The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  • • •

  The setting sun cast a crimson glow on the river, and from my little stool in front of the ticket window I saw the townspeople start to arrive.

  Leo had swept the stage plank, and one by one men and women walked up it wearing their good clothes and carrying lanterns for the walk back. I took their money and in return gave them a stiff gray stub, a souvenir. One man offered a sack of cornmeal in payment for himself and his wife, and when I hesitated, Hugo, who was greeting people at the top of the plank, said in his rolling English accent, “Splendid! Of course! And I thank you for it!”

  More people lined up. It was going to be a good show, I thought, my heart beating high with excitement, and I was right. That night we had almost sixty people in the audience, with only a few back rows left untaken. Mrs. Niffen sang her song without changing keys, and the new chain on Thaddeus’s cape kept it in place perfectly. Of course, tonight I noticed other things: Pinky’s cap, even with the strap, was too big for his face and sometimes hid his expressions—Pinky was wonderfully expressive, something to capitalize on, not to hide—and Mr. Niffen wore the wrong sort of tie for a shopkeeper. But the show as a whole went off beautifully. People left the auditorium laughing and repeating phrases to each other while I played them out on the piano. After they were all gone and I’d rolled the piano off to the side, I went into the office to retrieve the long silk bag of change; another part of my job was making sure Hugo took this with him to his room every night.

  Outside I found the townspeople still lingering on the flat spit of land. Their lanterns swung in the night, and I could hear children laughing with tired hysteria up in the trees while the wind combed the long grass underneath. My fingers were tired from piano playing, but I felt good, and the bag of change was satisfyingly heavy. I looped its string over my wrist, and then I stretched out my hands and made two fists and stretched them out again, loosening exercises I’d learned from a piano player in New York.

  “What’s that?” I heard Hugo say. “Who told you that?”

  I made out his figure just ahead standing with a small boy and a tall man in a dark suit. The boy turned and in the light of his small, child-sized lantern I saw it was Charles Mundy. I smiled and started to walk up to him but stopped when I saw his face was wet with tears.

  “She did!” he said, pointing to me.

  I started to say “No I didn’t,” for by now I guessed what this was about, but Hugo said quickly, “May, right, the change bag. Open it up for me, will you?”

  He stuck his hand in and pulled out three nickels. He gave one to the boy and one to the tall man—Postmaster Mundy, I assumed—and made the third appear under his own hat, in his inside vest pocket, and in Charles Mundy’s oversized boot. He took the coin back from the postmaster but then the postmaster found it in his palm again. Soon the boy was smiling, and when Hugo coughed a nickel up and took it from his mouth, he even laughed.

  “You keep this one,” Hugo said, rubbing the coin on his elbow and giving it to the boy. “I can’t stand the sight of my food after I’ve eaten it.”

  I watched the boy slip his free hand into his father’s as they walked away, and then he let go to run to his mother, who was standing in a knot of women underneath a tree. She bent to look at the coin he held out to her. Then, his miniature lantern swinging, Charles Mundy left his parents alone to skip ahead, his overly big boots bothering him not at all in this endeavor. All children, I’ve noticed, can work with any manner of footwear when it comes to skipping for joy.

  Hugo turned to me. I started to say I wasn’t the one who said anything about magic, but he spoke first.

  “Never promise something you won’t deliver, May. The audience has to believe they can trust us. It’s part of our job, don’t you see, to let people know what their dimes will get them. That’s what keeps them coming back every year. You’re new to this, May, I understand that, but you have to do better. I didn’t realize how much you didn’t know. You have to do better than this.”

  He shook his head, disappointed in me. A film seemed to harden around my heart. I wanted to say I wasn’t the one who promised the boy magic, but a crushing feeling came over me along with the sense that it didn’t matter; I’d already gotten another bad mark. What’s more, Hugo might say what I was now thinking: that in any case I should have spoken up when Thaddeus lied.

  The townspeople began to climb the bluff with their lanterns held out in front of them. From the corner of my eye I could see a light up in the galley of the boat, and then some more lights blinked on in the dining room: someone was turning up the oil lamps. The actors were hungry, I guessed, and, armed with bread and cold meat, they’d be sitting around the tables, dismantling the night’s show, discussing what worked and what didn’t, everyone with an opinion, their voices getting louder as they joked about someone in the audience with a stuttering laugh or an ill-timed cough, and then they would move on to joke about each other. Down in the auditorium, Leo would be sweeping the stage before bedding down himself.

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked Hugo. My bones seemed to stiffen as though in spite of my question I might tether myself to the spot by their very rigidity. In the moonlight I couldn’t make out Hugo’s expression. I would have to take a steamer back to Cincinnati, I was thinking. Or find room in a barge. Surely he’d let me stay until morning.

  “Leave the boat?” he asked. “Why? Do you want to go?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He paused, and for a moment I felt a terrible weight. But then he just said, “That’s all right, then. You’ve made mistakes, that’s all. We all do. I’ll tell you something I’ve noticed, though, which is that you care about the show. I could tell that last night, when you paid such close attention to what worked and what didn’t—well, I’m talking about the costumes, of course, capes falling off and so forth. I hadn’t thought about any of that very much, to be perfectly frank, and it surprised me. I think you understand more than you let on about putting on a fine performance. That’s worth more to me than a few mistakes.”

  I could hear the gentleness in his voice. “I do care,” I said, and although I was still too shaken to smile, I remembered to open my lips to show my teeth.

  Something passed over his features, a brush of an expression I couldn’t read.

  “Don’t worry, May, We’ll get you all sorted before long.” He took my arm and began to walk with me back up to the boat. “Anyway, you’ll want your twenty dollars back, and I don’t have it. But if you give me that change bag I’ll cut you a share of tonight’s house, and you can put that down toward what I owe you.”

  9

  It did not take me long to learn the habits of the Floating Theatre. Hugo and Leo woke up well before dawn to move the boat before the wind rose, and Cook was up even earlier, brewing dark, bitter coffee and frying up muffin-shaped doughnuts that he rolled in brown sugar. Once the boat was unmoored, Hugo stood at the bow drinking his coffee from a little white enamel bucket with a lid, about the size of a small water dipper, wearing his chalk-colored blanket coat with the yellow stripe and shouting out directions.

  I liked to get up early to watch the men move the boat, first fetching my own doughnut to eat while I stood on the upper deck out of their way. Leo worked one of the side sweeps, which is what I learned to call the long oars, while Pinky and either Sam or Jemmy worked the sweeps on the opposite side. Hugo steered the boat with a short front sweep called a gouger. Occasionally he called out names of the sandbars coming up—“Petticoat Ripple! Owl Hollow Run!”—in his thunderous English accent. I wasn’t sure if he was warning the crew or if he just liked saying the names. This was Hugo’s fourth season on the Ohio, and he could fathom its depth just by the color of the water. He counted aloud the number of snags—dead trees partially submerged in the river—and recorded the number in his oversized brown leather logbook at the end of every jump.

  Watching Hugo pilot the boat, I sometimes wondered if this was like another stage role to
him—the captain with his blanket coat and his river jargon—but other times I had the feeling that moving the boat downstream every morning was his favorite part of the day. He kept a long, narrow copy of The Navigator in his outside pocket with its detailed information about sandbars, harbors, channels, and creeks, as well as all the towns and settlements along the Ohio and their businesses: the saddleries and weaving houses, the brass foundries and breweries. I enjoyed the feeling of movement as we made our way downriver, and I also liked watching the steady stream of river commerce in the blue morning light, the barges on their way to New Orleans with barrels of pork fat and buttons and tea and molasses and nails, the steamers with their roped cargo or sleeping passengers, and our small flat riverboat theater moving among them, always last.

  Since the Floating Theatre was unmoored around three in the morning, by the time the actors awoke we were usually already tied up at the new landing. Breakfast was available until nine. At noon we ate dinner, and the supper gong rang at five. Normally we played one night in each town and then traveled four or five hours the following morning to get to the next one. We didn’t stop at every town, only ones large enough to draw a crowd. We played in Ohio and crossed the river to play in Kentucky, but, north or south, all the towns and villages were laid out very much the same: a long, wet pier before a line of two-story wooden buildings facing the water—taverns with a room or two to let, boat shops, warehouses, sometimes a tobacco-cutting shop—and the ever-present men sitting on horse carts on the wide dirt track next to the pier, waiting to unload or load their goods onto the packet boats. The track led to higher ground where the town proper was laid out, although often that was only one block long. From my balcony on the upper deck I could usually make out farms and orchards in the distance, wattle fences separating properties, and a creek or two snaking down to the river.

  Every morning after breakfast I went into town with Leo or Hugo, though after a couple of weeks Hugo felt I was sufficiently trained to go by myself. In the afternoon, if it was fine, I swam in the river with Liddy. Good as her word, she was teaching Celia and me how to dive.

  “Give a little jump with your toes, Cee,” Liddy instructed. “Look at how May does it. May, you’re a natural!”

  In the afternoons Leo sat fishing, and after swimming I often took my sewing outside to sit beside him and Oliver on the riverbank. Leo was very much like me in some ways with his own private interest, fishing, which he pursued as doggedly as I pursued my sewing. Most of the time we sat without talking, which suited us both, but sometimes he told me about Florida, where he grew up. “The swamp started at the back of the house,” he said. “I guess that’s why water feels more natural to me than dry land.” When I asked him, he showed me how to reel in a fish and then how to clean and gut it.

  He wound his long, tapered fingers along a filet knife and sliced in through the gills. “You sure you don’t mind this? Some ladies don’t like the looks of all that.”

  I didn’t mind. I always cleaned hares with my mother when she wanted a stew; my father, even using a cane, was a very good shot. Leo had a slow way of speaking and he always looked right at me, which ordinarily made me uncomfortable, but it didn’t with him.

  “Now you take the knife and try it with this one. That’s a smelt,” he said. He worked the knife into position for me under the gill. “You take it from here.”

  He knew every kind of fish and every kind of barge. But I noticed Hugo was right: Leo never left the boat if we were in the South. He didn’t even sit on the riverbank but instead he fished from the boat deck. In some ways the towns to the south of the river looked just like the towns to the north, but there were differences, of course. I never saw a slave auction, but at one town I did see rough stone blocks in front of a small hotel, on which the men and women would stand to be inspected and bid upon; the stones were so narrow, I didn’t see how an adult could balance on one. And once I saw a slave being led into a slave jail, where his owner paid a man fifty cents to whip him for some misdeed while young white boys scrambled for positions at the window to watch.

  I saw all this, but I don’t think I fully understood what I was seeing. Sometimes now I wonder whether, like swimming, when you first submerge yourself in a new environment, you lose some of the power of your senses—your ears clog, you shut your eyes—as you try to get used to it. I was learning a new trade and learning to live with people in a way I’d never done before. Most of my thoughts were focused on succeeding in these two endeavors. When I was with Comfort, we always rented rooms in a boardinghouse but we never much mingled with any other boarders. And although we spent a great deal of time at the theater, we usually ate alone in our room to save money. Or, if Comfort went out to a public house for a meal with an admirer or some fellow actors, I would go back to our room and eat by myself, sometimes only chocolate, and then go to bed when I liked.

  On the Floating Theatre everyone ate at the same time, family-style, and on Sundays we pushed the tables into one long row so we could all sit together. By law we could not perform any show on a Sunday, so there was no hustle to be finished, and everyone relaxed, content to sit for hours in the dining room and talk.

  “Here’s all you need to know about flatboats,” Hugo said one Sunday evening over coffee and a piece of Cook’s lumpy pecan pie. “Keep the boat as much as possible in the swiftest part of the current, avoid river cut-offs, and never tie up alongside a fallen bank. There! Now any one of you can be captain. What do you think, May? You’ve seen us move the boat enough now. You’ll be wanting your own captain’s papers before long.”

  Mrs. Niffen frowned. “Oh, Captain Cushing, no one knows all that you know,” she said. “If I studied the river twenty years, I could not come up with half the facts you tell.”

  “Leo here’s been on this river only two years and he knows more than I do already,” Hugo told her. “But I can make my way upstage to down if I keep my wits. So far we’ve stayed upright, I guess.” He smiled at Mrs. Niffen and she smiled back uncertainly, clearly at a loss as to how serious he was. Unlike me, she hadn’t seen him every morning with his little bucket of coffee in one hand and the gouger in the other, steering the heavy boat with one arm and landing it every time in the exact part of the current he aimed for, his blanket coat flapping behind him.

  “But you have your captain’s papers,” she said in a tighter voice.

  “That I have! Course, any fool who can read can get those.”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” Mrs. Niffen laughed weakly, looking over at her husband, who winked at her. I’d noticed that although Mr. Niffen did not speak overly much, he made good use of gesture.

  • • •

  By my third week on the boat I was feeling more capable. It was mid-May, and the Moselle had sunk at the end of April. I’d had no news of Comfort, but of course she didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t write to tell her. I still felt her absence sometimes, usually in the morning when I used to watch her do her exercises while I made our morning tea. But soon enough the tasks on the boat and in town distracted me even from that. Every night Hugo gave me a share of the house, usually a dime, toward the twenty dollars he owed me. We had good crowds most nights, or at least good enough to have made the stop worthwhile.

  I had only one nagging worry: Mrs. Niffen. Twice I had come upon her in my room, looking at my things. The second time she was holding my father’s pocket watch, which, going down early in the morning one day to bathe in the river with Celia and Liddy (“Prepare to be cold, May!”), I’d left by my bed.

  “This watch looks just like Mr. Niffen’s; I thought he might have loaned it to Helena,” Mrs. Niffen said, not handing it back right away. I was fairly sure that if I had returned a mere two minutes later it would have already been in her pocket.

  “Have you been able to find that key?” I asked Hugo after supper that night.

  “What key?”

  “The key to my stateroom. Mrs. Niffen keeps going in while I’m not there.”

 
; “Oh, don’t worry about Mrs. Niffen; she’s harmless. Well, fairly harmless,” he amended. “She only wants whatever anyone else might have.” He laughed, but I did not see the joke.

  “That doesn’t sound harmless to me,” I said.

  The next day we crossed out of the state of Ohio and into Indiana; on the other side of the river, Kentucky went on and on. June was still a week or so away, but the summer heat seemed to have settled in early. After my swim with Liddy, I thought I might try to rearrange things in the green room so I could put Helena’s trunks in there, too: they were still pushed against the cot in my stateroom. Whenever I asked Hugo about Helena’s belongings, his face seemed to grow a hard layer and he turned away from me, saying, “Yes, yes, I’ll work something out.” I don’t think he was lying, exactly, but after the third time he said it, I realized that if anything would be worked out, it would not be by him.

  Liddy told me that Hugo and Helena had been very close. “They built this business together. He probably can’t bring himself to look at her things yet.”

  So, with my hair still wet, I went along the outside guard to the back door of the green room to see if I could find space for the trunks in there. But as soon as I stepped inside, I realized that the room could barely contain what was already in it. Instead I decided to pry open the crates to see what was inside them, hoping for some useful costume material and props, and maybe I could consolidate a few of them to make more room.