Marcia Muller: Crucifixion River

By the time Sophie and I had it moored tightly to the shore, the first drops of rain had begun to fall. The roiling clouds had moved closer, their underbellies black and swollen, and the wind was a howling thing that lashed the slough water to a muddy swirl. The air had an electric quality, sharp with the smell of ozone.

Sophie rubbed a hand across her thin, weathered face. “What’s keeping Annabelle? She should have been home long ago.”

“Some sort of delay in River Bend,” I said. “No cause for concern.”

“The storm is almost here.”

“If she hasn’t left by now, she knows to wait it out in town.”

“She won’t. She hates River Bend more than she does this place.”

“Then she’ll be here before the worst of it.”

“If she isn’t, how will we know she’s safe?”

“The stage is due any time. Pete Dell can tell us if he’s seen her.”

“And if he hasn’t? What then?”

We were both thinking the same. River Bend was more than a dozen miles distant and the levee road would soon enough be a quagmire. If the downpour came fast and heavy and lasted long enough, the levees might give way at some point and render it impassable. More than one traveler had been stranded, more than one conveyance swept away in the turbulent waters.

“Thomas…maybe I should saddle Jenny and ride toward town…”

“No. If she’s not back soon, I’ll go.”

There was more rain now, the drops blown, sharp and stinging, by the wind. I took Sophie’s arm and hurried us both to the shelter of the roadhouse.

I heard the rain begin when the coach had traveled only a few miles from River Bend. The threatening storm had been a topic of conversation between the driver and station agent in River Bend, but they had decided to continue on schedule in spite of it. I unbuttoned the side curtain to note that the sky was now dark with heavy, gray clouds. It was cold and damp in the coach. Perhaps we should have remained in town.

When I rebuttoned the curtain, I saw the young man and woman on the seat opposite me looking at each other, their eyes full of concern. “What if the storm prevents us from crossing to Middle Island?” she asked him in a voice barely above a whisper.

“We’ll get across.” His tone wasn’t reassuring, however. He was as tense as the woman, who had clasped her gloved fingers together and held her hands under her chin in an attitude of prayer.

“I wish we could have taken the steamer,” she told him.

“You know why we couldn’t.”

They both lapsed into silence as the wind and rain buffeted the coach, causing it to rock heavily in its thoroughbraces. The storm was now full-born.

I felt some unease myself. Clinging Carrie, my brothers and sisters had called me as a child. But as an adult woman I had sinned, suffered, and lost so much that it would take far more than a storm to unnerve me.

Time passed slowly, it seemed. It was impossible to read or crochet in the jolting coach, so I studied the man and woman on the opposite seat. He was handsome in a raw-boned, strong-featured way; locks of brown hair that matched his mustache crept out from under his hat. She might have been beautiful, with her upswept auburn hair and large blue eyes and full lips, but her face showed lines of strain and dark circles underscored the eyes’ loveliness. She had a prosperous look while her companion, although dressed well enough, had the weathered features and work-roughened hands of a ranch hand.

When they’d boarded the coach at the delta town of Isleton, I’d been disappointed that I was to have companions. I had taken the stage from Sacramento, rather than the river steamer, because I wished to be alone. I was starting a new life, and I needed time to prepare myself.

I had overcome my unhappiness at their presence, however, and introduced myself. After some hesitation the woman had said that her name was Rachel Kraft. “And this is my…cousin, Mister Hoover.”

That hesitation in Rachel Kraft’s voice had told me a great deal: the man was not her cousin. But what affair was that of mine? We were merely fellow passengers.

I closed my eyes, trying to picture the ranch in San Joaquin County where my sister Mary lived with her husband and seven children. Mine would be a Spartan existence there, filled with hard work-very different from the comfortable life I had enjoyed in Sacramento. But that life with my husband John and my two sons was over now; I was being thrust into exile. I knew neither Mary nor her husband Benjamin wanted me. They were only offering me shelter because I had nowhere else to go.

Fallen woman, divorced woman, shunned woman. Woman deprived of her children. Who would want such a creature?

Hugh had, in the beginning. Hugh Branson, the lover I’d taken in my unhappiness, and cherished, and eventually found wanting. After my husband discovered our affair, the fabric of my life was torn asunder. My children were taken from me in the divorce proceedings, my former friends and acquaintances turned their backs to me, and Hugh-I’d lost Hugh as well. I’d tried to find work-I had some medical training-but word of my transgression had spread and no respectable physician or nurses’ service would have me. Life in Sacramento became unbearable. The only solution was to leave…

The coach lurched and slid on the levee road, which by now must have been slicked with mud. Rachel Kraft cried out and clasped Mr. Hoover’s arm. The driver shouted to the horses, a sound barely audible above the voice of the wind, and the stage steadied. Mr. Hoover patted Rachel Kraft’s hand and said: “Don’t fret. We’ll be all right.”

“If there’s an accident…”

“There won’t be an accident.”

“The storm’s getting worse. What if we can’t cross on the ferry…?”

“Hush up.” It was a command, not a soothing phrase.

The coach lurched once more, and Rachel Kraft stifled a cry. Her companion comforted her as he had before, then cast an oddly guilty glance at me. There was something wrong with the pair, I thought. She panicked at the slightest provocation, and he wavered between solicitousness and tense distraction.

I closed my eyes again. My fellow passengers’ troubles were of no concern to me, as mine were of no concern to them. Except for their sake and that of the driver, I would not have cared if we were cast into the slough and drowned.

Fallen woman, divorced woman, shunned woman. Woman deprived of her children.

It would have been a fitting fate.

An hour after I was ejected from River Bend, the skies opened wide and it began to rain like billy-be-damned. Well, it had been that type of day. A slip of the hand, an angry citizen crying-“Cheat!”-a hard-hearted sheriff, and here I was, out on the lonely road again in the midst of a storm. Instead of a dry livery and a warm meal in that swamp town’s only eating house, Nell and I were forced to weather the weather, as it were-where and under what precarious conditions we’d yet to find out. Pity the poor traveling merchant!

The rain came busting down in side-slanting sheets, finding its way inside my slicker and chilling me to the marrow. Late afternoon and the sky was black as sin and the daylight all but blotted out by the deluge. The wagon lurched as Nell slogged on. Careful driving from now on, I reminded myself, to forestall an accidental plunge down the embankment to certain death. On both sides of the levee road, slough water boiled and bubbled up over the banks like soup in a witch’s cauldron. If the storm grew much worse, the road would be swamped. It wouldn’t do to be stranded out here at the mercy of the elements.

My luck had been running fine until River Bend and the sharp-eyed citizen and that hard-nosed sheriff. There were store boats plying this delta country, but not so many that a wagon seller couldn’t make a decent living for himself. Farmers and their wives in need of clasp knives and pocket watches, writing paper and bottles of ink, saddle blankets, good maguey rope, bottles of liniment and cough syrup and female complaint medicine, needles and thread, pots and pans, spices and seasonings, yards of calico and gingham. Town citizens, too, eager to buy when their local mercantiles ran out of the goods I carried in this old red and green, slab-sided wagon with the fresh-painted words on each side: