ACY WHITE lounged in his parlor listening to the girl sing “The Letter Edged in Black” in her pure bell tones. Now and then she would end a line with a blue note, and Acy would stop her. “No. How many times do I have to tell you not to do that? It sounds trashy.” He’d taken to overseeing her practices and even her playtime. He made sure she didn’t sing to herself while she dressed her dolls, because inevitably she would come out with something improper-probably, he thought, written by a New York Jew for some lowbrow vaudeville theater.
The girl would listen to Acy’s commands because she sensed she had to, obeying him because there was no one else to obey. She was a child with no options. Sometimes she cried, and this was always in some way connected to her mother. Lily had no notion of death and didn’t know what to make of this nervous couple who told her five times a day that they were her mother and father. She was a baby, disoriented in a baby’s world. But she was smart.
Acy ran a finger along his thin mustache. “Sing it right, will you?”
“Where’s Vessy? I’ll sing it to her.”
“Vessy’s at her shack.”
“What’s a shack?”
“It’s a nasty little place where stupid people live.”
The girl came up to him and put a hand on the arm of his chair. “Is Vessy stupid?”
Acy pulled his watch and frowned at it. “She’s an untrained gal from up in the hills. Her people are dirt poor and we had to train her to wear shoes.”
She looked at him, unblinking. “Did you give her shoes?”
“What? Why, yes. Otherwise she’d be tracking up the house.”
She walked over to the grand piano and pressed down two notes of an A chord. “Thank you for giving her shoes.”
He went to her, got down on his knees, and put his face next to hers. “Look, remember that the last person in the world you want to be like is Vessy. She’s bad. Don’t forget that Vessy is a bad person and you shouldn’t trust her. She’s hardly a step above a nigger.”
The girl put a finger in her ear and yawned. Acy stood and looked out the window where Willa was haranguing the gardener next to the cast-iron fence, the old man’s head bobbing under the storm of her words.
ON THE TRIP up to Cairo, Sam shared a meal with Elsie in the café. He thought about her singing and had to admit that he was a little bit infatuated, though he couldn’t reconcile the image of her extraordinary presence in front of the orchestra with the woman seated across from him at the cheap wooden table. She had the buttermilk skin of a healthy midwestern girl, and he admired Ted Weller’s luck in matching up with her. August walked in and joined them, looking from one to the other before sitting down tentatively, as if worried he might be interrupting something. A stranger watching them eat and talk and laugh might have mistaken them for a complete family. It was a pleasant meal that Sam would remember for years, probably because it would be the last such meal for a long time.
WHEN THE BOAT tied up at Cairo the dapper advance man was there with the new schedule and an armload of mail. The weather was windy and a rainstorm was building in from the west, so he brought the mail to the central staircase to give it out. Among the envelopes was a telegram he’d been given that morning at the Western Union office, where he was sending precise schedule times upriver. He shuffled the mail and called out names, announcing that the telegram was for Elsie. Sam got a long envelope from New Orleans, a letter from Linda, and sat down on the staircase to read it. She told him the family news, then neighborhood tales, said that she wasn’t feeling all that well, that perhaps it was the heat and dampness. She let him know she missed him around the house and complained that she’d had to fix the gas range herself, but he saw that as her way of saying she needed him. The letter was four pages long, and he read it twice. Several crewmen were leaning against bulkheads or seated on coils of rope, reading slowly to make the letters last. He looked around for Elsie and saw her standing by the capstan, the buttermilk color of her face gone gray, the winsome expression missing as if scraped off by a surgeon. When she put her face down into her hands, he walked over.
“Bad news?”
She didn’t look up. “Go find August and bring him to my cabin. Then leave us alone, Lucky.”
He turned toward the rain-stippled water, afraid to look at her. “Is something wrong with Ted?”
She put down her hands and looked past him, up the stairs toward the dance floor. Her voice was flat and tired. “He got blood poisoning from the first operation. He died yesterday.”
“God. If there’s something-”
“Go get August.”
On the trip back to the boiler galley he thought of how the boy was about to be delivered, with just a few of his mother’s words, to the land of adult sorrow. He stopped at the entrance, not wanting to take the next step, but then raised his foot over the sill. August was on a stool in the companionway reading through a smudged arrangement for a De Silva fox-trot.
He looked up and smiled. “Hey, Lucky. Get a load of these licks.”
Sam felt like a black cloud, drifting close. “Your mother sent me down to get you. Go on up to your cabin.”
“Sure. Did you hear me play the other night for those hillbillies?”
“You played like a champ.”
August hopped off the stool. “She got that new music for me in the mail? I saw the advance man on the dock.”
“I don’t know.” He pretended to study a steam gauge. “You’d better get up there quick.”
The boy ran through the furnace room and out into the sun. Sam walked back by the engines to let the Bentons know they’d have to take on another fireman for August’s shifts, then climbed to the restaurant and dawdled a few minutes at a table until little Mr. Brandywine saw him.
The pilot walked up stiff-legged and slapped a folder of papers against his chest. “Bring these up to the pilothouse, young man, and lay them out on the liars’ bench for me.”
He took the papers and looked at them dumbly. “What are they?”
“Well, if you have to know, they’re the channel reports up to Pittsburgh. Off with you before you forget where you’re going and lose them.”
He walked up to the Texas deck, and as he turned for the steps leading to the pilothouse, he passed the cabin that Elsie shared with August, and coming from inside was the thing he most feared hearing: the bawling, incoherent voice that signaled August’s fall from childhood into a wild, uncharted, dead-serious place cut off from fathers and all things those fathers teach and give. For a moment Sam stopped and shared the immeasurable and growing loss.
THE NEXT DAY he helped carry their bags up the hill to the streetcar that would bring them to the station. Elsie had drawn their pay and figured they’d have enough to bury Ted and begin installments on his medical bills. Beyond that, she didn’t know what they’d do. When the streetcar appeared far down the street, she grabbed his lapel and shook it.
“Lucky, you’ve got your own life to live. I appreciate what you’ve done to find Lily, coming along with us and all. But it’s not working.” She began to cry. “She’s out there in the world somewhere, but it’s too big a place. Just too big.” She put her forehead against his shoulder for a moment. “If I ever get some money I’ll hire someone to look for her. I really don’t know what else to do. I don’t have a cent. I don’t know if I ever will now that he’s gone.”
He looked up the long street at the stone and brick buildings, wondering how anyone ever put together the money to build them. No one he knew had more than a few dollars saved. “I’ll ride out this circuit on the boat. It might look like I haven’t done much, but I’ve put out feelers all along.”
“If you hear anything, you have my mother’s address in Cincinnati.”
“That’s right.” He gave August a pat on the arm. “So long, bud.”
“Yeah.” The boy stared blankly down the street, his shoulders rolled forward in the wind like an old man’s.
THE GREENVILLE STATION agent, Morris Hightower, dozed in his chair next to the telegraph sounder. The room was hot as an attic, the next southbound wasn’t due for an hour, and the local switch engine was out in the country switching the lumber mills. He had a headache, and each eyelid felt as if it had a lead sinker glued to it. The sounder came alive in its box, and he reached for a Western Union pad. Dr. John Adoue of Memphis sent a message to the husband of Mrs. Stacy Higman telling of the outcome of her operation for female problems. He copied several lines of medical descriptions and the statement that Mr. Higman would call at the station for the telegram at five p.m. Morris sent a 73 on his bug, folded the telegram, and placed it in a window envelope. Settling back into the bay window of the station, he looked with one eye down the track to the south. He was feeling worthless and burned out in several ways, old, sickly even. Surely there was something he should be doing with his life other than sitting here sweating. Slowly, his head drifted back, his mouth fell open, and his upper plate floated down with a click.
Some time later, two cotton buyers barged into the waiting room complaining to each other about the market, and the bigger one bellied up to the counter. “Wake up there ’fore you catch a fly.”
Morris lifted one eyelid. “Do for you?”
“We need tickets to Graysoner, Kentucky.”
“What class?”
“We can stand day coach if there’s a parlor car for a good poker game.”
“There is.” He pulled out his guide to see what the connections were past Memphis and told them it would take a while to set up the tickets as they involved three different railroads. While he worked, the men chattered around their cigars about cotton prices and the damned bankers not wanting to loan money on signature anymore. The voices were just noise; some of it went in his ear, some of it didn’t. Then one of them mentioned a banker in Graysoner who’d demanded a whole cotton shipment for collateral on a small loan.
“I went to grammar school with Acy. He knew me when I still peed my pants, and when I asked for enough to ship eight thousand bales, just the shipping, mind you, he wanted to put the whole crop subject to duress in a contract.”
“You don’t say.”
“Sure enough. And I’ve been a guest in his house, made small talk with that odd wife of his.”
“I know her. She ever do anything other than walk around and shop?”
“When I was in his office she came in there with a sweet, crop-haired little girl, so I guess he finally put a bun in the oven.”
The other buyer pulled his cigar and looked at the soggy end. “Well, maybe that’ll sweeten his disposition.”
The men stepped out into the sun to look down the line and tell a joke. When they came back into the waiting room, a heat-drunk Morris Hightower was at the window with their tickets, his red face against the bars. “So Acy has a little girl?”
One of the cotton buyers looked at him and made a face. “You from Kentucky?”
“Agents know everybody up and down the line. She’s not a baby, is she?”
“She’s about three years old.”
“Cropped hair, you say?”
“Yes.” The buyer looked at him hard.
“Did they tell you how good she could sing? About all those songs?”
At this, the cotton buyer smiled. “Why, you do know the Whites!”
Morris Hightower laughed for the first time in a long while. “It’s a small world.”
THE CROWDS AT CAIRO were moderate in size and well behaved, so the order was not given to check for weapons. After an easy night trip, Sam was washing up at the little lavatory and inspecting his two uniforms, which were not holding up well.
“I told the captain I needed another jacket,” he said over his shoulder to Charlie, who was in his bunk holding an unlit cigarette under his nose.
“What’d he tell you?”
“Said I’d have to buy it out of my salary.”
“What you think about that?”
“I don’t know. It’d take two or three days’ wages to get one that’d last through the fights.”
“It’d be nine dollars or better, anyway. The boat raked in a fortune at Stovepipe Bend. The purser like to got a hernia haulin’ the change bags up the hill this morning.”
“Sometimes I think I’d be making more as a waiter, with the tips and all.”
“You could get into that late-night game down in the galley.”
“I gave that stuff up.”
“Then hold on to your pennies.” The cigarette traveled slowly under his nose. They were not allowed to smoke in the cabins. “You still thinking about that young’un?”
“I walked into town and spoke with the police captain. Went by the station and talked to the agent. He was full of information but mostly wanted to sell me some raffle tickets.”
“What’d he tell you?”
“About another boy they gave off the orphan train. I called this farmer up on the phone and sure enough it was a boy.”
The cabin door was open, and Charlie hopped down and walked right out to the rail to light up and watch the stars. “You give any more thought to the Cloats?”
“Not enough to ruin my day.”
“Damn, you’re worthless.”
“I’m thinking about it. You got to give me that.”
The Alice Brown passed downbound pushing a big raft of coal barges, the glow from her furnace doors sparking up the water. Her carbon-arc light raked the Ambassador and moved over the channel like a wand of ice.
“What’d Elsie say when you walked her to the streetcar?”
“Not much. Said she couldn’t even imagine he was dead. That she had to hold off thinking until she got up there.”
“I can’t believe old Ted’s gone myself. It’ll be a tough row to hoe for the both of them. The kid’s too young to play in the union bands. You say she’ll be living with her sick mother?”
“Starving is more like it. Her father’s too old to work anymore.”
Charlie drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out slow. “At least she’s got that boy with her. It could be worse.”
“Don’t say that. For God’s sake, don’t even think it.”
ABOVE CAIRO the Ambassador steamed into more populated regions where people in the civilized river towns looked forward to the new dance music promised by the flyers posted on every cottonwood by the advance man. Radios, the few there were in these rural areas, didn’t play New Orleans jazz, and record companies weren’t promoting it either. But the Ambassador had the real, rare commodity, and over the next week the boat did good business at Mound City, Metropolis, and Paducah, though at a mining town called Potato Landing, all three mates and six waiters were injured in a huge café brawl between baseball teams from opposite sides of the river. The boat was left in such a sorry condition that Sunday’s afternoon run at Evansville was canceled, and Captain Stewart gave the crew as much time off as possible. Sam went up to town to attend Mass and then find the railroad station. The agent looked at his bruised face and wouldn’t answer any questions, so he walked back to the river, stopping several times to let a leg cramp die down. He’d been kicked by a drunk woman after he’d pulled her away from a slot machine she was hammering with a high heel. Hobbling up to a corner bench, he sat and rubbed his calf, feeling silly and useless, a fool matched with a fool’s errand. He thought again longingly of his wife and his lost kingdom at Krine’s. A long vista of cottonwoods rising up from the Kentucky side made him feel solitary, small, and a long way from the house.
But when he returned to the boat, the advance man, a vest-wearing glad-hander named Jules, buttonholed him on the stage and handed him a telegram. “Here you go, bud.”
“Where’s it from?”
“Can’t you read?” The advance man jumped off the stage to the mud and headed for his idling Model T.
It was from Greenville, Mississippi, and the very paper felt crisp with possibility. He tore it open. THIS A GOOD LEAD. ACY WHITE AND WIFE. GRAYSONER KENTUCKY. LET ME KNOW. MORRIS.
He ran across the forecastle and asked a deckhand if he knew where Graysoner was.
“Don’t know, Cap. The chief steward upstairs, maybe he knows.”
He raced up the big staircase and walked back to the restrooms, where he saw the man talking to a janitor. “Can you tell me where Graysoner is?”
The chief steward looked at his face and winced. “Rough time last night. Graysoner the new man what replaced that old Jenkins boy with the broke leg?”
“No, it’s a town in Kentucky.”
“It’s a town.”
“That’s right.”
“Go see Mr. Check in the kitchen. He’s from Kentucky.”
Mr. Check, the head cook, was scraping down a stove top with a firebrick. “Naw, I ain’t from Kentucky. I was raised in St. Marys, West Virginia. The steward’s thinking of that Meldon feller who cooked for us two years gone. Go ask the captain. Maybe ten minutes ago I saw him kicking cinders off the skylight roof.”
He walked forward, but the captain was nowhere to be seen, so he took the stairs up to the Texas deck and found the first mate in his cabin. Swaneli was propped in his bunk reading a week-old newspaper from Chicago. “Lucky, what’s up?”
“I need to know where Graysoner, Kentucky, is.”
“It’s up ahead somewheres.”
“On the river?”
“Or close to it. Ask someone in the pilothouse, if anybody’s up there.”
He ducked into the companionway and went up the steps to the Texas roof and saw Mr. Brandywine’s cap moving about. He tapped on the narrow door and the old man waved him in with one crooked finger. He was leaning down over a river chart.
“Mr. Brandywine, can you tell me where Graysoner, Kentucky, is?”
“We’ll play there in a few days if I can get this boat in among the rocks.”
Sam leaned back against the door and caught his breath. “Is it another pigpen?”
“Well, it’s not a big town, but there’s five little burgs right around it, and all in all it’s a decent place to play. The people there know how to behave themselves.”
“Nice place to live?”
Brandywine leaned down over his channel map and pursed his lips, slowly placing a finger on a blue line passing between islands. “Paved streets. Electric lights. Good stores. Right now you can go down and get me a mug of hot coffee.”
“You heard about Ted Weller.”
“Of course. The captain gave his wife an extra fifty dollars when he paid her off. Told her she could come back and work the end of the season if she wanted. But you know she can’t.”
Sam reached over and gathered up two empty mugs. “Her life’s pretty much wrecked.”
“That’s a good way to put it, all right. She’ll be starting from scratch, I imagine.” Mr. Brandywine looked at him sharply. “Were you sweet on her?”
“I’m a married man.”
“I hope you plan to stay that way.”
He motioned at him with the mugs. “I’m very happy with my wife.”
“Don’t take offense. I’ve seen you sitting with Mrs. Weller at table with her son.”
“And?”
Mr. Brandywine’s eyes narrowed at some problem on the map. “And would you please get me my coffee?”