by Richard Peck
She hadn’t been gone long when I noticed a knot of women down in the distance one afternoon. They were starting up our hill. Cass and Calinda had taken a dip net down to the river, so I was the only one who saw. I was beating the braided rugs over the porch railing.
I’d heard somewheres of ladies with no more to do than call on one another in the afternoons. That didn’t sound much like Grand Tower. And the climb alone would have discouraged them from us. Still, here a bunch came, looking for more pathway than they could find.
Darting inside, I told Mama. I didn’t see surprise in her face. But she grabbed her head to smooth her hair and sent me for her shoes. She’d cast off her apron for a fresh one by the time I got back. She was still cramming her bare feet into the shoes when we heard them on the porch.
One of them was Mrs. T. W. Jenkins. Another was Mrs. Manfred Cady. And Mrs. R. M. Breeze, the preacher’s wife. They looked like three of Cass’s hens, all feathered out but suffering in this heat. They were sucking air to catch their breath.
Mama pretended surprise to see them, as if she spent a summer day in her shoes and a fresh apron.
“Mrs. Pruitt,” Mrs. Manfred Cady said, “it is hot weather and a hard climb, and we are all busy women, preparin’ for war.”
She fetched up a shuddering breath, and Mama said, calmly, “I am up for the day myself.”
“We won’t take more than a moment of your time,” Mrs. Jenkins said, and in they came, looking around as they’d never set foot here before.
Mama could have shown them into the front room for a breath of air from the river. She gestured them into chairs around the table. The kitchen hung in the foreign scent of Calinda’s pain-patate, a New Orleans gingerbread, baking in the Dutch oven. The whole kitchen was an oven. Mrs. Breeze sighed.
“Mrs. Pruitt, we all understand that life has not been an easy row for you to hoe,” said Mrs. Cady.
Mama’s hands were folded before her. “I haven’t asked for charity in this town.” Her gaze brushed Mrs. Breeze. “What good would it do me?”
“Nobody mentioned charity,” Mrs. Cady went on, “and it’s nobody’s business but your own who you let out your rooms to or who you take under your roof.”
Mama clearly saw eye-to-eye with her on that.
“But the tide has turned, Mrs. Pruitt,” said Mrs. Cady. “Now our watchword must be ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall.’ I will put it plain. We are at war, in case you haven’t heard, and you’ve got enemy aliens in your house. We come in good faith to let you know you’re on thin ice.”
“And you’re givin’ them succor,” Mrs. Breeze chimed.
Mama’s hands clenched in her apron. But she spoke mildly. “Well, I don’t see how I can send them home. The boats isn’t running.”
She glanced at the preacher’s wife. We weren’t churchgoers. For one thing, we’d never had the clothes. Mrs. Breeze had been agog since she got here, to see how heathens lived. “Shall I send them down to the preacher for shelter?” Mama inquired.
Mrs. Breeze bristled. “I wouldn’t have them at the parsonage overnight,” she said, about to spit. “I wouldn’t give them loft space in the barn, nor straw from the stable. We’re true-blue Americans here, and the whole community knows what they are.”
Mama’s eyes narrowed. “What are they?”
“Why, spies, of course,” Mrs. Cady rang out. “One of them’s eternally out in the timber, surveyin’ the territory for an invasion, they say. And the white one’s all over town, gettin’ the lay of the land. She’s down there right now.”
“Spies.” Mama pondered. “Then they come to the wrong town, didn’t they? If we had a secret, you three would tell it.”
The bonnets quivered and drew closer. They hadn’t made that climb to be insulted.
“And another thing,” Mrs. T. W. Jenkins piped up. “It’s enough to gag a maggot to see that overdressed little miss, that Delphine whoever, putting herself on public display. She’s switchin’ her skirttails up and down Front Street even as we speak. And the men in this town is starin’ holes in her, the brazen little hussy.”
Mama stroked her cheek. “She’s a big-city gal,” Mama said at last. “She don’t know how restless small-town men can get. They say the porch on your husband’s store is about to collapse under the weight of the men watching Delphine go by. I can see how it might be a worry to you.”
Mrs. Jenkins jumped on that. “If you’re insinuatin’ my husband has any interest in that painted-up little floozy, I have only this in answer to you, Mrs. Pruitt. I’ve held on to my husband, unlike some I could name.”
The kitchen went dead. You could hear the buzz of a horsefly circling.
Then Mama said, “Get out of my house.”
They’d never been ordered out of anywhere. They bumbled and bumped into one another. Mrs. Cady gave Mrs. Jenkins a look like maybe she’d gone too far. They were at the door when the preacher’s wife turned back.
“Mrs. Pruitt,” she said, speaking low, “as one mother to another, I will have to say my piece. It don’t look good, havin’ a son the age of your boy under the same roof with young women we don’t know nothin’ about, spies or otherwise. It just don’t look right.”
I was next to Mama, standing with her. “I don’t reckon my son will be under my roof much longer,” Mama said. “You have a son, don’t you? Will he be going to war?”
“My son? Bertram?” Mrs. Breeze stared. “My land, no, he won’t be goin’ to war. He’s fort—thirt—why, no, he won’t be goin’.”
Then they were gone.
Mama leaned against the doorjamb where we lingered for the air. She smoothed her apron and thought about taking it off to spare it. Then at length she spoke, softly. “I work hard not to draw their fire, and to keep us decent and together. I live and let live. I don’t even go down to town if I can send one of you. But it don’t signify. They can’t let you be. One day they come after you.”
That was a long speech for Mama. Now in the quiet I was thinking about Paw, and wondered if she was too. But we rarely spoke of him, and didn’t now.
“What’ll happen next, Mama?”
She stroked her chin. “Well, they wouldn’t dare to run Delphine out of town. It wouldn’t look good to their menfolk. I have an idea they’ve got it out of their systems.”
“Mama, do you wish Delphine and Calinda had never come? Would it just have been easier on us to be like we was?”
She looked over at me in surprise. I was as tall as she was now. “No, I’m not sorry they come. You can’t believe but every other word Delphine says. And if vanity’s a sin, she’ll fry. But before she got here, I wouldn’t have answered back to them battleaxes. That Delphine don’t lack confidence in herself. I’ll give her that. I believe a little has wore off on me. She put some starch in my spine.”
I hadn’t thought of such a thing. I didn’t know grown people changed, or were changed. I thought being grown was safer than that.
“Delphine’s wearing off on you too,” Mama told me, “just like Calinda’s wearing off on Cass.”
“Delphine? On me?”
“It’s in your walk, a little. And you’re tidier about your hair. You don’t look so much like you was dragged backwards through a brush-fence.”
“Many thanks, Mama,” I said. “But not the corsets. Never them.”
“Well, no,” Mama said. “There’s limits.”
Then not two minutes after our recent callers had vanished from view, there came Delphine toiling up toward us.
Climbing the Backbone was the biggest job of her day. Her summer dress was made of ticking, a fine black line against white. She had it in handfuls, climbing over rill and ridge. She labored along like she could feel every stone through her thin slipper soles. The silken morning glories on her bonnet looked to be working loose. Her face was beet red and streaming in this heat, and her curls hung lank. She was using the parasol for a walking stick.
It was a far cry from strolling the pavements of New
Orleans, but she kept true to her ways. I glanced at Mama. She was stifling a smile at the sight of all this elegance melting away. And it took something to coax a smile out of Mama.
Delphine fetched up at the bottom of the porch stairs, breathing so heavy you’d think she’d been pulling stumps. “Nom de Dieu,” she gasped, and several other French words.
Planting the parasol in the ground, she plunged a gloved hand into her reticule. Yes, gloves in this weather, little string ones with her bare fingers sticking out. She pulled up a handbill and shook it at us.
“A showboat! It comes down from somewhere called Muscatine, Iowa. But of course the musicians are from New Orleans, where else? The Ethiopian Melodiers. And a drama! And the E. P. Christy minstrels! And ‘the public is invited to dance upon the stage at the conclusion of the program!’” she quoted. “A showboat, and the last before they are taken off the river!”
Delphine was almost beside herself. Mama and I saw then how dull her life had been all this time she was making it so lively for us.
So of course when the showboat played Grand Tower, we’d go. Mama too. Our visitors that afternoon had something to do with it. Then Noah dispelled all doubt in the matter.
He came home from his work that night, lips white with anger. Being Noah, he’d have said nothing, though I heard him kick at the porch stairs before I saw him. My spine was starchier than before too, so I trailed him into his room. There I demanded to know what particular burr had got under his saddle.
He didn’t want to tell, and then he did. “They run their mouths down there around the forge,” he said, disgusted with humanity. “They talk to hear their heads rattle. I’d like to shorten the ears off about six of them. Maybe more.”
“What for?”
“They say we’re sending signals to the South from the light out of our windows.”
“Who?”
“Us,” he snapped. “They say we’re signaling the Confederate Navy out of this house. It’s what the lamps is for.”
He was wrought up for certain.
“This is talk against Delphine,” I said. “They mean Delphine’s spying.”
Of course that’s just what they meant, like there was any sense to it. Men gossip worse than women and don’t even know it.
Noah was hopping mad. As if trying to court a girl under his own roof didn’t give him fits enough. For one thing, he wouldn’t own up to how sweet he was on Delphine. For another, there was always witnesses to every little thing. The wonder is Noah didn’t flee this house of women sooner than he did.
I let him rant, and use some language I won’t repeat here. It wasn’t like him. But we’d be going to the showboat show. No question about that. We’d pull the money out of the well for the tickets, and we’d all sit on the front row like anybody else. Maybe more so.
Chapter Eight
Delphine, who didn’t know she was a spy, spent feverish days planning for the night of the show. It was a great event, the last of the showboats before they were all turned into hospital ships for the soldiers, or gunboats. But, my, how she fussed, turning out her trunks for finery.
On an August day hot enough to pop the corn in their rows, we heard that the showboat had cleared Cape Girardeau and was making for us. Delphine napped that afternoon. “Beauty sleep,” Mama remarked.
Calinda had said, “Me, I stay at ’ome.” But Delphine wouldn’t hear of it. Mais non, Calinda had to go because it was going to be a gran de boubousse and not to be missed. And who knows, maybe Calinda wanted to go all along. With her you never knew. She put a pot of her gumbo ’zerbe at the back of the fire for our quick supper. We weren’t hungry, but Noah had to eat.
When Delphine summoned Calinda upstairs, Cass went too. While they were up there, I pictured Cass and Calinda with a foot apiece in the small of Delphine’s back, yanking on her corset strings.
Then by and by Mama and me looked up from our work to see a stranger in the hall door. A perfect stranger. I jumped. It was a young lady, slender as a willow wand, her hair puffed over her little shell-pink ears. She wore a sprigged dimity with a froth of lace at the throat. Her rosebud lips were a good deal pinker than her ears. Her dark-fringed eyes were cast modestly down. She looked up at us. It was Cass.
Mama dropped whatever was in her hands. My jaw was on the floor. “Cassy?” I said.
Wet-eyed, Mama whispered, “Girl, what have they did to you?” But she couldn’t take her eyes off Cass. I couldn’t either.
I wanted to make a run for her, but hugging had never worked. Now she was made of dainty china, too perfect to touch. But it was still Cass. She went shy after the first moment.
When I could look away from her, I saw in Mama something new, something of joy, even hope. Just a flicker. But she nudged me and said, “You better skin upstairs and see what they can do with you.”
Heaven help me, I went up there. On the table that Delphine called her secrétaire, where she wrote letters to her maman, I saw a fearful sight. It was a blazing coal oil lamp. On the glass chimney rested a curling iron, heating up. Delphine and Calinda, in states of undress, turned on me.
“Oh no,” says I, “not the curling iron! You won’t get red-hot metal that close to my head.”
But they did. I was a lamb unto the slaughter as they worked me over, giving me curls fried like Delphine’s to frame my face. They jerked me into a dress of hers. I could wear it without corsets, so little figure did I have. It was a transformation that cost me dear. I felt frizzled and scalped at the end of it, and hobbled by petticoats.
They showed me beautiful tall tortoiseshell combs with glints of diamond in them. “I can’t wear them things,” I said. “My head ain’t big enough to carry them.”
“For your maman,” said Delphine.
In the distance a showboat’s whistle split the afternoon. “Écoutez donc,” she cried. “Hear that!” Her eyes flashed black fire because a steam calliope was playing “Annie Laurie.” The melody drifted over the water to us. We knew that song, parts of it, so we began to sing:
Her brow is like the snow-drift,
Her throat is like the swan,
Her face is the fair-est
That e’er the sun shone on.
We sang and danced around their room, Delphine and me, while Calinda looked on, almost smiling at us jumping over the clutter of this sudden ballroom floor.
It might be the last show we’d ever see, so they come from all over to see it. All Grand Tower was there, except for the preacher and Mrs. Breeze. They come from Makanda, and people rowed over from the Missouri side. We sat on the front row of skittery gold chairs. Noah Pruitt, hair slicked, in his paw’s coat, sat by his womenfolk as the town had not seen us before, and never would again.
Mama hadn’t unearthed the green silk from the death drawer, but she wore her otherwise best. And a black velvet ribbon that Calinda had tied around her neck. Deft hands had drawn Mama’s hair out of its knot and dressed it high with the Spanish combs that struck sparks in the light. Behind us the room buzzed, and for once she didn’t give a hoot what they might be saying.
I’d never been on a boat of any sort, so I didn’t know what to expect. We sat in a great satin-lined, tufted candy box, glowing like high noon under the chattering chandeliers. It was exactly what I hoped the world would be—this bright, with gold dust in the air, and throbbing with music.
The Melodiers were on the stage, playing their fiddles and drums and horns. They played the audience in with songs they’d gathered from all the rivers they’d traveled: “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” and “Oh! Susanna” and “Drowned Maiden’s Hair” and “Old Dan Tucker.”
A drama came next, a play, and I’d never seen one. We were promised it had never been given before and was written in the light of recent events.
Abe Lincoln strode onto the stage.
The audience gasped. But it wasn’t the real Abe Lincoln. It was a tall galoot with side-whiskers like his. In the play he wasn’t exactly the President of th
e United States. He was the father of two daughters, though in real life, as we all knew, he only had sons. But they were such pretty girls, though painted up like Delphine. With the prettiest dresses.
As I’d never seen a play, it was hard to follow. But one of the sisters was dutiful. I understood that. The other one was headstrong and seemed not to have a brain in her head. It took me most of the play to decide that the dutiful daughter represented the Union and the other one who wouldn’t listen was the Confederacy. So there was the Yankee daughter and her Secesh sister.
The play went on at some length with argument and weeping. But I can quote Abe Lincoln’s last lines to this day:
Go then, our rash sister!
Afar and aloof—
Run wild in the sunshine
Away from our roof,
But when your heart aches
And your feet have grown sore,
Remember the pathway
That leads to our door!
The curtain dropped. The band struck up “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and an American flag unfurled from the ceiling.
Applause rocked the boat, though Delphine beside me was disgusted by the whole thing. “C’est incroyable,” she muttered, and more, all in French. She fiddled with her feather fan. Beside her Calinda stared into space with her hands in her lap, so I suppose Cass did the same.
That was the serious part of the program. When the curtain rose again, it was a minstrel show with a line of men in chairs. The orchestra was black men. But the minstrels were white men who’d rubbed burnt cork on their faces to look black. You could see the white skin behind their ears.
The man at one end was called Mr. Bones. The man at the other end was Mr. Tambo. And the man in the middle was the Interlocutor, whatever that might be. This was the comic part, and they swapped a lot of jokes I didn’t get. But the crowd roared. And they sang comic songs, like,
