Houseboat Girl

by Lois Lenski

  “Oh, boy! This is fun!” cried Patsy.

  But Bunny got scared. She ran indoors and hid under Mama’s bed, crying. Patsy went to coax her out, but she would not come.

  Then at last, outside, the lower gates began to open, and they could see the lower level of the river ahead. Daddy started his motor and began pushing the houseboat out through the gates.

  “Come on out, Bunny,” coaxed Patsy. “We’re through the locks now.”

  Bunny came and hid her face in Mama’s apron. “I couldn’t see anything under the bed,” she said.

  “Under the bed is a good safe place to hide.” Mama patted the little girl on the back. “I don’t like the locks, either,” she said.

  After the lock excitement there was nothing much to see. The banks on both sides were low and far away. There were no towns on the Kentucky side from Paducah all the way to the Mississippi River.

  The day wore slowly on. A Diesel towboat, hauling coal from West Virginia, caught up with the houseboat and went on ahead. Mama cooked dinner and then Bunny and Dan took naps. Patsy got tired of the kitten, found Dan’s harmonica and played for a while. Mama took up a batch of mending. Milly came in, complaining of a headache.

  Patsy decided to go fishing. She climbed up on the houseboat roof and brought down a pole and line. She baited her hook with a piece of fat. Then she sat down on the porch floor and threw out her line. But nothing happened. No fish came to bite. All at once her fish pole fell out of her hand into the water. It floated beside the hull. Patsy held onto the porch post with her hand, leaned out and stretched her leg out over the water toward the pole.

  “Oh Patsy! Don’t!” called Mama. “Don’t do that!”

  But the girl had already caught the fish pole between her bare toes and was hauling it up on deck.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked her mother.

  “Oh, you make me so nervous,” said Mama. “Looks as if you’re just determined to fall in!”

  “Are there no fish at all in this old river?” asked Patsy.

  “Too many dams on the Ohio and too little current,” said Mama. “Wait till we get to the Mississippi. It’s plumb full of catfish and scale fish, too.”

  “When will we get there?” asked Patsy. To her surprise, she found a large jumping fish on her line.

  “Tomorrow maybe,” said Mama.

  “Where are we going to stay tonight?” asked Patsy.

  “At Mound City,” said Mama. “We’ll go visit Uncle Fred this evenin’. Can’t pass by with Uncle Fred lookin’ for us.”

  The sun was already setting when the Fosters reached Mound City, Illinois, a real river town with an active boatways on the water front. Daddy tied up in a small cove to one side. He came in the kitchen to wash the oil and grease off his hands and face, and to change his clothes.

  The minute the boat stopped, the children rushed to the bank. It seemed good to be on land again. “You’d think they’d just crossed the ocean,” said Mama.

  Patsy put a plank from the cabin boat to the bank. She shooed her chickens out of their coops and up on land. But it was getting dark and they did not want to go. So she sprinkled corn on the plank to coax them back in again. They seemed to know that the coop was their home. They did not like the strange river bank.

  Then Uncle Fred was there with his loud booming voice. He took all the Fosters in his car to his house up in town. They ate supper at Uncle Fred’s, played games for an hour with the cousins, and then Uncle Fred brought them back again.

  Already the houseboat had begun to seem like home. Soon they were all asleep in their beds, Tom, the cat, curled up at Patsy’s feet. The river water lapped lazily around the hull and the moon rose over the wide expanse of the Ohio River. All was peace and quiet in the Foster houseboat.

  The next morning Patsy was up early. She put on a T-shirt and blue jeans and went out to the cabin boat. She talked to Daddy while he tinkered with the motor.

  “It won’t take long to get to Cairo,” said Daddy. “Then we’ll be on the Mississippi.”

  “That’s a mean old river, I guess,” said Patsy.

  “Everybody says so,” answered Daddy with a laugh, “but it’s not so bad when you know it. There are plenty of things to cause trouble—wind, pile dikes, tricky currents, snags and sand bars. And there’s nothing worse than meeting a tow in a tight bend. The trouble with that old river is, it wiggles too much!”

  Patsy laughed. She felt safe with Daddy.

  Daddy could not read a book, because he had never been to school. But he could “read” the river like a book. Born in Kentucky, he had lived on the river all his life. He knew every bend and sand bar and buoy and navigation light. He knew what every riffle, eddy or “slick” meant before he came to it. He knew all the crossings without need of the buoys and he never used a map.

  “Will we stop at Cairo, Daddy?” asked Patsy.

  “We might go to the Boat Store,” said Daddy. “I need more rope and other supplies.”

  Suddenly Patsy heard a motorboat coming. Around the bend a man appeared in an outboard johnboat. Above the sound of the motor, his loud whistling could be heard. Daddy stopped work and looked up.

  “Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he said. “If that’s not Whistling Dick, I’ll jump in the river. I’d know his whistling a mile off.”

  The next minute the two men were shaking hands. The man was not a stranger at all, but an old friend of the Fosters. He had a cheerful smile and wore his britches with the legs rolled up. He patted Patsy on the back and came over to the houseboat for breakfast. Mama was glad to see him, too.

  “Dick, you’re a part of the scenery,” said Mama. “Every time we go up or down the river, we see you somewhere.”

  “And this is Little Abe,” said Whistling Dick. “A chip off the old block, I can see.”

  “Are you the man that never stops whistling?” asked Dan.

  Whistling Dick laughed. “Yes, Little Abe,” he said, “my whistle never runs dry. When I get tired of whistling, I sing.” He started singing Pop Goes the Weasel in a loud voice.

  Dan began to march around the table, trying to whistle the tune.

  “Are you fixin’ to go shelling, Dick?” asked Abe Foster.

  “Yep,” said Whistling Dick. “I been on the Cumberland all winter. Got my houseboat beached up there. But the river will soon be gettin’ low and there’s no fish left in it. So in the summer I always come over to Illinois. I got me a little cabin back up here on the river bank, with a cooking vat and some brails and hooks. I’ll soon be selling mussel shells."”

  “You can have ’em all, and the pearls, too,” said Abe Foster. “I’m tired of that job. Luggin’ them heavy shells up the river bank like to broke my back. We’re off down river now on a summer vacation. There’s still plenty of catfish left in the Mississippi!”

  “Watch out, catfish!” cried Whistling Dick. “Big Abe Foster’s coming!”

  The men began to brag about their big hauls of fish. Patsy wondered who was the better fisherman, her father or Whistling Dick. Soon he said he had to be going. Patsy held the cat in her arms as she watched him get in his boat. She waved good-bye and could hear his cheery whistle long after he was out of sight.

  “Daddy says we might stop at Cairo,” said Patsy.

  “Good!” said Milly. “We’ll go uptown and do some shopping. I want to get me a pair of high-heeled shoes.”

  “High heels?” Mama laughed. “On the river you’ll all go barefoot.”

  Soon the houseboat was in the river again. Now there was something to look forward to—the big city of Cairo. Everybody called it Ka-ro, not Ki-ro like the capital of Egypt. It seemed a long time since the Fosters had left River City, a long time since Patsy had left her friends. She had other things to think about now.

  As they neared the city, there was more traffic on the river—dredges and towboats and barges and motorboats. Soon the sky was darkened by city smoke and ahead lay the railroad bridge across the Ohio. There were t
wo other highway bridges out from Cairo, one from Illinois to Kentucky and the other from Illinois to Missouri.

  “Is this Cairo?” asked Patsy. “I don’t see any town. I thought it was a great big city.”

  “It’s big enough,” said Mama, “back up behind that wall. It’s bigger than River City, but not as big as Memphis.”

  The city was circled “by a concrete flood wall that rose up from the river like the ramparts of a walled town. Cairo’s location was a dangerous one, locked between two mighty rivers. With the Ohio on one side and the Mississippi on the other, the city had had to protect itself from innumerable floods and annual high water. Hence the great sea wall built of concrete.

  Abe Foster came to a place where there was a sloping rock wall, which might have been a former steamboat landing. He edged the houseboat in and tied up. Milly had on her good dress, ready to go to town. But Daddy said no, there wasn’t time. The sky had become cloudy and he was afraid of rough weather ahead.

  “I’ll get my rope and supplies at the Boat Store and be right back,” he said. “I want to get down to Wickliffe early. There’s a good harbor at the mouth of Mayfield Creek.”

  “Buy us a book of river maps,” said Mama.

  “Who wants a map?” asked Daddy. “I can’t read it.”

  “Well, I can,” said Mama, “and I like, to know where we’re going.”

  Milly took off her good dress, disappointed. When Daddy came back with the rope, he brought the big yellow book of Lower Mississippi River Maps, put out by the United States Army Engineers. He tossed it into Mama’s lap, and Mama got out her glasses to look at it. Patsy looked, too. Map No. 1 showed Mound City and Cairo. Patsy followed their day’s course with her finger. She found Wickliffe and Mayfield Creek a few miles below.

  Soon the houseboat was moving again, drifting lazily on the current, no power needed. The clouds had lifted a little and the river was still placid. The Fosters passed by a group of shanty-boats, some beached in a grove of cottonwoods and others afloat along the river bank. They came to Cairo Point, where towboats and dozens of barges were tied up. Cairo Point was a towboat terminal. Here barges of coal, grain and minerals were transferred to other routes for continued hauls up or down the Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois or Ohio rivers.

  “Where does the Ohio River end and the Mississippi begin?” asked Patsy. “How can you tell?”

  “The water from the Missouri is yellow and muddy,” said Mama. “It brings a lot of mud with it and dumps it into the Mississippi above St. Louis. The Missouri has always been called the Big Muddy. The Ohio just flows gently into the Mississippi, then gradually the water gets muddier and the current swifter, and you know you are in the Mississippi.”

  The sky grew cloudy again, and they began to notice the change. The river was no longer the placid Ohio. Driftwood sailed past on a speedier current. The wind began to blow up choppy waves. Daddy stayed in the cabin boat behind, controlling the course of the houseboat. He had to steer carefully along the dangerous Wickliffe shore.

  Mama and Patsy kept on studying the river map. Patsy saw that all the islands were numbered, starting at Cairo and going south.

  “I’m going to count all the islands as we go along,” she said.

  “That’ll be a hard job,” said Mama. “Many of them are missing, some are washed away or joined to the mainland. The river keeps changing its banks all the time, but the state lines never change.”

  Daddy seemed to know where he was going without looking at a map. Before long he nosed the boat into a little cove at the mouth of Mayfield Creek, below Wickliffe. Just in time, too. The lines were all made fast and Daddy was washing up on the back porch, when the downpour came. It made a heavy tattoo on the flat tar-paper roof of the houseboat.

  Mama had a pot of coffee on the stove and had started supper. She fixed baked pork and beans, mashed potatoes and iced tea. The houseboat rocked on the waves, but it was snug and cozy inside. It felt just like home.

  CHAPTER III

  Mayfield Creek

  “BUT I THOUGHT WE’D keep going,” said Patsy, “and not stop till we got to New Orleans.” Mama laughed.

  “Nobody said anything like that.”

  “And here all we did was to cross the river over to Kentucky,” the girl went on.

  “You never can tell what you’ll do on the river,” said Mama.

  “That’s why Daddy likes it so much. It’s a free life—he can do what he pleases. He’s his own boss. If he wants to go, he goes. If he wants to stay, he stays.”

  “But if he likes the river so much, why doesn’t he stay on it?” asked Patsy.

  “Stop fussing,” said Mama. “There’s good fishing here and we’re staying until Daddy feels like moving on.”

  “Oh—I just want to see New Orleans so bad!” cried Patsy.

  “Go and feed your chickens,” said Mama.

  A month had passed and the Fosters were still at Mayfield Creek. It was a pleasant location in the chute between Island No. 1 and Cane Island, with a sloping river bank and trees for shade. They lived in the houseboat, fished up and down the river, and peddled the fish in nearby towns. Daddy had rented a second-hand Ford to drive around in.

  “We might as well have stayed at River City,” said Patsy. “Daddy fished and sold fish there. He had his own little fish house and all the people in town came to buy from him.”

  “There were three other fish houses in River City,” said Mama. “Daddy had too much competition.”

  Fish, fish, fish! The Fosters’ whole life was nothing but fish. Sometimes Patsy wished she had never seen one. She never ate fish and she hated the constant fishy smell.

  One morning Mama was washing clothes on the river bank. Daddy had strung the wire clothesline up between two trees. When Mama began to hang the clothes up, she looked at the sky.

  “I hope it won’t rain,” she said. “Bring the clothespins here, Patsy.”

  Patsy heard voices and looked up.

  “Mama,” she said, “somebody’s comin’ to see us.”

  A woman came down the river bank. She held two children by the hand, a boy of eight and a girl of ten.

  “Howdy! How you folks doin’?” she called out.

  Mrs. Foster said politely, “Good morning.”

  “I’m Miz Preston,” the woman said. “I live in that two-story house up there on the road.”

  “Glad to meet you,” said Mrs. Foster. She hung up the last pair of overalls and came over. “Come in and set down.” To Patsy she said, “Go get the clothes props and prop up the line.”

  The woman followed but stopped at the stage plank.

  “I seen your shack down here…” she began.

  “My what?” asked Mrs. Foster.

  “Your shack!” repeated Mrs. Preston. “Oh well, what do you call it, then?”

  “I call it a houseboat,” said Mrs. Foster.

  Patsy came up and stared at the newcomers. She had seen the children up by their house but had never spoken to them. They were nicely dressed and had socks and shoes on. Their hair was all slicked back. They stared back at her in return.

  “On the Ohio River, it’s called a shantyboat,” explained Mrs. Foster, “but in Louisiana and Arkansas it’s a houseboat.,”

  “Do you live on it?” asked Mrs. Preston.

  “We sure do,” said Mrs. Foster. “Come on in, the stage plank will hold you. Come on in and set down.”

  The women and children stepped across the plank warily.

  “Aren’t you afraid your kids will get drownded?” Mrs. Preston asked.

  “They’re too mean for that!” Mrs. Foster laughed.

  Patsy spoke up. “We’re not either mean.”

  “Well, Patsy is O. K.,” Mrs. Foster admitted. Tom the cat was rubbing against her skirts. “But between her and the cat, I don’t know which one is meanest!”

  “Don’t she ever fall in?” asked the woman.

  “Laws yes,” said Mrs. Foster. “Patsy’s my unluckiest one. She�
��s always fallin’ in the river.”

  “I never let my two go near it,” said Mrs. Preston. “I don’t trust that old river as far as I can see it.” She held her children firmly by the hand.

  Patsy looked at them in disgust. They were worse babies than Bunny and Dan. There would be no fun playing with them.

  Mrs. Foster laughed. She and Mrs. Preston sat down on the leather couch.

  “Fallin’ in is an old story with us,” Mrs. Foster went on. “That’s why I’m gettin’ gray hairs. Milly—she’s my oldest—learned how to swim at Memphis when she was four. She’d fallin’ and I’d tell her to get herself out and sure enough she would. Good thing she learned young, ’cause she’s had to haul all the others out. I don’t worry if Milly’s with ’em.”

  “You don’t go off and leave ’em alone in this shack…I mean, on this shantyboat, do you?”

  “Sure,” said Mrs. Foster. “Abe and I go peddling fish twice a week. That’s the way we make a living. Milly stays here and takes care of the kids.”

  “How old is Milly?”

  “She’s twelve, goin’ on thirteen,” said Mrs. Foster.

  “But she acts like she’s twenty!” added Patsy.

  “Patsy here is a real river rat!” Mrs. Foster went on. “She was born right in the middle of the Mississippi River. That was when we were at Nonconnah Creek, down below Memphis. That houseboat we had then was so small I called it the Cracker Box! All but two years of Patsy’s life has been spent on the river. That girl never lived in town in her life until we went to River City, Illinois.”

  Mrs. Preston and her children looked at Patsy as if she were some kind of queer fish.

  “How terrible!” said Mrs. Preston.

  “One time she fell in and went under the barge and her daddy had to drag her out by the legs,” said Mrs. Foster. “That time she spit enough water, you’d a thought she was a camel!”

  The women laughed.

  “I can dog paddle now,” said Patsy. “Every day I go in the water and try it. I’m going to keep trying until I learn how to swim.”