by John Brunner
When the men were getting set to load the cumbersome electrical machines, it was not without malice that she inquired, “Aren’t you sending someone to tell the papers?”
And she was not entirely surprised when he answered, “I already did.”
Seizing his hat and coat, his gloves and whip, he hastened off in the cut-under buggy he drove himself on the first stage of his route to the nationwide renown he dreamed of.
Whenever the Atchafalaya was at New Orleans, Mr. Caudle—who in spite of all had remained Drew’s agent here—sent around letters for her crew that had been directed in care of his office. Invariably one was from St. Louis and bore the delicate script of Susannah Drew.
Today the postmark was as usual, and the envelope… but not the writing. The letter was from Elphin, and reported a sudden decline in his mother’s health.
Sorting out facts among his nephew’s protestations of trust in the Lord, Drew felt a terrifying suspicion grow in his mind. Was this what Elphin pretended to believe, a mere summer fever, or was it the final onslaught of the foul condition Jacob had bequeathed her?
His immediate reaction was to seize the speaking tube beside his bedhead and order David Grant to his stateroom on the double, while he composed a telegram instructing Elphin to obtain the best medical advice regardless of cost. He knew very well, he thought, what he wanted to say. Yet he kept the boy waiting a full minute, pencil poised, before making up his mind how to sign the message. Uncle Hosea? Hosea Drew? Or simply Hosea? And with or without some sort of salutation: affectionately, or anxiously, even?
In the event, conscious of David’s impatience—well concealed, as ever; this boy had learned to disguise his emotions—he settled on a compromise and wrote: Your anxious uncle Hosea.
Scarcely had the door closed again before he was regretting that he had not dared to say: Give her my love.
Up to the moment he set eyes on the envelope, he had been tolerably pleased with life. The gamble he had taken—he, who feared the gambling instinct as much as he hated it—seemed to have paid off: his record run to St. Louis had by luck started on a day when the Nonpareil was hundreds of miles away, and careful planning and careful maintenance had led to a successful outcome. Here lay proof that—as he had always insisted—there was no need for a race to demonstrate the qualities of a fine steamer.
On the other hand, if Fernand had been unwilling to rejoin the boat he had trained on, or if that faulty pipe in number four boiler had blown again, say at Dog Tooth Bend or the Devil’s Race Ground…
Oh, why was it his doom always to live through disasters that never happened? The fact was, the boat had stood up to the punishment she was given, and the horns were his, and that was reality enough to have kept both his staterooms and his hold full throughout the season. Freed from his inherited debts, he was amazed how rapidly profits could mount up despite railroad competition. At the Guild parlor, when other pilot-captains grumbled, he shook his head in silent puzzlement. Like Barber, they must be squandering their earnings; that was the only conclusion he could draw. By this time next year, if things continued as they were going, he would have enough saved to finance a brand-new boat from his own resources, perhaps not quite so large as the Atchafalaya but incorporating several improvements which ought to make her even faster. She was to be called the Susannah Drew… naturally. And as soon as she was launched, he would be able to sell the old boat and tell Barber to get lost. Their acquaintance had done little to make him like the other man. At best he could achieve a grudging respect. However, he would always detest the use Barber put his partner’s hard-won money to: more gilt and marble, more flash girls, another consignment of French wine…
But until this morning he had been in clear sight of an end to all that. The arrival of Elphin’s letter made the air chill, the prospect gray. If, in order to keep Susannah alive, he had to buy the time of doctors at the sort of fee it was rumored people like Cherouen were now demanding—
Why, good-bye to the new steamer, and to independence from the smug son of a bitch who had enabled him to commission this one!
Outside, the roar and clatter of the wharf continued as laden drays rolled up and the freight hoister chugged away the hours. Customarily, about this time on a day when they were due to start another trip, he would go the complete rounds of the vessel, checking on the minutest detail, from the order in which barrels were stowed clear to the stock of soap provided for the laundress.
But not every day brought a letter like this.
After a long moment of contemplation, he reached to the shelf where he kept his current reading and withdrew a volume that contained a poem he had been led to accidentally. He knew of nothing else by its author, whose name was Dunbar, and the language was sometimes impenetrable; still, that lent it a numinous quality and made the words more relishable on his tongue. A stern solemnity taking possession of his mind, he began to read silently but with movements of his lips:
I that in heill was and gladness
Am trublit now with great sickness
And feblit with infirmitie—
Timor mortis conturbat me!
The editor had at least been obliging enough to furnish a translation of the refrain.
As the stanzas rolled on, becoming a catalog of forgotten names much like certain passages of the Old Testament, the sense of religiosity which his favorite poetry could entrain became overwhelming. Lowering the book, he stared into nowhere for a while; then, abruptly, he did something that would have delighted Elphin, and awkwardly got down on his knees to beg his Maker that Susannah might be spared at least until they had a chance to meet one more time.
But the phrase “mourners’ bench” kept coming between him and what he wanted to say, as though by premonition that she was already past the medicine of prayer.
Or perhaps because in his heart of hearts he knew he still wanted to do what he had desired when they first met: take her in his arms and make her his.
He remained kneeling a long time, fighting the urge that threatened to possess him: cancel the trip to Louisville and make straight for St. Louis instead, with all the resources and tricks he had rehearsed on his record run to get him to Susannah’s bedside before she died.
The means existed. Cannily, as Burns would have said, he had guarded against the risk that Parbury—memory returned the image of the young reporter who had called yesterday, and with it came the jocular correction, “Woodley”—might force him into a race against his will. Today that danger was at its most acute. But there were always dodges to evade the clash…
His mind was wandering. As far as the ridiculous idea that, if the Nonpareil had not been two berths distant, he would already have started issuing orders to throw cargo back on the wharf, transfer passengers to other steamers—
Oh, no! That smacked of insanity! And insanity was the due of those who did not resist their animal instincts, but yielded to them, like Jacob!
Determinedly he heaved himself up. Replacing the volume of poetry, he took down the Bible Elphin had given him as a Christmas present the year he decided to study for the ministry. Not surprisingly his own gift to the boy had also been a Bible; his, however, had been much less ornate. Over that, there had been some malicious laughing and joking in the family—
Why, this mind of his was becoming as fractious as a steamer in shoal water with a fast current! He heaved a deep sigh, as though hauling on a rope attached to some enormous weight, and let the book fall open on the bed, closing his eyes and stabbing down with one finger. Consciously he regarded this practice as superstitious; nonetheless he retained a degree of credulity, which it solaced. He performed the ritual only at crises.
Haste caused him to catch the corner of several pages and double them over. He opened his eyes in fury to a crumple of confusion somewhere in II Chronicles, a list of town names as forgotten as Dunbar’s fellow poets.
An oath half-restrained accompanied his mastery of the impulse to fling the Bible on the floor and stam
p on it. He restored it to its usual place and stormed out, deciding to carry on with his regular round of inspection so as to distract himself from the hateful thoughts now infesting his brain.
Suddenly on the wharf: the clatter of a carriage approaching at high speed. It was forced to brake. Its horse neighed and whinnied. There were cries—insults and curses. And then a familiar voice was heard, at its loudest and between cupped hand:
“Hosea! Hosea Drew!”
Descending from the pilothouse, heading for the clerks’ office where at about this time before departure it was his custom to receive reports from the Atchafalaya’s officers, Drew started and glanced around.
“Barber?” he breathed.
Above him on the steps Fernand likewise reacted, and from the window of the pilothouse Tyburn stared out. The three had been agreeing the watch roster for the trip; they all preferred to change the order each time so as to refresh their acquaintance with every part of the river.
Balked in its progress by confused heaps of goods, the carriage halted. Two men climbed down, one Barber, the other familiar to both Drew and Fernand, though neither could put a name to him as yet.
At the foot of the boat’s stage stood watchman Eli Gross. Recognizing Barber, he ushered him and his companion aboard. By the time they reached the deck Drew, Fernand, and first mate Tom Chalker were there to greet them, the latter by coincidence, for he had only been intending to deliver Drew a message.
“Hosea!” Barber rapped. “You’ll have to cancel the trip to Louisville! There’s another emergency at St. Louis! You remember meeting Dr. Cherouen at my place, the night of Mardi Gras?”
The doctor stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Captain, we weren’t introduced on that occasion, but when I learned who you were, I regretted missing the opportunity.”
Perfunctorily shaking hands, Drew looked at Barber. “What do you mean, ‘have to cancel’ my trip? You don’t exercise any right of command, remember!”
Wheezing and puffing as ever, Tyburn had by now clambered down from the pilothouse. At almost the same moment Wills came from the office to see what was delaying the captain. On spotting Barber, he stepped back long enough to tell his senior partner Motley to come with him.
“Do you always have to snap like that?” Barber countered. “I told you there’s an emergency. Doctor, show the captain your telegram from Mrs. Grammont.”
Cherouen produced it with a flourish. “Exactly as I predicted!” he exclaimed. “Adhering as he does to the nonsensical germ theory, the doctor from Paris has failed. It may well be too late to call me in now, but I’m resolved to do my utmost.”
Engaged in conversation, caterer Ernest Vehm and steward Lewis Amboy, who was due to retire after this season, approached along the main deck. Vehm was the only person on board who owed a direct debt to Barber, except for Drew. When the Atchafalaya was first commissioned, Barber had given her two of his best cooks, several waiters, and a selection of the Limousin’s finest wines and liquors. Consequently Vehm’s eyes lit up as soon as he noticed Barber, and he hastened forward—only to register, a moment later, that he would do better not to interrupt.
Having taken in the telegram with the sweeping glance he used to sum up a report posted at the Pilots’ Guild, Drew handed it back.
“Convenient!” he said, and with a thumb over his shoulder indicated what he meant: the Nonpareil.
It took a while for Cherouen to grasp the significance of that gesture. In the interim more of the officers joined the group. Ealing had as usual been checking the wheels with Walt Presslie, who was considerably changed from the gangling tow-haired boy Fernand had first seen, for hard work and good steamboat food had turned him into a husky young man capable of wrestling reversing rods single-handed. Josh Diamond had been working with them and also arrived to report. Jack Sexton hovered in the background; he had recruited a dozen black deckhands whom Motley had to enter in the payroll. These too formed an audience.
Such was the attention concentrated on the two steamers that the appearance of Barber and Cherouen had created a great stir along the nearby waterfront. This further departure from routine sufficed to bring most work to a halt, regardless of the threats of overseers. The boat separating the rivals was the much smaller Lydia King, which both overtopped by the height of their hurricane decks; within a matter of minutes officers and crew aboard the Nonpareil were seen gathering with telescopes and field glasses, and some optimists on shore ran that way, hoping for a few cents’ tip for bringing news to her.
Then the circuit closed in Cherouen’s mind, and he took half a step towards Drew, lifting his fist. Reflexively the captain raised his heavy stick. The blow aborted.
Not so the blistering words.
“You think I faked this?” the doctor roared.
“Did I say that?” Drew retorted.
Just at that point Fonck and O’Dowd emerged, dirty, red-eyed, blinking at the sun, along with the black gang leader of the firemen, who would look over the new deckhands and pick the strongest to shovel coal.
Without planning, Drew found himself standing before a tribunal of his personnel.
And a phrase from Elphin’s letter kept revolving and revolving in his mind: “The Lord willing, Mother will be of sound health when you return to this city. But at the present…”
Temptation? Common sense? His brain felt like a whirlpool. A decision lay within his grasp which was so utterly unlike any other he had ever made that it frightened him. Moreover it contradicted a pledge made to himself long, long ago…
And was he now the same person? Would he be breaking an oath or acknowledging a simple truth?
Muddled, inchoate, like the spring floodwaters of the Mississippi, his thoughts raged and roared and swirled and he stood mute.
Events from his past flashed into consciousness, along with apt lines of verse such as he had made his mottos for a while before finding something yet more striking and suitable. For years he had been unable to think back to his youth dispassionately. The betrayal he had felt when marvelous brilliant Jacob went insane had cut so deep into his soul, he was afraid to remember the pleasure and excitement he had had as a boy from ideas that Jacob sparked in his mind.
And yet there was no way he could have known Jacob would rot at the core!
Just prior to his record St. Louis run, he had come on a recent poem by Mr. Emerson, and the image of turning down a Louisville trip in favor of one to the city where, if ever he retired and sank roots on land, he would most likely settle, shone at him from its first verse:
Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river-ark on the ocean brine,
Long I’ve been tossed like the driven foam;
But now, proud world! I’m going home.
Had not someone once said of him—he knew not who, but the phrase had currency enough to reach him at several removes—“Hosea Drew seems set on managing without friends”?
But there was one person beloved in his life.
And once a man in a buggy had struck at him with a whip.
And Ed Marocain’s unworthy heirs were hoping to see the Nonpareil take the horns for the St. Louis run.
And there was a foreign financier whose ideas of initiating a boy not much younger than Fernand into the world of manhood was to get him disgustingly drunk in a public place.
And there was a man who, having lost his sight in a battle between kinsmen, thereafter hated anyone who had dismissed the war for what it was before it started: a pointless bloodbath over quarrels time would mend.
And there was a man right in front of him who owned half of what he himself had made possible, and beside him another who perhaps might possess the power to heal, to cure, to vitalize…
And there was one person beloved in his life.
The silence grew. With a shock of horror Drew became aware that not only those immediately ab
out him, but countless hundreds of onlookers, were hanging on his words.
He found none. His throat was far too dry for speech.
Then, blessedly, blunt Dutch Fonck stepped forward and demanded, “What the hell goes on?”
The words unlocked Drew’s tongue, and with it the rest of his frame. He was able to set down his staff, lean on it, and gaze frostily at the doctor.
“Mr. Barber, whom you all know,” he declaimed in the kind of voice he ordinarily reserved for a night of gales, “wants us to dump the cargo and passengers we’ve taken on for Louisville and make another fast run to St. Louis.”
His eyes shifted briefly to Barber, then fixed on Motley and Wills as though to counter some imagined objection.
“This is the Electric Doctor that you’ve heard about, I’m sure. The cost of taking him to St. Louis the same way we took the doctor from France is underwritten by the Grammonts—if we’re to credit the telegram Dr. Cherouen showed me.”
On the verge of eruption, Cherouen thought better of it. Partly he was distracted by the arrival of Jones and Cuffy; they had been occupied in parking Barber’s carriage, and there was precious little space to spare within a hundred yards of the waterfront.
“But,” Drew went on, “the message doesn’t order him to come by the same boat Dr. Larzenac took, only by the fastest boat. Right over there”—flinging up his stick to point—“lies a steamer advertised for St. Louis, and her master claims she can outrun ours. Dr. Cherouen, why didn’t you apply at once to Captain Woodley?”
Ever so slightly, he stressed the last word but one. A chuckle rewarded his veiled gibe, echoed by several of his listeners, while on the fringe of the group the uncertain black recruits felt it advisable to join in. Glancing around to see where the laughter had taken its rise, Drew noticed that David Grant had stolen out of the office without permission and was eavesdropping.