The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  “He stores his goods right there in the hollows of the trees,” Dr. Early told us. “It was all very compact and snug. Wouldn’t be surprised if he slept there, too.”

  Jemmy and Sam, once they had examined the horse, wandered away while Dr. Early untied Liddy’s gift from the back of the saddle. The pouch, made from pounded deer hide and sewn with dyed-blue deer sinews, was very pretty. But more surprising was what was inside: a tiny baby raccoon the size of Dr. Early’s hand.

  “One of Mrs. Shakentale’s,” he explained to Liddy, holding the raccoon out to her with his fingers under its belly. “I’ll tame it for you. It’ll be your pet.”

  “How sweet!” Liddy looked up at him as she took the animal, blushing. She had changed her dress after breakfast, I noticed, and added an apple-green ribbon to her hair.

  “To celebrate,” Dr. Early said.

  Liddy blushed even deeper and handed the raccoon to Celia, who was begging to hold it. Dr. Early seemed taller and broader as he listened to Celia praise the creature’s little paws and tail.

  “And so you no longer are in pursuit of runaways?” I asked him when Celia paused.

  His eyes turned to Liddy. “Oh, yes, I’ve given all that up for good.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  Now he smiled and looked over at me. Liddy looked up, too, and he moved closer to her. “When it appeared that I had lost this dear girl,” he said, drawing her arm underneath his, “I realized very clearly what I wanted: to hang up my bachelor hat. Nothing else mattered.”

  I looked at his white hat and he caught me looking. “Ha-ha-ha,” he laughed. “I like you, May. You’re very straightforward. And I am hoping I can convince you to like me now, too.”

  “Isn’t it enough that Liddy likes you?” I asked.

  His smile faded a notch but he quickly brought it back up. “Ha-ha-ha,” he laughed, as though I were joking.

  Mrs. Niffen said quickly, “Oh, Dr. Early, we all like you very much indeed. Very much indeed. And we are all very happy for Liddy. But no one can be happier than I am. I am the happiest of all. I always say to Mr. Niffen that no one likes to see a couple come to an understanding more than I do. No one gets more joy out of that than I.”

  “Well, I might argue for that right in this case,” Dr. Early said, but Mrs. Niffen was not listening.

  “No, no, no, I am beyond doubt the happiest of all.” She touched the small puffy pouch underneath her eye with one finger as if checking for a tear or hoping to inspire one. “Liddy is like a daughter—no, not a daughter; I am not yet that old!—say, rather, a young cousin to me. A favorite young cousin.”

  “And what will you do to supplement your income?” I asked. “For your patients? Your experimental medicines? Now that you are no longer off catching up people for profit.”

  “Oh, I will always find a way to make money, no need to worry about that.”

  “Perhaps you could make cakes and sell them,” I said.

  A moment’s silence. Mrs. Niffen and Liddy looked at me with horrified faces. Only Celia was not paying attention, as she was still engaged with the baby raccoon.

  “I remember your pound cake was very good,” I said.

  Then Liddy laughed. “Oh, there, May is just joking!”

  Mrs. Niffen took up the thread. “Yes, how droll, a man baking.”

  “There are plenty of men who are bakers,” I told them.

  Dr. Early resettled Liddy’s arm on his and glanced up at the clear sky, unconcerned. Even the clouds seemed to part for him. “Perhaps we should go for a stroll before the day gets too hot?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Niffen said. “I’ll just get my shawl.”

  As she hurried back to the boat, Dr. Early and Liddy looked at each other and smiled. Even I understood they wanted to be alone. Celia, meanwhile, was still holding the baby raccoon, only a day or two old. Surely it was too young, I asked, to be taken from its mother?

  “Well, May,” Dr. Early replied in a professional voice, “in my experience it’s better to take them right away and feed them yourself. Bonding, you know. Without a mother she’ll be as tame as can be. She won’t know how to be wild.” I thought of the slave babies I had ferried across the river. I could not think of any creature on earth that would be better off without a mother, and I said so. But Dr. Early just smiled at my comment as though it merely reflected my ignorance.

  “What shall we name her?” Liddy asked, stroking the raccoon baby’s nose. The animal was remarkably docile—stunned, perhaps, from being snatched from its family and the subsequent long journey in a pouch. I would not like a forest creature with such claws for a pet, but Liddy seemed delighted.

  “Whisker?” Celia suggested. “Stripe?”

  I found myself watching Dr. Early closely, and he met my eye in an easy, casual way. The sharp look he had back at his cottage was gone. He was making every effort to be agreeable, and in this way he reminded me a little of Thaddeus. Thaddeus was still up in his stateroom, sleeping. He’d missed all the excitement of the morning.

  “What about ‘Rascal’?” I asked.

  Dr. Early looked at me and smiled, showing his beautiful teeth. Everything about him was so clean, it was hard to remember that he was a doctor who regularly attended fevers and putrid sores, who placed leeches on bare arms and wrapped festering wounds. He looked, then as always, as though he’d just finished scrubbing himself from head to toe. Mrs. Niffen came down off the stage plank with her shawl, ready for their walk.

  “Rascal,” Dr. Early said. He held out his other arm for Mrs. Niffen to take. “I like that.”

  • • •

  Hugo did not take kindly to a pet raccoon on his boat, and he made Dr. Early tie up Rascal outside during the performance that night. The poor little shackled creature clawed at the ground with some unease, but Dr. Early just laughed.

  “I’ll come out when the captain’s not looking and put you in my pocket,” he told Rascal, but then he forgot all about her just like everyone else did.

  The next day he came with us to our new landing, announcing that he meant to follow the show for a while. That’s when I felt the first seeds of anxiety: Did he somehow know what I was doing at night? Would he follow me? I told myself that my worries were silly and unwarranted. Illogical. Just my uneasy conscience making trouble. Breaking the law—breaking any rule—was not in my nature. It was like making a seam crooked on purpose. But once I started to suspect Dr. Early, I found I couldn’t stop myself.

  Pinky alone shared my dislike of Dr. Early, but in Pinky’s case it was from jealousy. That night Dr. Early sat in the front row with his white hat in his lap. At each song he tapped his hat against his knee, and after the show he lingered to be with Liddy, who came down from the stage in her costume to talk to him. Although it was a clear summer evening, I was very glad that no one came up to me to say I must go out in the rowboat that night. I did not trust Dr. Early.

  When at last the theater emptied, I pushed my piano to the side of the stage and went outside. For a while I stood on the bank breathing in the warm night air, which smelled of the muddy river and the heavy green trees along the water’s edge. The townspeople lingered with their lanterns, exchanging gossip and laughing. In the near darkness a circle of women resembled a stand of short trees, and when they laughed they shook a little.

  No one paid any attention to me, and I felt, for the first time in weeks, sadly alone. I wished there were someone I could confide in, like Hugo or Liddy. I did not want to talk to Thaddeus because I did not want to worry him; I could not risk him changing his mind about helping me. And Leo had already made it clear that he did not want to know. A poem that my mother taught me came into my mind: Allen gehört, was du denkst; dein eigen ist nur, was du fühlest. What you think belongs to all, what you feel is yours alone.

  Leo was standing a little ways away from me with his arms folded across his broad chest, watching some boys in short pants playing along the bank or climbing the oak trees that shade
d the boat. Two of the bolder ones approached our stage plank and pulled at the knot once or twice as if testing it before Leo shooed them away. His shout excited them to no end, and they giggled their way up the trees, shaking the branches with their scrambling.

  I heard Hugo’s voice rise above the laughter: “Paducah’s the place where we’ll open it. You think you’ll follow us there?”

  “I aim to follow you all the way to the Mississippi before I turn around.”

  My stomach tightened. That was Dr. Early speaking. I traced the sound of their voices to two figures standing at the edge of the wharf a little ways in front of me. Hugo was taller and his voice more commanding. They were looking out at the water. I saw a line of smoke rising before them in the air and realized they each held a cigar.

  “That’ll be the next stop but two,” Hugo told him. The scent of tobacco drifted back to me. “After that, we’ll perform it all along the Mississippi.”

  “What’s the name again?”

  “The Midnight Hour. A favorite not too long ago in London.”

  “I look forward to seeing it. Ah, here she is.”

  A figure in a long skirt—Liddy—approached them.

  “I’ve untied Rascal,” she said. “Have you brought something to feed her with?”

  From behind me I heard Leo’s quiet voice. “Not right to capture a wild critter like that for without you’re going to eat it,” he said.

  He came up to stand beside me, and we looked out at the water and at Hugo, Dr. Early, and Liddy, who stood closer to the river’s edge. I agreed, and I told him so.

  “I had to tie Oliver up inside,” Leo said, “he’s that excited about it. Listen.”

  From inside the boat I could hear, faintly, a yowl. “Poor thing.”

  “You tell the captain that the doctor has to take the critter with him when he go.”

  I said I would.

  “One more thing. Man I didn’t know come up to me while you was still inside. Tomorrow night they’re expecting another one at midnight.”

  “ ‘Another one’?”

  “Man said you’d understand.”

  I turned my head to look at him, and as I did so my boot slid on the gravelly dirt. Leo took me by the arm to steady me.

  “How did he know you were safe to talk to?” I asked quietly.

  Leo bounced his forefinger off his cheek. “How you think?”

  “But does he even know where we’re landing tomorrow?”

  “He asked me that first.”

  “Leo . . .”

  “And that’s all I’m involved. Now, good night, Miss May. I need to see to Oliver now. Make sure you tell the captain.”

  For a moment I thought he meant about tomorrow night, but then I realized he’d gone back to the subject of the raccoon. I watched his large frame walk away in the darkness. When he got to the oak trees, he looked up and shouted “Boo!” in his loudest voice. High laughter came down from the branches.

  “You git yourselves home now, it’s late,” Leo called to the boys in the tree. “Go on, now. I’m watching you.”

  • • •

  That night two owls calling out to each other kept me awake, and when I did finally fall asleep my dreams were worse than ever. Over and over again, in a variety of ways, I could not save Giulia. Every time I fell asleep I tried again and failed. At last I gave up sleeping and read a book by candlelight.

  When I felt the boat start to move, I dressed and went out to the guard. The air was strangely warm for daybreak, and I watched the mist coming off the water and creeping up the side of the boat. There was no sign of Liddy, and Dr. Early was staying at an inn in town. He planned to follow us to our next landing on horseback.

  The run this morning was fast and difficult. Almost immediately upon leaving the bank we came to a bad stretch of the river with lots of sandbars and sudden, low water. Jemmy and Sam had their work cut out for them, pushing the sweeps hard as they tried to keep in the current. I stayed on the top deck out of everyone’s way.

  “Battery Rock! Battery Rock!” Hugo shouted, running over to the gouger. Leo must have known what that meant, for he steered us into another channel of the river, and as the mist thinned I saw a perpendicular front of rocks jutting out from a tongue of land on our right. Everyone except Hugo turned to look. The rocks shaped themselves into an enormous, earth-wrought castle, and I half expected goblins to jump out from the rock face.

  “What’s this? We’re not on a pleasure outing! Man your posts!” Hugo shouted at Jemmy and Sam.

  The land flattened out as it sunk into the river and managed to go along in this way, seemingly half submerged, for almost a mile. Then a new natural fortress came into view: a straight wall of smooth limestone against the northern bank, with horizontal strata like stripes on an animal. It must have been one hundred feet or more in height. A cluster of small red cedar trees stood at its flat summit, and I could see some of their roots dangling through the fissures as though searching deep within the rock for their sustenance. Several birds of prey circled the trees. The morning air was still warm, but the scene before my eyes looked as if it should be cold, with the mist curling over the rock and the birds’ heavy dark feathers suggesting life in a cooler climate. A little farther downstream the limestone opened into a dark cave shaped like a keyhole. An old man and two dogs were standing at the edge of its huge entrance, the dogs jumping up to try to eat something that the man dangled just out of their reach. I was close enough to see the old man’s ragged coat and the dirty yellow fur of the hounds that he mercilessly teased. The boat picked up speed and then slowed again, and the dogs’ barking seemed to rise and fall in pitch with our movement. I turned my good ear away and saw that the heavy dark birds were following us.

  A strange feeling came over me then, as though we’d entered a dark, secret world. We crept along the north side of the river and the banks seemed to squeeze in on us while the river itself churned up mud. We passed a stand of bleached white oak trees, dead but still standing guard, and Hugo landed the boat just beyond them. While Leo tied us up, the mist floated upward into a dirty strip of gauze across the sky.

  But by the time everyone else woke up an hour later, the birds of prey were nowhere in sight and the mist had dissipated in the heat of the sun. Still, I could not shake the uncomfortable feeling that the rock face and the cave and the dirty man teasing his dogs had brought on, coupled with my uneasy night.

  No one else seemed to notice. At breakfast, the sun was streaming into the dining room and the day had found a pleasant mask: windless, warm but not too warm, and a blue sky with only one or two cottonball clouds. No one commented on the strong smell of stagnant water and mud coming in from the open window.

  When Cook brought out more coffee, Hugo stood to make an announcement.

  “Excuse me, you all, settle down a moment, please. Just for one moment, ladies and gents, if you please. Is everyone here? Thaddeus? Thaddeus, there you are, good man. All right, now. I have a couple of things I want to say. We’re going to land in Paducah in a couple of days and that’s where I want to premier The Midnight Hour. You’re all ready; just a couple of tweaks and turns and we’ll be all set. I’d like to find a time for a rehearsal today and then a dress rehearsal tomorrow. Maybe two if we can.”

  “Why Paducah, Captain?” Pinky asked. “We never landed there before. They won’t know us.”

  “It’s a big town, bigger than where we normally go, but that’s why I chose it. I want a full house for our opening night.”

  Paducah was across the river, in Kentucky. It had two newspapers and a distillery and its own savings and loan. Also, it had a long row of stores right there on the waterfront, and that meant not everyone was a farmer. Merchants have more in the way of ready cash. Hugo wanted standing room only, he told us; he wanted a great performance from each and every player, and he wanted to put on the best show Paducah has ever seen. “That’ll get the word down the river!”

  I looked around. Everyone wa
s listening to Hugo with the same shining expression on their faces, and at the same time their bodies seemed to swell or grow taller. I had seen this phenomenon with Comfort. Even her curls seemed to get firmer when she pictured herself on stage. Opening night was always a sea of excited actors and actresses who carried themselves as though a whole world lay inside them, which it did in a way: the world of their play.

  “Our friend Dr. Early knows some people there—he’ll be our advance man,” Hugo continued. At the sound of Dr. Early’s name, Pinky shot a dismayed and covetous glance at Liddy. But Liddy was staring fixedly at Hugo, a blush creeping up her neck.

  “May, I’ll need you here on the boat, seeing to the costumes and props and keeping everyone in line.” We shared a smile and a strong feeling came over me, a feeling that we were together in this, Hugo and myself, almost like proud parents overseeing these happy actors and their dog.

  “Meanwhile,” Hugo went on, looking at the actors, “your job is to get up the best show these river people have ever seen!”

  A burst of hurrahs and shouts filled the room. Hugo looked pleased at the noise, which continued until Cook broke up the excitement by reminding us that breakfast was over and would everyone for God’s sake get out of his way. Chairs were scraped back and cutlery clattered on the plates like bones while the actors spoke excitedly in their loud, trained voices, hardly listening to each other but getting louder when no one listened to them.

  “Remember, two o’clock, everybody, down in the theater!” Hugo shouted as they filed out.

  Only I remained apprehensive, knowing I had to go out that night in the rowboat. Later, as I put up our show posters in town, I passed the public whipping post, a common feature of these small river settlements. I’d once seen a man standing at such a post after he’d been beaten, his shirt slashed at the shoulders from the edge of the horsewhip. What was the punishment in this town for helping fugitive slaves? I wondered. Still, I knew I would go out that night unless, I reasoned, it was storming and absolutely unsafe to do so. But the day continued to be clear and calm, with a few clouds and just the lightest of breezes. There was no one tied to the whipping post when I went by.