The River Queen

by Mary Morris

  “The baby’s coming,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Not for another month.”

  She shook her head back to me. “Now,” she said.

  When I got home, I made myself some soup. I sat up, watching the news, trying to get tired, but sleep wouldn’t come. I got into the tub and took a long hot bath and when I got out of the tub, my water broke.

  My friend who lived upstairs took me to the hospital. Standing on snowdrifts, we hailed a taxi. It was four in the morning. I was nine months pregnant, carrying a small suitcase. When we got into the cab, the driver said, “I’m not going to the airport.”

  “I’m not either,” I gasped.

  When we got to the hospital, I handed him a twenty. “I don’t have any change.”

  “Keep it,” I said.

  As I entered the hospital’s double doors, a man passing a kidney stone tried to beat me to the reception desk. He was holding his side howling in pain as he pushed me out of the way. “We take the pregnant woman first,” the intake officer said and the man slumped to a bench. I labored for almost twenty hours. When the doctor told me he was doing a C-section, I told him I didn’t care if he did a lobotomy. I wept uncontrollably the first time I heard Kate cry.

  Six weeks later we flew down to Florida to spend a week with my parents. Before we arrived, I called my father to ask if he was comfortable with our visit. “Why not?” he replied. “We’ve got plenty of room.” Of course he knew what I meant. My father met Kate for the first time. As I sat in a lounge chair by their pool, trying to sleep, I watched him, walking with her in his arms around and around the pool.

  Lying in my berth on the Mississippi River, I’m tired. I am genuinely tired and I don’t feel the fast beating in my chest that has been my companion these past months. I flick off the light and pull the covers up to my chin. Only the sound of a passing freight train punctuates the night.

  * * *

  I wake in the morning as rested as I’ve been in months. I dress quickly and tell Tom and Jerry that I’m going to Casey’s Convenience Store to see if they have real, brewed coffee and any olive oil, which I consider to be a staple.

  “Olive oil?” Tom hoots. “And I’m Popeye.” He flexes a muscle for me. “Hey, Jer, you must be Bluto.”

  “Oh, olive oil. Right.” Jerry nods in agreement. “How about motor oil? Can you cook with motor oil? That’s more like it.”

  “Yeah,” Tom comes back. “Motor oil. Hey, you don’t even need to go to the store. I’ve got some Valvoline 50 around here.”

  “Hey, pick up a little chardonnay while you’re at it!” Jerry shouts. “French would be nice.”

  “Okay, boys. I’ll catch you later.”

  Tom raises his big fists into the air. “The Comedy Hour begins,” he shouts as I head into town. On my way I stroll by houses with Halloween decorations up in full force—ghosts, witches, jack-o’-lanterns. It’s only September 18. I can’t imagine what they do around here for Christmas. GO VIKINGS banners are glued to windows. A lawn is planted with wild prairie grass and milkweed.

  On a front stoop a red and white tub sits with a sign that reads TUB REFINISHING. A glassed-in porch displays dozens of shoes in all sizes and shapes. Birkenstocks, sneakers, pink platform shoes, flip-flops, high heels, kids’ shoes, nurses’ shoes, old people’s shoes, hiking boots, galoshes.

  This is riverfront, Main Street, U.S.A. Picket fences, flagpoles, lawn gnomes, screened-in porches, swings. The kind of houses Tom will later comment remind him of those in the old cowboy movies. Where you shoot a guy and he falls off the roof into a bale of hay. I go into Casey’s and Tom’s right. I am much more likely to find motor oil than olive oil.

  Then I head back to Clark’s Landing, the only restaurant in town, where I’ve agreed to meet the boys for breakfast. I get there first and take a booth near the front. It’s Sunday morning and farm families are having breakfast after church. One family has five towheaded children, stabbing at their buttermilk pancakes swimming in syrup. There are men in company caps and Stetsons and a few wearing leather jackets that say on them STURGIS, SOUTH DAKOTA, where the annual Harley festival is held.

  I’ve missed the Friday-night special. Beer-battered or biscuit-battered catfish, served with a nonalcoholic wine cooler. Deep-fried broccoli on the side. My stomach is churning as the boys come in. Tom takes one side of the booth and Jerry sits next to me. “We’re both left-handed,” he says. “That’s a good thing.”

  Tom orders diet Dew, which comes in a huge white plastic glass, and he manages to down three of these glasses of greenish yellow liquid before his breakfast of two double cheeseburgers and fries is done. I’m having a pair of eggs over easy. Jerry orders the Western omelette, which is smothered in American cheese, cooked with peppers and onions. “I feel like eating light today,” he says.

  After breakfast we stumble back to the boat. It is a beautiful day and Jerry doesn’t seem to be in a rush. Tom starts chasing Samantha Jean up and down the beach and Jerry’s tossing water onto the deck. I want to take my first river swim. The water looks clean enough and calm. I tell Jerry and he gives the river an eye. “Good day for it,” he says. “Might join you myself.” He pauses. “Wear your river shoes.”

  “I was planning to.” I have already been warned of the dangers of clam shells that can slice off your heel.

  “And maybe you should wear a life jacket,” Jerry adds as a second thought. A life jacket? Oh, he sounds like my dad. River shoes, life jacket. Tie a line around my waist? I am a very strong swimmer and the river is completely still. And I’m not planning to swim across it. Just paddle out a little ways. I cannot imagine why I’d need a life jacket.

  I put on my bathing suit and river shoes and start to slip into the water on the upstream side of the boat when Jerry eyes me. “Don’t get in on that side. You always want to swim on the shore side of the boat in the direction of the current. Always get in the water downstream from the boat.”

  I give him a questioning stare.

  “People go out swimming in the river and the current carries them under their boats. They get stuck there and drown. Oh gosh, there were these two kids on a raft once…”

  I put my hands over my ears and pretend to sing a song. “It’s okay,” I say. “Don’t tell me.” Good old Jerry. Always a cheerful cautionary tale to go with any misstep you’re about to make on the river. So I drag myself out of the water and go to the downstream side of our boat and put my feet into the silt. The bottom sucks at my river shoes.

  The river is calm. Its surface is glossy and there is hardly a ripple as I lift my feet out of the silt, which seems to want to suck me back down. I swim out a few dozen yards and feel the first tug of water. Turning, I see that Jerry has gotten into the river as well and is tossing a life ring to Samantha Jean, who proceeds to rip it to pieces. Jerry is trying to get her to stop and I’m watching them play when I realize they are getting smaller and smaller.

  It occurs to me that I’m being carried downstream. It is in fact a rather pleasant sensation. A little like being on a water-slide. But as I watch the River Queen slip away, and Tom and Jerry diminish in size, and Samantha Jean becomes a speck on the horizon, I grow concerned. I am being taken for a ride.

  I try to swim back. At first I do a leisurely breaststroke, but I’m not getting anywhere. I try again, but I still seem to be moving away from the shore. This feels a bit like swimming in one of those continuous pools where you have to use all your strength just to stay in place. And I’m going backward.

  I try harder, then switch to a crawl. I use all my might, but I make little progress. If anything it seems that I am being carried backward as if in a riptide. In another moment I’ll be halfway to Memphis. I suddenly see why Huck and Jim missed their turnoff up the Ohio. Anyone would. They were riding this conveyor belt too. The river is a team of horses, dragging me with it.

  I also see the wisdom of wearing a life jacket and I definitely understand the problem of getting sucked under the bo
at. But this is all hindsight. I’m fighting like a demon to get back to shore. Tom and Jerry are playing with Samantha Jean and the life ring and I give them a wave. “Hey, guys!” I call. They wave back. I swim, struggling, toward them. “Hello, Jerry? Tom?” I call to my two half-deaf river pilots, hoping they’ll get the hint and throw me a line as they frolic at the shore. But they just wave.

  Now I put my face in the water and use all the power in my arms. I paddle as if I’m being chased by a giant catfish, the kind rumored to lurk in the muddy depths of this stream. Brave souls “noodle” for them with their bare arms. I swim for my life and finally I reach a place around the bend where, for the first time, I can actually see a wing dam. There it is, a ripple in the water. A thin line of rocks barely revealed. A wing dam. It has eluded me, but I will recognize one from now on. And I know that on the other side the current will be weaker.

  I work my way around it, treading water, and soon my river shoes graze the silty bottom. Breathless, I drag myself onto the sand where they notice me. “Hey, Mary,” Tom says. “How was your swim?”

  “Great.” I’m gasping for breath. “That river is strong,” I tell them and they concur.

  “You didn’t need that vest, though, huh?” Jerry asks.

  I nod. “Actually, I could’ve used it,” I say.

  Jerry nods thoughtfully. “Well, next time you should.” Just offshore Samantha Jean frolics on top of the life ring as Tom splashes water into her yelping face.

  AROUND THE BEND

  24

  EVERYWHERE I look there are stories. Around every bend. Everything you do, every line you throw. There’s a tale to tell. Jerry, it seems, has a story for everything, usually one involving mutilation or death. Every waitress, every cabbie, every person at a marina, every boatman you meet will have his or her own. One that will always top yours.

  If you saw a storm, they saw a tornado. If you saw a tornado, they were in a tidal wave. If you saw a big catfish, they’ve always seen a bigger one, no matter how big yours was to start with. If you were in an accident or had a great pet, they were in a worse accident or had a dog who shopped for dinner.

  As we go through Lock and Dam 16, Jerry, who is at the helm, says, “Boy I remember the last time we were here. It smelled like brownies. I asked about it, but the lockmaster denied it.” He’s steering us away from the wall as I take the line in the front and Tom takes his in the back. “I guess he didn’t want to give me any.”

  Holding the line I take a sip of my coffee from my Citgo mug. The boat shifts and scalding liquid sears my tongue. “Ouch!” I cry out. “I burned my tongue.” It feels as if somebody sanded it.

  Jerry starts to tell me about when he burned his whole mouth. “With this very mug.” He holds up his Citgo mug. “Now let her go a little, Mary,” Jerry says. “You’re holding too tight. Remember what happened to that woman from Trempealeau.” And Jerry makes a motion like a knife slitting his throat.

  We are leaving the lock and dam, and river scum coats my hands. A sandbar to our starboard side is blanketed in birds. Pelicans, heron, egrets, cormorants, gulls. We’re running the engine at fifteen hundred rpm. Jerry says this is a good speed to run it and not burn too much fuel. I stand next to him in the cabin, my face to the wind.

  The rhythm of the boat has entered me. The gentle forward movement as we drift at a clip of eight and a half miles per hour. The sound of the engines as they punctuate our journey. As if life is just about forward motion. To go back is a struggle upstream. I’m coming to understand the meaning of “going with the flow.”

  I check the mile marker, then glance at our maps. We’re coming up on Hog Island at Mile 458. There seem to be many markers on this trip. There are the river markers and the day-markers, there are buoys and depth markers. There’s the log Jerry keeps. There are the markers on walls to indicate high water and flood crests and on bridges and dams for clearance. Then there are my own personal markers. Eight days on the river and I’ve stopped taking my pills.

  25

  “WE’LL KEEP you clean in Muscatine,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1927 when he worked for the Colliers Advertising Agency. I’m thinking of this as we are heading to Muscatine, a place I only know from Fitzgerald’s jingle. He had already published The Great Gatsby, but he needed a job. Writers have to do all kinds of things to stay alive, don’t they?

  I have long identified with migratory patterns of midwestern writers. Cather, Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dreiser, to name a few. They went east for opportunity, but they never lost their feeling for the Midwest. Twain’s greatest works about thirteen-year-old boys in Hannibal, Missouri, were written from the vantage point of Hartford, Connecticut. Cather wrote her novels of the prairie long after she’d left for good. And Fitzgerald’s yearning for the Middle West was always there.

  What is it about these flatlands and fields of corn and wheat that holds the imagination? Was it what Proust said in his masterpiece? The only paradise is the one we have lost. For me the Midwest represents a simpler time, one of great clarity and few deceptions. As a friend once said, “It’s a good place to be from.…”

  In 1926 Fred Angell, a resident of Muscatine, steamed a hamburger, instead of frying it, added his own formula of spices, and offered the sandwich to a deliveryman, who declared, “Fred, you know, this sandwich is made right!” Somehow this got translated to “Maid-Rite” and the Maid-Rite sandwich.

  Muscatine without Maid-Rite, the saying goes, would be like Muscatine without the Mississippi River. But the river continues to flow, though Maid-Rite, which closed its doors in 1997, is long gone. So are the pearl button factories that once kept this town employed. Once there were eighteen pearl button factories in Muscatine. Now there are three and they only make plastic buttons. The pearl buttons, made from Mississippi mussels, ceased being produced long ago.

  Coming into Muscatine, we see old Victorian houses set on the hill above the levee, well out of the flood zone. This is what I’m coming to recognize on the river. The grand houses sit high. We are searching for a landing and hopefully a gas dock and we spot one just below the town. The marina is large and there’s a courtesy dock.

  “You’ve got plenty of room,” Tom says to Jerry. “You can even back her in if you want.”

  “Naw, I’ll just bring her in forward, I think.”

  “Looks like you’re turning up some sand here.”

  “Yep,” Jerry says, not too happy. “I’ve only got four feet.” But he makes it and we come into a cozy spot on the dock.

  Muscatine. The Pearl of the Mississippi. I want to go to the button museum, but it is closed on Sundays. Instead I head for a stroll through downtown. I walk by a plaque. MISSISSIPPI RIVER, RECORD FLOOD CREST, 25.58 FEET, JULY 9, 1993. A mark on the wall shows how high the waters rose.

  I walk past Lee’s Bakers and The Purple Hedgehog, whose window is filled with—guess what—big purple hedgehogs, fairies, wizards, a Bruce Lee poster, a Bob Marley “Mellow Mood” poster, and some very odd pewter figurines that appear to be dragons. I walk by Hubbies, which seems like a kind of men’s store/bar with a wooden Indian in the back, a humidor in front. Nothing appears open in downtown Muscatine—not a coffee shop or a pharmacy, not a corner store—though many shops look abandoned and have FOR RENT signs in the window.

  Tucked between Hazel Green and Her Sewing Machine and a carpet store with banners for the Muscatine Muskies in the window is a pawnshop. Inside I see the usual items. A bowie knife, fishing gear, rifles. Bicycles. Elvis photos. Telescope. Television sets. Lava lamps. But then there are the things I don’t expect. Someone pawned his kid’s basketball, a toy John Deere farm silo, complete with barn. A pair of chopsticks ($2.75). An alarm clock made up of farm animals ($17.29), a lamp with an angel, guarding children ($39).

  But the main thing this shop pawns is musical instruments. Dozens of guitars. Shiny blue ones, a black one with flames licking out of its hole. Plain wood acoustical. All hanging by their necks from the ceiling like so many
broken dreams, going as far back into the store as I can see. Saxophones ($399). An antique steel reed accordion made in Germany, complete with its box ($159). A slide trombone ($179). A pair of maracas ($3.99). Two boys on scooters zip past me. These are the first people I’ve seen. They are followed by a pale child on foot. The boys on scooters seem to be Hispanic or perhaps Native American. Or Middle Eastern. One boy has a scar on his cheek. The other wears a Stars & Stripes Band-Aid across his nose. The boy who is walking has bad teeth.

  They almost run me over and I have to dash out of their way. On the other side of the street I notice an antiques shop has its door open and I slip inside. It is your usual tchotchke store, filled with ceramic cats, frilly tablecloths, old postcards. I start flipping through the postcards, looking for pictures of the river from earlier times.

  A tall man in gray pants comes in with his diminutive blond wife and he’s in search of coins. “I want old money,” he tells the woman.

  I think to myself, “I could use a little old money too.”

  “I like Civil War coins. Anything you’ve got.” She doesn’t have much in the way of old coins, but they start speaking in very loud voices about the price of silver and how it’s way up. How nobody can afford silver anymore.

  “I’ve got a Little Daisy butter churn,” the wife pipes in. “I bought it at a yard sale. It didn’t have its top so I only got the bottom. I thought I’d be able to find a top.”

  “Bet you haven’t,” the woman at the desk says as she swats the counter with her flyswatter.

  “You’re right. I haven’t.”

  “Well, those are real collector’s items now. You won’t find much in the Little Daisy line.”