The River Rose

by Gilbert, Morris

  "Yes, I would so much!" she said. "And I want to learn all the words to 'Turkey in the Straw.'"

  "Yes, ma'am," Clint said. "After I get something to drink we'll all learn 'Turkey in the Straw.'"

  Marvel asked, "But first would you please sing 'Avaymaria' for me? I just loved that song, when you sang it on Christmas Eve. Please?"

  "I wish I could, little one, but I'm afraid it's not possible," he said gravely.

  "Why not?"

  Clint explained, "See, when you heard me sing on Christmas Eve, I was singing in what's called my operatic voice. It's different from when I sing 'Turkey in the Straw.'"

  Marvel nodded knowingly. "You've been singing really good tonight, but it's not like Avaymaria. But it's still you singing, why can't you sing your 'pratic voice now?"

  "It's hard, it's real hard to sing like that. To be able to sing like that all the time, you have to practice every day. And before you sing a real song, you have to warm up the muscles in your throat and neck and shoulders and chest and even your stomach."

  "But you already have big muscles," Marvel said insistently. "And why don't you practice every day?"

  Clint grinned. "Because it would be so silly, everyone would laugh at me, and I'd probably laugh at myself. When you practice you do this." He stood up, placed one hand theatrically over his heart, threw out his other hand, and thundered out an operatic: "LA-LA-LAAAAAA!" Leo scrambled up and looked around in alarm.

  Marvel laughed, and Clint sat back down. "See? Told you. And I gotta tell you, Marvel, for you I'd sing anything if I could, but 'Ave Maria' is kinda hard anyway."

  "It is? Why?" she asked curiously.

  "When you sing, you want the sound to come from way deep inside your chest, and kinda roll out of your throat. That's why when you sing opera, you open your mouth really wide. Here, do this." He opened his mouth and sang middle C, "Ahhhh."

  Obediently, Marvel opened her pink mouth to a round o and sang, "Ahhhh."

  "That's good," Clint said. "Now listen: Ah-vay-Ma-REE-uh. Try opening your mouth and singing REEEEEE."

  Marvel tried, then said with disgust, "It's coming out my nose."

  "Yeah, it does." He reached over and gently pinched Marvel's nostrils shut. "Now try."

  Marvel sang: "REEEE. Now it's coming out my ears!"

  "Uh-huh. Such are the woes of singing in your operatic voice," Clint said lightly. "That's why I'm too yellow-bellied to try it when I haven't been practicing."

  Ezra came in from the outside stairs then, holding a tray of steaming mugs. Jeanne followed him in. "Clint's been singin' us up a storm tonight," Ezra was saying.

  "Really?" Jeanne said with interest. She pulled back her hood and took off her cape in the warm room. "And I've missed it!"

  "We're going to sing 'Turkey in the Straw' some more, Mama," Marvel said eagerly. "You put the flowers in your hair like I said! Oh, you look beautiful."

  Clint, who had risen when Jeanne came in, said softly, "You sure do, Jeanne. Just like the fairy queen and the fairy princess, when I first saw you and Marvel."

  Jeanne blushed a little with pleasure. "Why, thank you, Mr. Hardin. That's very kind of you."

  "Not really," he said, offering her his crackerbox. "You're going to join us, aren't you?"

  "I certainly am. I don't want to miss 'Turkey in the Straw.'"

  They all sipped their hot cider and talked about loading up the Rose in the morning, and Jeanne's and Marvel's upcoming shopping trip. "Marvel simply must have some new dresses," Jeanne said. "Mr. Masters is going to accompany us and introduce us to the finest dressmaker in Memphis. Isn't that wonderful, Marvel?"

  "Yes, Mama. May I have pink?"

  "You may. And blue to match your eyes, and green for coming spring."

  Clint whispered something to Vince, who nodded. Clint said, "Before we learn 'Turkey in the Straw,' I want to sing a song for Marvel. I can't sing the one you wanted, Marvel, but maybe you'll like this one."

  Vince played a slow sweet, haunting strain and Clint began to sing.

  Black, black, black

  Is the color of my true love's hair.

  Her lips are like a rose so fair

  And the prettiest face and the neatest hands,

  I love the grass whereon she stands

  She with the wondrous hair.

  Marvel thought the song was for her, and perhaps it was; but as Clint sang he looked only at Jeanne Bettencourt.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  On the river Jeanne counted time differently. Days were not days, they were distances marked off by islands, snags, sandbars, points, chutes. Nights were not dusk to sunrise. The night was the town: Helena, Napoleon, Pine Bluff, Little Rock, Memphis. Weeks did not translate as seven days. Jeanne counted and logged trips, which were eight days. By the middle of March, she was taken aback to see, thumbing through her logs, that she had made only six round trips as pilot of the Helena Rose. She had been in the wheelhouse driving so much that it seemed she had been on the river for a long time.

  It was the middle of their seventh trip, and the middle of March. They were overnighting at Pine Bluff on their return home. Jeanne sat at her desk with her captain's logbook, a lantern casting a bright aura around her and the rest of the cabin into deep shadow. She looked up at the window. A wild storm shot fat drops of rain that splatted noisily against the glass. Occasionally a garish glare lit her face, a bolt of lightning, and immediately afterwards basso profundo growls of thunder.

  Jeanne put her head into her hands and closed her eyes. What if the creeks are flooding? she worried. As spring had grown nearer, so had her anxiety. She wished devoutly that she could talk to someone about her concerns. Once, she thought, she would have told George Masters her fears that she wouldn't be able to handle the Rose on the lower part of the Arkansas River during the spring rains. But since he had talked to her about the article in the newspaper, his attitude seemed to have changed from wholehearted support of her venture to a sort of patient indulgence. She was reluctant to tell him about any setbacks or hardships on the Helena Rose. She had the feeling that he was just waiting for an excuse to talk her out of piloting. In spite of her current fears, Jeanne was far from ready to retire from the river. She must have as much of her father in her as she did her mother, she reflected.

  The natural person to talk to should be Clint Hardin, her business partner and the engineer. But Jeanne refused to contemplate confiding in him, for she simply didn't trust him. He and Vince always left the boat on their overnight stops, and she knew they must be going to saloons. They were careful, and courteous, she admitted. They must get all their drinking and carousing done before they returned to the Helena Rose, because Jeanne had never heard them come back, even though the door to Clint's cabin was directly across from her cabin door.

  But there were also the two- or three-day stays in Memphis after they concluded a trip. Clint and Vince left in the evenings, as usual. One morning when Jeanne left her cabin after they had arrived in town the night before, she could smell the essence of sandalwood in the hallway in front of Clint's door. She only knew what sandalwood smelled like because a gentleman at the Gayoso had always brought his own soap, sandalwood soap. To Jeanne the scent represented something costly, glamorous, mysterious, and it was outlandish to think that Clint Hardin would buy it. It had to be something to do with a woman.

  Also several times she had caught the barest whiff of a woman's perfume in the hallway. Jeanne wondered if the sandalwood woman and the perfume woman were the same person before she berated herself harshly for wasting her time even thinking about such things.

  And then, of course, there had been the infamous Suzette incident. One day as they were in Memphis loading up, a buxom girl of about eighteen with raven hair and dark snapping eyes danced onto the Helena Rose. Jeanne was standing up on the hurricane deck, just above the bow, watching the roustabouts load. When Suzette boarded, she could hear Vince and Clint laughing. Later Vince had said something to Clint about going to
see Suzette at the Bell and Whistle that night, or she'd have a thing or two to say when they got back.

  None of these things were Jeanne's concern; but she felt she had good reasons not to trust Clint Hardin.

  As these things ran through her mind, she took a mental step back. It's not that I don't trust him, I trust him with Marvel and I trust him with money. That is a lot of trust. It's just that I can't confide in him, talk to him about personal things.

  At the moment Jeanne's troubles weren't personal, they were about the Helena Rose. It was her own conflicting emotions about Clint Hardin that were in the way. But she was tired and she didn't want to analyze all that. She would see what the morning would bring.

  VINCE CAME INTO THE engine room and said, "Ezra's nervous." He had to shout because the engine was always loud and on this stormy morning the rain made a deafening staccato beat against the sides of the Helena Rose.

  "How can you tell?" Clint shouted back. He was kneeling down on the starboard side, looking underneath the complication of pipes that led into and out of the Rose's pumps.

  Vince came to kneel beside him and help him look. "He's standing out on deck, staring at the riverbanks. We got a leak or something?"

  "No, but listen how hard the pump's working. I'm thinking we're drawing up more sludge than water."

  "How can you hear the pump?" Vince complained. "All I hear is a deafening hurly-burly racket."

  "Good ears, I guess." He stood up and crossed to the port side to kneel again, and he said something that Vince couldn't hear, of course.

  Sighing, Vince stood up and was about to kneel by him again when not one but three jangling rings of the attention bell from the pilothouse sounded. Then they heard Jeanne scream, "Clint, Clint! Hurry, I need help!"

  Clint stood and bounded out of the engine room, took the stairs three at a time, and was in the wheelhouse in ten seconds. It was dark, the windows completely clouded up. Jeanne was standing on a spoke on the left-hand side of the wheel. "Help me! We've got to turn to port!" she cried, jumped, and stamped on the spoke, hard, but the wheel didn't move.

  Galvanized, Clint took two pins at the top and pushed left. For eternal moments he struggled, the tendons and veins on his arms bulging. Slowly the wheel gave, and he was able to move four pins left. Jeanne jumped off the wheel and cried, "That's enough! We've got to—"

  But Clint had already guessed the situation and he shouted, "Vinnie! Back and fill, back and fill!"

  This command effectively put the boat in neutral, and sluggishly she wallowed to a stop. Clint turned the wheel, still with some difficulty, until the kingpin, the one that was wrapped in marlin as an indicator, was straight up. This meant the rudder was exactly straight.

  "What's happened?" he asked Jeanne calmly.

  Her face was pale and her hands shook. "I was trying to come out of a hairpin right turn. From the east Choctaw Creek is flooding, and it created a strong cross-current and the rudder got stuck in the right turn. I couldn't get her out of it in time."

  "Can you hold her steady?" he asked, and Jeanne stepped up to the wheel.

  Clint went outside and wiped the rain away from his face. The storm clouds were so low and black that it was more like late evening than eleven o'clock in the morning. Around him all he could see were gaunt trees with naked spiky branches. The water was black. As he began to comprehend what he was seeing, he realized that the Rose was in a swamp, surrounded by cypress and tupelo trees. He ran to the side of the boat and looked around, and barely in the torpid light he could see great cypress knees—hull-killers—rising up out of the water. He oriented himself, and realized that the Rose had turned sideways to the current that had swept them in.

  He ducked back inside the pilothouse. "Is the way back to the river landmarked in any way?" he asked.

  Mutely she shook her head. He went to the speaking tube and didn't bother with the attention bell. Shouting in an operatic voice was loud enough. "Vinnie, Ezra up here now." He took a rag out of his pocket and wiped the windows, but like a wraith, the steam slowly stole back into the corners.

  Vince and Ezra came in and Clint said, "We're in a cypress swamp, and we can't back out. The Rose is turned port side against the current. What we're going to have to do is reverse, fill, forward, fill, reverse, fill, forward, fill, and so on 'til we get her head-on. Then I'll give you a shout to stop."

  "Got it, Clint," Vince said.

  He and Ezra started to leave, but Ezra turned back and asked, "Cap'n Jeanne, we's in Dead Man's Slough, ain't we?"

  "Yes," she answered dully. "Have you ever gotten caught in here before?"

  "No, ma'am, but don't you worry, we'll have her outta here in no time," he said reassuringly, and closed the pilothouse door.

  Clint said, "Jeanne, you're the pilot, you know this wheel. You want to do this?"

  "No, I don't," she answered tensely. She stood by the wheel, her fists clenched at her sides.

  He nodded, and slowly the engines geared up again, and the Rose began to back up. Clint worked the wheel, and then they filled, and he turned it the other way; this went on as they inched their way around, turning in a tight half-circle. At last the Helena Rose was facing due east. Clint leaned over the speaking tube and called, "That's good, boys! Shut 'er down!"

  When the engines came to a full stop, Clint ran outside again to see if the Rose was still being pushed farther into the swamp by the flood current. But the dark water looked still except for the raindrops splashing on its gloomy surface, and he could see no telltale ripples against her nose, so he went back inside the pilothouse. Jeanne was sitting on the bench, her hands limp in her lap, staring into space. He sat down beside her.

  "I've always heard the river plays the very devil's tricks on you," he said lightly. "This was a humdinger."

  "It wasn't the river," Jeanne said numbly. "It was me. I was afraid this was going to happen."

  "Jeanne, boats get shoved around every which way by flood currents all the time. It's not your fault."

  "It was my fault. I'm too weak to handle the Rose. If a grown man had been piloting he could have made the turn."

  "Maybe, maybe not. Ezra told me that pilots have a saying. 'It takes one upstream, but sometimes downstream it takes three: two to fight the wheel and one to holler encouragement.'"

  "Fine. So we need three grown men to pilot."

  "No. We need you," Clint said quietly.

  "Don't patronize me, I am not a child!" Jeanne stormed, jumping to her feet to stand before him, her bloodless fists on her hips. "You don't know anything about what I'm going through! You just tra-la-la, trip your way around life, everything comes so easy for you! You sashay onto a riverboat, and oh, sure, this is simple! Steam boilers, reaching jerkins, pooling rods, no problem! I've been a master machinist since I was two years old! Oh, what's the matter, poor little Jeanne, can't turn the wheel? Here, I'll do it with my pinky finger, see how simple it is? And you just open your mouth, and glorious sounds like an archangel's anthem just come rolling out, but you fiddle-faddle around and sing about stupid tuckahaws! And, oh, Vinnie, help me, I just can't decide between my sandalwood woman or my perfume woman or my tavern maid with the black, black, black hair!"

  When this tirade had begun, Clint's inclination had been to rise to his feet, because it was so deeply ingrained in him not to remain sitting when a lady stood. But after Jeanne's first few words he realized he'd better keep his seat. Clint had seen ladies having hysterics before, but he'd never seen one quite as wrathful, nor as acidly articulate, as Jeanne. Despite himself he was fascinated. And so he sat, looking up at her, struggling to keep his face expressionless.

  She shut her mouth abruptly, pressed her fingers to her temples, and squeezed her eyes shut. "What am I saying? I must be out of my mind." She collapsed back onto the bench.

  Clint watched her warily, but she seemed deflated and listless, and remained silent. Finally he said, "I'm sorry about all of that, Jeanne. But right now I guess we'd better figure out what
to do. Should we just stay here until the storm stops?"

  She looked down. "I don't want to stay in Dead Man's Slough overnight."

  He nodded. "Okay. It's only about noon now. We'll see how it goes for the next couple of hours. By two, if it hasn't let up, why don't we try this. We can take soundings, and drive out of here one paddle at a time."

  "That's fine," she said dully. "But I'm not driving. You do it. And I don't want to go south when we get back in the river. About ten miles north is a big landing, Widow Eames' Landing. I'm sure Ezra knows it. I want to stay there overnight."

  "Then that's what we'll do," Clint said steadily. "You look really tired. Why don't you go rest for awhile?"

  She rose and without looking at him or saying a word, she left the pilothouse. He watched her thoughtfully. She didn't try to shield herself from the rain. Her shoulders stooped, she walked slowly to the stairs and didn't look back. When he was sure she'd had enough time to get into her cabin he went down to the boiler room. Vince, Ezra, and Marvel were there. Marvel was sitting in her chair, clutching Avaymaria and Mrs. Topp. She looked scared. Instantly Clint went down on his knee beside her and took her hand. It was very small and cold. He smiled at her. "The river played a dirty trick on your mama, and whooshed us right up into a swamp. But everything's okay, Marvel. Your mother is fine, she just had a tough morning and needs to rest for awhile."

  She stared at him with her wide-spaced almond eyes, so like her mother's. Then she nodded slowly. "I understand. Roberty's already making tea, the black Indian that Mama likes. Should I take it to her?"

  "Yeah, I think that would be real nice."

  Marvel left to go to the galley, and Clint turned to Ezra. "What in blazes is Dead Man's Slough?"

  Grimly, Ezra said, "Hit used to be just a bog about a quarter-mile east of the river, called Choctaw Bayou. Indians used to go in there to gather thet moss on the trees, makes good stuffing for pillows and mattresses and such. But the Choctaw Creek acrost flooded and cut a swath over to the bog, so's now it's connected to the river by a narrow ditch of fast-flowin' water, in heavy rain times. Story is that back in the bad days when all the Indians was gittin' shipped out to the west, some of 'em would try to hide in Choctaw Bayou. But rivermen that got caught just like we done did told tales of finding Indians hanging from the trees back up in here, lot's of 'em, all over. That's when they started calling it Dead Man's Slough. And that's when it started to be said that Choctaw Creek tries to push the white man's boats up in it."