River People

by Margaret Lukas

  River People © 2019 Margaret Lukas. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying, or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Published in the United States by BQB Publishing (an imprint of Boutique of Quality Books Publishing Company) www.bqbpublishing.com

  978-1-945448-22-5 (p)

  978-1-945448-23-2 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 20189622660

  Book design by Robin Krauss, www.bookformatters.com

  Cover design by Marla Thompson, www.edgeofwater.com

  Editor, Olivia Swenson

  Praise for River People and Margaret Lukas

  “In this big, ambitious novel, Lukas renders the changing world of the Midwest in the late 19th century, a world as brutal as it is beautiful. The players on its stage are admiringly human and deeply flawed. In clean, beautiful prose, and an unflinching eye, Lukas illuminates the ways in which the relentless work of survival both builds and destroys kinship and community. Threaded through, as constant as the Missouri River at the physical center of this story, is a desire for belonging that flourishes in the unexpected.”

  - Rebecca Rotert, author of All the Animals We Ever Were

  “Wonderfully redemptive, River People brings alive a surprising group of underdogs, their life in the backwaters, and a scoundrel or two who care more for propriety than taking care of their own. A spirited tale of early Omaha you will want to share with your friends.”

  - Theodore Wheeler, author of Kings of Broken Things

  “River People is a wonderful novel full of heart and humanity. A delightful read.”

  - Jeffrey Koterba, Nationally Syndicated Cartoonist, author of Inklings

  River People explores the harsh reality of women’s lives at a time when their days were shaped by toil, poverty, and abusive patriarchy.

  But against the backdrop of that dark world, River People reveals another steeped in myth, the beauty of the Missouri River, and a woods where trees breathe, and their leaves “listen high where the spirits speak.”

  A mesmerizing tale of love and redemption.

  Jeff Kurrus, Editor of Nebraskaland Magazine; author of Can You Dance Like John

  Thanks to my husband, Jim, and our four gorgeous children: Jen, Emily, Julie, and Dan. You stood by me, never doubting, even when it might have seemed I ignored you. I loved you every day.

  Thanks to the tireless help of Kim Stokely (In the Shadow of a Queen) and Gail Weiland, (finishing her novel) who both spent endless hours reading and critiquing with me. You gave me insight, friendship, and encouragement when I struggled.

  Thanks to everyone at BQB Publishing, especially Olivia Swenson, my editor for her care and wisdom, and Terri Leidich, a woman as dedicated to literature as she is to the writers she encourages and nurtures. I needed both of you, and you were there for me.

  And to readers along the way who’ve given me valuable feedback: Sue Bristol, Gina Barlean, Rhonda Hall, Trish Lynn, and Heather Traymor.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  ABOUTTHE AUTHOR

  Grandma Teegan was dying. They shouldn’t have come.

  Eleven-year-old Bridget trudged up the dark stairwell. Her legs and arms ached. Water sloshed over the rim of her heavy pail. The heat in the tenement house swelled floor by floor, and sweat rolled down her neck and shoulders and dampened the back of her wool dress. She’d taken off her broken shoes and even her bloomers beneath her long skirt, but she was still hot as “frying mutton.” Through July and now into August, Grandma Teegan had muttered about the heat, but for the last week, she’d been too sick for talking or humor.

  Bridget set the pail down on the next riser and wiped sweat off her face. She’d made it up three flights. Only one more to go. She changed hands, gripped the handle again, and climbed. Grandma Teegan waited for her.

  Opening the door to their small room was hottest of all.

  Grandma Teegan, hunched on the cot, gasped to catch her breath. Bridget let the pail thud to the floor, socked herself in the stomach, and hurried to drop to her knees in front of the elderly woman.

  Moisture beaded on Grandma Teegan’s sunken cheeks though she wore only her threadbare nightshirt. Beside her lay the newsprint Bridget had stolen from a street vendor a week earlier. She picked it up and began to fan the sweaty face. Stealing the paper when she might have been caught was stupid. They couldn’t eat it. She’d tried and hadn’t been able to swallow.

  She waved the paper, trying to both cool her grandmother and sweep away the shadows filling the million lines on Grandma Teegan’s face. Wisps of white hair fluttered. Was she a hundred years old? Even Mum and Pappy had called her Grandma, and in the stories she told, the women who carried their people’s history and legends in the books of their hearts, often reached a hundred years. And more.

  “I’m taking care of you,” Bridget promised. And she would. Somehow. She couldn’t let Grandma Teegan die. She couldn’t have murder number two. “You’re going to get better.”

  The wrinkles in Grandma Teegan’s sagging cheeks didn’t lift, her watery eyes didn’t clear, and she didn’t nod with assurance. She also didn’t place her palms on Bridget’s cheeks and say, “We yet find your mum.” She coughed and then sucked and gasped for air with a sound like soup in her lungs.

  Bridget rose from her knees and sat beside her on the mattress—no more than paper sewn between rags. Nera, Nera, she prayed. I won’t be scared.

  Fish lived in Bridget’s stomach. Ten, she decided. T-E-N. They swam back and forth when Grandma Teegan coughed. And other times. Lately, they never stopped swimming, even at night. Bridget’s arms and legs slept, but the fish swam. Back and forth.

  “I brought water.” She hurried to dip their tin cup and hold it to Grandma Teegan’s lips. The streets below were cooler and had an occasional breeze. Ought she try and coax Grandma Teegan down the stairs and outside for a few hours? But what if Grandma Teegan couldn’t make it back? She couldn’t spend the night sleeping on the street like the homeless children who piled into brick stoops and slept
huddled together like puppies. Grandma Teegan’s bones would break. Her disappearing skin made her arms and legs into sticks; her shoulders, knees, and elbows, doorknobs.

  Bridget tried to think back over the months to when the coughing started. Coughing neither spring’s warmth nor summer’s awful heat had helped.

  Grandma Teegan hadn’t coughed when they first arrived in New York a year ago. Hadn’t coughed in the fall when for weeks they walked up and down the Irish quarter searching for Mum and Pappy. The coughing began in winter when they continued hunting—even at night during snowstorms. Shivering up and down city blocks, Grandma Teegan yelled “Darcy!” over the biting wind. Bridget yelled, “Pappy!”

  More than once, a man scooping snow into the lines of horse-drawn wagons had leaned on his shovel and looked up. But he was never Pappy. At first, she and Grandma Teegan were glad not to find him so desperate he worked with the unemployed Irish who came out during storms—men often without hats or gloves but with hungry children huddling in cold rooms.

  Winter ended, the coughing worsened, and they quit walking the streets and asking strangers if they knew a Kathleen, a Darcy.

  Bridget even quit insisting her parents were West—though she knew they were. Before leaving Ireland, Pappy had talked about getting to Dublin then Liverpool, the cost of steerage, surviving in New York without a sponsor, and earning enough money to outfit a rig for homesteading in the West. Mum and Pappy were there now. Nothing else explained their absence in New York. But when she insisted, Grandma Teegan’s eyes stared off until Bridget could no longer bear the sadness. Being eleven, she understood now what she hadn’t at ten. Grandma Teegan didn’t know where “West” was. They didn’t have money for next winter’s coal, even for today’s food. There was no money for a train ride into the unknown.

  “Tomorrow, the ticket,” Grandma Teegan managed. “Ye sell. Ye eat.” Bridget drew in a sharp breath, and all the fish in her stomach jumped at once. She socked them.

  Grandma Teegan’s bony hand dropped on Bridget’s wrist. “Na, na afraid.”

  Bridget wanted nothing more than to have Grandma Teegan’s return ticket to Ireland sold—had it cost ten or fifteen pounds? But what then?

  “When I’m a doctor,” she said, “I’ll make you well.” I won’t let you die. Not like Uncle Rowan.

  But she wasn’t a doctor and Grandma Teegan was growing down. She missed her croft, Ireland’s green hills, her sheep, and her dog, Ogan. She missed all the graves too.

  “You’re still going home.” Bridget nearly choked on the words. “You need to keep your passage.”

  “Find ticket.”

  “Tell me about selkies. Tell me how Mum swims in the sea and can visit us wherever there’s water.”

  “Ticket.”

  Bridget stood and took a step back. “I can’t. We’ll find Mum and Pappy.”

  In the year since arriving, Grandma Teegan hadn’t once reminded Bridget she’d only crossed to make sure Bridget found her parents. Hadn’t once reminded Bridget she planned to leave as soon as that was done. “I’ll lie me down with ye Grandfather Seamus,” she’d said in Ireland. “My resting place be here.” As she always did at the mention of the great-grandfather Bridget had never met, she’d looked at his old tools leaning in the croft corner: a rake, a spade, and a hoe. Grave-tending tools now.

  “You can’t sell your ticket,” Bridget tried again. You’ll die here. But how could she live without her? And you can’t ever leave me. Grandma Teegan had always been her most mum. Though the entire family had lived together, Grandma Teegan even then shared Bridget’s bed. It was Grandma Teegan who told the old stories, who held her when Mum and Pappy had red fights. Grandma Teegan who loved her in spite of Uncle Rowan’s death—murder number one.

  She backed slowly toward the door with Uncle Rowan’s words banging in her head. It be us now who must take care of her. But Rowan grew a shadow around his body and though Bridget had seen it, she’d not been able to keep him from falling through the gloom of it. Now, Grandma Teegan was hers to take care of. Without the ticket, Grandma Teegan had no hope of ever returning home. Dark shadow would grow like a grave around her, too.

  “We don’t need to sell it,” Bridget said. “I can get us food.”

  “Ye take ticket. Dunot steal.”

  Bridget ran out and to the stairs. Chased by Grandma Teegan’s coughing, she raced down the twisting flights, not slowing until she reached the first floor. She was relieved to see Mr. Wilcox, the man who slept in the foyer, wasn’t there with his blankets. He had a room on the top floor across from theirs, but he was so scared of fires he slept nights in the entryway, begging pardon every time someone needed to step over him. Yet, when a candle fell onto an old straw mattress and people cried “Fire!”, Mr. Wilcox ran against the flow of people fleeing and up the stairs to bang on doors and help people to safety. He’d been Nera.

  Outside, the afternoon sun hung low behind buildings, and much of the street lay draped in shadow. People sat on stoops to escape the heat inside; cranky babies bounced on mothers’ laps; men smoked in their ragged clothing; children shot marbles and chased one another. Bridget’s heavy feet shuffled. She had to stay close. She wished she hadn’t run, but for a moment she’d been certain darkness, the death space, swirled around Grandma Teegan’s head.

  I didn’t see shadow. She was eleven. Grown up. She had to be as brave as Nera, who in the old story stole a finger bone from an angry skeleton. She rounded the building, stepped into the empty alley, and leaned against the wall. I didn’t see shadow. She slid down the brick into a squat, tucking up her skirt to keep it off the filth. The narrow space between two buildings was quiet but smelled bad. Fifteen families emptied their chamber pots into the hole in the middle. Or not wanting to get too close, flung their smelly waste in the direction of the hole.

  She dropped her head back against the brick and closed her eyes. She wasn’t taking care of Grandma Teegan, and Grandma Teegan couldn’t die in America, couldn’t be buried this side of the water. That was Bridget’s biggest fear. Grandma Teegan had sold all her sheep and bought a return ticket to make sure it didn’t happen. She needed to go back for the coughing to stop and for her skin to turn pink again, not blue and see-through as paper. And years and years in the future, if she ever did die, she needed to be buried with Grandpa Seamus. But how to live without her? And without all her stories? Folktales, Brothers Grimm, and Irish legends. Especially stories of selkies, who lived in water and on land. Grandma Teegan told stories about them the way she told all her stories. The way she’d spun wool, combing and carding and pumping the treadle of their deeper meanings. She told them holy.

  Buzzing made Bridget look up. Mud dauber wasps were building a nest on the bricks several feet above her head. She watched them, blue-black in the dimming light, their long legs dangling as they swarmed. Pushing her feet out, she sank the last inches, forgetting the dirt. Grandma Teegan was dying because of her. Nera would do even the scariest thing to save her grandma. Nera would step up to a skeleton and yank off a finger bone.

  Bridget sniffled. How could she do it? Being left again, being without Grandma Teegan, would be scarier than sneaking up to an old, stupid skeleton. Scarier than its bones dancing in the air. Scarier than its eyes turning red and coming alive.

  She hugged her knees. Grandma Teegan would never leave her, no matter what. She couldn’t be forced into leaving her behind the way Pappy and Mum had. N-E-V-E-R. There was only one way to save Grandma Teegan: leave her. Then she’d have no reason to stay in America. She’d take her ticket and board a ship.

  The nice Irish cop who’d caught Bridget stealing had told them about a train taking children West. At the suggestion, Grandma Teegan gripped her red shawl tighter around her shoulders and shook her head. “Olc! Na, strangers!” And would say no more.

  In the alley, the shadows deepened. A wasp landed on the wall inches from Bridget’s shoulder and began walking up. A cart with a loud squeaking wheel rolled along the w
alk. Bridget sat up straighter. The cart belonged to the apple vendor who claimed a spot at the end of the street.

  She walked out. Indecision and fear kept her well back of the vendor. If she did it, she had to be caught by the Irish copper. The one who’d talked about the train and only pulled her up the four flights to Grandma Teegan—twice, though the second time he’d been much angrier.

  There, with him tut-tutting, Grandma Teegan had clutched Bridget as if she herself were the one who’d stolen and needed forgiveness. “Dunot steal,” she begged. “Promise.”

  Bridget hadn’t promised. A nod was not a promise.

  But the last time she’d tried to steal, a mean and scary cop dragged her blocks and blocks to a police station. He shoved a slate into her hands with her name chalked in large letters. In even larger letters below her name was the word “thief.” As she mumbled “Nera, Nera” to try and stop her sobbing, a man used a big camera to take her picture. Then four men pushed her into a chair, circled her, breathed on her. They called her a “street rat,” said girls were the worst because they “gnawed away at society.” They threatened to make her an inmate of a house of refuge. Then they shoved her out onto a now-dark street, and she walked hours until she found her way home.

  Watching the apple cart, she shivered and took slow steps forward. She could never go to the police station again. Not even Nera was that brave. But she couldn’t let Grandma Teegan die in America, either.

  The vendor in his cap watched her. Gray haired, he’d not been quick enough to catch her before, but he remembered her. This theft, she wanted him to know, wasn’t about two apples.

  She waited, hardly aware of the street noise surrounding her. Finally, a blue uniform with its flash of shiny buttons appeared half a block ahead. She waited still longer. The cop ambled and talked with people while she socked her stomach. When it was time, she took a deep breath. “Nera, Nera.” Would he take her to jail this time? Or would he only huff and puff like before, trying to scare her into believing he would?

  She ran at the cart. Though the vendor tried to block her, she ducked under his arm and snatched an apple. “Thief !” he yelled. “Thief !”