Suddenly she glances up to find him staring straight at her as he talks. The rest of her notes are a mess, but she troops out dutifully with the group as they follow him up to the Observation Deck for a tour of the Pilot House. Pete introduces them to the pilot at the wheel, Rupert Middleton, who looks like a professor. Then Pete begins to speak. The boards on the big red paddle wheel are called bucket boards, Harriet learns.

  “We use pine boards because if we hit anything, the boards will break and absorb the shock. This is a whole lot easier than replacing the Pittman bearing,” Pete says. All the old men on the Pilot House tour nod sagely, as if they know what a Pittman bearing is! Honestly!

  “All boats show up on the radar, which sees for a mile and a half, allowing us to continue in rain, fog, or at night. The radar also picks up buoys. Then we can hit the buoy with our six-million-candlepower spotlight, which picks up the buoy’s fluorescent tape. One time we saw two white-tailed deer, swimming across right here.” Pete smiles directly at Harriet. Next he explains the sonar or depth finder. “We’re sitting nine feet down right now, with four feet of water under that.” This doesn’t sound like much, to Harriet. In fact, it doesn’t even sound safe. Pete explains how they used to have a system on the river involving puffs of steam and whistles to signal to oncoming ships which way they’d pass them; one whistle or puff of steam meant port to port, two meant starboard to starboard. Now they do it all with radio. “Any questions?” he asks. To her own horror, Harriet finds herself raising her hand. “But how do they decide?” she asks. “Who has right of way?”

  “The boat coming downriver, of course.” He grins at her, showing the square yellow teeth under his snowy moustache. “It can’t stop.”

  “Oh, of course.” Harriet’s response is lost in the general laughter.

  Pete explains that the phrase “get the lead out” meant to drop the lead overboard on its hemp line to measure the depth. The line had one-and-one-half-foot marks on it. Twelve feet, or two fathoms, was safe water. “Mark Twain,” the boy would cry, meaning okay. Captain John Dulaney of the Belle of Natchez started out on the river twenty years ago, literally “learning the ropes” (Oh! thinks Harriet), eventually working his way up from pilot to master’s license, and now he’s a captain. He’s a good example, Pete says: “If you work hard and study and leave the girlie books at home, you can make something of yourself.” Then Pete actually winks at her! “Captain Dulaney has been on the river for thirty years, since he was seventeen years old. By the way, to get your first-class captain’s license, you have to be able to draw the river from memory, all of it, every bend and town and island. You have to know it like the back of your hand.” He doesn’t say, You also have to be picturesque and able to carry a tune. Harriet remembers old Captain Cartwright sitting at the wheel in his rocking chair under the red umbrella, pointing out the sights along the way.

  Pete says, “That’s about it, folks. Go ahead, take your time, look around at everything, Rupert here will enjoy the company. But don’t touch these instruments.” His lecture done, Pete crosses the Pilot House, heading straight for (oh no) Harriet. “I didn’t mean to single you out or make fun of you,” he says to her. He’s really a very nice man.

  “Oh, I didn’t think so, not for a minute. I just blush so easily, I’m afraid. It doesn’t mean a thing, though.”

  “Hey, I like a woman who can still blush,” Pete says. “Hey!”—again, startling her—“How would you like to eat lunch with me tomorrow in Natchez? There’s a pretty good restaurant right by the dock named the Magnolia Grille.”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t do that,” Harriet says immediately. Her eyes come up to the V in his open shirt. His chest hair is white, too.

  “Well, another time then,” Pete says easily, turning away to leave, then stopping to listen to a question from the dapper elderly man with the dog-headed cane.

  “Are you sure you saw those deer swimming across this river, young man? I would tend to doubt that.”

  “Well, sir, all I can say is, they did it, and I saw it with my own eyes. Of course you know that every hair on a deer is hollow, so that might account for it. And now, if you will excuse me—” Pete’s gone. He must be making that up, Harriet has never heard of such a thing. Isn’t it irresponsible for a Riverlorian to make things up?

  Harriet is perspiring so; she reaches in her purse and gets out a Kleenex, then shreds it to bits. She pushes her way past a little clot of ladies flirting with Rupert. They all wear those flowered short sets. “Pete!” she calls into the wind on the deck. “Pete!” But he’s gone. Harriet runs into the passageway, then starts down the metal stairs. She rushes out onto the Observation Deck, where several people are playing shuffleboard and others are sunning themselves on deck chairs or observing the shore through binoculars. Some instinct tells her to head down the forward stairs. She’s just in time to see one foot—his foot, in the black shoe—disappear. “Pete!” she races down the stair steps.

  “Harriet?” Suddenly he pokes his head back around the divider, scaring her to death.

  “Yes,” she says breathlessly. “I mean yes.”

  He just keeps grinning at her in the most uncomprehending way.

  “Lunch,” she has to say. “Yes I will have lunch
with you tomorrow.”

  “Twelve o’clock then,” he says. “Meet you at the landing.” He doesn’t seem to be a bit surprised that she followed him. And then he’s gone again.

  Mile 435.7

  I-20 Highway Bridge

  Monday 5/10/99

  1920 hours

  DURING DINNER THE Belle moves out of the Yazoo cut and back into the Mississippi, steaming down the setting sun’s red path in the river. It’s turned into a clear, beautiful evening with a nice breeze—a little cooler than it was. A momentary hush has fallen over the table, each face enlivened, for a minute, by the dying sun. Then while Maurice pours coffee all around, old Leonard and his pretty wife, Bridget, describe the casino boat where they have apparently spent the better part of the day. Bridget hit the jackpot on the Wheel of Fortune quarter slot machine. “So then I moved over to the next one, I think it was Wild Cherry, but nothing happened. I just lost quarter after quarter, while the guy who had taken over my machine won again. I never should have left, I knew it. Don’t quit when you’re ahead, there’s a lot of truth in that. But then he wouldn’t leave, so I couldn’t get it back. I tried Elvis, and Jeopardy, but I never got another run like that one.” Leonard whispers in her ear. “Oh yes,” she says, “I won seventy-two dollars, in case you’re curious.”

  “That’s a lot of quarters.” Catherine smiles at her. Actually, Bridget reminds Catherine of her daughter Page, it’s the same haircut, the same bright willing expression on her face.

  “I learned about something today I’d never heard of before.” Russell stirs cream into his coffee. “All of our associations with Vicksburg have to do with the siege, right? But come to find out, one of the biggest naval disasters in the entire history of the United States has an association with Vicksburg, too. Right after the end of the war, the steamboat Sultana put in at Vicksburg to get its boiler patched because they were having trouble with it, and no wonder. The Sultana was carrying 2,400 men on a boat designed to carry about 450. It was taking Union soldiers home from Andersonville. The captain got paid by the head—that’s why there were so many on board. But his greed killed him. The patched boiler blew up north of here, killing 1,900 men—why, that’s more than the 1,600 killed on the Titanic. Amazing.”