The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  “Pretty. She’ll like that.”

  Hugo was wearing a broad-brimmed hat and he angled it to lengthen its shadow over his face. He held a copy of The Midnight Hour in one hand and his fishing line in the other. Leo took an angleworm from a second bucket and dressed his hook while Oliver eyed him with interest.

  “If all goes well, we’ll debut the play in Paducah or Florence,” Hugo said. “How are you coming along?” he asked me. He meant the costumes. He had begun to take an interest in them—even went so far as to make some suggestions. “I was thinking maybe the General should have epaulettes. That would mark him as a military gent.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. And a broad sash; that’s easy to make.”

  “A striking color. Red or gold.”

  “Gold would match this.” I held up Liddy’s costume with the gold embroidery.

  “Gold it is,” Hugo said. He leaned over to look at the embroidery more carefully.

  “Lovely. Maybe add a blue tuck in the center,” he suggested. “To draw in the eye.”

  I smiled to myself. If Comfort had taken this kind of interest in my sewing I would have never sewn scratchy feathers into her costumes, no matter how much she laughed at me. I was pleased that he noticed my work, although I had no temptation to follow his suggestion, since the blue dot would ruin the design. Hugo went back to his play, and when he bent his head I could see the tanned line of his neck just under his thick, dark hair. In the morning, after he and Leo had landed the boat and he’d gone upstairs to wash his face and hands and write in his logbook, he had a certain talcum-y smell. Also his shaving cream gave off a richly sweet scent, though he did not shave every morning. Sometimes he waited until just before the evening show, after he had napped and eaten supper, and on those days it seemed to me that his stubble had its own rough but not unpleasant odor, like pine needles. He was proud of being a riverboat man and proud of his captain’s papers, and he was also very proud of his theater. If Leo had not whitewashed the floor to his satisfaction, he got on his hands and knees to spot paint himself. Then he smelled like the lime in the whitewash.

  I unthreaded the yarn from my needle and pulled out a stitch that was not quite loose enough. “Have you noticed how full the risers have been this week?” I asked Hugo. “I’ve been giving out complimentary tickets.”

  “To free blacks?”

  “I ask them to tell their friends and family. I calculated that our net is up twenty-eight percent from last week.” I wanted to remind him I was good at math in case he was thinking of letting Mrs. Niffen take over the books.

  “I hope you haven’t done that in slave states,” Hugo told me. “None of the whites will come if there are Negroes in the audience.”

  “Whyever not?”

  Hugo put down his fishing line and wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers. The script fell onto the pier by his foot. “I agree, it’s not right. But there it is.” He picked up the script, held the fishing pole under his armpit, and turned down the page he was on. Then he sat on the script to hold it in place and began fussing with his line. Oliver was sniffing the bait bucket and Leo snapped his fingers at him.

  “What’s it like to be a slave?” I asked Leo.

  Beside me, Hugo shifted uneasily in his canvas chair.

  “You know I don’t know that,” Leo told me.

  “Your mother didn’t tell you any stories?”

  Hugo shifted again. “Now, May . . .” he said warningly. But Leo just shrugged.

  “She found herself a better life. Don’t look backwards behind you, she always said.”

  Hugo cleared his throat, a growly whisper of a noise. He took off his hat and I could see his eyes, which seemed wet and unfocused in the sun. “Listen, May, Leo was never . . . Leo is a free man, you know.” He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “You shouldn’t be asking him such questions. You shouldn’t ask anyone that.”

  “Why not?”

  On the river, a large steamship blew two sharp whistles. As it passed I watched its slow side wheel send up sparkling white water and then dash it back down. Leo didn’t want to talk about his past, I understood that. But on that day I felt compelled to keep talking. No one seemed able to tell me what I wanted to know. Maybe I wasn’t asking the right questions.

  “Why don’t you ever go into town in the South?” I asked when the steamer had passed.

  Leo tested his line. “There are slavers there. Man could catch me up and make me a slave.”

  Now Hugo became even more agitated. “They can’t do that: there are laws!” he said. “You’re a free man, Leo, you know that. Born that way.” He stopped and then said, “Not that I want you to go to towns in the South. If you’re not comfortable, why, then, of course . . . but you should know you’re perfectly safe.”

  Leo shrugged again but he was right. Ten years later I read in a newspaper that men were trying to write new laws that would allow a white man to do just what Leo feared: catch a black man and take him back to the South as a slave, no matter if he’d been a slave before or not.

  Leo reeled in another brown fish, identical to the last one, and cursed. He was searching for a large catfish he’d seen early that morning.

  “I’ll gut all those,” I said, gesturing to the fish bucket, “as soon as I finish this bit.”

  Leo baited his line again. “I just know that cat’s down there.”

  But Hugo hadn’t finished with me yet. “I don’t understand, May,” he said. “We’ve been out here for over a month and now, suddenly, you can’t get enough of the slave question? Why is it you didn’t wonder about it before?”

  “I don’t know. That’s how I am.”

  “I hope you’re not corresponding with that woman, the abolitionist.” His eyes searched mine. “She’s a bully, May. Don’t let her dictate your thoughts. You’re independent enough not to mind her.”

  “She’s not dictating my thoughts. She started me wondering. And now I keep wondering.”

  Hugo began to say something and then stopped himself. He reeled in his empty fishing line and stared at the bucket on the pier. After a while he said, as though talking to the bucket, “You pick up the thread of something and then you can’t put it down.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a question or not. “Is that bad?” I asked.

  Hugo and Leo looked at each other. Then Leo deliberately worked his line, not answering.

  “No,” Hugo said. After a moment he added, “Well, I don’t know. It can be.”

  I waited for him to say more. He took a long breath and then he put down his fishing line. “I suppose I feel some responsibility.” He glanced at Leo. “For both of you. For everyone. I don’t want you, May, or anyone else, to get hurt. As the captain, you know. I feel I should . . .” he trailed off. He looked out at the water where a couple of boys were drifting by on a makeshift raft, one wearing a bent hat made from newspaper.

  “Bother,” he said. “It’s too hot out. I’m going back to the boat.”

  I’d pulled my stitch too tight again and I bent over my work to hide my face as I loosened it because I could feel an expression on it, something I didn’t want him to see. He felt protective, he said. Hearing that gave me a sort of ballooning feeling, a great expanding pleasure, just under my skin. At the same time, however, I was aware that I wanted something more, something more singular and for me alone. I listened to his footsteps go down the pier and onto the boat deck. When I heard the office door slam, I looked up. Oliver was already curled up in the canvas chair where Hugo had been sitting a moment ago. Leo was standing in the same place, looking out at the water with two hands on his pole. The tree snags caught in the muddy shallows bobbed a little as though in expectation of gaining their freedom, but they were stuck fast until a government overseer could come along and put them on his list for removal.

  Leo began reeling in his line. He said, “My mam told me that at Christmastime she always got new clothes from the Great House. Caps and such, or b
oots and shoes. They also gave ’em molasses and sugar and flour. Every family with a bucket.”

  A hot breeze blew in from the river, pushing his long hair to the side. With it loose, he looked more like an Indian and less like a black man.

  I smoothed the fabric on my lap with my fingers. “That doesn’t sound bad,” I said.

  “When she were punished, the master put her in a potato sack and hung her up in an oak tree and beat her with a stick. She once told me that she would wade in blood and water up to her neck before she went back to that place.”

  I looked at him then but he was staring down at the glassy water as if hoping to spy the whiskers of the fish he was chasing. I couldn’t think what to say. Like the child-sized manacles in the empty slave hold, it’s worse when you let yourself imagine it. The bottom of the Ohio was muddy and dark, the way catfish liked it. It must be cool down there. The fish stayed well hidden.

  I went over to the bucket and picked up a fish to gut and clean for him. I could do this, at least. As I knelt on the pier Leo said, “It ain’t hard to row across this river. My rowboat, now, it pull a little to the right. But it does just fine.”

  At that, I lifted my head and stared at him. Did he know what I was planning? Had he overheard the conversation I’d had with Mrs. Howard? For the first time it occurred to me that he could have stayed in the office after telling me about my birthday celebration instead of going back to tidy up the stage, which is what he usually did after a show, and what I had assumed. But if he had stayed in the office, he might have heard Mrs. Howard’s proposal to me. Had he? The side of his face gave nothing away.

  14

  I don’t remember if it was that night or the next that I began to have nightmares about Giulia, the little Italian girl from the Moselle, I only know that it was a few days before I made my first crossing in the rowboat. In my dream, Giulia was holding on to me while I swam across the river. Suddenly something caught my leg and began pulling me down. As I was trying to kick it off, my attention shifted from Giulia, and when I finally got loose I found that I was alone. While I was fighting, Giulia had slipped from my hold and drowned.

  I jolted awake, but the horror and dismay and absolute failure stayed with me like a line of bitter smoke around my heart. Why did I trust that she could keep her little arms around me? Why didn’t I keep a stronger hold myself? It was only a dream, but I still felt the weight of my guilt even after I washed my face, dressed, and walked down the guard to the dining room for breakfast.

  As the days went by, people began to notice something was different, although I tried hard to act just the same. The problem was I didn’t know what “just the same” meant. Unlike the actors around me, I never took much to studying my own habits or characteristics. When Pinky said, “May, you haven’t watched us land the boat lately. You all right?” I realized I’d been sleeping later than usual due to the nightmares, which woke me every night, and I resolved to get up earlier the next day. When Liddy said, “No breakfast for you this morning? That’s three days in a row!” I put a slice of ham on my plate. Each day I waited for someone to come up to me with a piece of paper, my instructions. At first I imagined it might be Donaldson, since he was the one who would meet me afterwards and take the children. Then again, as a black man he would be more conspicuous. Maybe it would be a stranger, then, someone I had never seen but who was involved in this business. An abolitionist. It turned out I was right about that. He might come to one of our shows, I thought, and I was right about that, too.

  Hugo said, “May, is this your watch? I found it in the dining room.” He held my father’s watch in his palm, the chain looped around his fingers. I could feel his eyes on my face as I took it from him. I did not remember taking it off.

  “You’re not suffering from any more seasickness, are you? You’ve looked a bit pinched lately.”

  “No, it was just that once.” I was surprised he knew the watch was mine, and I told him so.

  “Used to have one like it, but someone nicked it in Surrey. A fine piece.”

  “It was my father’s.”

  He smiled. “Ah, the glass factory gentleman.”

  I was surprised he remembered that, too. His dark hair was growing long, and he looked weathered and healthy from all these weeks and weeks of standing on an open boat, calling out the names of sandbars and directing the men to heave this way or that. What would he think of the danger I was putting him in—putting all of his company in? Not to mention this boat. Well, I knew what would happen: the smile would be gone and his accent would become very pronounced as he ordered me off.

  We wouldn’t get to Paducah for another few weeks, and the players were still performing their sketches and songs while I accompanied them on the piano. I couldn’t help but scan the benches as I played, wondering if someone sitting there would be the one to tell me that I had to go out that night in the dark and fetch a couple of children and bring them back safely to shore. There was a man who wore a slouch hat throughout the performance as if he might have to leave at any moment; could he be the one?

  During the intermission, Mrs. Niffen said, “You’re coming in late on your cues tonight. That’s not like you.” She gave me a long look, as though she’d had her suspicions about me and they were being confirmed. “Are you ill? Shall I take over? I only have a walk-on next half. Celia could do that for me.”

  I’d begun feeling easier around her, but now I reminded myself that I must watch my back. She would take over playing the piano and anything else that she could.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I repeated my Greek to myself but I could not think of a lie to tell her to explain why I would be late on my cues. “Just fine,” I said.

  There was a man with darting eyes and a clipped Vandyke beard, and another man who kept looking behind him . . . It could be either of these men, or anyone. I tried to keep my attention on my playing, but my fingers felt like stiff bones and the melodies all sounded ridiculously light and happy, even the sad ones.

  “I’d like to run through the new play tomorrow,” Hugo told me after the show as he helped me move my piano back off the stage. “Costumes all set? Of course, I’ve noticed you like to make changes as we go along . . . refining your art, what?”

  I did not consider sewing an art and I told him so. But I was pleased that he noticed. His cuffs were rolled up, exposing the fine dark hairs of his wrist, and as we pushed the piano he adjusted his movement for the one uneven roller, his arm briefly resting against mine.

  After he jumped off the stage, I put my music sheets in order. The auditorium was empty, but as usual after a show the feel of all the warm bodies lingered. Someone had dropped a lacy pink handkerchief on the floor and I picked it up. Then I went into the office to see to that night’s take, putting all the change in the long silk bag to give to Hugo.

  When I went outside to find him, I was hit by the warmth of moist, summer air. The crowd was walking home, most of them not bothering to light their lanterns, since the moon was full and bright, but a few still lingered along the pier. I could see Hugo speaking to a couple near the water’s edge, and when the woman saw me, she stepped forward, smiling.

  “My handkerchief!” she said, seeing me with it, and she walked up toward me away from the men. “I’m so grateful to you.” She had a long neck and a long nose and wore tight sausage curls on either side of her bonnet. Artificial, I guessed, and so shiny I wanted to touch one to see if it was wet.

  I held out the handkerchief. As she took it from my hand our fingers touched, and she said in a low voice, “You’re the friend of Mrs. Howard’s, aren’t you?” My heart jumped and then started racing. I glanced at Hugo, who was standing out of earshot. The woman’s back was to him, blocking him out. Deliberately, I realized.

  “Yes. I’m May Bedloe,” I said quickly. Then I thought: Should I have told her my name? I didn’t know how this worked, but it didn’t matter, I believe I could have said anything as long as I started with Yes. She came to deliver inf
ormation, not receive it.

  “Your package will be waiting across the river tonight,” she told me.

  • • •

  After my father died and my mother sold our dairy farm, there were not many occasions for me to go outside at night. Certainly not in New York with Comfort, or in Boston or Baltimore, either. Sometimes, though, as a girl, if my father had to see to one of the cows or check on a batch of cheese, I would go with him to the barn in the moonlight. Nighttime, or I suppose I should say the dark outside, never frightened me. As a child I had the strange fancy that darkness was more honest than daylight, that the shrubs and trees and the creatures that lived among them were more themselves at night, and that the ashy shade of the grass was in fact its true color rather than the bright hue it took on during the day. Even the darkened river bellowing along below our house assumed its rightful character as it hurried past our farm. Perhaps at night I felt more like a spectator, and I suppose that was for me a comfortable role. I remember the smell of Nicodemus flowers, which bloom after sunset, following my father and me as we walked to the barn.

  Stepping into Leo’s rowboat that night and waiting while it stopped swaying from my movement, I was keenly aware of the deep color that descends after the sun goes down, and of all the night noises: the cicadas, the soft gulps of wind, the creaking of the trees. I was glad for the noise, since it masked the sound of my oars pushing the boat away from the dock and the soft plash of the water as I rowed. Leo was right: the boat pulled a little to the right. The water around me shimmered like sealskin, a dark smooth expanse that once in a while caught the moonlight and then quickly absorbed it. At midnight I was supposed to be halfway across the river, where I would make my signal and then get a signal in return. That was all the instruction I got from the woman with the pink handkerchief—no letter with points A, B, and C.