Barbara Hambly - Dead water

So January followed Souter to the bow, and spent until nightfall in the tedious occupation of sparring the steamboat over the Horsehead Bar. This well-known local landmark below the small Horsehead Point had apparently proved too high and too gravelly to be simply rammed through, and the Silver Moon had hit its outer end too hard to be poled off backwards. Once the long poles were sunk upright behind the boat, every male on board, white as well as black, with the exception of the three planters standing guard and the deck-hands wooding the engine, was drafted to turn the capstan-wheels to which the upper ends of the poles were chained. The ends were levered down, and the whole weight of the boat inched gradually forward across the shallow, with the paddlewheel turning slowly to push and a leadsman crying out soundings at the bow.

Then the poles were pulled loose, re-positioned, and the whole laborious process repeated again. The manufacturer Dodd fumed and refused to join the others at the capstans, and Ned Gleet attempted to charge rent for the use of his slaves and was shrieked into submission by Mrs. Tredgold, but on the whole the process went smoothly under Mr. Souter's shouted orders from the pilot-house.

The white women—cabin and deck-passengers alike—crowded the starboard rail to watch, and Molloy came charging along the boiler-deck promenade cursing them and shouting “Trim the goddam boat! D'you want to sink us?”

Muscles aching, arms smarting, body numb with fatigue as he leaned on the capstan-bars between Jim the valet and Hannibal, January scanned the beardless faces in the twilight. He picked out Mrs. Fischer, with her thick brunette chignon and her dark eyes narrow and hard, and Theodora Skippen, turned, not toward the men around the hatch but toward the bank. Saw Sophie and Julie clinging together on the lower deck, arms around one another's waists, the sylph-like daintiness of the one emphasizing the strength of the other.

Saw Rose a little apart, the last of the daylight flashing in her spectacles, and knew that she was watching him.

Where was Queen Régine? he wondered, bending his back again to 'Rodus's rhythmical shout. How had she been able to slip out of the hold as they started unloading the luggage—if that was, indeed, her hideaway down there in the darkness? Could she be simply concealing herself by sitting among the women slaves on the portside promenade in the gathering shadows?

“If she did, I've seen no sign of her,” said Hannibal when January asked, under cover of the slaves' chant as they labored. “And they've kept the luggage under guard from the moment they started moving it out, drat them.”

'Rodus's voice rose in the work-chant, and the slaves took it up as they threw their weight on the capstan-bars:

Mama brought me coffee-uhn!

Mama brought me tea—uhn!

Mama brought me evvythin'

'Ceptin' the jail-house key—uhn!

On the capstan-bar before them January picked out the bent back of Jubal Cain, heavy shoulders standing out like pink-stained marble between the black and whip-scarred backs on either side. He took up the song; a moment later Mr. Byrne the gambler, heaving the bar between Quince and Weems, added his.

Turn me over easy——uhn!

Turn me over slow——uhn!

Turn me over easy, lord,

'Cause de bullets hurt me so——uhn!

Every man of Cain's coffle, January saw, was whip-scarred—most of the scars fairly fresh. 'Rodus's naked back told January everything he could have asked about a short life-time of defiance. Yet the dealer worked among them, sweating in silence, and neither the man to his left nor to his right offered challenge.

“As I said, I was halfway back to you with the news that the boat hadn't let steam down, when I recognized Sophie,” said Hannibal, panting as he leaned his weight on the bar to the timing of the chant. “I followed her back to the boat, and she went straight to their stateroom. I watched to see if I could get in—they clearly hadn't abandoned it—and just as it began to get light, who should appear but the guilty pair themselves, La Pécheresse with a false beard and enough padding to hide her Junoesque curves, and Weems in a very fetching French-blue gown and veils. I was looking around the boat to see if you'd followed them back when we put out. They must have bribed Molloy to keep steam up—Tredgold was furious when he woke up about an hour later.”

“The more fools they,” murmured January. “Since Molloy was one of the Bank's depositors. He must have laughed when they handed him the money—probably the remainder of what Weems got from Cain. Molloy's too good a pilot for this to have been an accident—with the luggage in a shambles you couldn't get to it, but he could. I saw Weems and Fischer leave the hotel but didn't recognize them.”

With solemn mischief, 'Rodus led the chant:

Massa, he an ugly man——uhn!

Missus, she a sinner——uhn!

Skin a flea for tallow an' hide

An' gimme the bones for dinner——uhn!

It was dark by the time the skiff was loaded up, and the two coffles of slaves were put to work helping the deck-hands replace the cargo in the holds under Thucydides's sharp eye. Iron cressets loaded with firewood burned on the deck and on the bank to light the work, and all the white men were given rifles and set to guarding the bank, with the exception of Mr. Quince, who declared that violence of any kind was repellent to his nature. “Milksop,” said Cain impersonally, pulling on his coat and taking up a rifle—his own, a .50-caliber Henry, not one of the Lemans from the ship's store.

A belated dinner was served in the Grand Saloon, and January retired to Hannibal's stateroom, where the fiddler tipped Thu to send in a copper tub and hot water for a bath. “It's one thing there's never a shortage of on a steamboat, thank God,” said Hannibal as January stripped off his mud-crusted clothing and settled in the round towel-draped tin vessel. “Rose was going to dump the boilers if you didn't show up by the time the cargo was re-loaded. With everyone on deck it wouldn't have been difficult.”

January smiled. “That's my Rose.”

“According to Tredgold, we should be under way by the time dinner is finished, and Mrs. Tredgold ventures to hope you and I will play after dinner, though I don't expect there will be much in the way of dancing.” Hannibal knelt on the bunk—there was almost no floor-room left with the bath—and dug through his portmanteau for clean shirts for them both. “I think we can safely venture to say that neither Weems nor Fischer will abandon the boat tonight. With the luggage jumbled as it is, they probably couldn't find their own trunks, even if they had some means of transporting them elsewhere, and there's a fog rising. I doubt Molloy could see the flag on the landing of any plantation we pass, and the next town is Mayersville, fifty miles up-river. It's small. I suspect we're safe until we get to Greenville, sixty miles beyond that.”

“We may not have to worry about them leaving the boat,” said January softly. “But I saw Mrs. Fischer as she looked down at us turning the capstan—I saw the look in her eyes. We're not safe.”

Though it would have been pleasant to linger in the bath, he was mindful of his responsibilities to friendship. He got out promptly, while the water was still hot, so that Hannibal could bathe as well. The fiddler looked haggard, as if he, too, had not slept after their shared vigil outside the Majestic Hotel the previous night; January could only be thankful that when the boat snagged up on Horsehead Bar, Hannibal hadn't attempted to look for him on shore.

Still, the fiddler took his violin with him when he went to supper, and a few minutes later a porter appeared, to lug away the bath. January supposed he should go down and scrounge his usual supper from Eli, to share with Rose. But weariness overwhelmed him. He rolled up in his blanket with one of the spare bed-pillows under his head, and slept, hearing through the black-velvet weight of exhaustion the soft clang of the Silver Moon 's bell, and the voices of the slaves, singing on the promenade below.

Follow the Drinkin' Gourd, follow the Drinkin' Gourd,

There's an old man 'cross the river gonna carry you to freedom,

Follow the Drinkin' Gourd.

In his dreams he saw Mary, with her child on her hip, a lonely figure walking back across that weedy field to the dogtrot cabin under the grilling sun. Saw Julie, weeping in Rose's arms— What'm I gonna do? —and the backs of the two slaves who'd shoved on the capstan-bar ahead of him, knotted with whip-scars as if sections of fishing-nets were embedded under the skin. In his dream he tried to explain to them, I'm traveling on this boat to get my money back, so that I can be free.

And in his dream a man chained to the wall of the promenade deck, a man who had his father's face with its tribal scars, said gently, You already free, Ben.

No, thought January, waking to gaze into the darkness of that tiny stateroom, I am not free.

What time it was he couldn't guess. Not very late, since Hannibal had not returned—even in pitchy dark he would have been able to hear the fiddler's breathing. The floor beneath him vibrated with the shaking of the engine; the night smelled of the wet straw matting where the bath-water had dripped on it, and of fog.

Flickers of yellow light, tiny and dim but vivid as stars in the complete dark of the stateroom, outlined the louvers of the door. The cautious rattle of metal, a minute scratching, nothing like the sound of a key. A gash of light opened vertically, the pierced glow of a shuttered dark-lantern, wreaths of fog trailing around it and everything behind it lost in blackness.

January sat up, raised a hand against the light. “Rose?”

The door slammed shut. Footfalls retreated down the promenade. January scrambled to his feet, fumbled the blanket around his waist, tripped over the portmanteau that Hannibal had left sticking out from under the bunk, and by the time he pulled open the stateroom door, there was nothing outside but utter blackness, and the smell of the river and of fog. From the bow end of the boat a voice called out, “Quarter twain! Quarter twain!” monotonous as the creak of a branch in wind.

January thought, Not another damn bar, and returned to the stateroom floor to sleep.

He thought again, I am not free. Nor is Rose, nor will our children be.

Then it was misty daylight.

And still.

ANOTHER bar? Or the same one?

Hannibal's bunk was empty, but his fiddle lay in its case on the chair, and the blankets had been rumpled. January dressed, and strode aft to look for Rose.

Half the passengers on the boat seemed to be gathered at the stern ends of both the lower and upper promenades, leaning over the rails. They seemed to be craning to look at the paddle, which hung still and glistening in the warm gray vapors that seemed to hold the boat locked. We hit a snag, thought January, and damaged the paddle . . . .

Now we'll be stuck here until Christmas and his boys arrive . . . .

Why hadn't the jolt of it waked him?

He picked Rose's white tignon from the crowd, close to the rails on the port side, talking to the Roberson ladies'-maid—who slept on her mistress's stateroom floor and almost never came downstairs—and Colonel Davis's valet, Jim Pemberton. January hurried down the stairway and made toward her—she caught sight of him and turned, reaching out. She looked shaken and sick.