“That’s a good biscuit,” she said.
I locked my door again. By this time everyone had gone down to the theater for rehearsal, but I couldn’t take any chances. After breakfast I’d asked Leo, whom I found in the office, if I could borrow a screwdriver. At the same time I gave him Helena’s fishing rods, which did not fit in the small trunk. Killing two birds with one stone.
“What’s this?” he asked, taking both the rods in one hand.
Alpha, beta, gamma. “Hugo wanted you to have them. They were Helena’s,” I said.
Leo ran his hand up one of the rods, the longer one, and felt the line between his two fingers. Then he spun the reel, which was sticky.
“Got to use a fishing rod,” he told me. “Else it’s unhappy.”
“Just don’t say anything to Hugo—thank you or anything. He might feel bad. You know, remembering.”
Leo stooped to hunt around in the oversized tin bucket where he kept his tools. He handed me a long screwdriver without asking why I needed it. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell him about Lula, not wanting to get him in trouble. “I know he would,” he said about Hugo. “But those who’ve passed don’t care if we remember or not. That’s only for us. I’ll be thinking about Miss Helena when I use it.”
Back in my room I twisted the end of the screwdriver into the soft, rotting wood of the largest trunk, the one that had been left in standing water and was a little bit warped, while Lula worked at brushing her teeth. She had never brushed her teeth before, she told me, so I showed her how. Her eyeteeth were very white and slightly pointed, like a fox’s, and her gums bled a little. While I worked on the trunk, she held my little square mirror in one of her hands and spit every so often into the basin.
After I decided that I’d punctured enough holes in the wood, I moved the trunk behind the door and turned it so that the hole-ridden side stood an inch from the wall, hidden from view. Since this particular trunk was for dresses—or fishing rods, in Helena’s case—it stood upright, taller than it was wide, and inside there was a hook hanging down from the top for hangers. I worried that the hook would be in the way, but after Lula got herself curled up in there, sitting cross-legged with her knees raised, she said, “No, but look here.” She took off her shawl and hung it on the hook, making a curtain in front of her. It wouldn’t hide her from anyone really looking, but if the trunk was open a crack, all you would see was fabric.
I closed the trunk up.
“Can you breathe?” I asked.
“Yes’m,” came the muffled reply.
I opened the trunk again.
“You don’t have to stay here,” I said. “I’ll lock my door. You can just go in if you hear someone trying it.”
“I don’t mind,” Lula said.
“I don’t want you shut up inside all day.”
Her large eyes looked watery, she blinked so little. “I’ll just sit here with it open. If I hear someone come, I’ll shut it up on me,” she told me.
I watched her practice pulling in her legs and closing the trunk from the inside. When I was satisfied she could do it quickly and quietly enough, I said, “All right.”
Then I handed her the Birds of America book that Hugo had given his sister.
“I don’t know my letters,” she told me.
“You don’t have to read, you can just look at the pictures. See these words here?” I turned the cover toward her. “They say Birds of America. It’s a book of birds.”
“What’s America?”
What’s America? I glanced quickly at her to see if she was joking. “It’s the country we live in. This big stretch of land, all the cities and farms together, they make America. Don’t you have a mother or father to tell you these things?”
She shook her head no. “I have my auntie, but she never said nothin’ like that.” She opened the book to a color illustration covered by a thin piece of rice paper, which she lifted carefully by one corner. She breathed through her mouth like a child, but I noticed she was cupping her left breast with her free hand.
“Does your chest hurt?” Her milk wouldn’t stop for a while, even without a baby to feed.
“Not so much to signify.”
“I’ll get you some ointment. You shouldn’t be in pain.”
She blew air out from her nose. “This ain’t pain.” She turned the page with one hand while keeping her other hand cupped under her breast. She wasn’t looking at me anymore. As I’d hoped, the pictures caught her whole attention.
“Will you be all right while I’m gone? I’ll lock the door. Don’t make any noise, now.”
“Mm. Mm-hmm.”
I hoped she was right to trust me.
• • •
Earlier that morning, even before I went in to breakfast, I’d found a boy on the pier to carry my letter to Mrs. Howard to the ferry, where he was entrusted to commission another boy to take it across the river to the inn where she and Comfort were staying. This was faster than the post office, and even with paying two boys it did not cost any more. I’d asked for a return reply, and, after locking Lula into my stateroom and putting the key in my pocket, I leaned over the guardrail to see if the ferry was on its way back. Below me in the theater I could hear Jemmy speaking some lines: “Flora, Flora, you are in the plot!”
And then Hugo in his director’s voice: “Show us your eyes, man! Show us your eyes! No, no, don’t stop, keep going.”
There were a good many boatmen along the pier, but I could not see the ferry on the water. As I was coming down the stairs Pinky came out of the theater. He was dressed in his old-woman’s wig and cap and had a gray flannel wrapped around his neck. He said hello to me and then coughed after his words. A strong waft of garlic came from his mouth.
“Are you ill?” I asked him. Actors superstitiously believe that garlic helps anything from a sore throat to a bunion.
“Just a bit of a throat, nothing more,” he said. “I’m popping up to see if Cook won’t give me some more garlic to crunch.”
“That won’t do anything. I’m going to town; I’ll stop at the apothecary there.” Which I was already planning to do, for Lula, but I didn’t tell him that.
Pinky thanked me several times. “Oh, that’s very generous done, very generous done to be sure. It’s only a scratch I’m thinking, but I can’t lose my voice—” Here he stopped and swallowed laboriously. “Tomorrow’s the big night!”
“Rehearsal going all right?” I asked.
“Booming! Only that Jemmy, he needs to learn his lines better. We still haven’t run all the way through without stopping. But our Liddy is wonderful, don’t you think? Pity she should forsake all that talent of hers for a man . . . a man like that,” he said.
“A man like what?” I asked with interest. Had he noticed Dr. Early’s sly behavior? But he was only jealous, being in love with Liddy himself.
“Oh, any man, really,” he said pulling his face back as if speaking into his flannel scarf. “Any man except me.”
I thought he was the better of the two, and I told him so.
“Pity only you and I know it,” he said with a self-effacing grin.
When I got down to the pier, I looked up at my stateroom window and was relieved to find that I couldn’t see anything through the pinned-shut curtains. Maybe it was a mistake to leave Lula alone, but at the same time I couldn’t arouse suspicion. I had to do what I always did when we landed in a new place: put up posters and give out some free tickets, no matter that ever since breakfast I felt as if I had swallowed a walnut whole and it was now lodged in the side of my stomach.
The day was cloudless, like the day before, but hotter. Although the town, Smithland, had a reputation for lawlessness—there were a good many taverns up and down both sides of the street—as I stepped inside the apothecary shop I could see that people there took their health seriously. The shelves along both walls were lined with covered glass bottles and jars, and in front of the shelves stood low glass cases displaying metal canisters and ro
und disks of ointment as well as the inevitable cigar boxes. At the far end of the shop I spotted a low doorway closed off by a green velvet drape. Above it hung two signs: “Open All Night” and “Inquire Apothecary Within.”
I could hear voices coming from beyond the velvet drape, but no one else was in the shop. Unaided, I looked along the shelves for what I wanted: spirits of ammonia and niter for Pinky’s throat, and dragon’s blood to stop Lula’s milk. As I went along, I breathed in a mixture of wood polish and fish oil and a dry, powdery odor that I could not identify.
I found the jar of dragon’s blood and pulled it off the shelf. Then I found the ammonia. The voices in the back room, although not loud, became more discernible as I got closer, and as I crossed in front of the doorway I thought there was something familiar about the voice of the man speaking.
“. . . you may have heard it called Irish moss. Good for rickets, too. A bit of lemon juice will help it down the pipe.”
Another voice responded in a low tone, and I couldn’t catch his words. But when the third man spoke, I turned abruptly. It was Thaddeus.
“Thanks, Doc,” Thaddeus was saying. “Lucky for me I ran into you.”
“I see it all the time,” the first man said.
Now I recognized the voice: Dr. Early. I immediately turned to leave, but in my haste I forgot to put down the bottles I was holding. A man came into the shop just as I was exiting, and he held up his arms when I nearly plunged into him.
“Whoa there,” he said with a grin. But he didn’t step aside.
The apothecary lifted the green drape and came scurrying out of the back room, saying, “Well, now, I didn’t know anyone else was in here.”
“The lady was just leaving, I think,” the man at the front door said. He took off his hat.
I saw the apothecary look at the bottles in my hands. He was a little man wearing spectacles and a green vest that matched the green drape over the door.
“No,” I said. “That is, I wanted to pay for these first, of course. I thought . . .” I paused. Alpha, beta, gamma. “I thought I might have dropped my purse outside. But here it is right here in my pocket.”
Thaddeus had come out of the room after the apothecary, and I was aware of him watching me and grinning. He could probably tell I was lying, but he just said, “Well, Miss May. This is a surprise. On a particular errand? Dr. Early is here, too. Our Liddy’s future happiness. I’ve finally met the man.”
He spoke with his usual light tone, and I could not tell if he was sincere or not. I could never tell with Thaddeus.
“I’m here to get Pinky some things for his throat.”
“Pinky has a bad throat?”
“Also some lozenges, if you have them,” I said to the apothecary, who had begun wrapping up the small bottle of ammonia in brown tissue paper.
Dr. Early came out from the back room carrying a dropper bottle, which he gave to Thaddeus. When he saw me he came up and took my hand as though we were the best of friends, apologizing for missing the show the night before. “Completely unavoidable. I was called on to help deliver a baby. Up all night. The life of a doctor.” He looked impeccably clean and not the least bit tired. In his left hand he carried a pair of spotless gray gloves.
“Dragon’s blood?” the apothecary asked me, picking up the next bottle. “That won’t help a bad throat.”
Dr. Early looked at the bottle the apothecary was holding. Then he looked at me. Something in his eyes changed very slightly and my brain wouldn’t work for a second, even to summon my Greek.
Thaddeus said, “Oh, that’s for makeup.”
Dr. Early turned. “Makeup?”
“For the stage,” Thaddeus explained. “We mix a drop or two with talcum powder to make our cheeks red.”
The apothecary took out a large white handkerchief and sneezed into it. Then he said, “Even the men?”
“Makeup,” Dr. Early said. I wasn’t sure if he believed Thaddeus or not. “Well, Miss May, you do a bit of everything, don’t you? And here I thought you simply sat in a corner and sewed.”
There was something not very nice in his voice, and I saw the apothecary glance at him. But I understood. He wanted to let me know that he had still not forgiven me for showing Liddy the runaway slave advertisements. He would never forgive me for that.
“Oh, I do much more,” I said with some feeling. “You would be surprised at how much I can do.”
Dr. Early eyed me again with that shrewd look of his. A bully, I was thinking. That was what he was. The apothecary looked from me to the doctor and then back again.
“That will be thirty-eight cents,” he said firmly, as though that number would settle all differences between us.
Dr. Early touched his hat. “I will see you this evening,” he said as he left us, but I did not know if his remark was directed to Thaddeus or to me or to both.
• • •
Back on the boat, I mixed the throat gargle and gave it to Pinky, I gave Lula a draft of dragon’s blood to stop her milk, and I stole a half loaf of bread and two broiled chicken legs for her dinner while Cook was napping in his galley hammock. In the afternoon I watched the end of the second dress rehearsal and made minor adjustments to Mrs. Niffen’s dress. I fitted the actors up and helped them change and listened for any sounds coming from my stateroom. Not hearing any, I nevertheless made excuses to go upstairs so I could check.
Lula sat half inside the trunk the whole day looking at the bird book and jiggling her knees to get out her energy. Whenever I came into the room, she asked if I’d gotten any news. But although I’d been sitting in the auditorium watching by the window, no boys came running up to the boat with a note for me. Finally, toward evening, I told her that it might take another day.
I could see she was scared, and to distract her I asked if she liked the book all right.
She showed me her favorite page. It was a bluebird with a caterpillar in its mouth, feeding a baby. “Look at all the legs on that thing,” she said. She meant the caterpillar. “Someone spent a whole day I bet just drawing those little bitty legs.”
“You like it because of that?”
“Well, that’s one thing. Also the blue color of her wings.”
I fingered the holes I’d made in the back of the trunk, wondering if they were large enough, and I re-pinned my curtains to keep them closed. Meanwhile, Dr. Early spent the afternoon on the pier with Rascal. Sometimes I saw him speaking to the riverboat men, and once in a while he wrote something down in a small notebook. Just before supper I noticed he was talking to Thaddeus near the stage plank, and my throat seemed to close a little when I saw them. Rehearsal had finished and everyone else was resting for the show that night—our last performance of songs and jokes and jigs. Thaddeus should have been resting, too.
When he came up on the boat I asked him what he and Dr. Early had been talking about. It was the first time we’d been alone together since the previous night. But instead of answering me he said in a low voice,
“Are you still hiding her?”
I hesitated and then nodded.
“The doctor is a slave catcher, you know,” Thaddeus told me. “He’s on the lookout for a runaway right now.”
My breath caught in my throat. “For Lula?”
“For a man named Jackson.”
I was relieved, but only for a moment.
“I knew he was still doing that,” I said about Dr. Early. “I knew it.”
“Twenty-year-old man who ran away yesterday. One-hundred-and-fifty-dollar reward.” Thaddeus looked at me sideways. “That’s a lot of money.”
“They wouldn’t pay so much for a girl,” I said quickly.
“Of course not,” Thaddeus said smoothly. “Not for a girl.”
It was impossible for me to guess what he was thinking. I was never good at that sort of thing. Was it my imagination, or were his blond curls darker this morning? I wouldn’t put it past him to put a rinse on his hair like an old actress Comfort used to laugh about
in Boston.
“Well, keep it to yourself,” Thaddeus said, turning to go up the stairs. The supper bell was ringing. “He told me he’s only doing it once or twice more. He wants money to buy Liddy a nice wedding present is all.”
I believed that Dr. Early would want money to buy this or that for this person or that person from now until every runaway slave was caught in every corner of this country, but I kept that opinion to myself. He would never change his ways. He knew it and I knew it. Maybe we were the only two.
“I wonder how much they would pay, though,” Thaddeus added as he went up. “For a girl.”
Everything above my waist seemed to stiffen at once, the back of my neck in particular.
“Thaddeus,” I said. “Wait.” I followed him up to the guard. I didn’t want to raise my voice in case anyone overheard. “Thaddeus. You can’t be thinking about that.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “Only it’s hard to be on the wrong side of the law. Makes a fellow uncomfortable.”
“My . . . my connection”—all at once I was afraid to say too much—“is coming to get her tonight. He’s coming here to get her.” Alpha, beta, gamma, delta. “I’ve had a message.”
“You’re lying,” Thaddeus said evenly, without turning around. By now we were walking in single file toward the dining room, Thaddeus leading. On our left, the river glistened silvery-gray, pushing a small keelboat west.
“You can’t even see me!” I said.
“I don’t need to. Remember, I was the one who taught you how. But don’t worry, May. Ten or twenty dollars doesn’t much signify. Or whatever the reward for a girl might be.”
I thought of those broadsides I’d found on Dr. Early’s piano. Some of them named rewards of up to one hundred dollars, even for women. “I can get you more money,” I told him. “After supper, if you want, I can give you some more.”
The Underground River Page 29
