Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

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.”