Mary Shura: Gabrielle

"Don’t knock my girl’s biscuits, DuBois," he warned. "I don’t have my crew keeping guns handy by accident. More than one showboat has been attacked by ruffians along this river. Who knows? We could run out of ammunition and have to defend the Levee Princess by throwing Gabrielle’s biscuits."

Gabrielle knew Stephen was watching her, gloating over her embarrassment. She didn’t have to glance at him to know how smug and arrogant he looked, his smile strangely lopsided as if he was never more than half amused. How anybody that good-looking could be such a complete disaster totally astounded her.

A lot of her distaste for Stephen was just old-fashioned disappointment. She had been the only young person on board for a long time, which meant she didn’t really have any friends near her age. It wasn’t possible to get to know the young people along the river, even when the boat was tied up at the same place for a long time. The land people didn’t see her as a real girl at all, but as an actress and singer. Then after the boat’s dancer and acrobat left to take a job working on a Kentucky tobacco plantation, her father hired Stephen in Paducah. She had been really excited, thinking she would have somebody like herself on board the boat at last.

Had she ever been wrong!

Stephen was different, and better than most of the performers her father had hired on. He was not only a good gymnast and dancer, but could do an amazing number of other things. When the channel of the river was deep and straight, her father sometimes even let Stephen take the pilot’s wheel.

And he was handsome, Gabrielle had to admit that. Most of the Frenchmen Gabrielle had seen in New Orleans and along the river were slender like Stephen, but not much taller than she was. Stephen was even taller than her father. His eyes, dark under black lashes, seemed to hide forbidden secrets. But she could certainly do without his smart mouth and his supercilious smiles!

When all nine of the coffee mugs had been handed out, Gabrielle took hers outside to join her father on the Texas deck. It was silly to call a deck after a state, but all showboats did it and the Texas deck was always the top deck with only the pilot house above it. Gabrielle settled herself at her father’s feet as he and Pud Swallow watched the first glimmer of daylight come up above the Illinois shore and shudder across the face of the swift river moving toward them. Birds flew low over the face of the water, piping ' and crying. Now and then a bird went by standing on one leg to ride on the exposed surface of a racing log. From the darkness of the woods behind them, Gabrielle heard the barking of a coyote.

"They’ve had a real storm somewhere north of us," Pud said soberly. "Look at that current."

Although Pud was the funniest clown on the river and the best comedy dancer anywhere, he was a strangely solemn man. Gabrielle liked him as well as anyone she had ever known, except for her father and Flossie. He had prominent cheekbones, a large beak nose, and eyes set too close together. Without makeup he looked rather peculiar, but when he became a clown he was so perfectly right that she laughed before he even did anything. And like her father, Pud had worked on the river ever since the end of the War Between the States, and knew it as well as any man.

Her father nodded. "Maybe it’s just as well it comes now. Those loose logs that struck us when we were tied up north of Hannibal left some weak places in our hull on the port side. The sooner we fix them, the easier the job will be. And you’re right about the current, Pud. It looks downright hazardous. And it’s not like we’re rushed, either. We only need to make it downriver to St. Louis by the first of October."

As he spoke, a long row of barges pushed by the tug Mandy Sue passed them going south along the river. The quiet was broken by the greeting from the tug’s engineer: one long whistle followed by a short one. The crew of the Levee Princess waved back from the deck.

"Griz is taking a chance even with that load he’s pushing," Pud commented, lifting his hand. Gabrielle waved, too. All the regulars along the river knew each other, as if the water itself were a moving town.

Gabrielle had recognized Stephen’s distinctive light step coming up the stairs, but she ignored him. Of course, she thought, he didn’t even have manners enough to stay out of a conversation between his older-and-betters.

"How long do you generally have to stay in at shore when the river runs high like this ?" he asked. He had only worked on boats on the Ohio River before joining the Levee Princess , and the Ohio River was a bathtub compared to the turbulent Mississippi.

"It depends," her father said. "There’s no sense in taking risks that will lose us more time in the long run. The flood stage could pass in a day or keep rampaging for a week. But as I was telling Pud, we won’t waste the time we spend tied up here. We have maintenance on the boat to do, and maybe we could even work on some new acts for the show."

New acts. This would have been a perfect chance for Gabrielle to talk to her father about what she wanted to try, if only Stephen had taken his coffee into the dining room with the others instead of coming out on deck where he wasn’t wanted.

"New acts ?" Stephen asked. "That sounds interesting. Anything special in mind ?"

I have something special in mind, she wanted to shout. Only Stephen, there in the darkness behind her father, kept her silent.

"I’ve been watching you, DuBois," Pud Swallow told him. "I like the way you handle yourself. I bet we could work up a comedy dance routine that would tip them into the aisles."

"Hey, Mr. Swallow," Stephen said, sounding very young suddenly, "I’d sure like that." Gabrielle stirred. He had better be impressed. Pud was the best comic on the river. Anyone who got a chance to work with Pud was privileged.

"Sounds good to me, too," her father said. "What about you, Gabrielle?" He touched her hair gently as he spoke. "Got any bright new ideas brewing? You added a lot to the band this year by learning to play that banjo."

"I do have an idea," she admitted, "but if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you later." As she spoke, she rose and took his coffee mug as well as her own. "I need to go help Flossie clean up."

"You and Flossie are a wonder," her father said gratefully. "Maybe we’ll luck onto a new cook to hire at the next stop."

After taking Pud’s mug, Gabrielle passed Stephen leaning in the doorway. She pretended not to see the empty mug he held out to her. Who did he think she was anyway, his personal maid? She might as well have taken it. He laughed in a low, teasing way that brought a furious flush to her cheeks.

Flossie was elbow-deep in hot dishwater when Gabrielle entered the galley. "Any sign of shoving off?" she asked, looking up.

Gabrielle shook her head as she slid the soiled mugs into the soapy water. "Father and Pud don’t like the way the river is rising. They are talking about settling in for a while and fixing that place where the logs hit the hull up north."

"Do you know where we are?" Flossie asked.

Gabrielle shook her head. "Not exactly. I have a rough idea only because I looked at Father’s river map yesterday. We’re three days south of Hannibal on the Missouri side, but I don’t know what town we’re near."

"Probably not any," Flossie said. "There are more boat landings than towns along this stretch of the Mississippi. I was just wondering if there was a little town close or if we could find a farmhouse. We need to buy some salted side meat. I don’t really have enough left to fix breakfast today."

"I’d be happy to go ashore and look for some as soon as it’s light," Gabrielle told her.