by John Brunner
Enough of this brooding. It was leading nowhere. He turned toward the pilothouse stairs, offering himself the excuse that he was too overwrought to sleep.
The darkness of the pilothouse was eerie. Faint by way of the bell tube under the breastboard came a ghostly echo of the racket in the engineroom.
Fernand was at the wheel. At one end of the bench behind him, carefully sited so that no glow would reflect off the window, Tyburn was smoking a meditative last cigar before snatching some rest.
Both of them glanced around on Drew’s entrance, but neither spoke until he had walked to the window, gazed for a moment at the Nonpareil, and joined Tyburn on the bench. Then the latter said, “She’s a flash boat. But she won’t make it.”
Drew glanced sharply sidelong. “What makes you say so? Long as she has this much of a lead—”
“She won’t keep it,” Fernand cut in, making a minuscule adjustment to the Atchafalaya’s heading. A tall cottonwood had come up on the skyline, which this year for the first time slanted enough to serve as a mark.
“Why not?”
“She’s swinging overwide in the bends.”
“That’s so,” Tyburn confirmed. “In principle she ought to have the legs of us. But even without Walt, since nightfall every bend is giving us… not much, but a yard or two.”
Drew gave a satisfied nod. “So where would you expect to try and pass?”
Fernand and Tyburn exchanged glances. “We were talking about that,” said the latter. “Figured we might try the reach north of Ellis Cliffs, up towards Como Landing. If not there, then any other place where she’s too light to be manageable. Directly before a coaling stop would be ideal.”
Drew thought that over and said at length, “I guess you have a fair point. We’ll try it, anyhow… But here’s a question, Fernand. How long have you been up here, that you’ve talked it out? I’d have expected you to stay below with your—womenfolk.”
One could almost sense the heat in Fernand’s cheeks as he worried over his best answer.
“Captain, you should think yourself lucky! With both of them on board, I’d never dare make a mistake—now would I?”
Tyburn burst into a full-scale laugh, and after a moment Drew so far relented as to accord the joke a chuckle.
Much relief showed in Fernand’s voice as he concluded, “No scandal, sir, I promise you, will mar this trip.”
“Scandal?” Drew snorted. “Long’s you marry the girl before it starts to show, I don’t give a damn! I’m more concerned about disputes and disagreements which might affect my junior pilot’s concentration. How’s your mother getting on with your intended?”
“I was telling Ketch,” Fernand said after a brief hesitation. “Swimmingly. It’s hard to believe, but… We ate supper together. They were like old friends.”
“Like is not the same as being,” Drew said heavily. “But I hope you’re right… Say, don’t I see a boat coming down? Who can she be at this time?”
It was a gentle probe of Fernand’s competence, such as he had often used when the latter was still his cub. Sighing, Fernand answered, “She’ll be the Treasure Chest, most likely. Unless of course she’s the Dinah Shine ahead of schedule.”
“Or another goddamn’ coal tow!” Tyburn grunted.
“I surely hope not! When towboats start to run by night…!” Fernand spat at the cuspidor, accurately despite the darkness.
“How are things below?” he added, making a pointed effort to change the subject.
“Oh!” Drew sighed. “The passengers we don’t care about are finding out that a steamboat race is dull and lengthy. I mean the ones who came aboard at the last minute to watch over the money they’ve bet. Some are beginning to imagine we’re doing less than our best; I have my eye on a couple who are drinking a lot and arguing even more. A few are complaining that they chose the wrong boat, naturally.”
“Cherouen?” inquired Tyburn.
“Gave over when Barber got him drunk enough. I—”
Fernand seized the binoculars that reposed on a ledge close at hand and peered at the oncoming steamer.
“I’ll be damned! She is the Dinah Shine! Never tell me the Treasure Chest is grounded!”
Tyburn made to say something but thought better of it. It was not the first time he and Drew had sat like this and waited to see what Fernand would do. Long ago, he recalled, he had disliked Drew. Then, watching what a transformation he was working in his cub, he had realized there was much of the man beneath the surface.
Like the Mississippi.
Here the river was curving around in a huge shallow arc, traced anew by last winter’s floods. Somewhere in the waste of water, which pilots learned by day and had to remember by night when riffles on the surface were invisible and only silhouetted trees and rocks and nearby rises in the ground could serve as clues, there was a deep safe channel.
Even by day the route of the Nonpareil would have confused anybody following her, the wake interacting with the natural flow of the current. It was consequently of some importance that the correct side be chosen to pass the Dinah Shine.
Half a minute slipped away; a minute, while neither of the older men commented and Fernand simply steadied the wheel with one hand and the glasses with the other.
Then finally, with an air of decision, he set by the glasses and reached for the whistle lever.
One!
Drew and Tyburn relaxed. That was exactly what either of them would have done in the same situation. Working down with the current, the Dinah Shine was less controllable. Passing starboard to starboard meant that in this bend, where Donaldsonville was fading astern and there would be no further clear marks until past Dominguez Landing, up around the Louisiana Institute, the upstream boat would benefit from deeper water.
But almost instantly there came a challenge: two short blasts on the other whistle.
They tensed. Drew said, “What in heaven’s name—?”
Tyburn broke in. “Ain’t he standing off to east’ard like he means to tie up?”
The clues that led him to this, vague and subtle as the undeveloped image on a photographic plate, would have been impossible to explain in words to anyone who had not been long in the profession.
“No,” Drew said softly. “He’s just giving us room. I wonder if he did the same for Woodley.”
“I guess,” Fernand said cynically, “it’s more for the benefit of his passengers than either him or us.”
He released half a dozen brief notes as though scrabbling over a message inscribed in sand, then made plain his agreement with the other pilot’s proposal: two whistles loud and stately.
At once the Shine repeated her signal and laid off into the shallower water. She was a fine sight in the clear night air. Many of her lights were still burning; people could be discerned waving from her, and strains of irregular music drifted across the water as though a scratch band and a group of drunken passengers had decided on separate melodies.
Hereabouts, also, there were people on the bank who had stayed up to watch. A couple of dying fires gleamed dimly red, each surrounded by a group of sleepy young men. This would almost certainly continue clear up the river by day and night. Steamers were commonplace enough, but racing steamers were worth weariness to see.
Such onlookers, though, would grow more scattered as the voyage progressed. Already the trees were dense; the Nonpareil was hidden behind a stand of cottonwoods, her location marked only by the glow on the underside of her smoke plume. Farther up, landings would be isolated, miles apart, the loneliness being almost hurtful to travelers accustomed to cities. There was a saying that summed it all up: “Wait till you get beyond Baton Rouge. There’s an awful lot of nothing up there…”
Yet to those who understood it, as Drew sometimes explained to his sister-in-law and nephews, the Mississippi itself was company of a sort: better company, he would say, than a horse to someone riding range. (The younger boys were indulgently permitted to buy dime novels, most of them f
eaturing real-life heroes in impossible adventures, fighting outlaws or Indians and miraculously escaping certain death in every other chapter.)
By every wave and ripple the river spoke to those who knew how to listen.
The Dinah Shine dwindled astern as Fernand laid the boat into her marks for the next bend, and as the last few passengers retired and even the most sleepless of the deckhands ceased their quiet singing, Tyburn doused his cigar and stretched, rising.
“See you at change of watch,” he said, clapping Fernand on the shoulder. “ ‘Night, Captain.”
Elsewhere they had long been “Ketch” and “Hosea”; never, though, in the pilothouse.
Drew grunted by way of answer. Then, for a little while when they were alone, he spoke to Fernand somewhat in the manner of a father. What he said made the younger man’s ears burn. Then he left him alone, having delivered a final compliment to salve his wounds.
At some point around midnight Fernand said to the air, “Damn, but it’s a shame the old man don’t have kids. I guess that accounts for a lot of what he’s doing these days. Well, he had the chance, and…”
After which he thought a lot about marriage, and how much easier it had been made in prospect by his mother’s amazing reaction to Dorcas.
Thus reminded of Eulalie, he fished out the silver crucifix she had given him and set it on the ledge beside the fieldglasses. After which, as though rid of a burden, he stopped dreaming about the future and concentrated on eroding the Nonpareil’s lead.
And now this did begin to look like a race between steamers instead of human beings. Both boats were almost wholly in darkness, save for smears of red when furnace doors were opened for more fuel—less often than by day, for even with the best and keenest pilots it was hazardous to run at night. Indeed, within a generation’s memory it had been unthinkable except when the moon was within a day or two of full. Then the habit was for the pilot to instruct the captain, “We shall tie up here till sunrise, sir.” And the command was resignedly obeyed.
Progress had changed that, as it had changed many things. But the steamers remained: vast, purposeful, announcing their presence with roars and hisses. From the distance of the banks it was impossible to detect the people on board; the great machines seemed to be acting of their own volition.
Now and then they passed other vessels adhering to the older tradition: here a smaller steamer engaged in the way-landing trade, delivering coffee and nails and gunpowder to such private jetties as Parbury had known in childhood, never aspiring to ascend beyond Baton Rouge or at farthest Natchez; there a towboat that had sidled its monstrous clutch of barges into the shallows, grounding them securely until dawn; then again something rarely seen so far south, one of the last of the timber rafts that long ago had composed much of the traffic on the Mississippi, with a sort of hut at the stern to shelter her crew and a great sweep for steering—this too laid up overnight, and indeed having no business on the bustling modern river. Such rafts were now generally broken up at Natchez, but likely the lumber it was made of had been contracted for by a New Orleans builder cutting the meat on his client’s contract to the bone.
Once or twice their wake disturbed alligators. By day this would have been a signal for half a dozen gentlemen to fetch rifles and start shooting; now it was a mere distraction for a handful of insomniacs and the men on watch.
Also they startled birds: wild turkeys on a sandbar made a machinelike rushing sound with their wings as they rose blindly into the night, and occasionally owls complained at this intrusion into their domain of darkness.
But any boat running at night might have the same impact. It was to people that the passage of this pair was exceptional.
Here the Mississippi twisted and writhed. Leaving behind Claybourne Island and the Louisiana Institute, five and a half hours after departure the steamers were heading due west. Six hours after, they were heading north, passing the mouth of Bayou Goula to larboard; almost immediately after that they were heading east, using St. Gabriel’s as a marker but not relying on it wholly, for the channel shifted deceitfully hereabouts. Once or twice the Nonpareil slowed almost to walking pace, and Trumbull feared he might have to send out leadsmen, but the risk passed and he was able to lay her into the reach above the hundred-mile mark, bow slanting toward Plaquemine in the narrow but clear channel between the bank and the pair of islands that every year grew larger and would eventually create a cutoff, shortening the river and leaving an oxbow lake and perhaps isolating Plaquemine from the outside world. It had happened to many other ambitious towns.
The hundred-mile mark was reached at about six and a quarter hours from New Orleans: better by several minutes than the time set by the Atchafalaya last month. About then Parbury came up to the pilothouse, enough recovered from the drink he had taken to inquire about their speed and exclaim with satisfaction at what he heard. Miraculously he seemed to have forgotten about Dorcas for the time being.
Shortly, though, he dozed off again and snored away the reach dictated by the long and treacherous sandbars opposite the mouth of Bayou Jacob, where steamers were obliged to turn through almost 180 degrees and head east again, lining up now on Manchac, with due care for the silt washing out of Bayou Iberville. The pilots knew these bayous better by their appearance than by their names. Often the local people had names that appeared on no map or chart; often the names on maps were unknown to the settlers.
Astern, sometimes masked for a while by trees, the Atchafalaya made her solemn way upstream. Perhaps it was the lack of the special cutwater that so elegantly provided the Nonpareil with her moving fountain; perhaps it was the deeper note of her engines, or her broader beam and marginally shorter waterline… but she looked the more purposeful of the two, as though a heavy-shouldered hound were on the trail of a deer.
Yet, if the order had been reversed, the pursuer might have brought to mind a mountain lion unhurriedly wearing down a stockier prey: an aging plough horse?
Bruly Landing loomed ahead on the west bank. It was time to change watches; another four hours had passed, and both boats were beating the record. Scarcely three minutes separated them; the distance had opened and closed and opened again, and now there was going to be some chance of a level run in competition, despite the darkness, for upstream of Bruly Landing a northeasterly reach was as straight and as safe as any on the southern Mississippi, to and beyond Baton Rouge.
About midnight the company in the cabin of the Nonpareil dispersed with rash promises to rise in time to watch the dawn. Joel was enormously relieved. He himself had no bed to go to; Graves’s advance had been meant to cover the cost of a stateroom, but he preferred to husband the money, knowing that he would have to be up at all hours if he was to ensure that his reports were sent ashore at the proper times. Right now, specifically, he must prepare an account of the first day of the race to be telegraphed from Baton Rouge, where a launch was supposed to collect it. Under a flaring lamp, with the liquid in his inkwell rippling back and forth as the boat breasted sluggish surges, he drafted and blotted and scratched out and rewrote. Plain facts were easy enough to set down: the Nonpareil was in the lead, the Atchafalaya had failed to overtake her, the captain was delighted and his co-owners were overjoyed and all along the banks people were turning out to cheer. So much was simple.
But even as he struggled to fix that on the page, he knew there was something else, deeper, more significant, that he could never define in words—or at least not until he had the chance to recapture emotion in tranquility. That was the sensation of being here, compounded not only of sights and sounds but of vibrations, smells, hoarse orders and maladjusted machinery and food left too long on a galley stove, and the live excitement of passengers and crew.
He achieved a draft that satisfied him tolerably well, and yet it was not right, it was not the whole truth. While he was rereading it for the fourth or fifth time, shortly after one o’clock, he drowsed.
And was awakened scant minutes later by his name being call
ed.
“Joel—I say, Joel!”
Coming to himself with a start and narrowly avoiding knocking over the inkwell, he glanced around. In the dim light of the few lamps which were kept on overnight, he made out his cousin-in-law emerging in a handsome silk robe from the stateroom he shared with Louisette.
“What is it?” Joel said around a yawn.
“Something’s wrong with Loose.”
Instantly he was fully awake.
“I came out to find her maid. I guess she’s been put away somewhere with the other servants. Did you see—?”
But Joel had pushed past him into the stateroom. It was palatial as such accommodation went, better than all except the finest on a transatlantic liner, but it was still like being shut up in a chest.
On the bed, broad enough to serve as a double if the occupants were reasonably slender, Louisette was tossing and turning in her nightgown, the coverlet thrown aside. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open; she breathed in gasps and now and then moaned. A lamp, lit by Arthur before he came out, showed her pale skin shiny with perspiration, and when Joel caught her wrist, he found her touch clammy, her pulse strong but slow.
He whispered her name. Her eyelids rolled back, and on recognizing him she forced a smile.
“Oh, Jewel! I don’t want to be a nuisance! Why don’t you tell Arthur to stop worrying? I guess I ate something that disagreed with me, that’s all.”
“Are you in pain?” he demanded. “Where?”
She gestured vaguely at her belly, and even as she did so her hands folded over and she gasped in renewed agony.
“Abueron has been hinting,” Joel murmured sidelong to Arthur, “that you’ve… well, begun your family.”
Dry-lipped, Arthur nodded.
“And I couldn’t help noticing how excited she was by the race. Sometimes tension—But hell! I’m no expert!”