River Runs Deep

by Jennifer Bradbury

  Stephen looked up at him sharply. “What?”

  “That spot,” Elias said, “where nothing goes through. Is that the pit?”

  Stephen smiled, but it wasn’t a friendly smile this time. “Just a piece we haven’t been in much yet.” He moved his hand along the map to the north. “Pit’s right here.”

  Elias scratched his head. “Why ain’t you been in there?” He wondered if maybe they’d paint sea monsters and leviathans on there, like the old sailors used to on places they hadn’t been.

  Nick and Mat exchanged looks over Stephen’s head. “You want me to take him back now when I go?” Mat said, his voice louder than necessary.

  “I want to stay. I ain’t tired, I swear. Been lying around that hut all day. And I’m not even wheezing much—”

  Nick sucked on his teeth. “I got to git,” he said.

  “I have the tour tomorrow and something to do before then,” Stephen said.

  “C’mon, just show me some—” Elias began, desperate not to go back to the quiet of his hut.

  “No,” Stephen said firmly. “Now go on back with Mat, and don’t bother me about it or we won’t bring you out again.”

  Elias started to argue. How dare they talk to him like that! But the threat of not getting out with them tomorrow was enough to make him hold his tongue.

  Chapter Five

  LAPP KNOT

  You need anything?” Lillian asked.

  Elias shook his head and tapped the paper with a pencil.

  “I’ll be back before too long,” she said. “Just going over to Hannah’s to fetch some soap.” Lillian had just changed the turban she wore, two braids thick as cables trailing down her shoulders.

  “I’ll stay put,” Elias promised.

  “If Miss Nedra need something—”

  “I’ll run over,” Elias said.

  Lillian hesitated. “You sure you won’t wander off?”

  Elias held up the paper. “This’ll keep me anchored.”

  Satisfied, Lillian went, leaving Elias to his letter.

  He found he didn’t have the right words. He wanted to write about his adventures of a few nights back, scaling the wall, cramming himself into the hole. Or about Nick’s kindness, how his tobacco smelled like Daddy’s had, or even Mat’s surliness. Most of all, he wanted to write about how unusual Stephen Bishop was, about his maps and his writing and reading, how Elias found him a bit too proud for his own good, but at the same time found the man had plenty to be proud of. He admired him. But Mother and Granny wouldn’t have understood, may have even been alarmed at it. Maybe if he wrote and just didn’t tell them Stephen was black, he thought? But to what end? And why did it matter to him?

  He settled on telling them he’d taken on Bedivere as a pet, leaving out all but the most necessary details on how he came to have him. An interesting fellow here keeps birds and gave me one to look after. If it left a lot out, he reckoned it was for his family’s own good. Even a pigeon alone might give Granny cause to complain. Then he filled a page with a description of the doctor’s poultice, and added a paragraph regarding the news that Croghan was kin to William Clark. He was just beginning to assure them he was getting better, working up to suggesting that they might bring him home soon, when he felt himself being watched again.

  “Hey,” he heard a voice whisper from the window.

  Not a voice. The voice.

  Elias glanced up. His heartbeat kicked into a canter, but he wouldn’t be made a fool of again. Not this time. “I ain’t talking to you.”

  “Are so,” the voice came back. “You jes’ did.”

  Elias glared at the window, tried to make out the eyes, but couldn’t see them there this time. “I mean, I’m done with you. Not gonna chase you or talk to you or think on you no more.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause you got me in trouble with Stephen is why. I don’t know who you are, or how you go round the cave like that, but he didn’t believe me I was following anybody. And they took me out not long ago and I aim to get a chance to go out again, but something tells me you’ll muck that up if I let you. So, whoever you are, if I don’t pay you any mind, you’ll leave me alone.”

  Just when it was quiet enough for Elias to wonder if the voice were gone, came this: “I brought you something.” A hand emerged from the darkness. Elias saw it for only a second as it dropped something through the window. But he saw enough to tell that whoever was on the other side was a Negro.

  In spite of his promise to ignore the voice, Elias abandoned his letter and picked up the dropped something. Bedivere hopped over to inspect the offering.

  Elias unwrapped a scrap of blue cloth to find a cube of salt pork, about two inches square. It was already cooked, the grease of it spotting the fabric, the edges crisped brown. Elias’s mouth watered just at the sight of it. He lifted it to his nose, smelled the salty, fatty deliciousness of it, and his stomach flipped itself over in expectation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d truly felt hungry, truly wanted to eat something. Maybe it was because it wasn’t what he’d been forcing himself to eat for weeks. Or maybe the hint of his appetite returning meant he was getting better.

  “Thought you might be liking something besides eggs and tea,” the voice said.

  Elias would have liked nothing better, but he forced himself to wrap the food back up and place it on the windowsill. “Can’t eat it,” Elias said firmly, returning to his letter. “Doctor’s orders.” Oh, how he wanted to gulp it down. In truth, it was only half out of fidelity to the doctor’s remedy that he didn’t. The other half couldn’t let this voice, this pest, make amends just by giving Elias a treat and making him forget how he’d led him off in the dark and made him look a fool.

  The gift disappeared back into the darkness. “How come you ain’t tell the doctor about me?”

  “Who says I didn’t?” Elias scribbled in the margin of the letter.

  “ ’Cause you didn’t.”

  Elias wondered how often this person was listening at his window. “Look, if you want to sneak about and get yourself whipped for bothering me and snitching food, that’s your hide. But I don’t fink on nobody, no matter who they are.”

  “That’s big of you.”

  Elias didn’t care if it was or not. He concentrated on his letter. I am stronger, the doctor thinks, he wrote. Maybe in a few more weeks I can—

  “Who you writin’ at?”

  Elias fumed but answered anyway. “My family.”

  “They near?”

  “Virginia,” Elias said. “Clear to the coast.”

  The voice whistled softly. “Your folk sent you all the way over here? Just to eat some eggs and lie round and get some doctoring?”

  “It weren’t like that!” Elias hissed, but he was having a harder and harder time convincing himself that it wasn’t. He pretended to be keen to come, keen to see some of the wilds of Kentucky, to see a cave so big and ancient it was named after the mammoths that died out long ago.

  But it had been Granny’s notion. All their attempts to save Daddy had failed. When Elias fell sick, Granny learned about Dr. Croghan and his grand experiment. I’d cotton he’s onto something, she’d said.

  His mother had seized on the hope of a cure. Elias went along with it to make her happy, but he missed his family more than he ever thought he would. Many times he’d recalled that last glimpse of them waving from the landing back in Norfolk, the tears on his mother’s cheeks, the ones Granny blinked back. Tillie holding fast to Charger’s collar, wrestling with the big dog to keep him from jumping into the river and following the boat.

  He’d figured that even if the doctor’s cures didn’t work—and he hoped, oh how he hoped, they would—at least he could spare his mother the sorrow of watching him die the way Daddy had.

  Still, it was hard to be so distant, hard not to resent them a little for sending him away.

  “It ain’t like that,” Elias said more softly.

  “I barely ’member
my mama,” the voice whispered. “She was long gone ’fore I left.”

  Left? Elias perked up at the word.

  “And I ain’t never seen me an ocean. But I traveled all the way up the Mississippi afore I ended up here. You seen the Mississippi? Lawd, that’s a river, that is—”

  “Just go ’way,” Elias said, shifting to the bed, sliding Nedra’s book out from under Bedivere, who had climbed up on it and was working loose a thread in the binding. “Shoo,” he said to both the bird and the voice on the other side of the window.

  “You don’t want me to go,” the voice said.

  Elias snorted and flipped the pages noisily.

  “You readin’ now,” the voice said. “I see how it be. Rather read some old book than visit with a pal who brung you a gift.”

  Pal?

  To keep from having to listen to such nonsense, Elias read the words out, starting at random in the middle of the poem.

  On either side the river lie

  Long fields of barley and of rye,

  That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

  And thro’ the field the road runs by

  To many-tower’d Camelot;

  And up and down the people go,

  Gazing where the lilies blow

  Round an island there below,

  The island of Shalott.

  He read the first stanza at a racing clip, loud and steady, so that by the time he’d finished it, he had to pause and gulp air. It was enough time for the voice to break in.

  “What’s ‘clothe the wold’? That don’t make a lick of sense.”

  Elias ignored the question and charged through the second stanza, louder this time. As he finished, he held his breath, waited for the voice to say something, but didn’t hear it. What he did hear was Nedra calling.

  Nedra. His heart sank a little. It wasn’t her fault she was nearly the spookiest thing about the whole place. Still, at least it gave him an excuse to get away from the voice.

  “Elias?” she called again.

  He threw the book on the table, sending poor Bedivere hopping sideways to avoid being hit, and bolted out the door. Once outside, he couldn’t help looking round to the side of the hut. Nothing there but darkness.

  “Elias?”

  “Coming!” But he hadn’t made two strides before a stone rolled out from the shadows and right past Elias’s feet.

  Elias froze as the stone came to a stop.

  Pest. He set his jaw and walked over to Nedra’s. Dr. Croghan had told him about her. That she had a fiancé who had visited often at first. That she taught French to the daughters of fine families down in Memphis where she lived before she came here. Elias had not had the courage to ask how long it took her to reach her current state. He didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to know how quickly he might end up like her.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “You were shouting out Shalott.” If there was such a thing as a ghost in the cave, Nedra had to be the closest. She was still beautiful; that was easy enough to see. But her long golden hair had grown matted and frizzy, like a pony left wild. Her skin was pale enough to seem transparent, save for the blushed spots in her cheeks. Her blue eyes were sunken deep into her face, and she had the stink of fevers about her that Elias remembered from his father’s battle. And the fever gave her over to broken conversation, so Elias had to work twice as hard to puzzle out what she was saying.

  Nedra sat in her straight-backed chair in front of her little stove, a small bundle on her lap. He thought quickly to come up with a story to cover why he was hollering. “I . . .” he began. “Sometimes it’s just a fair bit too quiet in here.”

  Nedra stared past him, like she wasn’t seeing him at all. “You have a new friend.”

  Elias startled.

  “You heard him?” Elias asked carefully, wanting, surprisingly, to protect the pest’s secret.

  Nedra smiled, almost wickedly. “Such a clamor, always a clamor, though no worse than before.”

  But the voice always whispered so quietly, almost so Elias could barely hear him. How could she have heard?

  “Did you name him?”

  “Name—” Elias caught himself. Why would he name the boy?

  “Everything should have a name. Even a bird—”

  Bedivere! She meant the pigeon!

  “He’s called Bedivere,” Elias managed. “After Arthur’s knight. And he’s eating good at least. Gobbled up most of the corn I got off Pennyrile already. He’s a pig, that one.”

  “A pig and a pigeon,” she muttered.

  Elias thought she appeared more strung out, drawn thinner than she had a couple of days before. Daddy had done that toward the end. Every day when Elias went in to see him in the morning, he’d look different, like a little more of him had forgotten to wake up, gotten lost in the night.

  “Here,” she said, holding out the bundle.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s green,” she said nonsensically. “Like Gawain’s knight. Like the sash.”

  Elias was almost more worried that he could follow her thoughts. He let the scarf’s length drape to the floor, felt the soft scratchiness of the wool, recognized the yarn she’d been working with when he first met her the day after he arrived.

  “It’s nice,” he said, holding it up to the light, admiring the way the little stitches acted as much like perfect little knots as anything else.

  “Wear it,” she commanded. “It’s so cold.”

  Elias wrapped it around his neck loosely. “Thank you, miss.”

  “Take care on your quests, squire,” she whispered, leaning forward. And the way she said it, Elias was sure she’d seen him leave with Mat three nights ago, maybe even seen him chase the ghost last week.

  “Yes, ma’am. Thanks for the scarf.”

  She didn’t reply but took up her needles and some blue yarn, and began to knit again. Elias decided he had been dismissed.

  When he reached his room, he found Bedivere pecking at something on the table.

  It was the fraying end of the little cloth tied around the piece of salt pork.

  Pest. Or friend. Elias was so out of practice in having friends that he’d forgotten how hard it could be to tell the difference.

  “Boo,” the voice whispered as Elias settled back on the bed.

  “I know you ain’t no ghost,” Elias said, but he couldn’t help but smile. “And stay outta my room.”

  “You don’t know nuthin’! Can’t even get eyes on me when you try—”

  “I know ghosts don’t make shadows. And they don’t leave chunks of bacon for folk they haunt.”

  “You worried I was, though.”

  “Did not.” Even this Elias had missed. The bickering. If people did get near enough to him to talk when he’d gotten sick, they never argued with him. Even Tillie gave up fighting with him. Elias picked up his book.

  “Don’t you get tired of reading all the time?”

  “Don’t you get tired of lurking round windows?”

  “I do more’n talk to you,” the voice said, adding, “I get myself all over.”

  Bedivere hopped across the tabletop, stretched his neck out to the window, and warbled.

  “You don’t like that streak o’ lean, you might want to know them birds’ not bad to eat,” the voice pointed out. “A job to pluck but taste all right if you know what you’re about.”

  “He ain’t for eating!” Elias looked with horror at poor Bedivere.

  “Not for you, anyway,” the voice said. “Think the doc would let you eat pigeon eggs?”

  “Only chicken I reckon, but I don’t figure this fella’s gonna go laying anytime soon.”

  “What’s yer book about?”

  Elias narrowed his eyes at the window. Why wouldn’t he show himself? Why was he hiding? Not just from Elias, it would seem, but also from everyone else?

  “I don’t read,” the pest went on. “Never took to it.”

  “You ain’t supposed to be talking to me, ar
e you?” Elias asked.

  The voice made a sort of clicking noise, like he was sucking the inside of his cheek. Bedivere stretched up tall and cocked his head. “Naw, I reckon I’m not.”

  “How come?”

  “Can’t say.”

  Elias could hear plain enough that can’t meant won’t.

  “Look, if you’re gonna get into trouble, and if you getting into trouble is gonna give Stephen or the doctor or anybody else a reason to get sideways with me, maybe you ought to just go. Not like we’re friends anyhow, seeing as I don’t even know your name.”

  An injured sort of silence settled before the voice whispered, “M’name’s Jonah.”

  “Jonah,” Elias repeated, adding, “like in the bible. That one went courtin’ trouble too.” Of course his name was Jonah. He heard tales from his father about men aboard ship who seemed to bring bad luck—storms, poor winds, trouble with supplies—how they were called Jonahs on account of the Jonah in the Old Testament who got himself thrown overboard during a storm and swallowed up by a great fish.

  “Tell you what,” Jonah whispered, “now that we’re friends, I’ll tell you somethin’ else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what Croghan do to the others.” Jonah’s voice dropped lower.

  “Why would I care about that?”

  Jonah made a noise. “You got it easier’n some, I tell you that. But maybe you too afraid of hearing—”

  “Can’t be that bad,” Elias interrupted, though he remembered from watching his father suffer that it could.

  “Worse than you imagine,” Jonah said. “But first you gotta tell me something.”

  “What?” Elias asked.

  “Tell me about that Gawain you and the miss was talkin’ ’bout.”

  Elias worked the hem of the scarf. Of course Jonah had been eavesdropping on his conversation with Nedra. He might have even managed to sneak across to listen at her window.

  “How come I have to go first?”

  “Just tell!” Jonah whispered fiercely.

  Elias bristled at being told what to do, but he couldn’t afford to be choosy where his friends were concerned. So he told the story of Gawain from memory, the way his father used to tell it, emphasizing the parts about the green giant riding in astride a massive green horse to challenge Arthur’s knights. He told how Gawain accepted the challenge to trade blows with the ax, how later he came by the magic green sash that both saved his life and cost him a measure of his honor.