A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  —

  For a year, the Arabia had been serving towns on the Missouri River, sometimes going as far into Indian territory as Pierre, South Dakota, bringing dry goods and groceries, hardware, boots, shoes, and hats to the various merchants who ordered these valuable things. Bringing migrants, immigrants, and now, among other treasures, the Arabia was rumored to be carrying four hundred barrels of Kentucky bourbon straight from the source. There were other barrels packed with Davenport Ironstone china, including a flowered teapot with matching cups, and there were glass items packed in straw: whale oil lamps, tumblers, and empty ink wells. There were buttons and shoehorns and gloves. There was fabric enough to furnish two retail shops. There were tools and tiles and the lower deck of the Arabia was loaded with wagons heavy enough for the Santa Fe Trail, all of them stuffed with bedding and family goods. This big boat weighed more than four hundred tons when loaded and there were no cabins or berths available at such a late date, but there were carpeted salons with chandeliers. There was wood paneling. The staterooms opened onto the promenade.

  When Captain Terrill predicted that the trip to Independence would require a struggle upstream for seven or eight days, Lavina said she could not sleep so many nights on an open deck in public. For heaven’s sake, Father, she said: Couldn’t we, shouldn’t we wait for another boat. (And their son?) But the river was lower and slower every day, which made a collision with underwater branches more and more likely. After Independence, going on to Westport and St. Joseph would require another three or four dangerous days. It was now or never.

  Patton is waiting for us, said John, to inspire his wife, although he was operating on faith, as usual.

  For passage from St. Louis to Independence the Dickinsons paid twelve dollars for wagon, animals, and human beings. They were now nearly stripped of the cash Lavina had brought with her from home, and they climbed aboard tired, shabby, and desperately sore at heart. Lavina found it difficult to muster any guidance for Electa or Gina. It was her habit to remind them to smile, to stand up straight, to speak only when spoken to, and to sit with both knees touching under their skirts but now she ignored any misbehavior and pulled herself up the gangplank, gripping the handrail when all she wanted was to run to the woods. She ignored the medley of screaming animals and shouting humans while John led the mules, the pony, and his horse into stalls on the lower deck and parked the wagon there as well. As the Arabia whistled and departed the harbor, Lavina and the girls sat dismally on their loose baggage, keeping an eye on the crate of goods they had stowed at the stern by the shuddering wheel. The cows had been put in a forward pen. Having spent some pleasant weeks grazing on summer grass, they, at least, were sleek and fat. There was braying and mooing and neighing from every direction. Pure misery is what Electa called all the chaos through her tears, and Lavina agreed. She was in turmoil as the boat began to churn upriver ever farther from her lost and dependent child. She wanted to scream and beg but she was enclosed in a dark, humiliating sense of her husband’s power. Martin will find us, he said through gritted teeth, and she felt no will to fight back. She felt useless and depleted, too low in her mind to move from the seat she had taken on the upper deck. There was shame in her depletion, more than anything else, since she was not staying on the shore waiting for Martin but following her husband’s commands. There were high cliffs on both sides of the river again, shutting the world out and closing in thoughts that were incoherent. A boy lying in grass. A corpse. How did she come to be crushed between steep earth walls under a sky bare of clouds, and where was her boy and where was this hellish tunnel going to end?

  We selected her on the basis of a letter, a woman from the east was saying to someone nearby. Lavina was not listening, but she could not help overhearing. My second cousin wrote to us that the Arabia was next to none for comfort a year ago…

  The words floated past while Lavina thought of Brother Borden and his abrupt departure from the campsite. He had kept his distance after John’s arrival and she had missed his gentle attention to her needs. Concern such as no one had shown her for the longest time. He had made her feel happy and somehow likable and she missed the eyes behind those round glasses, wire-rimmed, eyes that studied her expressions for signs of pleasure or pain. She had looked into them they had looked back at her and now she had lost that regard without quite realizing what it meant to her. Lavina looked at the passengers around her and wished she could tell Brother Borden how their clothes described their destinations as accurately as their accents. He’d enjoyed her little commentaries. She’d tell him about the men wearing homespun and soft hats who would obviously buy teams of oxen to pull their big wagons and go off in search of gold, while the Yankees aboard were better dressed in order to stake a legal claim in Kansas Territory, where they could vote on the Northern side of the statehood dispute. She could see it all very clearly, but who else would care to hear her thoughts? There were Mexicans and Negroes and even a party of Indians on the upper deck. Brother Borden would be amused by that. Then Lavina heard a woman near her say that a little boy had been killed on the boat last month. He was only twelve and they sent him down on a flatboard to unload wood.

  It was a slaveboy, someone chimed in.

  Well a slaveboy can still have value.

  Lavina looked over at her daughters, who were sitting at a table in hopes of tea, Electa swinging her leg back and forth over her knee and Gina picking at her fingernails and then her nose.

  Well his owner got a settlement, said the woman whose accent was from Georgia and whose clothes were starched.

  If you want to know the worst thing, there were a hundred infantrymen on this boat a year ago. And then the cholera struck.

  How many died?

  A woman, untying her bonnet, said grimly: We weren’t informed.

  It’s all over Missouri, killing man, woman, and child.

  Maybe this boat is just plain unlucky.

  Lavina sat watching her daughters taking tea while their brother might well be stretched out, sick and dying alone in some frightful place. I should have told Gina to wash her hands, oh, dear God, we should have sent out a search party, waited forever, offered our wagon as reward. Did the little slave boy have a mother? She could see her husband sitting quietly on their packing crate and she wondered how he could live with himself.

  61

  John saw a game of cards being played and he had it in mind to interfere. The boat was loaded with nothing much better than merchants and gamblers and land agents. There were cards being slapped on a table in front of his daughters and, up by the prow, a group of Baptists was holding a prayer meeting as if their notions of worship had any business being enacted in public. In the salon, there was a game of dice run by a real professional who displayed watches, earrings, and pieces of money, inviting anyone with fifty cents to throw. John sat on the crate rubbing his hands and ever watchful, but his heart was behind him, left in the swirl of muddy water and bracken and filth and regret that consumed the St. Louis harbor. He knew his part in the family tragedy, but he could not put a cause to it. His poverty was unimportant. Why send Patton away with the warrants, which were the only thing that stood between the family and starvation? Warrants earned by old soldiers who had no use for them and sold them or traded them cheap. Warrants Patton might well have lost. John had felt a little ashamed of his sons for collecting them, but they were often easier to come by than cash. He closed his eyes so as not to look at his wife. Then he felt dizzy, the boat plunging and swaying like his thoughts. He longed to lie down but there was no place to do that during the day and barely a safe place at night and there was the crate with everything not packed in the wagon, which Lavina had cleared of valuables because of passengers she viewed as untrustworthy. John had elected to sit on the crate. He had taken note of Baptists and Mormons, but there were wandering con men, too, looking for customers, and he kept an eye on his wife, who might be taken in by some sales pitch.

  Dinner that night was delayed until just
before nightfall when the captain cut the engines and the crew managed to tie the vessel to a well-rooted tree. But the boat was knocked so much by waves and current that plates flew to the floor and food fell on laps and none of the passengers could eat. It began to rain. At nine, a bell rang and everyone without a cabin scrambled for a mattress. These were to be wedged throughout the salon or under the overhanging roof of the open deck. Lavina ordered the girls to bring up quilts from their wagon but Gina refused, too afraid to descend into the dark, so mother and eldest daughter crept carefully down a ladder and felt their way between wagons on the lower deck. Regal in their white hoods, the wagons looked like monuments. To folly, Lavina was thinking. And Electa said: I’m going back to St. Louis, as she climbed in over the tongue of their movable home, unlacing the canvas.

  Hand things down, said Lavina calmly. It’s a boy, isn’t it? Someone you met.

  No. What boy?

  I know my own daughter, don’t I? What Lavina knew was that her daughter, even in the dark, was a looking glass where she found her own reflection. You’re a romantic, she said.

  Do you think we could find a latrine down here?

  Just tell me anything about him. It will help pass the time.

  Please don’t speak about it, Mama. Please. Electa brought the quilts down from the wagon, handed them to Lavina, and quite boldly squatted. Her bloomers were conveniently split between the legs. Lavina handed the quilts back to her a minute later and did the same. What a relief. I’ve waited hours. They giggled and were pleased with themselves. For a little minute Lavina felt almost happy. Then everything came back.

  More than forty passengers were going to sleep on the upper deck, where gentlemen and ladies were separated by a gate. For Lavina, who had never slept in the presence of anyone but her husband and daughters, it meant lying rigid with arms straight along her sides. Here is your chance to sleep under the stars, she said to Electa, hoping to keep the soft mood between them. Later she dreamed she was cradling a baby’s head. It had no body but batted its eyes and smiled at her. On the deck of the Arabia, Lavina lay looking up at the millions of stars. What necessity did they provide? Wasn’t that the new idea, that each particle of the universe was required by all other parts? Each little change created other changes – mules and trees and fish – and when a person can’t sleep the mind will wander and it must not think of weather or Indians or cholera or wild animals or apple trees. She must not think of Brother Borden, whose name was James, touching places that were hers alone. James Borden touching what he called her clamorous and comparing it to the tongue of a bell. She felt the now familiar ache he had taught her to feel and put her hand between her legs while the Arabia’s passengers slept on their inside bunks and outside mattresses, and the river swept along, pulling down sycamores, oaks, and walnut trees that grabbed the dark water.

  —

  The next morning, passing Hermann, Missouri, John noticed nothing about the town or port. Perched on the packing crate, he was concentrating on memories that threaded through his life like sutures, and when a young man tried to draw him into conversation, he did not hear. He did not notice a man of dark skin on the dock singing a Methodist hymn. An Indian brought out a drum and danced on the upper deck while passengers threw coins. Dizzy and weak, John stared at the foam that blew off the rear paddle wheel. The overall picture was sky, shelf of land, turning wheel, and that hard spinning water. Round and round. His head ached and he rubbed it. He had lost his paltry breakfast over the rail. Along the riverbank wagons were clumped together and people gawked at him from shore, a man who had left his child to die of starvation, to freeze, to be killed. Children ran alongside the big churning boat trying to keep up.

  62

  Taking advantage of the melted snows of the Rocky Mountains, the Arabia was heading to the trading posts on the Missouri’s upper waters and she was steadfast now, struggling against a current strong enough that she sometimes stood still for long moments, going nowhere. When she neared a shoreline campsite, the drone of her engines and throb of her paddle wheel brought people down to the edge of the river on foot or on horseback looking for flour instead of cornbread and sorghum, beef instead of venison, while John sat on his crate and narrowed his eyes and heard only the crumbling of the banks and the chunks of loosened earth that fell hard in the river with loud splashes.

  In Jefferson City on the fourth night, the captain gave a dance and residents of the town swarmed aboard. Someone played an accordion.

  What of a God who was not intervening?

  At Booneville, while they waited for people to board or depart, Gina begged her father to open the precious crate and retrieve a toy rickshaw that was packed with the spice jars and flour scoop. Perhaps it was an effort to rouse her father, to remind him of her need of him, to jostle him or shame him, but John continued to sit on the unopened crate in order to remember the place in the creek at home where Cuff had liked to fish. What was it about that particular ledge that a bear would so favor it? He sat on the crate watching Lavina, who sat on a bench with her broad shoulders back and her look of disdain for the changing world. Or was it grief? Must he carry her pain as well as his own? On the lower deck there were hundreds of crates destined for the merchants in Independence or the City of Kansas or St. Jo farther upriver, but Lavina would not have her own crate mixed in with those crates and possibly lost or stolen by guile or mistake. What kind of cargo do we carry? she had asked the captain one afternoon because, she said, a few long and narrow identical crates on the lower deck gave her reason to suspect they might hold Northern contraband or guns. She had heard about this from Brother Borden. Pushy abolitionists were sending Sharps rifles out to Kansas Territory. Afraid that they might be put off the boat due to Lavina’s nosiness, John had tried to distract her, finally asking to be shown the manifest and he might then have laughed at his wife if he’d any mind to do so. Twenty crates of boots. Ten crates of horse tack: bits, stirrups, spurs, bridles, and whips. Brandied cherries from France. Hats, cigars, clay pipes, wooden buckets. There were shovels and washboards and canning jars and three cast iron stoves along with flasks, thimbles, pepper sauce, pickles, ax heads, and spoons. There were bolts of blue wool and black silk, cases of cognac, champagne, boxes of candles, tins of nutmeg, coffee grinders, and nine kegs of pine tar and six of square nails weighing one hundred pounds each. There were thousands of glass beads to trade with the Indians. For the same purpose there were two dozen flintlock guns painted red with a brass serpent inlaid in the stock. (The white man desired furs and the Natives desired guns.) Barrels were smoothbore not rifled, so they could shoot a lead ball or a found piece of gravel. The Hudson’s Bay Company asked for twenty beaver pelts per gun. Captain Terrill was glad to share this information. He was proud of his boat and its trade mission. If there were Sharps rifles aboard, they were well hidden in the hold and unmentioned on the manifest, which also failed to list a box of lead printer’s type meant for an abolitionist newspaper in Lawrence.

  With every new crate brought aboard, the crew had to redistribute the cargo using hooks to pull the loads on long blanks that ran from bow to stern on the lower deck while John sat on his family’s treasure and heard the gasp of the steam pipe as a last breath whenever the river burst through a dam of fallen branches.

  63

  On the south side of the river, Bry looked for a possible crossing. The cliffs were sheer and steep and there were flatboats on the water and passing pirogues and sometimes canoes and there was not a minute when he would not be seen. Fording the river, trying to get to the north side, he would announce himself as a runaway. He thought he would cross at night or try to float on his back as he had seen it done in Louisville by the boys who dove for coins. He couldn’t swim any more than Josiah could or Young Jim, who one time fell into a crick and nearly drowned. Bry couldn’t see into this dark, churlish water that could have a rock waiting to meet his skull. He sat in a crouch, afraid to fall asleep for lack of a good hiding place. There were too
many people here and there along the shore to find any privacy. Finally, when the sun fell behind the westward trees, he began his descent. Sliding, clinging, he was filthy and yet the river made everything clean if it didn’t kill you first.

  He was cold and terrified as he slipped into water so turgid he could almost walk on it. Then, in a sudden sweep of current, he was swept off his feet and pulled under. Something grabbed his legs like a living hand and in a minute he was choking, head up, struggling, head down, on his back, flapping his arms, water in his throat his nose his mouth his lungs and he went down again, grabbed at anything, at bare nothing, then pushed, rolled, head up to breathe, head down in water too fast to wrestle and he rolled his face to one side and tried to look back at the world.

  64

  Trees hold out their arms. Martin made his own songs…like God weaving a shirt made for me. His voice was shaky due to hunger and a weariness such as he’d never felt. All he’d wanted was to get away from his father; all he’d wanted was to save his bear and now he was swallowed by trees and he could hear their language, could almost speak it but they were so encumbering, so tall and everywhere and wise like a community; he took in air and made it feed him. Air and sound and smell is what he ate, the being of everything and his own being the same. Beneath him, the ground, tender with forgotten life. Embedded fish bones! Embedded snails and lizards dead a thousand years. The ambling bear walked over these fragments and stirred them. She was majestic. She stalked and chewed and nudged the boy, always encouraging, fur thickening, self fattening, eating pupae and cherries and hazelnuts as she had done just this time last year when she found delicacies by some justified instinct. Then it was acorns she’d loved, secret to a good winter’s sleep, and now she would find them again. Martin yawned. Hungry, he supposed these things and dreamed them into being. Sometimes he stopped and went to sleep under a tree. Sometimes he sang; sometimes he prayed. He communed with the snail that climbed the stalk of a fern and with the fern itself. All it required was breathing, simple breathing, and listening through his skin like the little salamander who crawled over his foot all glowing green. And when the hunger was too fierce in him, the bear found something good for him to eat. They could speak now as equals, although Martin was dependent on the bear for food and warmth. When it rained he was soaked to his skin and he wondered why God made a human defenseless. He remembered the birdman saying that as people cut down trees and put up houses they surrounded those houses with thorn bushes and then the loggerhead shrikes had more to eat. Why’s that? Martin had been so charmed by the man who had ruined their lives. The shrike has claws too small to hold its prey is what he’d been told, but it can impale a little bird on thorns and keep it for dinner.