Dead water

THIRTEEN

Immediately upon their return to the Saloon, Davis sent for Mr. Souter from the pilot-house. “It's next to useless dealing with that arrogant boor Molloy,” remarked the Colonel, and January wondered if Molloy had seen Miss Skippen's attempts to claim the young widower's attention with dropped handkerchiefs and worshipful gazes.

By this time rain was hammering down in earnest, churning the brown water with fluttering white-edged waves. All the male cabin passengers had sought shelter in the long, gloomy room, drinking coffee or whiskey as their natures dictated, and playing cards. The sole exception was Mr. Quince. He as usual remained as a guest in the Ladies' Parlor, entertaining them—if the word could be used—with his views on Vegetarianism and the organization of the spiritual hierarchies.

Passing the open door of that small chamber, January felt a pang of sympathy for Miss Skippen, who sat in a corner by the window, gazing bleakly out at the rain, clearly bored to sobs. Mr. Quince, finding the company of his own sex unbearable and vice versa, had the option of ingratiating himself with Mrs. Tredgold and being invited to hold court among the ladies. For a woman to spend the day in the Main Saloon chatting with the men would have marked her as inerasably as if she'd sewn a scarlet A on her dress.

At least she had a dry room to sit in, thought January. Most of his pity went to Rose, sheltering among the wood-piles, and to the chained slaves and to the immigrant women huddled with their children in the doubtful cover of the bow. It did not, of course, occur to Mrs. Tredgold or anyone else to extend an invitation to them to come up and stay dry.

Nick the barkeep lit the whale-oil lamps in the Saloon, and the men pretended to talk or play cards. But the planters Roberson and Lockhart, the two slave-dealers, and the New Englander Dodd all kept glancing up from their cards or their newspapers at the corner table where Davis established his headquarters.

At least, reflected January, they'd all be in one place to be questioned.

“Molloy cursed somethin' wonderful,” asserted the junior pilot in response to Davis's question. “Went on for five minutes about unprintable expletive-deleted branches from trees that'd grown out of the Devil's toenails—although toenails might not have been the word he used—snaggin' up his rudder, and how if he had his way he'd turn crews of niggers loose on the banks to shave 'em to the ground five miles on either side, and him pullin' and wrestlin' with the wheel all the time, with the smoke of his cigar rollin' around his head like Satan's own breath.”

The young man chuckled, fresh-faced, long-jawed, and rather plump, with big dark eyes under long lashes, a bit like a friendly cow. “Not much trash in the river when she's low like she was last night, but now and then you'll get branches and leaves caught up on a snag. When I took over the wheel I could see what he meant, and it was a struggle, keeping to the center of the channel and easing off 'round the bends where she gets strong. . . . Even in low water she can be strong around Magna Vista Point. And it was blind foggy. Couldn't see hardly down to the nose of the boat.”

“When did the rudder snag, do you know?” asked Davis. “How soon before Molloy went off at midnight?”

“Fairly soon. I came in maybe fifteen, twenty minutes of midnight, just as we come opposite Ulee's wood-yard, and it was maybe five-ten minutes after that.”

“If it was blind foggy,” asked Davis, curious, “how do you know you were opposite Mr. Ulee's wood-yard?”

“Oh, there's an eddy backs under the point just below the yard,” replied Souter. “Even in low water you can feel her.”

“Surely there are other eddies along the shore?”

“'Course there are! But they all feel a tad different—you can tell the voices of one of your niggers from another in the dark, can't you? Well, I can feel the difference in the way she pulls, between that little eddy under Ulee's yard and, for instance, that cantankersome bull-bitch you got under Dead Man's Bend, for God's sake. Besides, where else would I be, that time of night? I'd just heard old Fergusson's dogs barking when we passed his place, we'd made the crossing over Magna Vista, so where the hell else would I be gettin' a little eddy 'cept opposite Ulee's?”

Lightning flared, a white explosion in all the high clerestories of the Saloon; thunder cracked like the sky splitting. Souter listened, then nodded approvingly. “About time we got a rise. Be a hell of a lot of trash in the stream, but the rise'll be a help.”

“Did you hear anything?” asked Davis. “You say you heard dogs barking on the bank. . . .”

“'Bout a mile and a half the other side of the levee, actually,” corrected Souter. “Fergusson has this mastiff bitch, you see, name of Penelope. . . .”

“If you heard dogs barking a mile and a half away,” persisted Davis, “it must have been a very still night. Did you hear voices on the deck? Or the sound of argument?”

Souter frowned, then shook his head. “Oh, I heard those deck-passengers, laughin' and tellin' jokes as they played cards as I came up the stairs, and a nigger gal singin' to her pickaninny. . . . Say, it's been twenty years since I heard ‘House Carpenter.' My Grandma used to play it on her cheeks, slappin' her own face and making mouths to change the pitch. . . .”

“When did Weems leave dinner?” asked January softly, leaning down to where Hannibal sat at the other side of the table.

“Almost before the pudding was served.” The fiddler scratched a corner of his gray-flecked mustache. “And he was fidgeting throughout it like a fly in a tar-box. Mrs. Fischer was most insistent that I stay and play for them—one would almost think she'd forgotten about swearing out a warrant for my arrest in Natchez. She was overpoweringly gracious, and exerted her charms on every man at table, I think, to get them to stay on as well. I didn't think much of it at the time—well, in fact I suspected she'd had a falling-out with Weems—but now I realize she must have been trying to keep as many people as possible in the Saloon while Weems searched their staterooms.”

“That's what it sounds like.” January turned his head at the drawling whine of Ned Gleet's voice.

“I was here till about two, weren't we, Jubal?” The two slave-dealers had taken Souter's place in front of Davis's table. “Us and Byrne . . .” Gleet nodded in the direction of the gambler, who was dealing a game of whist for Roberson, Lockhart, and Dodd, none of whom had apparently learned his lesson yet about playing with the so-called “dry-goods importer,” who invariably seemed to win.

“Davis played until one,” supplied Hannibal in an undervoice. “Gleet proposed the game—he usually does—and as usual insisted that I play. As usual I dumped most of the liquor he plied me with into the spittoon. After several hours heaving at a capstan, I assure you it was not easy, but the last thing you'd need after the day you had yesterday was to wake up this morning and be told I'd lost you to Gleet at vingt-et-un.”

“Thank you,” said January dryly.

“They played vingt-et-un, all-fours, short whist and ecarte, turn and turn about—Byrne won most of the money but not so much as to be pointed at. Si possis recte, si non, quicumque modo rem. Gleet and Cain left together twice to check on their slaves, and were together the whole of that time. The rest of us played short whist in their absence. Roberson, Lockhart, and Davis left once apiece, to piss over the side—at least that's what they said they were going to do, and they were back quickly enough to have done no more unless they were very speedy murderers indeed. Molloy came in about twelve-thirty for a drink and a hand of whist, then left, presumably, for the perfumed delights of Miss Skippen's bower—that was just before one. Davis played another hand and left just after one, and I left just after that.”

A tremendous flash of lightning illuminated the windows; rain pounded down as if the Silver Moon were passing under a waterfall. In the door of the Saloon Souter rubbed his hands together and reported, “Plenty of water now!” in a pleased voice, and trotted down the hall and outside, presumably to observe the effects of the rise on every sand-bar and point within view.

“What I'm curious about,” went on Hannibal, “is what Weems was searching for in everyone's staterooms. A hundred thousand dollars in gold—not to mention Bank of Pennsylvania notes and all the rest of it—isn't something you tuck in the back of your glove drawer. Even if the trunks that contained it were stolen and hidden somewhere during the upheaval with the luggage, surely a glance through the stateroom window would have sufficed to tell him whether they were in the room or not. None of those bunks is big enough to conceal a hatbox under, let alone a trunk.”

“Which means the specie was taken out of the trunk,” said January. “Was there time for that?”

“Oh, I think so.” The fiddler's eyes narrowed as he mentally reviewed the events of the previous afternoon. “But probably only just. When the boat hung up on Horsehead Bar, there was about an hour of driving and heaving as Molloy tried to bull through, when anyone on board could see that we were going to have to unload and spar over. Afterwards Molloy turned the pilot-house over to poor Souter, and directed the deck-hands to start unloading. But he had plenty of time to come and go from the hold, pretty much unobserved in the confusion. I'm not sure how much gold he could have emptied from trunks, but it could have been transferred to sacks—God knows there are plenty of pillow-cases in the linen-room and flour-sacks in the galley—and stowed to be moved later, or simply transferred to a crate or box with his own labels on it. Molloy's certainly the only one who could have done it unobserved.”

January grunted thoughtfully. “I wonder if Weems knew that.”

At Davis's table, Kyle Outliver—even more verminous and bedraggled-looking than when he'd tried to lift Sophie's skirts a week earlier—was explaining that most of his fellow deck-passengers had been awake playing cards. . . . No, they didn't know what time they'd quit, but it was before the boat had gone over the bar. No, all the boys wasn't together playing all that time. Some of 'em crawled off to sleep behind the crates, or to have a smoke or take a piss or whatever—it wasn't his look-out what they did. Who'd played? Him and Sam Pawk and Cupid and Billy Earthquake most of the time. . . . No, they hadn't heard nuthin', 'cept Johnny Funk's snorin'. . . .

“An' you fartin' ever' time Cupid took money off you,” retorted Johnny Funk, a bear-like man with one ear bitten off.

“Either Weems didn't figure it out,” said Hannibal quietly, “or he had some information that we don't.”

Leaving Hannibal to follow the proceedings as Davis systematically questioned the deck-passengers—who seemed to have mostly gotten drunk and fallen asleep before midnight, as usual—January descended to the lower promenade to look for Rose. He found the niches among the sheltered wood-piles empty—niches considerably enlarged now because of the amount of wood burned at Vicksburg and Horsehead Bar—for all the inhabitants of the stern were bunched along the starboard rail among the male slaves, watching while Mr. Molloy rowed the skiff away toward what looked like a murky, bubbling tributary stream that broke the wall of trees.

“He ain't really gonna try and take this boat through there, is he, 'Rodus?” asked a boy in Gleet's coffle of the tall, slim Fulani who stood at his side.

“'S'a matter, Lam?” joked an older man to whom the boy was chained. “You ain't anxious to get to Memphis?”

“We could probably do it.” 'Rodus narrowed his eyes to watch the skiff maneuver through the sluicing curtains of rain. “See what he got there, that rope with the markers on it? That's a lead-line, to measure how deep the water is back there.”

“That's the thing he didn't use yesterday tryin' to run over that bar,” added Mr. Roberson's white-haired valet Winslow, and everybody laughed.

“What's goin' on up there, Michie Ben?” asked 'Rodus as January moved along the rail to search for Rose among the spectators. “They figure out anythin' yet about that poor buckra that went overside?”

And January heard in the young man's voice the false note of assumed casualness. Well hidden, of course—blankittes were always complaining that slaves were habitual liars, not seeming to make the connection between the necessity to tell whites what they wanted to hear and the fact that whites could flog or sell the speaker if they didn't like what they heard. As a child, January, with his open and innocent face, had been the champion liar on Bellefleur—something that hadn't saved him when old Michie Simon went on a tear with the rawhide.

Now he scanned the faces of the men chained along the wall, and he saw in all of them a wary and desperate interest.

He said quite quietly, “Colonel Davis askin' questions. I think he means to question everybody on board, probably you included.”

“Us?” The boy Lam looked scared, and put a protective arm around the younger brother chained at his side. “Why us?”

“What would a dressed-up buckra like Weems be doin' down here that time of night?” asked 'Rodus in a tone of such complete calm naturalness that January would have bet money they'd seen something, knew something.

And with an almost audible click, like the sound of a key in a lock, he heard Souter's voice again: a nigger gal singin' to her pickaninny . . .

Every night, the voices of the male slaves had risen in song. Desultory, sometimes, or joyful; sometimes the familiar call and response of work songs. He'd heard them himself as he slid into sleep last night. . . .

So why not at midnight, when Souter had gone up to the pilot-house?

Why had the men on the starboard side fallen silent, while the women continued to sing?

But he only shook his head. “They know he was dead when he went in the water,” he replied, and saw the glance go back and forth among the men. “Somebody smashed him over the head.”

The men around were silent. In the to-and-fro of their eyes he could almost hear the words: How'd they know? How much do they know? What's it gonna mean for us?

“He tell 'em?” asked 'Rodus mildly, but before January could answer, Mr. Lundy appeared at the bow end of the promenade and flourished his cane at the cluster of servants and deck-hands watching Molloy in the skiff.

“God damn the lot of you, trim the boat! What do you think you're looking at? Trim the damn boat before we get in more trouble—how do you expect a body to steer with all the weight on one side? Haven't you anything better to do than gape?”

“Oh, 'scuse me, sir,” murmured 'Rodus too low for the former pilot to hear. “I'll just move on upstairs into the Saloon for a few hands of ecarte.” And the men on either side of him, including January, snickered. The servants moved obediently on their way, some of them as usual pointedly ignoring the slaves chained along the wall—as if they themselves couldn't just as easily end up in the same situation next week—and others exchanging nods with them. January wondered how much the valets might have heard, or guessed, of what had happened on the other side of the piled cordwood, and whether he could ask questions without engendering suspicion.

“Man's an idiot.” Lundy tottered over to January's side. “Claims we can cut half a day off our time by going through Hitchins' Chute—high water be damned, you couldn't drown a cat in that chute!” The former pilot looked exhausted, hollow-eyed with strain as he glared out across the threshing water with its floating masses of downed trees, broken lumber, and torn-off branches.

Across the narrow stretch January could see Molloy standing in the skiff, dropping the lead-line overboard, then pulling it back. What he found must have satisfied him, for he rowed on a ways, almost invisible now between the rain and the intervening boughs.

“Looks deep enough to me, sir,” commented January, folding his arms. The thunder had ceased, save for ever more distant rumblings over the Mississippi bluffs. “Why's he in such a hurry all of a sudden?”

“Well, we lost most of a day yesterday.” Lundy's mouth twisted sourly. “More hurry, less speed, I say. River's gonna fall the minute the rain lets up and we'll be stuck in the chute waiting for Levi Christmas and his boys to show up. Molloy threatened to cane me when I told him what that girl of his had been up to in Natchez—like I couldn't have taken on that Gaelic drunkard with one hand behind me, before the palsy caught up with me! But the first thing he did when we got ourselves stuck good was to get every man-jack armed and on the deck, watching the shore. He knows.” Lundy shook his head, and unslung his spyglass from his side.

After a moment of silent scanning he offered it to January, who took it and followed the far-off figure in the skiff until it disappeared behind the trees. Down at the stern the paddle was turning slowly, more to keep water in the boilers than anything else. With the strength of the storm-fed current the Silver Moon was almost literally standing where she was in the water.

“How did the boat get hung up on Horsehead Bar to begin with, sir?” January folded up and returned the glass. “Souter seems to know his business better than that.”

“Souter?” Lundy sniffed. “If Molloy told Souter to stand on his head bare-naked in the Saloon, he'd do it. Mind you, anyone can run on a bar—in high water they build up fast. But it wasn't high water. The boy knew damn well there was a bar below Steele's Bayou, but Molloy told him to shave the bank close and shave it he did, and everyone on board got to rassle spars until nightfall because of it.”

“Is that what happened?”

“It's what Souter says. He was near in tears about it when I talked to him on the bow that afternoon and asked him what the hell he meant by shaving the bank that close. Molloy came down the stairs and slapped him on the shoulder and says, ‘You shouldn't go believin' everythin' you're told, boy. . . .'” Despite the crippled soft monotone of his voice, Lundy captured the Irishman's speech with blistering scorn. “It's my opinion Molloy did it just to break the boy's spirit a little and keep him under his thumb.”

The white triangular sail of the skiff winked from among the trees, tacking before the brisk gusts back toward the Silver Moon. Molloy's oilskin coat and wide-brimmed hat were running with rain, but he looked cheerful and stood up in the skiff to shout, “Plenty of water in the chute, laddies!”

“Oh, the hell there is!” Lundy limped over to the pilot as the deck-hands crowded forward to draw the skiff close to the bow and help Molloy spring aboard. January saw the older man gesture furiously, pointing toward the gap in the trees as the Silver Moon came slowly around and pointed her nose to the chute.

Because of the palsy, Lundy's buzzing, timbreless voice was inaudible over the rain and the paddle's splashing, but Molloy's reply boomed out arrogantly.

“What's the matter, man? You can't run a boat in ten feet of water? I thought you were the one with the hard-on to get to Lexington—in a manner of speaking,” he added, and strode on up the stair with a jeering laugh.

Lundy clung for a moment to the stanchion as if all strength had deserted him. But as January came forward to help him, the former pilot pushed himself away and moved, with surprising agility, up the stair as well.

“What causes it?” asked Rose's voice softly behind him. January turned to see her looking after the old pilot with compassionate eyes. “Palsy, I mean.”

“They don't know.” January went to take her in his arms, to press her to the thin boards of the wall through which the throb of the engines beat like a heart. To press his lips over hers, as the touch of her, the scent of her—even after a week unwashed in the heat on a steamboat's deck—aroused in him the desire to pull her behind the wood-piles and crates and have her on the bare deck like a savage, a Kaintuck, a rapist.

I feared I would never see you again.

He realized how often this was his fear when something separated them, when something went wrong.

“We wouldn't have left you, you know,” Rose said after that long, wordless time of silent rocking in one another's arms. Of silent thanks to God and the Virgin that in spite of Queen Régine's curse and every effort by the world in general to the contrary, the ultimate thing was still all right. She was still with him.

“I don't think I've ever felt so relieved in my life as when I saw you coming down the bank,” she went on. “Hannibal and I were watching for you, of course—Mr. Lundy told us Steele's Bayou was the likeliest place you'd make for.”

His lips brushed the feather-soft curls that emerged from beneath the edge of her tignon. “Don't tell me you were the one who actually got poor Souter to run the boat up on the bar.”

“Nonsense.” Her smile was a quick sunflash, quickly tucked away. “If we hadn't run aground on that bar, Hannibal was going to light a small fire in the cordwood near the engine-door just as we came within sight of Steele's Bayou so that I could slip in and dump the boilers in the confusion.”

January sighed. “It's good to know I have ingenious friends. Where was Lundy last night, by the way? I'll have to ask Hannibal what time he left the Saloon after dinner.”

“You don't suspect poor Mr. Lundy of heaving Weems overboard, do you? Why would he? I'd say it would be Mr. Molloy, if anybody. Or that cold savage, Cain.”

“Except that Molloy was in the pilot-house when it happened,” said January. “And Cain appears to have been continuously in the company of others—either the other card-players or Gleet—between nine-thirty and one. And I suppose,” he added thoughtfully, “if I were being suspicious, I'd find that in itself suspicious . . . because as far as I've seen, Cain can't stand Gleet. But it doesn't alter the fact that he couldn't have hit Weems over the head and dumped his body overboard at eleven-thirty—which is what seems to have happened.”

And he recounted to her, briefly, the results of his makeshift autopsy, and Hannibal's account of events in the Saloon the previous night. “Which makes nonsense of Mrs. Fischer's accusation, of Hannibal at least,” he concluded. “In fact with both Molloy and Cain accounted for, the murder could have been committed by anyone on board, including Mrs. Fischer herself. She's certainly tall enough and strong enough to have killed a man with a sharp blow over the head, especially one who had no reason to be wary of her. And in fact, we know almost nothing about anyone on board, including such ostensible innocents as Lundy and Quince.”

While he spoke, the Silver Moon had drawn closer to the fast-racing waters of Hitchins' Chute. Seven or eight deck-hands clambered down into the skiff, rowing across to the steep clay banks among the willows. Four sprang ashore on one side of the chute's mouth; the rest took the skiff across the fifty or sixty feet of water to the other. There they waited, with the long poles they'd brought with them in hand, for the steamboat to approach and be nudged into the narrow passageway.

Meantime the rain was lightening, till by the time the Silver Moon was fairly into the chute it was barely a patter. Though the current of the main river still surged with trees, limbs, scraps of sawn lumber or dead animals, the force of the stream was noticeably lessened. January could see where the wash-line on the banks already stood several feet above the surface.

Overhanging boughs swept the arcades of the boiler-deck above, and slapped at the stanchions only feet from where January and Rose stood by the passway. The male slaves pointed and commented about the suddenly-close scenery—the boys Lam and Jeremiah moved out to the end of their chains to lean over, to catch at the dripping leaves that whipped in under the arcades, and overhead January heard Melissa Tredgold scream, “I want to see! I want to see!”

No doubt while she tried to drag the unwilling Cissy over to the edge to let her do the same.

“No, you're right.” Rose leaned against January's side, rested her head on his shoulder. With his palm on her back he felt the tension in her slender body ease. “We don't know a thing about anyone on board except what they've told us. My guess is that Lundy was in bed. Sufferers from his ailment don't have much stamina. He told me once he has to lie down every few hours. He was the Silver Moon's original pilot, the one Molloy undercut. He took on the job because he has to get to Lexington, Kentucky—Tredgold is a friend of his and agreed to let him work, since he desperately needs the money. Because Tredgold reneged and hired Molloy, he's letting Lundy ride for free—though to my mind it's a high price, to put up with Molloy's abuse. There's evidently a professor at the medical school there who can help nervous disorders of this kind.”

“Did he say what his name is?” January felt a twinge of chagrin, like a twist in the muscle beneath his breastbone, at the reflection that it had been months since he'd had time to read the issues of The Lancet so dutifully stacking up in the small study at the back of the new house. He'd been conscious, as he'd examined Weems's body, of how long it had been since he'd done any serious medical work at all. Though the circumstances had appalled him—and though he felt pity for that sly, weasely little man—he had also felt all his old delight and wonderment at the tiny structures of the human body, the sense of probing into some of God's more mysterious and beautiful secrets.

“Burnham? Barham?” Rose shook her head. “I can't recall exactly.”

“The name isn't familiar. I'll have to ask. But one thing I do know. Whoever did the murder, I'd be willing to bet—if I had any money of my own to bet with—that it took place either on the starboard promenade of the boiler-deck, or more probably on the starboard promenade of the main deck. And that dark as it was, at least some of the slaves saw it.”