The Drifter

by Susan Wiggs

  “Red ones?”

  The silence spun out. A distant horn blew, signaling the end of the shift for Chicago’s dockworkers at Quimper Shipyards. The swampy smell of Lake Michigan blew in on a cold wind through the courtyard. “Carrie?” Jackson strained to see inside the locked room, but spied only shadows. “You all right?”

  “No,” she said, the word muffled by a mouthful of candy. “What’s this, Jackson?”

  “Something I made for you. Carved it out of firewood.”

  “It’s a bird.”

  “Uh-huh.” He imagined her turning it over in her small hands. He was proud of his work, his attention to detail. It was a dove; he’d copied the stained glass Holy Ghost in St. Mary’s Church. At Christmas and Easter, the brothers scrubbed the orphans up and paraded them to church, and Jackson had always spent the hour staring at the jewel-colored windows.

  “Oh, Jackson.” Her voice came through the barred window. “I’ll keep it with me always.”

  “I put a hole in the back so you can wear it on a string around your neck.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she said, and he had the eerie impression she wasn’t speaking to him. “I just wanted to hold the baby, just wanted to be warm by the fire, but they blamed it all on me, put me here in the cold. I’m scared, Jackson.”

  His legs began to tremble from the effort of holding himself up. “Carrie—”

  “You there,” barked a deep, familiar voice. “Get down from there, boy!”

  Jackson didn’t have to look back to know Brother Anthony stood below, flexing a knotted belt while his eyes gleamed with hell’s fury and his costly ring of office flashed in the light.

  “Are you deaf, boy, or just stupid? I said get down.”

  He tilted his head up. Just a short reach away loomed a drainpipe. If he could grab onto that, he’d climb up to the roof, maybe find a way down the other side. He leaned toward the rusty pipe, closed his eyes, and leaped. The ancient iron groaned under his weight, but it held. He began to climb, up and up, ignoring the wrathful commands of Brother Anthony. Jackson kept climbing toward the pigeon-infested ledge above him. How he wished he were a bird. He’d fly away free, soaring...

  “If you won’t come down, I’ll give your punishment to that little devil-spawn girl you like so much,” Brother Anthony promised.

  Jackson stopped climbing. His brief fantasy of freedom flickered and died. He blew out a long, weary breath. He slid down the drainpipe and dropped to the cracked brick yard, stumbling a little as he turned to face Brother Anthony.

  The portly warden backhanded him across the face. Jackson’s head snapped to one side; he saw a spray of blood fly out. Brother Anthony’s ruby ring had cut him above the cheekbone.

  He knew from years of observation that the warden would go easier on him if he cried and begged for mercy. But he’d never been able to plead. Instead, he wiped his bleeding cheek with his sleeve, then clawed off his shirt even before Brother Anthony commanded it. With a cold gleam of defiance in his eyes, Jackson turned, braced his hands against the wall, and waited for the first blow to land.

  In the detention room, Carrie was strangely silent.

  In the bathhouse, many miles and many years away from that moment, Jackson plunged his head into the lukewarm water and scrubbed hard, wishing he could wash clean the past. But he couldn’t, of course. The past would always be with him, just as the scar from Brother Anthony’s ring would always be with him. Just as Carrie would always be with him.

  Pregnant. God Almighty, Carrie was pregnant.

  She had awakened briefly this morning. Like a petulant child, she had turned up her nose and complained about the sour smell of the vinegar and herbs, but she seemed to breathe easier after the treatment. He had managed to get her to eat a bit of bread sopped in warm milk and flavored with cinnamon and sugar.

  “You’re good to me,” she had murmured. “You’re always good to me.” And she’d reached her hand out for the bottle of tonic she needed.

  “I left it on the boat, honey.”

  He’d taken her hand in his. Her fingers tightened into a fist, and she knocked his arm away. “I need it, Jackson. I need my medicine now.”

  Resigned, he’d rowed out to the schooner. He planned to bring her in to dock anyway. He’d paid the harbormaster, then returned to Carrie. He should have talked to her about the pregnancy, talked about what it would mean to bring a baby into the world. Their world. Instead, he watched her grab the bottle, watched her drink greedily until her eyes grew dazed with a sated look.

  “Save a little of that,” he said. “The doctor wants to know what’s in your medicine.”

  “I need it,” she mumbled, visibly calmer. “I always do.”

  He’d sat with her and held her hand until she slept again. All in all, it had been an easy day with Carrie. Not every day was like that. Her moods had always been unpredictable, but lately her spirits had spiraled downward at an accelerated rate. He supposed the pregnancy explained that, but what the hell did he know of female things?

  For that matter, what did he know of anything the future held for him and Carrie? He knew better than to expect love and security, a settled life, a home. That was something that didn’t happen to people like them. They were too desperate, too damaged. He would simply drift along with Carrie, taking each day as it came.

  He’d never done a lot of planning for the future. He’d always lived for the moment. Decisions that had altered his life had turned on a single moment. A three-year stint on a whaling ship? He’d gone simply because his bed in the flophouse where he was staying had been lumpy. Ownership of a broken-down seagoing schooner? He’d won it with a single hand of cards.

  Good or bad, it was the way he had lived. If you don’t expect anything out of life, he reasoned, then life won’t have a chance to disappoint you.

  It was enough to simply stay ahead of the law. Drifting along had never bothered him in the past, though today it preyed upon his mind. There was something about that lady doctor that made him wish he could be something more than a wanderer. Made him weary of always being on the wrong side of the law—even when he was trying to do right. If he could get Carrie away to a safe place, maybe they could start over again, settle down, get a house and some land like regular folks.

  He dried himself with a clean towel and wrapped it around his waist. The timid deaf girl called Iona had set out some shaving things for him. Peering into a small, oval mirror, he lathered up. He’d gotten careless the past few days with Carrie being so sick. He had to stay clean-shaven because the Wanted poster showed him with a beard.

  His mood rose a couple of notches. The likeness and its screaming headline hadn’t been posted in Seattle, so he guessed the search wouldn’t reach this far north. Not anytime soon, he figured.

  By the time they traced him here, he’d be long gone, thanks to a lucky hand of cards dealt at a tavern on Yesler Way in Seattle. A timely quartet of queens had won him the schooner.

  The thought of the boat almost brought a smile to Jackson’s face. He’d always dreamed of having a boat. When he was a boy, he’d stolen a copy of Treasure Island—everything worth having was stolen. Late at night, burning a contraband candle in the boys’ dormitory at St. I’s, he had devoured the adventure story with his eyes, his mind, his heart. Against all odds, he had learned how to dream. Ever since reading that book, he’d wanted to sail away, wanted the freedom, wanted the sense that he was in control of a world of his choosing.

  Jackson T. Underhill had never found that. Not yet. He was still looking.

  The whaling ship had not been the answer. He’d hated the tedium, the rigid pecking order among the crew, the sick cruelty of the second mate, the grim violence of the hunt. As in all the things Jackson had done in his life, he’d gleaned important skills from the experience; then he’d moved on.

 
The schooner was a new—if leaky—start. But it had problems. The damage done by the lady doctor was only the beginning. Once he’d docked the boat, the harbormaster’s assistant had given him a depressing litany of repairs to be made before she was seaworthy again.

  If he could just get her running well enough to make it to Canada, he’d take his time, maybe make a plan. He had only the vaguest idea where he would go; all he knew was that he needed to find a place where Carrie would feel safe, where his face wasn’t known, where a man could be judged by the hard work he did, not by a past he couldn’t change.

  He cleaned off the razor, wiped his chin, and turned to reach for the pile of freshly laundered clothes in the dressing room.

  Instead of the clothes, he saw a woman’s backside.

  Dr. Leah Mundy was coming into the bathhouse, shuffling backward, bent over and talking softly to someone in a rolling wood-and-wicker chair. “Just a few steps more. There we are,” she said.

  Her voice was incredibly sweet and coaxing, devoid of the acid, scolding tone she used with Jackson.

  “You’ll feel like a new person when you’re in the bath,” Leah Mundy said. She brought the rolling chair fully into the room and swiveled it around.

  “Dr. Mundy, who’s that man?” asked a child’s voice.

  She glanced up, and her eyes grew wide and panicked, the eyes of a doe caught in a hunter’s sight. “Mr. Underhill!”

  He bowed from the waist where the towel was knotted precariously. “Ma’am.”

  He was impressed by the way she regained control without even moving a muscle. The panic in her gaze subsided to a detached authority. In her profession, she probably saw male bodies all the time. Half naked or not, he was no more than an anatomy specimen to her. She straightened her shoulders, folded her lips into a humorless line, and cleared her throat.

  “I didn’t expect to find anyone here,” she said. Jackson could tell she was trying not to look at his tattoo. “I was bringing Bowie for his therapeutic bath. He’s Mrs. Dawson’s boy.” Her voice softened a little as she glanced down. “Bowie, this is Mr. Underhill. He was just leaving.”

  The child in the chair smiled shyly. Jackson felt his heart squeeze with an odd feeling of longing and loss. Bowie had fair hair and pale skin, and a face stamped by an invalid’s patient resignation. He was painfully thin, with a blanket draped over sticklike legs.

  Jackson managed a friendly grin. “How do, youngster. Pleased to meet you.”

  He glared at Leah, his gaze never leaving hers as he gathered up his things and stepped behind a trifold screen. He whistled as he dressed, savoring the feel of clean clothes against clean skin. He noticed that his shirt button, which had been broken for weeks, had been replaced. Leah Mundy might not be all that friendly, but she employed good help.

  Every so often, it was possible to feel respectable, just for a minute or two.

  As he was leaving the bathhouse, he happened to glance into the bathing chamber. Leah had managed to get the boy out of his clothes except for a pair of drawers for modesty.

  “Sophie’s away, so it’s just the two of us,” she was saying. “Can you hang on to my neck?” She burrowed her arms around and under him.

  Bowie complied, linking his bony wrists behind her neck. “Where’s Sophie?”

  “She took the side-wheeler to Port Townsend.” Leah lurched as she stood up with the boy in her arms.

  “Here, let me help,” Jackson said gruffly, striding toward them.

  A flash of surprise lit her face. She gave the briefest of nods. “Just take Bowie’s legs and we’ll ease him into the bath.”

  The legs were even paler than the rest of him, flaccid from lack of use. Jackson took careful hold and slowly bent, easing Bowie into the water.

  “Too hot for you, son?” Jackson asked.

  “No. Just right...sir.”

  “You don’t have to call me sir. Call me Jackson.” It just slipped out. Here he was, running from the law, and he was supposed to be keeping a low profile. Being friendly only brought a man trouble. The lesson had been beaten into him by all the hard years on the road.

  The boy seemed happier once he was in the bath. He rested his head against the edge of the basin and waved his arms slowly back and forth.

  “You like the water?” Jackson asked, hunkering down, ignoring Leah as she seemed to be ignoring him.

  “Yup. I keep telling Mama I want to swim in the Sound, but she says it’s too dangerous.”

  Leah scooped something minty-smelling out of a ceramic jar and started rubbing it onto Bowie’s legs. “It is too danger—”

  “Just make sure you’re swimming with someone real strong,” Jackson cut in.

  “Don’t put ideas into the boy’s head,” Leah snapped.

  “If a boy doesn’t have ideas,” Jackson said, “what the hell is he going to think about all day?”

  “And don’t swear,” she retorted.

  Hell’s bells, she was a bossy stick of a woman. “Did I swear?” Jackson asked. “Damn, I never even noticed.”

  He found a sea sponge and playfully tossed it to Bowie. The boy looked baffled for a moment, then tossed it back.

  “Anyway, son,” Jackson continued, “when I was your age, I was full of ideas.”

  “What sort of ideas?”

  Like how to escape the orphanage. How to forget the things fat Ralphie made him do in the middle of the night. How to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the younger boys...

  Jackson thrust away the memories, hid them behind a broad grin. “Ideas about sailing off to paradise. I had me a favorite book called Treasure Island. It was by a man called Robert—”

  “—Louis Stevenson!” Bowie finished for him. “I know that book. He wrote Kidnapped, too. Did you read that one, Jackson? I have heaps of books. Dr. Leah always gives me books, don’t you, Dr. Leah?”

  “You’re never alone when you’re reading a book,” she murmured, and Jackson looked at her in surprise.

  For the remainder of the bath, he and Bowie discussed all sorts of things from storybooks to boyish dreams. Jackson couldn’t believe he’d actually found something in common with a little crippled boy who spoke properly and owned a roomful of books. And all the while, Leah Mundy looked on, her expression inscrutable.

  She probably disapproved. He didn’t blame her. She didn’t know him, and what she’d seen of him did not inspire trust. He’d taken her away at gunpoint, would have kidnapped her.

  In a way, he was glad it hadn’t come to that. The idea of spending days with her cooped up aboard the schooner gave him the willies. Still, a sense of urgency plucked at him. The past was nipping at his heels.

  “Ever been sailing?” he heard himself asking.

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s a fine thing, Bowie. A damned fine thing.” Jackson shot a glance at Leah. “Of course, you have to make sure you don’t have a mutineer aboard who’d sabotage the steering.”

  “Who’d do a thing like that?” Bowie asked. “Pirates?”

  “A crazy woman,” Jackson said casually.

  Bowie laughed, thinking it a great joke. Leah ducked her head, but Jackson noticed the hot color in her cheeks. She didn’t look half so harsh when she was blushing.

  “One time,” Bowie said, “Mama was going to take me on the steamer to Seattle, but she changed her mind. Said it was too far from home.”

  “Maybe your daddy—”

  “His father’s been dead for years,” Dr. Mundy said. She spoke with a peculiar icy calm that sat ill with Jackson.

  He kept his eyes on Bowie. “Sorry to hear that. But be glad you have a place to call home. Maybe you’ll go swimming in the Sound one of these days.”

  “Maybe,” Bowie said, slapping his palms on the soapy surface of the water.

 
“I’d better go.” Jackson lifted him out of the bath, and Dr. Mundy wrapped him in a towel. “You keep reading those books, you hear, youngster?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dr. Mundy.”

  “Good day, Mr. Underhill,” she said stiffly.

  He left the bathhouse, shaking his head. What the hell was it with her? She’d gotten her way, forced him to stay here on this remote green island, yet she refused to drop her mantle of self-righteousness. Something about her taunted him, challenged him, made him want to peel away that mantle and see what was underneath. He told himself he shouldn’t want to know her. He wondered why her opinion of him mattered.

  Damn. He’d met scorpions and prickly pears that were friendlier than Dr. Leah Mundy.

  * * *

  By sunset, Leah had finished with Bowie, lanced a boil for the revenue inspector, visited elderly Ada Blowers to check on her cough, and set a broken arm for a drunken lumberjack who swore at her and refused to pay a “lady sawbones” for doing a man’s job.

  But Leah’s long day wouldn’t end until she paid a visit to her newest patient. She stood for a moment at the bottom of the wide hardwood staircase, resting her hand on the carved newel post and listening to the sounds of the old house at evening.

  Perpetua hummed as she worked in the kitchen, a little worker bee at the heart of the house. In the parlor, the boarders sat after supper, the men smoking pipes and the women knitting while they spoke in muted voices.

  This was Leah’s world, the place where she would spend the rest of her life. The light from the lowering sun filtered through the circular window high above the foyer, and to Leah it was a lonely sight, the symbol of another day gone by.

  She didn’t know how to talk to these people who lived under her roof, didn’t know what dreams they dreamed, didn’t know how to open her heart to them. And so she lived apart, working hard, keeping to herself, an outsider in her own house.

  She smoothed her hands down the front of her white smock. The starch had wilted somewhat during the day, and she knew the ribbons straggled down her back.