River Runs Deep

by Jennifer Bradbury

  Elias tried and failed not to stare at the bulge on the man’s neck, and in his failure couldn’t help noticing that the wrap was topped off with a neatly done lighterman’s hitch and finished with a pair of half hitches. It was a tricky knot, one the men used to moor a boat up to the dock and then cast off easily.

  Then Elias remembered himself, remembered how much he was always told not to stare, and he managed to tear his eyes away from the knot and the bulge it covered. “I . . . uh . . . I found your bird.” He held the pigeon out.

  Pennyrile scowled, then his eyes grew wider as he roughly took the bird from Elias. He palmed the body of the bird upside down in one hand and checked its legs. For fingers so meaty, he deftly untied the message, freeing the roll of paper and tossing it onto the bed behind him.

  “I think his wing is—”

  But Pennyrile had already righted the pigeon and was testing the wings. Working at the left one set the bird grunting and cooing.

  “That’s the one.” Elias winced. “He doesn’t seem to be able to fly, but—”

  The rest of his words caught in his mouth as he recognized what Pennyrile was about to do. He’d changed his grip, holding the bird by his head in one hand and by the body with the other. He’d seen the house girl back home hold chickens that way right before they ended up on the table.

  “Stop!” Elias hollered as Pennyrile began to twist the pigeon’s neck. “Please!”

  The man waited, silently watching Elias, hands still ready to snap the beautiful green-and-purple neck. The bird didn’t move but to blink once at Elias.

  “If it’s all the same to you,” Elias said, forcing the words to slow down, “I can look after him. Get him flying again.”

  Pennyrile leaned forward slightly and narrowed his eyes.

  Why won’t he say anything? Elias wondered.

  “Please,” Elias added. The memory of the pigeon’s heart beating against his hand was still so fresh.

  Pennyrile sucked at the inside of his cheek, still eyeing Elias, still with his hands poised to snap the neck. But just as suddenly as he’d prepared to end the bird’s life, he righted the pigeon and returned it to Elias.

  “Thank you!” Elias gathered the bird to his chest. “Thank you!”

  He backed away quickly and ran to his own hut. He was too relieved to have saved the bird a second time to take note of Stephen’s and Lillian’s looks of concern. And he was far too happy to pay much mind to the uneasy feeling he got when he glimpsed Pennyrile still watching as he pulled the curtain across his own door.

  Chapter Three

  HALTER HITCH

  Your lungs sound slightly improved, I believe,” Dr. Croghan said as he tucked the tube he used to listen to Elias’s chest back into his leather bag. He glanced at the pigeon. “Though your new friend’s chatter makes it somewhat difficult to hear.”

  “His name’s Bedivere.” Elias rapped a knuckle on the tabletop. The pigeon strutted closer, twisting his head this way and that. Bedivere was a good name. The name of King Arthur’s best friend, the one who he trusted to throw Excalibur back into the lake.

  Croghan started to pet the bird, but Bedivere threw up his good wing and squawked.

  “I think I’d prefer that he be caged like the rest of Pennyrile’s birds,” Croghan said, eying a brass watch as he held Elias’s wrist to count out the heartbeats. In the silence, Elias studied the doctor. He wasn’t so old that he’d begun to go gray, but his hair needed a trim and he hadn’t shaved. He wore a gentleman’s clothes, but he’d missed a button on his waistcoat, and his trousers sported a patch poorly stitched.

  “Oh no, Doctor,” Elias said. “He can’t fly. We’re pals, see?” Elias rapped his knuckle once more on the tabletop, and Bedivere hopped into his palm.

  “Fine,” Croghan agreed. “But if you begin to decline, I’m afraid the bird will have to go.”

  “I been drinking your tea and eating all the eggs,” Elias protested as he drew the bird closer. “Bedivere won’t make me sicker.”

  “We aren’t just after your not wasting away further. Our objective is to make you well.” He paused. “Are you feeling better?”

  Elias considered. Maybe? He was at least pleased about last night’s adventure and rescuing Bedivere. So yes, he felt better in that way, even if not in the way the doctor meant. “Some,” he said. “A little. I promise if I feel worse I’ll tell you.”

  “We’ll see,” the doctor mused. “But, at any rate, it’s time we added something to your regimen.”

  “I thought the cave air was meant to be enough,” Elias said, worried.

  “The vapors in the cave are powerful,” Croghan began, “but they primarily arrest the march of the wasting disease.”

  Elias recalled the mining operation that sat up near the entrance to the cave. The timbers from the Revolutionary War were still in perfect condition, owing to those magical cave vapors, which was how Croghan landed on bringing sick folks down there to heal. “So while the vapors do their work, we must do ours, pioneering the very latest in curatives.”

  Elias wasn’t sure about curatives, but he liked the bit about pioneers. “I read a book about Lewis and Clark and their push to the Pacific,” he offered.

  Dr. Croghan brightened. “Did you know that I have for an uncle Mr. William Clark? And that I trained for surgery under the same physician as Meriwether Lewis?”

  “No foolin’?”

  “Indeed. The new frontier is here.” He gestured around the hut, to the cave beyond. “This place holds secrets and discoveries to rival those of the great expedition.”

  The doctor had a way about him, all hope and optimism, that Elias liked. Still, new treatments worried him.

  Croghan tapped his lip in contemplation, staring at Elias. Elias stared back, took in the dark circles under the man’s eyes, the bony fingers. And he wondered if maybe he weren’t like Merlin just a bit. Merlin was said to have retreated to a cave after Arthur died. And if the doctor did manage to cure him, it would be magic to rival that of the old stories. Magic to no longer hear the crackling in his lungs, feel the frequent pain in his side, or be seized by coughing spells, or bouts of fever. Magic to not feel so spent all the time, to want to eat the food put in front of him instead of forcing it down.

  “A poultice twice a day, I think,” the doctor announced finally. “Wild ramps fried in goose fat.”

  Elias’s shoulders relaxed with relief. Granny put poultices on him all the time. They weren’t any bother except for making him a little greasy.

  “You haven’t been out in the cave much, the Negroes tell me,” Dr. Croghan said.

  Elias bit his lip but said nothing. If the others hadn’t told about Elias wandering into the cave last night, he wasn’t about to.

  “I think I’ll take you with me on my rounds next week,” the doctor said. “That way I can observe you and see how you do with the increased activity. I wonder if inhaling more of the cave air might incite a more rapid healing. A brisk walk should get you respirating at a more rapid pace.”

  “Why aren’t Nedra and the others going for walks, then?”

  Croghan exhaled loud and slow. “Many of my patients arrived here already too weak for the activity, Nedra included. Pennyrile used to be more active, walking his birds up toward the entrance to release them, but with the scrofula at his neck and not so much in his lungs, the more vigorous breathing may be less effective.”

  “Scrofula?” Elias asked. “That’s why he keeps his neck wrapped up?”

  “Yes,” Croghan said. “Sometimes they call it the King’s Evil. In Europe in the Middle Ages they believed it could be cured by the touch of a king or a queen. Ridiculous, but it became the custom. Nothing at all to do with real medicine, of course. At any rate, poor Pennyrile is losing weight rapidly and his spirits seem low. I’m encouraged he gave you the bird, to be honest. Perhaps making a friend will do you both good.”

  Elias chose not to explain how he came to be Bedivere’s protector. Doing so
would have required him to reveal how he’d found him in the first place. “So what do you do for scrofula?” he asked instead.

  Croghan seemed eager to be off. “The bear fat and whale oil compound on his neck attacks the growth from without, but the silence cure is the first line—”

  “Silence!” Elias said. “That’s why he don’t say nothing!”

  “Yes, Elias, that is why he doesn’t say anything.”

  Elias thought on how a lost voice was one more thing added to the pile of the many already taken away in the name of healing.

  “Eat your eggs.” Dr. Croghan snapped shut his leather bag. “You need to keep up your strength.”

  * * *

  Though he wasn’t the least bit hungry—he never really was anymore—Elias forced himself to eat half of his eggs. Bedivere seemed even less inclined to eating, but Elias reasoned it less to do with appetite: He needed feed for the bird.

  “Be right back, fella,” he said, worrying—and maybe hoping—that the bird might try to follow him like Charger would have. But Bedivere, roosting on the back of the wooden chair, just stared blankly, cooed once, and let Elias go.

  Elias dashed across the clearing, glancing at Nedra’s window. She was bent over her knitting, the lamp drawn close.

  At Pennyrile’s hut, he tapped on the doorframe. “Mr. Pennyrile?” he called out softly. Now that he knew the man was not meant to speak, it made his silence a little less unnerving, but still, Elias wasn’t sure how to talk with a man who couldn’t talk back.

  “I don’t mean to trouble you, sir,” Elias went on. “But if you could spare some feed for that pigeon you give me, or at least tell me what he eats, I’d—”

  The curtain whipped open.

  Pennyrile stood there, not quite smiling, but not looking entirely displeased to find Elias at his door. In his hands he held a slate and a nub of chalk. He was bundled up in a long wool coat, the collar revealing a new wrap at his neck, this one finished off with the same elaborate knot as before. But as he moved, the fabric shifted, revealing a lumpy edge of bluish purple, like an old bruise, glinting beneath a layer of ointment. Bear fat and whale oil, Elias recalled the doctor saying, the odor suddenly recognizable to him. Whale oil they burned at home, and on board his father’s ships. Elias forced himself to look the man in the eye. Despite his size, Elias could see that Pennyrile was indeed losing weight like the doctor said. His face, deeply lined and spotted all over by the sun, had begun to hollow out, the cheeks caving in.

  “I . . . good morning, um . . .” Elias had almost forgotten the reason for his errand.

  And then he heard a sound that made him remember a different life. One where he’d have been right then if he weren’t so sick. Pennyrile began writing across the slate. It was just like the one Elias had used in school back in Norfolk, the same kind Horace Peters had cracked over Merriman Oakes’s head when Merriman had called Horace a Yankee. Pennyrile wrote quickly, the chalk scratching and shrieking. After a second he turned the slate around and tapped the words he’d written there.

  Victor Pennyrile. The printing was spindly, all lowercase letters.

  He tapped his chest.

  “I know,” Elias said. “I’m Elias. Elias Harrigan. Pleased to meet you.”

  Pennyrile pointed at his neck, at the kerchief he had knotted there.

  “Doc Croghan told me. I’m sorry for you.”

  Pennyrile shrugged, like it couldn’t be helped. Then he pointed at Elias’s chest, almost touching it. Elias flinched, but he understood the question in the gesture.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “My lungs’re bad.”

  Pennyrile kept his black eyes fixed on Elias as he scratched something more onto the slate, the rasp of the chalk more whisper than screech this time.

  So young, the slate said when he held it out, and he looked at Elias like he was a horse that needed putting down.

  Elias bristled, suddenly recalling how quickly Pennyrile’d been ready to snap Bedivere’s neck. “I don’t want to keep you, but could you maybe spare some feed?”

  Pennyrile motioned Elias to follow him inside.

  It was much the same as Elias’s hut, with its narrow bed and table and stove and shelves. But pushed up against one wall was a great tin washtub. Elias shuddered, glad no one had brought up the notion of a proper bath yet. He searched for some other place to put his eyes. Right inside the door, half filling the window, was a set of wooden cages.

  The pigeon loft.

  Elias didn’t know much about keeping birds, but a quick glance told him that the enclosure had been built for more birds than the two it held now. They seemed almost lonesome in there.

  “Why’s it so empty?”

  Pennyrile wrote again. Had lots more. Sent them out already.

  “You gonna have whoever’s been getting the messages send ’em back?”

  Pennyrile swiped the slate clean with a scrap of red cloth and wrote again. Too much bother. He paused, then wrote more. Didn’t figure on being here this long.

  “You can always send out messages with the regular post, can’t you?”

  Pennyrile shook his head, acted as if he would not elaborate, but then wrote: This way better.

  Elias wasn’t sure how he figured that, what with the birds getting lost and injured and not taking the messages all the way out. But he didn’t ask, deciding that maybe the less he knew about Pennyrile’s reasons, the better. “About that feed?”

  Pennyrile’s eyes brightened. He set the slate on the table and hefted a cotton sack off the shelf. Rummaging around in his breakfast dishes, he found an empty cup. The two pigeons remaining in the loft began to coo and flap in anticipation. Pennyrile rapped sharply on the cage. The birds quieted.

  He then scooped out a measure of dried corn and handed it to Elias. “I’m obliged,” Elias said, taking the cup.

  Pennyrile held up a finger and pointed at a dish of water settled in the bottom of the pigeon loft.

  Elias understood. “Give him fresh every day?”

  Pennyrile nodded once.

  “How often with the grain?”

  Pennyrile held up two fingers.

  “Morning and night, then?”

  Pennyrile tapped his nose, pleased to have been understood.

  He stayed that way, grinning at Elias long enough to make him uncomfortable. With nothing left to discuss, and the notion of small talk seeming cruel with one for whom communicating was hard, Elias thanked the man again and made to go. But Pennyrile caught him by the arm, held up a finger, and then fetched up his slate. He swiped it clean, then wrote quickly.

  You went off in the cave last night.

  No question mark there. Like there wasn’t any point arguing what it said.

  “That’s where I found the bird—” Elias began before Pennyrile cut him short.

  Doc doesn’t know?

  Elias felt something pricking at the back of his neck. Why would Pennyrile care?

  “No, but—”

  More scratching at the slate. Just saw you. Jealous.

  Jealous? Elias relaxed a fraction. Maybe Pennyrile was as bored as Elias.

  Pennyrile was writing again. Won’t tell.

  That settled, Elias thanked him and took a step back toward his own hut, but Pennyrile rapped the slate sharply again. Elias waited as Pennyrile wiped off his slate and scrawled something new. This time the letters were more jagged, written faster, less sure of themselves.

  Sending out a pigeon later. Want to watch?

  Elias looked at the two remaining in the cage. “But what if it gets lost too?”

  Pennyrile shrugged, then scribbled: Needs must.

  Elias couldn’t stomach it. He didn’t like the thought of more poor birds getting hurt or killed trying to find their way to the entrance. “I could maybe carry the bird out for you, if you wanted? So it had a better chance of making it home?”

  Pennyrile made a face to show he was surprised and pleased at the offer.

  “I wouldn’t mind,
” Elias continued. “Doctor wants me to come walking with him soon, anyhow.”

  Pennyrile considered. Then he erupted into a frenzied scratching at the slate. On second thought, best reserve birds. And have another way.

  “Another way?” Elias asked as Pennyrile swiped the slate and wrote even more.

  Tree at entrance where I used to walk when stronger. My friend leaves letters there for me. You could leave my note for him there instead of sending out bird.

  “If he’s near enough to leave a note for you outside, then why doesn’t he just come the rest of the way in?”

  Pennyrile’s smile faltered just a step, like he wasn’t pleased to have Elias questioning him. But then he wrote. We value privacy.

  Still puzzled, Elias looked toward the loft and the two birds still within. Pennyrile might send them out. They’d only get lost in the cave like the others. And no wonder. They weren’t made to fly around in the dark, and he’d seen enough of the cave to know it was an easy thing to lose one’s sense of direction. It had to be even trickier for a bird used to flying in the daylight. “I don’t know, sir,” Elias began. “Seems a heap of bother when you could just use the regular post. Or Croghan’s hands to go back and forth to your tree.”

  Pennyrile shook his head, clearly losing patience now. He flipped the slate and wrote on the other side. Can’t trust. Some of them read. Don’t like it. Only you.

  “But—” Elias began before Pennyrile held up the other side of the slate, pointing a stubby finger at the word privacy.

  Even though Elias was standing perfectly still, he felt the wheeze begin to grow from that tiny whistle that was almost always there to the rusty gate Lillian had described. The cough would come on soon if he wasn’t careful. “I don’t know—”

  Pennyrile wrote again. You carry for me. I give you feed for the bird.

  Elias thought Pennyrile’s expression would not have been out of place carved into a jack-o’-lantern sneering from a fence post. And those words written on the slate sounded more like an order than a request. He was beginning to get an odd feeling about the whole business when Pennyrile added: A friendly arrangement?