by John Brunner
“I’ll get down and find out,” Woodley said hastily. But he could not forbear to check on the threshold and glance back with a snarling final gibe.
“If it takes too long to fix the trouble, don’t blame me! I never wanted to hire a cripple as our carpenter, give him a free ride into old age!”
Parbury’s face turned perfectly white and he raised his cane and would have struck out by sound alone, only the slam of the door and the clatter of Woodley’s boots on the steps came even quicker than the intended blow.
Hogan said after a while, “We’ve been ill-wished. Short of being drunk or mad, I don’t know how I could have overlooked the risk of drift along this reach. Even when I saw him put his helm over to larboard, I didn’t realize he was kicking the damned stuff our way so our wheels would suck it in!”
The admission had the grudging tone of a sinner making confession, not because he planned to, but because he had bumped into a priest and been persuaded.
“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?” Parbury said.
“Sure I am!”
“So’s my wife!” And without further ado he followed Woodley down the stairs.
It was no secret that Hiram Burge, ever since he had been blown up with Parbury on the old Nonpareil, was less than prompt about responding to emergencies. Not he, therefore, but Underwood and Whitworth went bellowing to summon every available hand.
One black man, whose name Whitworth did not know, was nimbler than all the rest and was already peering through a breach in the paddlebox when the second mate arrived. He looked carefully at the tangle of broken branches and dying greenery that had jammed the wheel, then, with a ceremonial air, took from around his neck something hung to a leather thong and pitched it into the water, and after it sent an insulting gob of spittle. Then, and only then, did he yell his report.
“Bucket’s okay! We just strip her and she’ll roll again!”
Whereupon men swarmed down with hatchets and knives and their bare hands and ripped and slashed until the drift was cleared.
But by then the current had carried the Nonpareil a long way back down the Grand Cutoff, while the Atchafalaya was rounding Blues Point and making for Buck Island, her lead once again increased to a safe half hour.
Gordon had been looking all over the boat for Whitworth since before the cutoff; he had failed to locate him, because he was dozing in a corner of the hold. When he did need to sleep, he needed it without interruption, and anyone might find him in his stateroom.
Coming upon him now, as the wheel was finally freed from broken branches, Gordon seized his arm and drew him aside.
“You take the train at Memphis tonight!” he whispered. “Your business is to delay the Luke S. Thrale!”
“What?”
“The Thrale is to take on Drew’s passengers for Louisville. You’re to contact her skipper and ensure she doesn’t make the rendezvous!”
And Gordon accompanied that with a monstrous wink.
Whitworth gazed up the reach, seeing how far away the smoke from the Atchafalaya was now. Slowly nodding, he said, “So the deal is on.”
“Yes! But remember: twenty per cent if I figured out how to explain your disappearance! And I did!”
Whitworth shrugged. “If I need more, I only have to remind you I can talk about our arrangement. But the way you lay out your money, I reckon twenty per cent could keep me in comfort for a good long time. I’ll go find a pine log the right size to hide you know what. I just hope they didn’t burn them all.”
Emerging from the heat and stench of the engineroom, Caesar rubbed his sore eyes and looked about him. In order to free the jammed willow, they had had to unship part of the paddlebox. A group of passengers watched the work, leaning over the boiler-deck rail a few feet above where he stood. Among them—
Totally without intention he called out, “Mam’zelle Josephine!”
She started, putting her hand to her mouth. An expression of terror crossed her face.
“You are mistaken!” she said after a pause. Which made Caesar absolutely certain he was not. Wanting very much indeed to view from close up this mysterious person who had created his trickenbag, he glanced around and spotted a way he might clamber onto the intact upper portion of the paddlebox. Up he went and was on a level with her, while two or three of the firemen, who had also come out on the guards for air, moved close, staring.
“It’s true my name is Josephine! It’s true I’m unmarried! What is it to you? You speak as though you know me, but I swear you don’t!”
The other passengers leaning over the rail looked puzzled and muttered among themselves.
“No, I don’t know you,” Caesar said. “But I know who you are, and so do plenty of other people!”
She might simply have spun around and marched away; he would not have dared follow her to the upper deck. But she seemed transfixed, like a trapped doe confronted by a hound.
“I had a trickenbag from you! The moment I came aboard, it fell off my neck!”
A gust of excitement rose from the firemen. One of them demanded, “What yoh doin’ for de Nonpareil?”
“I bet mah las’ red cent on um!” came another accusing shout.
“So did I!” The chorus swelled as more of the firemen and deckhands appeared.
Josephine began to sway, clutching the rail for support.
“Now what’s all this?” inquired a high voice, and Auberon arrived, his cheeks more flushed than ever, his eyes brighter, his hands more eloquent in the air. He laid one comfortingly on Josephine’s shoulder. “Don’t you men have work to do? You!” He shot out his other arm. “Aren’t you Caesar, whom my cousin brought aboard to replace the drunken engineer?”
Caesar gave a sour nod.
“Then get about your business! You’re not the only people who’ve laid bets on the Nonpareil—just the only ones who think a race can be won with charms and incantations instead of planning and hard work!”
“If you were in the engineroom,” Caesar countered, “you’d never dare say we weren’t working hard!”
“What was that?” Auberon dropped his hand from Josephine’s shoulder.
“You heard me!” Caesar snapped, and a cry of approval sprang from a dozen mouths. “And I didn’t bet anything on the Nonpareil ‘cause I don’t have anything to bet! I just want to go home saying I was on the winning boat and not the loser!”
Auberon licked his lips, dismayed. He was unused to having blacks talk back to him. He tried another tack.
“If you want to help her along, what are you doing out here?”
“Did we run the boat foul of all that drift? And shan’t we breathe sweet air while what’s the pilot’s fault is set to rights?”
“You’re apt to start a mutiny if you go on.”
The words came flat and penetrating from Josephine. Auberon glanced at her in dismay.
“Best leave such talk to the officers,” she continued. “If I were one of these men, I wouldn’t stand to hear a passenger talk to me that way! You’re not appointed to rule the world, you know! I swear by heaven you make me ashamed of our connection! Thank God our cousin is a decent man!”
Auberon, face dark with fury, had been about to slap her the way he would have slapped any uppity female slave in the days “befohdewoh.” Her concluding words checked him in mid-movement, giving her time to round on Caesar and his companions.
“I surely do not know why you think you know who I am!” she shouted. “When this here is my own half-brother and he doesn’t know me! So leave me alone, will you? I’m not the Josephine you think I am!”
“But if that’s so, Mam’zelle,” Caesar countered, “how do you know what Josephine we’re thinking of? It ain’t no white folks’ business!”
At which precise instant the roar went up: “She’s coming clear!”
“Back to work!” Caesar rapped, turning to slither down the paddlebox. “If she won’t help us win the race, we got to do it by ourselves!”
Auberon ha
d been about to stride away, enraged. But Josephine’s face crumpled like wet paper and she began to sob. Pity overcame anger; he took her by the arm and led her away, uttering vague words of comfort, as the Nonpareil began her second traverse of Grand Cutoff.
A moment later they were accosted by Joel.
“Ah, there you are! I thought for one awful minute Arthur had cornered you and staged a confrontation… Hey, what’s wrong?”
“You didn’t tell me,” Auberon said, gazing venomously over Josephine’s shoulder.
“Tell you what?”
“You know damned well what! You let me make a fool of myself in front of a bunch of coons!”
“I did what?”
“Oh, the devil with you!” Auberon put his arm around Josephine’s shoulders and urged her away. “Come, my dear! It seems we have both been cast out; we should console one another.”
And as they passed Joel, who was still staring blankly, he concluded, “Knowing how much I care for Louisette, were you afraid I might care equally for my other sister, whom neither she nor I had been told about?”
Joel stood there for a long while, mind in turmoil. Finally he remembered that he had another dispatch to draft, to take ashore at Memphis, that unwholesome city.
Auberon would no doubt calm down. But it would be useless reasoning with him in his present mood. He regretted having uttered that meant-to-be joke about Arthur. His cousin-in-law was drunk and snoring in a corner of the cabin. Privately he gave thanks for the fact.
For the first time he began to appreciate in his guts what it must have been like during the war for families that were divided along lines of conscience to the point where one branch—or even one brother—might take up arms against another.
As Whitworth was heading in search of a pine log he might hollow out enough to conceal explosive, he chanced upon the black man who had been first at the wheelhouse to inspect the damage.
Checking him, he said, “I saw you throw something in the river!”
For a second the other seemed inclined not to make sense of the remark; Whitworth amplified, “Took it off your neck and spat after it!”
The man’s face twisted as though he had sunk his teeth in an apple and found it both sour and maggoty. He said, “Till I come on dishyear trip I b’lieved Mam’zelle Josephine was on de culluhd folks’ side!”
And he was gone about his work.
The racing boats turned north in the dying light of Saturday. Mile by mile it was growing less credible that this was a contest between humans. In a desolation of water relieved only by sparse and random settlements, transient as any on the river because hereabouts the Mississippi gnawed at dry land like a wolf gobbling the carcass of a deer, the Atchafalaya and the Nonpareil resumed their thrust-and-parry as though they were a pair of fantastic duelists condemned by a supernatural power to strive until at least the magic number of three nights and days had worn away.
And after that would come the resolution of the fray.
Delayed by the excitement, supper was eventually served in the Nonpareil’s cabin. There were more staff than customers; it was curious to see this immensely long room emptier than at any time since the maiden voyage. In spite of being under far less pressure than usual, Katzmann’s cooks made a dismal showing, as though a universal despondency had overtaken the food as well.
Nonetheless some people maintained the fiction of dining in a floating hotel, calling on Bates’s finest wines and liquors. Urged on by Hugo and Stella, Arthur roused himself and came to table to pick at what was set before him, his face a glum mask. He spoke little, and what he did say indicated that by now he was thoroughly ashamed of himself. Alcoholic depression had him in its grip. Sometimes he talked of cabling home from Memphis; sometimes of leaving the boat there and returning to New Orleans by train.
But mostly he confined his replies to grunts and monosyllables, eating scarcely anything and drinking much wine.
A trace of animation did appear in his face when he noticed Auberon escorting Josephine up the cabin from the far end, to seat her solicitously at a nearby table for four thus far unoccupied. When his cousin looked directly at him, though, and drew back his lips in a wolfish grin, Arthur only muttered something incomprehensible and returned to his meal.
Late, the band began to play. Despite Manuel’s best efforts, however, the musicians kept falling back into slow tempi and sad keys. Like so many others of the crew, they had bet heavily on the Nonpareil’s victory, and with every setback it seemed more and more probable that the race was effectively lost.
If the faster boat could not overtake the slower in a dead-straight cutoff, what hope was left?
Entering when most of the other passengers had reached their dessert course, Joel glanced about him and responded—reluctantly—to a beckoning invitation from Auberon.
Dropping into a chair placed for him by an attentive waiter, he said, “I thought you and I weren’t on speaking terms! And I also thought you should be in bed!”
“I have tried to tell him,” Josephine sighed. “But he’s determined to burn both ends of his candle.”
“And why not?” Auberon spread his hands. “I didn’t want everybody to know, old fellow! That’s what I chiefly hold against Arthur—apart from his foul treatment of Loose: the fact that he made my affliction public!” He gulped a mouthful from the glass before him; it held champagne.
Leaning forward, he went on confidentially, “Also I’m sorry I snapped at you. You’re as good a friend as I have in the world, and—and… well, introducing me at long last to Josephine was a welcome act, even if you did leave me to find out who she was. And even if she thinks that I ought instantly to turn into a whining invalid, assailed with stinks and smokes from carbolic balls and God knows what else, fed on a diet only fit for babies, in spite of all that, I’m obliged! You won’t do the same, will you? You won’t say that this damned illness has to make me old before my time? I want to use what time I have left—use it to the full!”
That final outburst might have been overheard by half the people present, except that—in a vain effort to rouse their spirits—Manuel whipped his band into a fortissimo. Joel suddenly felt his eyes fill with tears.
What would he choose to do if he knew tuberculosis had doomed him to an early death? It made all kinds of sense, Auberon’s attitude. Had not tens of thousands of men and boys died in the war without being given a chance to say yea or nay? It seemed nobler to make one’s own decision instead of leaving it either to some anonymous general or to the insidious progress of a disease.
He was ill-accustomed to speaking of such deep matters; while he was still hesitating over a reply, Auberon had to stifle a cough in his napkin. Though he folded it rapidly after wiping his mouth, Joel caught sight of a trace of red on the cloth. He turned to Josephine.
“When Arthur hit him, it caused real harm, didn’t it?”
She gave a sober nod. “If he would behave like a normal patient, I’d have him in bed right now. Only rest can help him.”
A speculative look came and went on Auberon’s face. But he commented lightly, “Why, you’d not deprive me of my chance to go out in a blaze of glory, would you? When we reach St. Louis, if Arthur is still aboard, I’ll take pleasure in making my sister a widow… or letting Arthur turn me off, if he can. Wouldn’t it make the greatest climax to your series of dispatches if you could report that duel on the foredeck which we were talking about?”
“It might,” Joel said curtly as the waiter delivered to him a charred steak and some dismal-looking vegetables. “But I wouldn’t be here to report it.”
“What?” Auberon tensed.
“I’m leaving this tub at Memphis. Going on by rail to Cairo. After what happened this evening, I don’t believe we have a snowball’s chance in Hades.”
And thrust a wedge of meat into his mouth and chewed busily.
After a long pause Auberon said, “Then I might as well fix that duel and hope to come off worse.”
Joel checked in mid-movement. Having swallowed, he said, “You can’t be serious!”
“Why not? Every cent I have is backing the Nonpareil. I looked forward to spending my enormous profits during my last few years on earth.”
“You just cling to that idea of years!” Josephine said in a tone of sharp reproach.
“That’s right!” Joel agreed. “Besides, a lot of bets are going to be declared void because of what Drew’s been getting up to. The tricks he’s pulled can’t be called fair, can they?”
“The world is under no obligation to be fair to anyone,” Auberon said, and with a sudden shift of mood gave precisely the kind of boyish grin he had exploited during childhood to escape a scolding. “Yes, I guess I can take the cheap way out if I must, though I hate the notion… Change the subject! I propose a toast!”
Reaching for his glass again, he raised it high.
“May my newly discovered sister become a more beloved member of our family than my loathsome brother-in-law!”
Whereupon he completely ruined the effect by adding, “Well, when I go, someone will have to take my place in your hearts, because I’m bound to be sorely missed, n’est-ce pas?”
Out on deck with the rest of the black crew, Caesar was finally tucking into his much belated supper. He had no idea what kind of meal the white engineers were being given, but if there was one advantage this job had over any other he had ever taken on, it was in the quality of the food, so he doubted whether what they were getting could be half as good as this: black-eyed peas stewed with plenty of onions and great chunks of ham floating in the pot liquor, fresh cornbread, and as much hot sauce as you wanted to spice it with.
Even if he had to put up with a dozen of Steeples’s kind, he decided as he wiped round his pan with the last of the bread, it could be worth it to feel his belly so well and warmly lined twice every day.
Maybe this was what he had been assured by Mam’zelle Josephine’s expensive trickenbag. Maybe this kind of thing represented the limit of her power, while machinery, including steamboats, was beyond her reach, because it was white folks’ business. Maybe she should be forgiven for her failure.