by John Brunner
Try that with a boat as long and narrow as the Atchafalaya, let alone the Nonpareil, and all you’d do would be to break her back.
Still, a drill survived from the past, and the mates were at once ordering their men to carry it out. Chalker and Sexton’s voices carried clearly to the pilothouse as they mustered polemen and leadsmen, ready to launch the yawl if need be. One of the speaking tubes whistled and Tyburn answered; it was Gross inquiring whether he should have firebaskets readied.
Before Tyburn had made up his mind, the stairs to the pilothouse creaked and the door was flung open. Here was Fernand dragging on his coat because he had been summoned from bed, and—
Well, it might have been foreseen. No way was Hosea Drew going to remain sequestered when the boat had gone aground.
All the windows were now beset with the gray and baffling mass. It was no longer possible to make out the verge staff.
“That’s bad out there!” Fernand exclaimed, having sorted out arms and sleeves well enough to attend to his cravat.
“Save your breath!” Tyburn retorted. “Cap’n, Eli’s asking about fire baskets.”
“Try anything!” was Drew’s crisp response. “And launch the yawl!”
“Yeah, I guess we must,” Tyburn sighed. The speaking tube was wheezing and complaining; he returned to it and repeated the captain’s order.
Shortly there were flaring torches at the bow, and the sound of splashing, which carried clearly now the engines were stopped. Only the faint occasional pulsing of the doctor came up from the engineroom. Everybody aboard, crew and passengers alike, had swarmed to the forward area of the decks, if not otherwise engaged… which was going to make her bow-heavy, Tyburn reflected with annoyance. Shouts came from the polemen, wielding their red-and-white bars.
“One!… And a half!… Quarter less twain!”
At least she was headed into deeper water. Tyburn gave the order to move ahead slow on both. Whistling once a minute, the Atchafalaya made a couple of miles at walking pace. Then:
“ ‘Stern, ‘stern!”
And she touched again, just enough to send a shiver from end to end of the hull.
Backed. Swung. Tried anew. But by now there was not a hint or clue or sign to help her pilot.
“It’s like plodding through a blanket,” Fernand muttered.
“Care to take her, Cap’n?” Tyburn said at last. He pronounced the words with indescribable reluctance; it would be the first time in his career he had ceded the wheel because of fog.
But it was a matter of both courtesy and pride to make the offer.
Drew hesitated a long moment. He wanted so much to keep the Atchafalaya moving!
So, however, did they all. And it was cold, dispassionate professional judgment, due to the fact that ahead still lay those traps of the devil—his Island, his Tea-table, his Bake-oven—which made him say gruffly, “Thank you, Mr. Tyburn, but I never saw such fog in twenty years. You may tie up until it lifts.”
“I wish we might have raised Cape Girardeau, at least,” Fernand sighed, mentioning the next town on the western bank. “Maybe the people there would turn out with lights and skiffs and help us along!”
“We can still hope, I guess,” Drew granted. “They should have heard our whistles. But without that…” He shook his head heavily. “Our sole consolation is that we’re still in the lead, and the fog is moving south, and it’s going to handicap the Nonpareil after it’s blown clear of us.”
Dense as the fog, as clammy, as pervasive, a mood of frustrated anger closed over the Atchafalaya as she nosed into the bank and men jumped ashore to fix cables around the stoutest trees.
They were a thousand and sixty miles from New Orleans. They had thus far made an average exceeding fourteen miles per hour.
And that average was about to be savagely slashed.
The arrival aboard the Nonpareil of Smith and Tacy had created a council of war of a different kind, because the moment they discovered that Barfoot had been engaged at the going rate, they forgot all intention of simply “looking at the river” and lost their tempers. Up in the pilothouse, with Hogan struggling to concentrate amid the gathering dark, yet unwilling to order everyone else out because he wanted to take his part in the argument along with Trumbull, red-eyed and overdue for his next ration of sleep, there was a shouting match: Woodley, Gordon, Parbury, and the pilots.
Among whom Woodley and Gordon were growing more desperate by the minute. They had seen Whitworth come back aboard, and even greeted him, but it had been in public, and they were eager to sound him out privately, to learn whether his gamble had come off. Fully coaled once again, the Nonpareil was making excellent time, drawing so close to her rival that the noise of the Atchafalaya’s engines could be heard from the foredeck. Moreover the Atchafalaya was in shoal water by this time, whereas the Nonpareil was still in a deep channel and would remain so for at least several miles.
Was that regular pounding of pistons going to be replaced abruptly by explosion?
Or—and this was a point that had struck neither of them when authorizing Whitworth to set out by train—might that explosion occur when the Atchafalaya, having gone aground, was struggling to break free… just as the Nonpareil went past?
Those who believed in divine retribution might foresee such an outcome.
Finally Hogan’s patience wore out, and he invited the company to adjourn to the office, as more appropriate to money matters. Grumbling, the others perforce complied, leaving only Parbury to scowl and glower on the leather bench.
The countryside around was eerie in the dusk. Darkling, the hills and rocks acquired an aura of menace unknown to those who lived by land, who might look on the surface only and think how much they could draw up to irrigate a farm. Gordon, a foreigner, saw no deeper; Woodley paid as little attention to such matters as any clerk; but the pilots saw, and knew.
The shape of the world implied a threat.
Therefore, even before they had reassembled in the office, Barfoot flung up a hand and said, “Did you hear that?”
There was a pause. Then Matthew spoke, who had been excluded as ever from the pilothouse, but now was tagging behind Gordon with all appearance of dutifulness. During the voyage he had been surprised at how much one might learn simply by listening.
He said, “It sounded as though the Atchafalaya went aground.”
Preparing to announce that revelation himself, Barfoot stared at him, blinking. At last he said, “By God, young fellow, any time you feel like signing on as a pilot’s cub, you come see me, d’you hear?”
Flattered to the point of blushing, Matthew muttered some incomprehensible answer.
“Damnation, but he’s right,” said Tacy. “Hark at her! She’s going astern!”
“That’s Ketch,” Smith said with assurance. “He’s bringing her back in the channel neat and prompt.”
“You think it’s not Drew, do you?” Trumbull offered doubtfully, and corrected himself at once. “No, that’s Ketch okay!”
His unlooked-for moment in the limelight over, Matthew withdrew into the background again, leaving Gordon and Woodley to stare at each other.
“Grounded?” the latter said at length. “Nothing more?”
“What the hell else do you want?” Trumbull demanded.
But of course neither could reply.
Not that the rest were paying attention. When the interruption occurred, they had been on the point of entering the office; now they all made for the bows.
The off-duty deckhands already gathered there had reacted likewise. The most athletic of them had swarmed up the verge staff to boiler-deck level for a better view. “Seems to me,” he announced loudly, “it ain’t all jes’ reg’lar nightfall up yonder.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Gordon growled. At his side, Matthew supplied the answer.
“Fog, sir. Must be fog that sent the Atchafalaya out of the river.”
“Think you’re smart, don’t you, boy?” Gordon raspe
d.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean!”
“Och, ye ken it weel!” The shift into Scots was as always a sign of fury. “I saw ye preen when Mr. Barfoot praised ye! An’ ye salt what ye speer wi’ this ‘river talk’! Come tae me for a reference when ye quit, an’ ye’ll hae nane!”
Matthew felt his cheeks turn fiery-hot, but his voice was perfectly controlled when he said, “Nonetheless, Mr. Gordon, if you bother to look, you will find I’m right about the fog.”
And added to himself that that had just doubled the fee he was going to demand of Gordon for keeping his secret.
At the foremost edge of its advance the mist blew in ragged ribbons, like the curtains of some great house sacked in the war. The breeze was more stirring the air than moving it, and at first those aboard the Nonpareil dared to hope it might be coming in waves, as sometimes happened, with wide clear intervals between. Under such circumstances one might keep going, albeit at the risk of grounding now and then.
But the increasing darkness made that less and less likely; it showed too dense for an ordinary summer’s night.
Despite which, she kept on for a while. Fire baskets were lighted, leadsmen despatched, the silk banner replaced by a nighthawk, reports shouted up to Hogan at the wheel… All else forgotten, the other pilots, plus Gordon and Woodley, returned to the pilothouse, under strict promise of holding their tongues save when they could offer useful information.
Which indeed both Smith and Tacy could, as: “No, lay her a little more to larboard and hold till you come abreast that broken tree. The channel’s working down this season.” Or, similarly: “That old snag floated free last week and jammed against the eastern bank—you can make a straight run of this reach now.”
All the time Hogan was sounding that piercing-sweet whistle, and the Atchafalaya was answering, until it seemed they were spending more steam on their whistles than their engines.
And then it was the Nonpareil’s turn to touch bottom.
She did so with delicacy, almost with politeness, but it was unmistakable: the soft, slushy, not-quite-abrasive sound as the underside of the hull rubbed on mud. The leadsmen had not been quick enough to utter a warning, so as he backed and eased her Hogan muttered curses on them and their progeny unto the third and fourth generation, then sent a message to tell the mates they must look livelier.
Not that there was much hope for it. By now the nighthawk was invisible from the pilothouse, and he was progressing by feel and memory.
Nonetheless all optimism had not fled, for each time the Atchafalaya whistled the noise was perceptibly louder, indicating that they were closing on her, and even in fog there were places in this part of the river for two boats to pass abreast. There was no need to fear oncoming or overtaken traffic; none but steamers in a race would still be running under such conditions.
Sometimes with Hogan at the wheel, sometimes with Barfoot—always with counsel from Smith and Tacy, who were far too proud of their profession to let any boat they were aboard run needlessly aground—the Nonpareil crept onward, and for a full quarter of an hour followed the channel safely, not so much as hearing mud and gravel scatter under her wheels.
Meantime the whistling from the Atchafalaya ceased.
When it had not been heard for two minutes, Hogan said, “She’s tied up.”
The other pilots nodded confirmation.
“Either she’s run into the blindingest fog that ever was,” Barfoot pronounced, “or Drew is chicken.”
“We can go on,” Hogan muttered, and set about proving it.
Three more minutes, four, five, six—as many hundred yards were accomplished. Then there was a sudden break in the fog of the kind they had all been praying for, and they were able to hurry past Thebes up toward Rock Island and make the swing to larboard at mile 1060.
Then a cruel waft of the breeze blocked out the way again and once more the Nonpareil grounded.
This was too much for Gordon. He exploded.
“Five pilots we got aboard—five! And you still can’t keep her in the channel!”
“I’m glad I didn’t lay out the money for the lot of you!” Woodley chimed in. “It would have gone to waste!”
His face turning perfectly white, Hogan abandoned his embryo response to the emergency, dropping his hand from the backing bell rope. After a frozen pause he said, “Mr. Woodley, we shall tie up here until the fog clears.”
“No!”
That cry came from the heart. Parbury was hauling his long gaunt frame upright.
“No,” he said again. “Give me that wheel, damn you— give me that wheel!”
Striking left and right with his cane, he advanced to precisely the spot he had occupied by invitation on his brainchild’s maiden voyage. Dropping the cane, he put a hand accurately to each of the bell ropes, each of the speaking tubes, not missing a single one. He drew himself up to his full height.
“There are some things a man may be fooled by,” he declared. “A lone black gunner—a slick-tongued foreigner—a wheedling banker—a fawning girl! In my life they’ve all deceived or cheated me! But this I swear on whatever grave my parents found when the waters washed them from their farm: I have kept faith with this river and she with me! Of all the fickle females I have loved, this is the one who cannot lie!”
“He’s gone out of his mind!” whispered Gordon. Hogan turned to him.
“Oh, no,” he said softly. “He’s come to himself again.”
“You’re going to let a blind man steer?”
“In the old days,” Trumbull said, “we used to tell our cubs: Miles Parbury could run a reach blindfold better than they could run it in the midday sun. It’s our only chance. And blind or not, I—”
He hesitated. Barfoot completed the sentence for him.
“Blind or not, I wouldn’t cross him now. He’d kill any man who tried to stop him.”
“Mr. Corkran?”—imperiously to the speaking tube that connected with the engineroom.
“Caesar here, suh!” came the faint reply. And after a brief pause: “Say, aint’ that Captain Parbury?”
“It is indeed! Advise the engineroom that we are going astern directly; then we shall continue in the channel with leadsmen out, with constant call for backing. Be prepared to jump on my order without notice.”
And finished dryly, as he returned the speaking tube to its hook: “You have fire baskets out, I believe. Call them back and douse ‘em. I have no need of them, you know.”
By now the fog was so dense, it had begun to gather in the Atchafalaya’s cabin. From the bar the painted staterooms near the stern were masked by drifting wisps.
Dispirited, and suddenly realizing how incredibly weary they were after the strain and tension of the past two days, and moreover because those acquainted with the ways of the weather declared the fog might clear in half an hour or at worst a few hours, whereupon the steamer would be able to resume her progress, the passengers one by one retired, and the crew seized their chance to snatch some sleep. Cherouen was last to go, grumbling about his ill fortune and the fate of the Grammont child, but even he finally turned in.
When Fernand entered the cabin, following a debate with Drew and Tyburn concerning their best course of action, there was nobody in view save a snoring tender lying full-length behind the bar.
In the distance the Nonpareil’s familiar whistle was continuing… but the three pilots had agreed this could only be because thus far the fog had not grown dense enough to halt her, though she had grounded once already and possibly twice. In a while she too would be obliged to tie up, long before she could draw level.
Abruptly a possibility dawned on Fernand, and he found his pulse racing.
He was fresh right now; had been tired enough to drop off after his last watch and sleep deeply, albeit briefly, without dreams. He did not need to return to bed.
At least, not to his own bed…
Thought turned to action on the instant, and he went striding down the cabin wi
th the lightest paces he could manage, until he arrived at Dorcas’s door. He tapped on it.
“Who is it?”
“Fernand!”
“Oh, my love!” she whispered, and the snick of the catch followed. Then, before the door opened: “Are you sure…?”
“No one’s about, I swear!”
The door swung, and he slipped inside.
She was wearing nothing but his ring, her skin golden in lamplight; she shone, for she had been washing all over with a cloth dipped in water from the laver; on the bed lay a tumble of her daytime clothes and a nightgown ready to be donned. Dropping the washcloth, taking up a towel as he made to embrace her, she warned, “But I’m all wet!”
“I’ll dry you!” he responded, and made a ceremony of it, worshipping each limb in turn and then her torso; most of all, her breasts. At the touch of his hands and lips she moaned and writhed and closed her eyes, and at last pushed away rough cloth and drew him close.
“Beautiful!” she said, as to herself. “Oh, beautiful!”
Never in his life had it been like this, not with any of the casual women he had bedded, not even with Dorcas on that first rushed occasion at the Limousin. He felt secure and confident; every thrust he made into her body evoked another sigh of delight, and when she trembled and tautened and exclaimed and relaxed he was able to continue thrusting, like the impersonal efficient piston of a steamer’s engine, until he felt his entire being caught up in the rhythm of his muscles.
Beside his ear her moist lips whispered, “Oh, my husband, my lovely husband, my bridegroom, my marvelous man…!”
And all the while her hands pressed at him, clawed him, drove her nails deep in the skin of his back. Again she climaxed, and again, and eventually begged, “My love, my lovely one, let go! It’s been enough!”
Fernand was smiling so broadly he was afraid he might never loosen his face again. But when the storm within him broke—