The River Queen

by Mary Morris

  Now I know, of course, that such action is a sign of sociopathic behavior in children. Was I a sociopath? If I could control the world around me—the world of rabbits, fish, dogs—the way my father wanted to control us, keep us in line, if I could get them to do it, then maybe everything would be all right. I wanted these creatures to obey me as I tried to obey him.

  “If there’s a wrong way to do something, you’ll find it,” I hear him say as I try to do my knot. This is the voice I prefer not to hear. It is not where I want to go. Why is my mind taking me to this place? But love is never simple, is it? Never really so cut and dried.

  Down, out, around, in.

  At Mile 110 I take the wheel. Underneath I feel the current and it is very strong. I am having trouble keeping a straight course. I struggle with it.

  Jerry tells me the current is strong here because the bottom is uneven. There are forces beneath the surface you can’t really see. “It would be difficult for anyone to pilot here,” he says.

  I return to my place on the bow. Dozens of monarch butterflies flutter past.

  We pass the Chester State Prison. A sign reads LANDING—PRIVATE. I’m sure it is. I’m using my binoculars all the time now to read daymarkers, indicators on bridges, at the locks and dams, to locate our whereabouts. After the prison, I return to my knot. Cowboy Carl, a tow with barge, comes by us too fast on the starboard side and soaks us in his wake.

  They’ve given me enough rope to hang myself, shall we say. I go back up to the flybridge, where Jerry who is left-handed and a bit more patient tries to show me again. Still, my knots look more like something you’d put on a Christmas gift than use to tie up an eighteen-thousand-pound boat.

  But left to right has never been my strength. Tying knots never came easily to me. I flunked the shoelace tying lesson in Ms. Partlow’s second grade. If someone taught me how to hit a baseball right-handed, I played, and still play, as a righty. I throw and kick, such as it is, as a lefty; I play golf as a righty, but can barely swipe my Metrocard in New York City, which is always a right-handed motion. And so on.

  I recall shoe tying as a trauma of a left-handed youth. I only succeeded when my seatmate and best friend, Tommy Hinds, patiently instructed me. But I never learned very well. For the whole school year Tommy stooped down at my feet and tied my shoes. I can still see him. His blond head bent over my sneakers.

  He was the first boy to show me real kindness and we were true friends. Perhaps he was my first boyfriend. We remained that way until third grade when he broke his leg during a simple fall from his bed and he died from bone cancer the following year.

  * * *

  We want to reach Cape Girardeau by dark, but there’s only a gas dock there, not really a place to tie up for the night. We decide to bivouac on the Illinois side of the river. At Mile 61.7 I spot a lovely strip of beach. “Can we go there?” We locate it on our navigational maps. It is a sandbar called Dusky’s Bar beside a channel called the Picayune Chute. “This is good,” Jerry tells me as we gaze at the maps. “It’s accessible only by boat. There’s no access road. No one can come near us. You don’t want to tempt fate, you know.…”

  Please, I whisper, please, don’t tell me a story about someone being murdered on a beach. It is a missed opportunity perhaps, but Jerry lets it pass. But there are other issues, he says, as we make our way toward it. We are a distance from the fueling dock and we need fuel. We have an eight a.m. appointment with the gas man, who will make a special trip if you call ahead for gas. “It means we’ll have to leave by six a.m.,” Jerry says.

  But he is more concerned about anchoring just off the main channel. He is worried about the wake of barges and tows. “I don’t want to get pushed up onto a beach,” he says. “Or trapped by a loose barge.”

  Trapped by a loose barge. I am calculating what the chances are of this happening. “I know a guy back at the marina in La Crosse. Twice he said he got stuck on the beach by a loose barge.” Somehow I feel willing to take the odds against being pinned against the sandbar by a runaway barge. In the end I convince Jerry that it’s a perfect little strip of beach—isolated and pristine. And though he’s loath to agree with me or even tell me that he has agreed, he points the River Queen’s nose toward shore and heads her straight toward the inlet, next to the Picayune Chute.

  Checking the draft, he nods, and this seems to mean we’re all right. I feel the bow as she begins to rub up against the sand and in another moment we are tucked onto the shore. Tom jumps off with an anchorline and pulls her ahead as hard as he can. Then he sets the anchor lines, burying each one in the sand.

  As soon as we are anchored, Tom pulls Samantha Jean onto our beach for a run in the waves and I announce I’m going to take a bath before it gets dark. “Knock yourself out,” Jerry tells me.

  This time I do it right. I put on my river shoes and borrow Jerry’s fashionable L. L. Bean snug zip-up life vest. No more of that antique orange thing for me, though here the tug of the current isn’t so strong. I take my towel, shampoo, and soap. I am sweaty. My body smells. I walk out into the river and scrub my face and hands. The back of my neck. My armpits. I scrub and wash. I dive into the murky water, then wash again.

  “Hey,” Tom shouts as he heads off, axe in hand to chop wood, “Mary’s taking a mud bath!” This is a new level of Mississippi baptism, but one I am prepared to make. I turn my back to him, pretending to give him a snub. But now I’ve been christened in the waters of the river too. I float on my back, watching the sun crest the tops of trees on the western bank.

  In the final few moments of daylight I walk the beach as Tom gathers wood for a fire. Jerry has the grill going. It is a cool, calm night. A breeze blows. I’m sitting on a log. There are no mosquitoes and just a hint of fall. I watch the sky turn a shade of crimson, then purple, as the sun quite literally sets in the west.

  Tom returns, lugging half a tree above his head like the hunter and gatherer he is. He builds a huge campfire, but then gets pouty because we don’t want to sit right in front of it. We have grilled chicken breasts with orange slices, rice pilaf, carrots, and broccoli. He eats his dinner alone in front of the fire. “Let him be,” Jerry says. “He’s just being Tom.”

  Without a word Tom goes right to bed after dinner as he always does and Jerry and I sit by the fire, which is dying down. The “genie” is off and there isn’t a sound, except crickets and the lapping of the waves. “This is what I love,” Jerry tells me. “I could just live like this all the time. On a beach on the river. Not many people know what this is like.”

  The night is full of stars and I tip my head back to see them. Jerry’s brought out some beers and he gives me a bottle of his best imported, an honor, I believe. I don’t really drink beer, but this one tastes good and cold. “It’s so quiet,” I tell him.

  “This is one of the last free places,” Jerry says. “I just love being out here.”

  We sit, each with a stick, poking at the fire. “You’re probably right about that.”

  “Where else can you just stop and spend the night? That’s all gone. Freedom is pretty much over in this country.” As the fire crackles, we talk about America, about Bush, and God, and our families. We finish our beers. Soon I am tired and I turn in. The sound of the cicadas and crickets fills the night. The only other sound is an outboard motor, which races incongruously up the river. The moonlight shines into the cabin, casting a dappled light on my wall. The North Star rises right over Missouri. I see Orion from my window. I realize I am cold. I’m surprised by the chill in the night air. I crawl into my sleeping bag. I snuggle inside, and before I know it I am asleep.

  I awake to the cabin filled with brightness. It is the middle of the night but a light shines in like a beacon. Are we being abducted by aliens? Or is it the police, coming to arrest us? Looking out, I see a passing barge, the kind that Jerry feared. But it moves slowly, causing no wake.

  42

  I’M UP before six, working on my knot. Jerry has instructed me to do it back
ward. As he eases us off our sandbar at six a.m., I lie in bed, rope in my hands, struggling to get it right. Take it apart in its reverse order, he has told me. Then you will see how it is made.

  I am taking it apart as we head toward the gas dock in Cape Girardeau. It is a pristine morning and from my nook I see the river bend. I am sad to leave our beach on the shore. Gazing out, the water churns. Behind us Dusky’s Bar recedes. I go back to my rope. I see how it comes into its hole. How it winds around the tree. It is seven a.m. and I haven’t had my coffee, but I’m working away. Once I’ve analyzed the knot, I try it for myself. I try it three or four different ways.

  Finally I think I’ve got it. I slip into a pair of flannel pants and a sweatshirt. Jerry has boiled water and I drop my three bags of Folgers into my Citgo cup. Then I go up to the helm where he is at the wheel. I hold it up to him and he takes a look. He holds my knot in his hands as if it’s a dead animal. “You’re missing a loop,” he tells me. Clutching the piece of rope, I go back to my nook, determined to get it right.

  I am practiced in this kind of thing. I recall a rainy, spring morning and I am three or four years old. My mother says to me that I can play in the den, but I can’t disturb my father because he is doing our taxes. But of course if I go into the den, I am going to disturb him. I have nothing else to do. The den has sliding doors and I like to slide them back and forth. I can do this hundreds of times in an hour. Another thing I like to do is sit on the couch that looks out onto the garden and blow my breath onto the glass, then scribble on it.

  I do not know how to write. I do not know how to read. But my father, for lack of anything better to do with me, writes my name across the top of a yellow pad. MARY. “There,” he says, “that’s your name. Now you write it.”

  He knows I can’t, but it is a distraction good for half an hour or so. I take a pencil and the yellow pad. I am surprised by the point of this pencil. My father always kept his pencils very sharp. I do not know if I have ever held a pencil before, but I grip it in my left fist. I hold it the way you’d hold a knife if you were planning on stabbing someone in the chest.

  I start to copy what my father has written at the top of the page. I do not know why, but I recall this moment with perfect precision. The grayness of the day. My father’s somber, serious face. The yellow pad and MARY written across the top. I work for what seems like a very long time and, when I am satisfied, I stop. I take the pad to the card table where my father works. My nose just reaches the table. I can smell my father’s cologne, his fresh-shaved face. And the slight odor of talc I have always associated with him. Now I see my father’s finger coming down as he points to the page. “The R is backward,” he says.

  I have certainly read worse critiques of my work over the years, but this was the first. It did not make me want to stop. To the contrary, it made me want to persevere. I went back to the scratchy carpet, the pencil hard in my tiny fist, and I struggled until I got it right.

  * * *

  Haruki Murakami writes, “Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.”

  I have underlined this quote. Committed it to memory. How a rush of water can become a heart. It is not why I planned this journey in the first place, but it has become a large part of the reason to me. I am trying to understand why I have decided at this time to undertake this. But my heart is a river, gushing forth too.

  There is perhaps only one story I really have to tell. It is the one I could not tell until now. It is the story of home and the one I have wanted to write for years. I wanted to write about my father as I knew him and not as others saw him. But his long life prevented me from doing so. This journey began in a different place but it has taken me where I never thought it would. What began as an adventure and a lark has become a passage into memory, childhood, and the past. I began writing some of this material long ago, when my father was alive. But I knew that no one would read it until he was dead.

  I waited for him. As a little girl, I waited every day for my father to come home. I waited with his slippers, newspaper, and robe. A courtesan. His lady-in-waiting. He would come in, beaming, and for a while it was good. But then a minor incident would happen. Some small thing would go wrong. “If there’s a wrong way to do something, you’ll find it.”

  I recall carrying a tray of dishes from our playroom back to the kitchen. I am holding the tray and my father says, “You’re carrying too many dishes. You’re going to drop them.”

  The tray I had a good grip on moments before starts to slip from my hands. The dishes crash to the floor. “I told you,” he says, “you were going to drop that tray.”

  I ran up to my room, sobbing. I stood in a tightfisted pout, a stubborn pose it would take years of love and therapy to untie. My mother came up and told me to apologize. “Just say you’re sorry,” she begged.

  I went downstairs where my father was hammering some paneling in the basement. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said, though I’m not sure for what.

  He turned, knelt, and held me as I cried. That was what he wanted. He wanted me to be sorry. And I was. I would do everything right. If I did it all right, then no one would be mad at me again.

  If there is a secret vein I still have to mine it is this. I grew up trying to figure out how to get it right. I lived in terror of the left-on lightbulb, the horror of the incorrectly buttered piece of bread. (“Always break your bread before you butter it”—a tongue twister for me). The way to eat soup. With cold soup the spoon went one way, with hot soup the other. “Let me let you in on a secret,” he’d begin, and then we knew what was coming. He was articulate and precise. A dry drunk, a friend once referred to that rage.

  The dragon eyes would turn red. The fire that almost came out of the nose. In fairy tales I knew what the dragon looked like. He looked like my father.

  Once he lost his temper with Kate. She was about eight years old and she and her friend Amanda had gone to visit my parents in Florida for a winter break. They were at dinner and one of the girls burped. They both started laughing and couldn’t stop. For some reason, my father thought they were making fun of him.

  When he asked what they were laughing at, they only laughed more. He asked, “Are you making fun of me?”

  They shook their heads, trying not to convulse. Then he flared. “I’ve been around for ninety-five years and I know when someone’s lying to me!” He screamed at them and ordered them to leave the table. It is a scene I know only too well. In a sense it is a reality check for me.

  My mother decided to separate the two girls until they calmed down. She put Amanda in a bathroom and locked Kate in my parents’ walk-in closet, where she spent the better part of an hour, trying on my father’s wigs.

  43

  “BY GEOGRAPHICAL standards the lower Mississippi is a young, even infant stream, and runs through what is known as the Mississippi Embayment, a declivity covering approximately 35,000 square miles that begins 30 miles north of Cairo to Cape Girardeau,” John M. Barry writes in Rising Tides. It is here at Cape Girardeau that the true head of the Mississippi Delta, which will extend to the Gulf of Mexico, begins. Already I feel the landscape flattening where the banks are rich in alluvial soil.

  As we approach the gas dock at Cape Girardeau, a cruiser speeds toward us. It is a big white boat and it’s coming full throttle. There is a woman on the deck, shouting and waving something in her hands. I think there’s something wrong with her boat or someone on board. “Excuse me!” she yells. “Excuse me!”

  “Hey,” Tom says, “she’s racing us for the dock.”

  Jerry glances at the cruiser out of the corner of his eye. “Well, we are here first,” Jerry replies. He is concerned that we were low on fuel and relieved that we’ve gotten here
at all. But the cruiser keeps coming. I have no idea what she wants. It seems as if there is some kind of emergency. A heart attack. Her boat’s on fire. But Tom and Jerry chose to ignore her.

  The woman is screaming and shaking something in her hand and I now see it’s a set of keys. For some reason I think they are our keys or that she has a message for us. Then I realize that they just want to tie up on the dock ahead of us.

  She shouts again as they come closer, this time with attitude in her voice. “Excuse me!” I recognize her as the woman with the Bernese Mountain Dog from Hoppie’s Landing. She and her husband are doing the Great Loop. On the bow I see the other woman, who has the Irish Wolfhound.

  “Hey, hello!” she’s shouting, shaking these keys.

  Jerry sees her and, disgusted, turns away.

  “We’ve got the key to the gas dock,” she cries. She shouts that the gasman gave it to them the night before so they could take their dogs for a walk in the morning. “So if you’d just move your boat, we can walk our dogs.”

  Jerry shouts back. “You are welcome to tie up to us and we’ll carry your dogs onto the dock.”

  But she is adamant and insists that we move. “We have the key,” she says. “The gasman gave it to us.”

  Still Jerry won’t budge. He looks at me and says, “We’re already tied up here. They can tie up to us.”

  “We can’t tie up to you. How’re we going to get our dogs off the boat?”

  “We’d be glad to help you there,” Jerry offers.

  I’m not really sure of the proper boat etiquette at this moment. But suddenly the woman screams at us: “You should change your name because you aren’t Friend Ship. You’re bullshit.”