Barbara Hambly - Dead water

A flash of pink on the gangway behind him made the Reverend whirl, and like a panther he bounded to intercept the dainty form that tried to scurry past him. He caught her by the wrist and dragged her to the dray with such violence that her stylish hat tumbled from her head, but January had already recognized the frock, with its ruffles of blond lace and its bunches of silk roses on the sleeves.

“You been diddled, you little spunk-bait! You and that toss-pot Irish boat-driver of yours!”

“Piss on you!” retorted Miss Skippen, trying to pull her wrist from the Reverend's iron grasp. “Molloy said they'd stole money and was takin' it north! He said he knew the man from seein' him at the bank! This has got to be a trick!”

“Of course it's a trick, you brainless slut! Didn't you think of that when you come here all full of how there's two trunks of money comin' ashore? My God, of all the stupid cunnies I've had to do with, you're the stupidest! But if you think this pays me off for what you owe me . . .”

January backed slowly up the alley, keeping to the cover of the snagged-up deadfalls and the rough stands of brush. At higher water one would have needed a boat to get to the back of the Stump, but now only ten or twelve yards of knee-deep brown river separated it from the muddy shore. A broken-down gallery sagged at its rear, to which a ladder led up, its feet propped in the shallows. The single window was boarded up.

It would be best, thought January, to simply return to the Silver Moon at once, tell Mr. Tredgold that his “master” had been falsely accused and was in the town jail, and to have the boat held until the matter was regulated. He was almost certain that Weems had no intention of pressing the charge—the object of the game was clearly to delay whoever pursued Weems ashore, not to bring up a lot of questions about why Weems would have made the charge.

That would be best. The longer he, January, lingered in the filthy and anonymous precincts of Natchez-Under, the greater his chances became of being spotted and recognized by Christmas. Or of being randomly attacked for the contents of the flour-sack he still carried, with hat and jacket.

Instead of doing what would be best, however, he glanced up and down the alleyway, satisfied himself that nearly the entire population of the Stump had assembled on the front gangplank to observe the screaming-match developing between Miss Skippen and the Reverend Christmas—and waded swiftly across to the ladder and climbed.

The door at the top was locked, but the framing was so rotted, it yielded at once to a sharp blow of his shoulder. Someone in the room beyond scrambled aside in panic. January called out hoarsely, “Bobby? It's Ben.”

“Ben!” The runaway hurried to the door as January pushed it open. “You gonna come after all?” His young face shone with hope, and with delight for his new friend's change of heart.

The tiny back room contained little. A blanket, a bowl that smelled of rice and beans, a couple of bottles: whiskey and beer. The liquor colored Bobby's breath as he spoke.

“Ben, the Reverend Christmas got the beatenist scheme for gettin' me money for when I get to Canada!” Bobby caught January's hand like an eager child. “They gonna take me over the other side of the river to Feliciana Parish, where nobody know me, an' pretend to sell me! Then they helps me escape, an' we go a little farther an' they sell me again ! We do that two-three times, then we splits the money fifty-fifty, an' they sends me on north!”

January walked—or rather climbed, because the angle of the floor was almost twenty degrees—over to the inner door that led to the rest of the saloon, and tried it. It was, as he'd suspected, locked.

He looked back at Bobby, infinitely weary, infinitely angry at men who'd ply a boy like this—for he was scarcely more than a boy—with liquor and lies. There were times when January truly hated white men. “You do that two-three times, then they cuts your throat, an' slits your guts so you won't blow up an' float to the surface, an' dumps you in the river. They thieves, Bobby. Thieves an' whoremasters. They out there right now, fightin' over two trunks they stole from the Imperial Hotel.”

Tears flooded the young man's eyes: tears of half-drunken grief, of fractured hope. “What you tell a lie like that for, Ben?” Bobby whispered. “They gonna get me out of here. Get me to freedom.”

A country boy, thought January. A village boy. Born on one plantation and sold to another, or to two or three—he'd probably seen no more than five hundred people, all-told, in his entire life, before coming to Natchez, and four hundred and fifty of those had been country-born slaves like himself.

Clinging to his dream of freedom.

“Don't believe them, Bobby,” he said softly. “You run now. You follow the river north. You travel at night, and you stay away from people. If you got to leave the river, you follow the stars—you know the stars that make up the Drinkin' Gourd?” He sketched the Dipper on the dirty wall with his finger. “These two stars, they point to the North Star. You follow the Drinkin' Gourd, you'll be headin' north.” He reached in his pocket—wincing, since he was almost certain he was simply handing the sum, through Bobby's agency, to the first scoundrel who happened along—and brought out thirty dollars of Hubert Granville's money.

He pressed the heavy coins into the boy's hand, closed the work-callused young fingers around it. “You got about two minutes to make up your mind,” he said, “before they come back inside.” With a corner of his sleeve he scuffed away the dusty ghost of the star-map from the wall. “Whatever you decide to do, you don't tell a soul it was me who warned you, or they come after me, too. All right?”

Bobby's lips formed the words all right without sound. Tears rolled down his cheeks—of disappointment, and of terror.

January descended the ladder, waded through the stinking tug of the Mississippi current, and back to shore.

Only the faintest wisps of smoke rose from the Silver Moon 's stacks when he crossed the muddy landing to the boat. The big stern wheel was still, its upper surfaces dry under the grilling noon sun. Tremendous activity surged around the engine-room door on the bow-deck, and January could hear Molloy cursing.

“I refuse to allow you to let that man speak so in your presence!” Mrs. Tredgold's strident voice soared over the hubbub. “Let alone in mine! If there is damage to one of the boilers, I refuse to continue on this boat. . . .”

“Darling, I swear to you . . .”

Coming up the landing-stage, January could see Mr. Tredgold sweating and wringing his hands as he pleaded with his wife in the engine-room doorway.

“Every inch of the engine was checked before the voyage began! You know I would never let my family journey on an unsafe boat! Now, whoever it was who told you that one of the boilers was faulty could not possibly have known such a thing—”

“She said in her note that she was ‘walking out' with one of the engineers. But her handwriting is that of a lady.” Mrs. Tredgold thrust a piece of notepaper under her spouse's nose. Though not nearly close enough to study it, January felt almost certain that he would have recognized the hand.

“What happened?” he asked Mr. Lundy, who was leaning against one of the pilasters of the promenade arcade near-by.

The former pilot's lips tightened under his white-streaked mustache. “Some woman put a note under Mrs. Tredgold's door, claiming an assistant engineer had told her one of the boilers was faulty, and like to blow.”

All around them the anxious chatter of the deck-passengers covered their words. The Irish and Germans were trying vainly to grasp the nature of the danger, holding their children close and glancing at Tredgold as if debating whether or not to ask for their money back and take another boat, the Kaintucks speculating about how one could tell if the boilers were about to blow and trading tales of similar catastrophes: “I was comin' downstream on a raft and we was but thirty feet from the Queen of Sheba when she blew, this huge spurt of fire come flamin' out frontwise from her bow, then like the whole top of the boat ripped off with boards go sailin' up a hunnert feet in the air in shoots of flame. . . .