THE RIVER NORTH OF VICKSBURG was running high and the Ambassador strained against the current to make its shore dates. The crowds were civilized, even appreciative, but at one malignant landing called Hurricane Slough, the boat filled with lumbermen and their whores and also the entire congregation of a Baptist church. The night trip was a brawl from landing to landing and ended with a shoreside religious war by torchlight, a hollering slugfest out on the dark bank. The crowd dissipated as slowly as a stinking smoke, and the crew was so exhausted and the boat so filthy that the captain sent the advance man on horseback to the nearest telegraph office to notify the town above that the morning excursion would be canceled. All night the boat leaned against the bank, as if the very planks and machines had lost all strength. Some time before dawn, the crew began to stir and Mr. Brandywine backed her out and turned her toward Greenville, the river running ponderous as molten lead against the hull. The old pilot spotted a sandbar and figured how to steer around it, and later decided which side of an island to choose for passage as he walked spokes on the wheel. When the full disk of sun lay over the bunched pines of the eastern hills, he reached up and pulled on the whistle cord, letting the ring slip through his hand, and the big whistle grumbled half a word.
In less than a minute, Sam opened the narrow door to the pilothouse with Lily on an arm. He sat her on the lazy bench, and she looked around at the windows, then through them.
“Saul’s bringing up your coffee,” Sam said.
The pilot stole a glance at the child. “Hello, little miss.”
“Good morning, Mr. Brandywine.” She fluffed her dress around her dangling legs.
The pilot nudged the Ambassador out of a thread of current and peeled away from the head of the island. He pulled an engine-room bell and turned his head for the western shore, watching the trees roll past. “You being nice and quiet like you should.”
“I know.” She nodded.
Saul, a retired Pullman porter too old for railroad service, tapped at the door and Sam waved him in. He carried a bright, triple-plated tray and sat it on the cold pilothouse stove. “I brought you a biscuit with your coffee, sah.”
“Thank you. I’ll eat it when I go off in an hour.”
Saul turned the cup handle out on the tray, and when he swung around to leave, he noticed Lily for the first time. “Little ma’am, would you like me to go and get you one of those cookies they’re bakin’ fresh down in the kitchen?”
She looked at him squarely. “I’m not supposed to talk to niggers.”
Sam looked at the old porter and his face was unmoving, hardened by a lifetime of blows. Saul kept his smile and said, “Yes, little ma’am.”
Mr. Brandywine slid a hand from the wheel. “Sam, come over and just stand here and hold her steady. Don’t do anything but hold it in one spot.”
He hesitated, looking out at the water sliding by. “I’m no wheelman.”
“Just for a minute.”
They changed places, and the pilot walked over to the lazy bench and gave Lily a serious look. “Little miss, would you hurt someone’s feelings on purpose?”
Lily shook her head.
“Well, lots of people use the word ‘nigger,’ and I know you’ve heard it thrown around by those folks who stole you, but let me tell you, it hurts people’s feelings. Would you want Saul here to call you something like ‘nasty grits’?”
She began to get the idea she’d done something wrong and straightened her back. “That’s ugly. I’m not nasty grits.”
Mr. Brandywine put his many-creased face close to hers and trapped her with his glossy little eyes. “It hurts your feelings to be called that, does it?”
She nodded.
“So it’s ugly to call Saul here a ‘nigger.’ That pretty young mouth of yours should have nicer words come out of it. You can refer to him as a Negro or a colored man.”
She looked at Saul, whose expression was still unreadable, and he was waiting, as he had all his life. “I’m not supposed to talk to a Negro,” she said.
Saul laughed, and no one in the pilothouse could tell exactly what the laugh meant. He turned for the door and was gone.
Sam called out, “Mr. Brandywine.”
The pilot was watching the porter through the aft glass. “What?”
“There’s a towboat rounding the upper end of this island.”
The pilot still didn’t turn around. “Do you not see a big white house with green shutters and a gallery sitting on the bluff over the next bend?”
Sam scanned the east side in a panic. “I think so.”
“Well, put the flagstaff on the front door.”
He turned the wheel and began to sweat as the boat swung a few degrees, then began to drive at the hallway of the farmhouse three miles away. Behind him, he heard Brandywine say, “You feel the weight of my hand on your shoulder, girl?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“When you insult someone it puts a weight on you. Oh, you don’t feel it until you get older, like me, but that’s when you get to thinking and thinking about all the hurt you caused people in your life with your smart little mouth and your wise little cracks. Now, do you feel this hand on your other shoulder?”
“Yes.”
“Each pain you cause people, little miss, is a weight, and the older you get, the more they burden you like stones until you’re bent over and near buried by them all.”
The shore was coming up, and the towboat had fully materialized on the port side pushing ten loads of heaped block coal. “Mr. Brandywine?”
But he was staring intently into Lily’s sharp blue eyes. “Do you not see the big gray rock some lovesick fool has painted a heart on off to your right about five hundred yards?”
Sam swung his head in several quick scans of the riverbank. “I see it.”
“One hundred yards this side of it, split the difference between it and that descending tow.”
“But-”
“It’s all water in this spot, son, and this here is a boat,” he snapped. The girl’s eyes watched his own steadily, and Brandywine knew what he told her would stick. She was too smart, young as she was, for something not to stick. “Somebody has taught you it’s all right to hurt people’s feelings, to try and make them less than you are. And I’m here with my bent-down shoulders to tell you for a fact that it’s not.”
He stepped back to the wheel, slapping Sam’s hand off a spoke. “You and that child can leave now. It’s going to get busy here directly while I try not to knock all that coal back to the mine.” He pulled a long, bluesy note from the whistle, and Lily covered her ears.
A WEEK LATER above Cairo, Sam shared a table with Elsie after the last trip of the day. Her color wasn’t good, and the corners of her mouth branched with the start of wrinkles. She ate her food with a habitual motion that showed she enjoyed none of it. More than once she began a conversation by blaming him for all her troubles, saying things like, “You brought back my child, but it wasn’t the same child.” At this meal she told him, “Those people made her different. She’s not sweet. She’s less mine.”
Even Sam realized he was the worst person to talk to like this, because accusations stuck to him like beggar lice. “I’m sorry about everything,” he said this time.
She wiped her mouth with a napkin and threw it in her lap. “And August isn’t the same. He’s still using his talent, at least, but he doesn’t talk to me anymore. He used to tell me jokes, one a day, and say how much he liked to hear me laugh, and Ted used to say the same thing.”
“He’s doing well with the band. He’s off the boiler gang.”
“He’s learning, all right, but it’s as if he’s gone from kid to old man overnight.”
Nothing was good for her, everything had changed for the worse, and he could tell that no matter what happened for the rest of her life, she would blame her misfortune on the fact that a department-store floorwalker had allowed himself to be bested by a pair of back-woods thugs. He knew that event followed event, and that it was his bad luck to be first in a string of bad fortune. But once or twice some little spark of resentment flared up at her badgering, and he was tempted to ask what she and Ted were doing the moment the child was spirited away from them. How long had they been distracted while looking at men’s coats or women’s dresses while Lily was swept into a topcoat or lured away with a handful of candy? And hadn’t he begged Ted not to go after Skadlock? He tightened his finger in the handle of his cup as though he wanted to break it off.
Elsie drained her coffee. “You look like you have something to say, Lucky.”
He started to open his mouth, his shoulders trembling with the burden of her accusations. “I’ve got to move on,” he said. “I’ve got to replace about fifty lightbulbs.” He pushed through a door out onto the deck and stood there watching dark water sluice by. What good would it have done to have said anything? At worst it would’ve taken away the balm of blaming him for everything, making her look to herself, and most people never think to blame themselves until they’re old and have time for thousands of second thoughts.
AT CAPE GIRARDEAU the moonlight trip was attended by a civilized tribe of midwesterners who had leased the boat. The dancing was orderly and friendly, and the young people danced as if they’d been taught the steps in school. Sam and Charlie faced no emergencies, and after they had walked around the boat twice, took a break on the boiler deck forward rail and listened to the orchestra. Onstage, Elsie was singing in the spotlight, her alto caressing “When My Baby Smiles at Me.” He watched her through the window, and in her makeup and shiny dress, she looked like a million dollars and sang like a mint.
Charlie had just come back from his father’s funeral and had spent a week settling the small estate. “I tell you, Lucky, the old man didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and his shed was full of the damnedest stuff. It took me two days to haul it out into the yard for the sale. Stove legs, empty shotgun shells, parts to railroad lanterns, a broken plow, and I don’t know what all. I made about ten dollars and had to pay that to get the rest of the junk hauled away.”
Sam leaned back against the rail and let the music pour over him. “What’d he do for a living?”
“Watchman in a foundry. They paid him so little he could draw a week’s pay in coins.” Charlie shook his head. “I got there about five hours before he died. Someone had picked him up in the street, and he was at the clinic two days before anybody in the family knew where the hell he was.”
“It’s good you got to see him before he passed.”
“I don’t know. He was out of his head and cussed me for not send-in’ more money. But I knew it was the sickness talkin’.” A breeze came up, and Charlie snugged his cap and slipped his big hands into his pockets. “At least I had a father. You ever wonder what your old man would’ve been like?”
Sam looked upriver, into the wind. “No.” In fact, he had thought about his father right after he realized that his cousins weren’t his brothers. He’d asked his uncle what he’d been like, but Claude had only shrugged and said it wasn’t time to talk about that. For years, this was the answer he’d gotten: “C’est pas les temps pour ça”-an unfathomable statement that might have meant he was a bad man and his son shouldn’t know this, or he was a wonderful man whose son shouldn’t be made aware of such a loss.
Charlie moved a step closer along the rail. “You mean you just didn’t give a damn, or what?”
“I didn’t know what to be curious about.”
“You didn’t even have a picture of him or your mama?”
“There weren’t too many photo studios in Troumal.”
Charlie leaned in. Two young couples were walking past them toward a companionway, the boys lighting up the night with their seersucker suits. “I still can’t believe you’re not curious about who killed them.”
“I’m curious.”
“I mean serious curious. Track ’em down or somethin’. Sic the law on them at least. Damn, you got their name off one of the Skadlocks, didn’t you?”
Sam stepped away from the rail, suddenly angry. “What, you got nobody to fight tonight so you want to fight with me?”
“Calm down, Lucky.”
“I tell you what. When I get finished paying my bills and sending money for my wife and baby, I’ll buy an outfit and load it on a train and track those bastards all over Arkansas for a month. You want me to hire some Pinkertons while I’m at it? Would that make you happy?”
“Look, it’s all right. Forget it.”
“I’ve never been long on vengeance, friend. It’s not exactly in my budget.”
Charlie began to walk off. “Time to check for cigarettes.”
Sam yelled after him. “What am I supposed to do with these people if I find ’em? Write out a bill for memories that never happened? Shoot ’em in the eye? Listen, you ever slap a dog for pissing on your leg? You think the dog understands why you hit him? What’s the use, is what I’m saying.” But Charlie had rounded the deck into darkness, and he found himself enraged and near tears. He made his rounds quickly, dodging passengers and telling himself he was merely tired. He stopped at the rail and watched the moon-glazed river for a long time, then he went up to the café for coffee.
Elsie, working even between sets, slammed a cup in front of him as soon as he sat down. “You’re on the floor.”
“Give me a break. I just need five minutes.”
“After the trip tonight, August needs you to go over an arrangement for that newest DeSylva piece he’s been practicing.”
He took a hot swallow. “I don’t know arrangements like Ted did.”
“Well, I thought you might want to do some of his work.” She said this in as cruel a voice as possible. He wondered if she remembered she was talking to a man who’d never even had a father.
“And tomorrow, before you play for the two o’clock crowd, can you watch Lily?”
He shook his head no, but said, “Sure.”
“Even you ought not to be able to lose her on a boat.” She snapped around and walked through the crowd to go down for the next song, her fine dress swaying like water.
He went back to his cabin and dug out Charlie’s new bottle of Canadian whiskey and sat with the door open, looking out into the passing dark. He’d rescued the child, but so far as Elsie was concerned, he’d brought only part of her back. “Bits and pieces of all of us fall away,” he said aloud, staring out into the dark, waiting for a light, onshore or waterborne, it didn’t matter. But no light passed his door.
THE NEXT DAY he was at the piano setting up for the two o’clock trip. A few Presbyterians were crossing the gangplank dressed in their snappy summer clothes. Elsie appeared at the treble side of the piano and thrust Lily’s hand toward him. “Here. I’ll be back in an hour.”
He lifted her onto the bench and continued practicing “’N’ Everything.” She was looking at her sooty doll as if it were diseased.
“That your favorite dolly?”
She put out her bottom lip. “I had some nice ones with real china faces.”
“Why, you can have just as much fun with a cheap doll,” he said, instantly sorry that he’d said anything at all. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.” She slid next to him on the bench and watched his hands play through the Broadway tune popular a few years before. The rhythm was tricky, a sort of semi-ragtime experiment. Lily began to hum.
“You know this one?”
She quietly sang the last verse along with his playing, forgetting the second-to-last line.
“You’re not interested? You’d sound good with a band behind you, I bet.”
“Maybe,” she began, “when my fingers get long, I can play the piano.”
“But you can sing right now.” He finished the piece, took up a pencil, and made a few marks on the music, thinking how sooner or later everybody has to sing for their supper. He looked down at Lily’s unbrushed hair and the drooping rickrack bow. “You want me to play something?”
She shook her head.
“Anything you want to ask me?”
She put a thumb over one of the doll’s eyes. “Why are the rooms on this boat so small?”
“It’s a boat, honey, and boats have small rooms. You won’t be on one forever.”
She put a thumb over the doll’s other eye. “That’s good,” she said, her voice shaking.
After one glance at her face, he began playing “Kitty Kat Rag” and jostling her on the piano bench. “Come on and clap.” She let her doll slip to the floor but didn’t move, only watched his fingers, and at the turn she put up her right hand and began to insert grace notes an octave above where he was playing, in time and matching the melody. In the repeat she put in more notes, guessing right where he was going. Something was happening, but he wasn’t sure what. She was staying with him now, bouncing on the bench.