The River Between Us

by Richard Peck

  I leaned in to pour brimming cups of sassafras tea. Calinda bent to sniff at her cup, and flinched. Overlooking her eggs, Delphine said, “How good you are to take us in, orphans of the storm.” Her smile was like sunup. Across from me, Calinda eyed the scrapple with dark suspicion. She poked at an egg with her fork.

  “I hope you slept,” Mama remarked. Her face was damp from the fire. Seeing Delphine’s hair, she just touched her own.

  “Mais oui, madame,” Delphine said. “We stuff petticoats around the windows. We wear our cloaks.”

  Cass went goggle-eyed and surprised herself into speech: “’Tain’t winter!”

  No, it was springtime. We slept with the windows wide open. On the other hand, we were still sewn into our winter underwear. And as we knew, Delphine, for one, wasn’t.

  Her laugh tinkled like silver. “Yet it is more winter than we know.” I saw they were both still freezing. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll put them nearer the fire, to thaw them.

  That was the way with Delphine. You tried to think of ways to please her. I saw that on the first day.

  We weren’t used to talk at the table, and the kitchen rang with hers. She babbled and bubbled like a wellspring, and told nothing. Her accent came and went. I looked back to the way life had been yesterday, and couldn’t find it.

  Dazzled though I was, I saw Calinda wasn’t going near her breakfast. Delphine moved more vittles around her plate than she ate. The sparkle of her gaze played back and forth over us, always ending to linger on Noah. She saw how red his ears had gone. Who could miss them? They were on fire.

  He didn’t chance a look at her, but he drank in every word. If she’d reached out and touched his wrist, he might have fallen forward in a faint. A scent came from her, of some flower we didn’t know. Noah swayed.

  Mama saw and didn’t like it. All men were what she called “susceptible,” and Noah thought he was a man already. Mama stepped in, so to speak. “Won’t your aunt up at St. Louis wonder what become of you?”

  Calinda shot a quick sideways glance at Delphine, who answered at once. “Tante Blanche! Of course, unless she is already murder in her bed. I write at once to say where we are.” Now she did touch Noah’s wrist. “Where are we? Me, I know nothing. What is this place?”

  Noah swallowed. “All the territory this end of the state’s called Egypt, and this here is Grand Tower.”

  “It thrives, this place?”

  Noah rubbed his chin to make the point that he shaved. “It’s promising.” He pitched his voice way down below his bootlaces. “If we could get the railroad in here, we could load the boats with the coal coming out of Mount Carbon and Murphysboro. A rail line could make us, might could bring in some industry. The railroad first reached the river up at Rock Island and made a considerable town of it.”

  I fell back in the chair. That was the longest speech that ever come out of that boy’s mouth. Was he running for office? But then Cass was chirpier too this morning. We were all changed, overnight.

  Mama didn’t draw breath until Delphine’s hand slipped back in her lap. Noah went on looking at his wrist where her fingers had been.

  “And your folks down South,” Mama pressed on, “won’t they fret over your whereabouts?”

  Delphine started in her chair, prettily. “Maman! But naturally I must write her. Will the next boat take the letter? She will be beside herself until she know we are safe.”

  “I wonder your mother didn’t come with you since things are so . . . unsettled down there.” Mama was beginning to pry for sure.

  “Ah, she is brave, that one,” Delphine said. “If anyone dare besiege New Orleans, Clemence Duval will defend it with her last breath. Who will not? Let the enemy smell the gunpowder of Louis Hébert’s Pelican rifles. All that gold braid! You know what happen in that War of 1812 when les maudits Anglais try to take New Orleans? They—how you say it? Skedaddle.”

  She glanced at Paw’s fowling piece hanging there above Noah’s head. I had a quick picture of her mother up there on a levee with her skirts in her boots and a rifle butt in her shoulder, taking potshots at us Yankees.

  Delphine turned over a tiny, plump hand. “But war may not come to us. New Orleans is the largest city of the South, perhaps the greatest in the world. It could strangle the North by blocking to ships the river’s mouth.” She knotted her fist and held it up. “New York will do anything to keep our cotton coming. New York does not care who picks it.”

  She leaned nearer, to take us into her confidence. “Maman is a lady of fashion, you know. To our house on Chartres Street come all the persons of tone, all the distinguished.” She sketched that house in the air for us to see, and I swear I did. “Maman’s loge is on the second tier of the French Opera House, the grand new one on Bourbon Street. When she is driven out the Chalmette Road to take the air, crowds form.”

  Delphine caught her breath at her mother’s magnificence. “Tall as a swaying palmetto is Maman, the belle of ev’ry ball. You have not live until you see Maman revolving in the waltz, her shoulders bare, her throat ablaze. They cannot hold the opera on Wednesday nights. Clemence Duval is at the ball! The balls, you know, each Wednesday at the Salle d’Orleans.”

  Something happened then. Below the table Calinda’s hand seemed to jerk at Delphine’s skirts. Delphine fell silent. A warning had passed between them. We all noticed. Well, maybe not Noah.

  Delphine wavered and went on. “No, Maman will not leave her Nouvelle Orléans. Not yet. Perhaps never. Perhaps we can all be as we were.” She looked away from us, seeming to hear music.

  That was Delphine all over. She could tell you so much that you thought you’d heard it all. Her conversation was a lacework fan that opened and closed, concealing and revealing. I didn’t doubt her mother was rich and beautiful and admired. What other mother would Delphine have? What could be left to know?

  We’d never lingered over breakfast this long in our lives. But Delphine stirred first. “Eh bien,” she said with a little shrug. “Well, me, I would like to examine the town. Are there shops?”

  Chapter Five

  It took the morning for Delphine and Calinda to unpack. Mama and Cass and I heard the thump and scrape of their trunks from above, and the mumble of their voices. Scents this house had never known drifted down to us: the sweetgrass of their baskets, the lavender of sachets. Who knew what came tumbling out of those treasure chests? I wouldn’t have minded a look but it was none of my business.

  So it was well past midday before Delphine and me started down the hill. Mama had turned me loose, and Calinda had said, “Me, I stay at ’ome”—the first time I ever heard her voice.

  Best of all, I wore a bonnet of Delphine’s—a store bonnet—when she saw I didn’t own one. Hers was crowned with a spray of silk roses like the ones in the pattern of her dress. My bonnet was deep, so I saw the world at the end of a tunnel. I hoped to be noticed in it.

  As quick as we were in Rodgers’s store, we were watched like hawks—both Rodgerses and Pegleg Snelson and all their other help, and a couple of country women turning over the goods. Word of our visitors had reached well beyond Grand Tower by now.

  Delphine made short work of the store. I feared that very little in it would interest her, and very little did. She breezed by the pile of mackinaw blankets. She barely browsed the dressmaking counter with its needles and pins, the ferreting for binding, the tin suspender buttons, and the dozen bolts of calico at seven cents a yard.

  She turned up her pert nose at the maple sugar in lumps and swept past the home remedies, the liniments and laudanum and borax, and all the salves and sulfurs. We were shortly back out on the porch.

  As Delphine could see, we’d pretty well done the town. Across the road was the only brick building, the office to lure Dr. Hutchings to come and doctor us. I for one wanted to give that place a wide berth. They said his floors were painted red to hide the blood.

  Delphine nodded past this landmark to the freight landing. T. W. Jenkins ran a hardware and
ship repair establishment beside it, along with a lumberyard and smithy.

  “It is where your brother works, no?” Delphine said. “We go there.”

  I explained to her that womenfolk didn’t go into Jenkins’s as a rule. The forge was in a back room, and men were apt to hang around there, chewing and using language we all knew but weren’t supposed to.

  “Pffft,” said Delphine, and lifted her skirts across the road.

  On the porch of Jenkins’s store, Mr. Clarence Worthen and Old Man “Dutchy” Brunckhorst were going at it, hammer and tongs. The Worthens’ ancestry was Kentuckian, and they still called themselves Southern. Old Man Brunckhorst was straight from the old country and staunch for the Union and Lincoln. Each had a finger in the other’s face.

  We sidled past them and inside. It was far better stocked than Rodgers’s. But here were cattle yokes and boat pins, oakum and caulking chisels and black iron pots. Hanging from rafters were rat traps and briar scythes and I don’t know what all. I could see Noah in the yard behind, measuring off planking. I expected Delphine to turn on her heel. She rapped the counter for service.

  As luck would have it, Curry Marshall answered the call. I looked away, to give him the side view of my bonnet. Then I looked square at him. Searching the contents of the bonnet, he found my face. “Hey, Tilly,” he said.

  I replied in kind. But I couldn’t command much of his attention this near Delphine. She had a powerful effect on the male sex.

  “Have you—how you say it? Les allumettes?” She spoke in a throaty voice. What she was doing with her eyes, I couldn’t see.

  Curry swallowed hard. “Zoom whats?” he said in a fading tone.

  “To make fire.” Delphine gestured.

  “Matches,” Curry said. “We do, but they’s high.”

  Delphine overlooked that. “And lamps? Coal oil lamps?”

  “They’s higher than a cat’s back. We want an arm and a leg for them.” Curry hooked his thumbs into his shop apron.

  Delphine overlooked that too. Evidently in New Orleans the merchants didn’t warn you that their goods might be higher than you could pay.

  “Send six or eight to the house of Madame Pruitt,” Delphine said. “And the oil and the wicks and the chimneys. Plenty of oil, and a box of . . . matches.”

  Curry and I both gaped. I was all bonnet and jaw. Nobody but the doctor burned oil.

  Curry recovered. “I’ll box it up and bring it to the house, after work.”

  “Do not let darkness fall,” warned Delphine.

  There was some afternoon left. “Now we climb your hill,” Delphine said, “to regard the view.”

  I told her it was liable to be muddy underfoot and spoil her petticoats. But that naturally didn’t matter to her. We climbed the Backbone, past our house. Delphine showed a good deal of ankle, hitching her skirts over root and rock.

  “How steep your country is.” She began to puff. All her shawls were askew. When we came at last to the devil’s footstool, I saw Cass wasn’t there. As a rule, she’d escaped from the house by this time of day.

  Delphine settled beside me on the footstool, and her skirts fell easy about her. How I admired her grace, and wondered how to have it.

  The river flowed empty below, high with the spring floods from the snowmelt above us. Delphine nodded north. Between the Devil’s Backbone and Oven Rock was a straggling graveyard.

  “Your papa,” she said. “He is there?”

  “Oh no, Paw’s not dead.” Not that we knew of. She’d thought Mama was a widow woman.

  “Paw’s a river man. Summers, he works the logging camps up in the Minnesota country. Winters, he’s down south, going shares on a seine net. A lot of the menfolk do that. They’s here in the spring to put in the crops and back in the fall for the harvest. Of course, we haven’t got any land, so they’s no crops to put in.”

  Oh, I babbled like a brook and flowed like a freshet. At least I didn’t tell her how many seasons had passed since we’d seen hide or hair of Paw. Years, really.

  She seemed to hear more than I’d told. I was provoked at myself. Hadn’t Mama just warned me to watch every word I spoke? Hadn’t she made that crystal clear? So I made so bold as to ask if Delphine had a paw.

  “Papa? Mais oui. He is Monsieur Jules Duval. No doubt Mayor Duval by now, gird for war.

  “I bring Papa’s portrait in a gilt frame,” she said. “I am never without it. You will see where it hangs over my bed.”

  He’s apt to be hanging by the neck from a sour apple tree when us Yankees take New Orleans, I thought, but didn’t say.

  On Delphine flowed. “Papa is of an ancient French family, you know. The Duvals are there on their land long before the Americans come. Long before.”

  It took her no time to make me see the vast sweep of Duval cotton fields stretching for miles back from the river. She raised before my very eyes the columns that held up their deep porches, white as marble in the dazzling day. I saw the great houses of the Duvals standing in gardens hung with Spanish moss.

  “He live, Papa, mostly in the country. A gentleman, you know. But he come to New Orleans for the opera, and of course for the balls.

  “Ah, ma chère,” she said, “imagine-toi Maman and Papa in the brilliance of the ballroom, leading a quadrille. Always, always the first on the floor.” She sketched this romantic couple in the Illinois air. “Ev’ry eye upon Maman en grande toilette and Papa golden-hair and all in midnight black. You have not live until . . .” Her voice sighed to silence so I could see them for myself.

  Then when I had, she turned full on me. Her eyes had darkened with the day. They glistened. What did I know of homesickness, who’d never been away from home? She spoke low. “You would destroy all that, all I come from, and know.”

  I didn’t want to fight the war with her. For one thing, I thought I might lose.

  I pulled away from her eyes and looked around for something else to say. “Cass is usually up here by now.” I tried to think how to explain Cass.

  “She is droll, that one,” Delphine said.

  “She sees things that ain’t there.”

  “She has visions?” Delphine was interested at once. “She is a seeress?”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “Mama’s worried to death Cass will lose her mind.”

  “But it is a gift she has!” Delphine exclaimed.

  “Not in these parts,” I said, wondering what I’d blurt out next.

  The river flows calmer at the end of the day for some reason. By and by we began to feel the evening chill. Delphine and I climbed down the Backbone to the house. On the porch stood a crate with the lamps and the oil.

  “Eh, the lamp boy makes his escape.” Delphine rolled her eyes. “He skedaddle before you find him.”

  I was flushed in cheek and neck, and silent for once.

  “You are sweet on the lamp boy, isn’t it so?” Delphine peered into my bonnet for the truth.

  So it looked like she knew everything anyway, without you had to tell her.

  But I was forgotten in the next moment. As quick as we were in the door of the house, another scent I’d never smelled wafted our way.

  Delphine breathed deep and fell back, clutching her shawls. “Jambalaya!” she shrieked. “Merci, bon Dieu, we are save!

  How well I recall Delphine and me coming in from that damp evening, pulling off her bonnets. Calinda, treetop-tall, had her face to the fire and her skirts pinned up under an apron of Mama’s. She was browning onions in the biggest skillet. Nearly stuck to her side was Cass, measuring paste out of a jar.

  The kitchen was ranked with provisions Calinda and Delphine must have brought with them. A sack of rice and another of red beans. A wreath of onions, a coil of sausage, a mess of little bird’s-eye peppers.

  It was Calinda’s fireside now, and I was astonished to see Mama setting at the kitchen table. She wasn’t idle. She didn’t know how to be idle. But daylight had never caught her setting down. She was into a sack of peca
ns we’d gathered out in the timber last fall. In a litter of shells she was picking out nutmeats.

  She glanced up, a little shamed about her ease. I seemed to see for the first time how twisted and knobby her hands were. Winter got to her joints, and she had pain she never spoke of. Looked to me like she’d surrendered her kitchen without a skirmish.

  And didn’t we eat that night? Always before, pig’s cheek in pot likker was a banquet to us, when we could get it. Now we ate our first jambalaya, thick with tomato paste and the sausage and a slab of salt ham we had, and alive with the onions—all poured over the snowy rice.

  Real abolitionists wouldn’t eat rice or cane sugar or anything the South produced. We dug right in. My insides didn’t know which way to turn. Noah ate his fill too, twice. But he’d miss his mouth for stealing glances at Delphine. We saw now what a good appetite she enjoyed. She was always to be a hearty eater, though she couldn’t boil water herself. She’d have starved to death in a well-stocked larder.

  Calinda was back and forth from table to fire, but she ate her share. Life stirred in her dark eyes. How beautiful her long hands were, dishing up, feeding us. Cass was right there beside her, watching Calinda’s hands, hearing her silences.

  Night never come. We had the new coal oil lamps, you see. Once they were filled and we struck the matches and saw how the wicks worked, the kitchen sprang to life just as the hearth fire began to die.

  We covered our mouths at the sight of one another, Mama and Cass and me. Somehow it was brighter than day, and we were players on the showboat stage. Light found all the corners. The crockery glared from the shelf. I looked at Noah and caught my breath. I swear I hadn’t noticed before how handsome he was. We were twins. How come he got the looks?

  He was dazed by the light, or Delphine. She’d summoned up her sewing from an elegant basket with seed pearls and tiny shells patterned on the lid. In her hands was a pair of ladies’ underdrawers to be mended, though I didn’t think Noah needed to be seeing them. She leaned into the lamplight as if it was nothing to her, and the silver thimble on her finger glimmered like a star.