Chapter 4
The packet came down the river in the last hour of the afternoon. A man stood alone at her bow rail, watching a town rise off the water.
Louie Morritt was thirty-two years old, lean as a towline, brown as the river in June. He had a boatman’s way of standing, loose in the knees, riding the deck without holding on. Twenty years of rivers will do that to a man. They will teach him to balance on all but solid ground.
Camden Bluff. He had waited most of his life to see it again, and now that it lay before him he could hardly breathe.
The town had grown. He remembered white houses on a green bluff, a spire, a street of brick.
All that was still there, but more had come up around it, the way a tree thickens.
Warehouses stood along the levee now. A mill smoked away upstream.
The bare windy platform he remembered was a proper riverfront now, stacked with freight, loud with rousters singing a load ashore.
Twenty years. A town does its growing in twenty years.
So does a boy.
The packet swung in, backed her wheel, kissed the landing soft as you please. Lines went out. The stage came rattling down. Louie shouldered his whole life, which fit in one canvas bag, and walked ashore into the town where he had last seen her.
What he carried besides weighed nothing at all. A name. Nora.
He had been carrying it for twenty years, through eleven states, up and down four rivers. It was the one cargo he had never once set down.
Nobody on the levee looked at him twice.
River towns are used to river men, and he had the look.
Weathered canvas, quiet boots, a man off a boat like a hundred others.
He stood a moment in the crowd, getting the feel of the ground.
The old ritual rose in him, the same as at a hundred landings before.
Somebody here might know. That was the whole prayer of it.
Somebody here, this town, this time, might remember a little, brown-eyed girl taken off the orphan train in the spring of 1868. A girl called Nora, six years old, who cried at night unless a lamp was lit.
He had asked at every town on the river: storekeepers, ferrymen, preachers, old women on porches who remembered everything the century had done.
Twenty years of handling had worn the question smooth, so he could ask it now in a voice that sounded almost easy.
Almost as if the answer were a small thing.
Almost as if a no could not knock a week’s sleep out of him anymore.
It had taken him twenty years to come here, to the one town where the trail truly started. The reason was simple and hard.
Camden Bluff was the last hope. A man saves the last of anything.
While there were other towns to try, other landings, other registers, the search could not die.
There was always somewhere he had not asked yet.
But he had run out of somewheres. He had worked through every river town in the state and three states besides, year over year, wages spent on nothing but the asking.
This was the end of the list. This was the town where the train had stopped. Here the wagons had waited, and a woman with many buttons had carried a small girl away into the crowd.
If nobody here remembered Nora, then nobody anywhere did.
And then there would be nothing left of her at all, except a story with no one to tell it to.
Louie picked up his bag and climbed the levee into town.
The light was going long and gold. He walked the brick street slow, reading it the way a man reads a stretch of new water.
A courthouse now. A newspaper office, a barber pole.
Wagons rattled home from the mill, and somewhere a school bell counted out the hour.
His plan was the plan of twenty years, worn to habit.
Find a cheap room. Find supper. Then, in the morning, begin.
The church registers first, for a christening or a marriage might carry the name.
Then the courthouse. Then the old men who sat where old men sit down watching the boats.
Men who watch rivers remember years the way other men remember faces.
Simple. Patient. He had done it a hundred times.
But standing in the long light with the town going home around him, Louie found he was afraid, and honest enough to know it.
At every other landing, hope had cost him nothing much.
Here it could cost him everything, because here was the end of the line.
Tomorrow this town would begin giving him its answer.
Tonight he wanted only to sit down somewhere warm and not know it yet.
He asked a rouster on the levee where a man got supper.
“Baldwin’s.” The man pointed his chin up the slope, where lamplight showed yellow in a long low building above the landing. “The widow feeds the boats. Feeds them proper too. You want the eating-house, friend, and get there before the Belle’s crew does.”
The eating-house stood on the rise where it could watch the river. It was clapboard, with a porch, a painted sign gone soft with weather, and the best aroma in four counties coming out the door. Fried ham. Coffee. Bread just out of the oven, the kind of scent that pulls a hungry man through a door.
Inside was lamplight and long tables, oilcloth worn pale, a dozen men eating with their hats on pegs. A girl of six or so flew past the door at the back with a rag doll, chased by nobody. From the kitchen came a woman’s voice, easy and clear, calling somebody to carry the pie plates steady.
Louie took a place at the end of a table, near the window where he could see the water. Old habit. A man raised the way he was raised keeps a door in sight, or a river.
He was reaching for the coffee pot when the woman came out of the kitchen, two plates up one arm. For no reason at all, he watched her cross the room.
She was smallish and quick, brown-eyed, somewhere in her mid-twenties.
Flour dusted one forearm to the elbow. A wisp of hair had come down over her brow, and she blew it aside without breaking stride.
She set the plates down before two deckhands and made a comment that made the near one laugh into his cup.
Then she was gone again, wiping her hands on her apron.
A widow, the rouster had said. She moved like a woman with three more hands’ work than hands.
When she came to him she brought ham, greens, cornbread, a wedge of dried-apple pie, all of it hot, none of it asked for. That was the way of a boat-crew table. You got what there was, and it was good.
“Coffee’s strong this end of the pot,” she said, filling his cup. “You look like you’d want it strong.”
“I do. Thank you, ma’am.”
“Off the packet?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, you’re in ahead of the Belle, so eat while there’s elbow room.
” She looked at him a moment longer than the words needed.
Not bold. Just a good hostler’s glance, taking the measure of a tired animal.
“There’s more of everything. You look like the far end of a long trip, if you don’t mind my saying so. ”
“I don’t mind,” Louie said. “It’s a fair description.”
Something crossed her face then, quick as a bird’s shadow, gone before it could be named. She smiled and moved down the table with the pot, filling cups, trading words with men she plainly fed six nights out of seven.
Louie sat still, fork in hand, and could not for his life have said what had just happened to him.
Nothing had happened. A tired stranger had been given supper by a kind woman who made her living serving supper to strangers.
He bent to his plate, and the food was better than any he could remember.
All the while some part of him followed her around the room, the way a compass needle follows north.
The tug had no sense in it. He turned it over while he ate, examining it, suspicious of it.
Her voice, maybe. The pitch of it, perhaps, low and carrying, that landed on him like a word he almost knew.
Or the way she stood a half second, hand on hip, surveying a table before she waded in.
Maybe it was nothing. He was thirty-two, bone lonesome, at the end of a twenty-year road.
And here was a warm room with a woman’s laugh in it.
A lonely man’s fancy, that was all. Some drifter blows into a town, and the first kind face he meets, his fool heart tries to make a home of it.
Not tonight, Louie told himself. Not this town of all towns. He had business here, twenty years of business, and it had nothing to do with a brown-eyed widow who fed the boats.
The little girl with the rag doll made another pass through the room.
Captured by a customer’s knee, she stood negotiating her release with great dignity.
The widow called her Cissy, come away now, let the man eat.
A boy of ten or so hauled a filled wood-box through the kitchen door, dark-headed and grave.
Louie’s eyes marked them without meaning anything by it.
Her children, likely. The place had the feel of children kept close.
He ate all of it, down to the pie, the finest thing that had happened to him in a month.
Full dark had come on outside. Below the window the river had gone to iron and lamp-glimmer. Somewhere down around the bend a late boat moaned. Tomorrow the courthouse, the church books, the old men on the levee. Tomorrow this town started answering.
The widow came back with the pot one last time.
“Room at the top of Front Street, if you’re wanting one,” she said, reading him the way she likely read every man off every boat. “Mrs. Hale keeps it clean. Tell her Ada Baldwin sent you, and she’ll not overcharge.”
“Ada Baldwin,” he repeated, fixing it in memory. “I’m obliged, ma’am. It was a fine supper. Finest in a long while.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” she said, simple as that, and gathered his plate. “Goodnight, then. Rest well.”
For no reason on earth, a wish to say more rose up in him, so strong it startled him. To keep her one more sentence at the end of his table. He put the wish away, paid his two bits, and took his bag off the floor.
At the door he glanced back once. Ada Baldwin stood in the lamplight with a stack of plates along one arm, laughing at the words of a boatman.
The loose wisp of hair had come down again over her brow.
A settled woman in a settled town, with her name on the sign out front.
Nothing in the world to do with him, or with the small cold ghost of a name he would begin hunting in the morning.
Louie stepped out into the river dark and pulled the door to behind him.
And so the evening closed on the two of them, a widow washing up by lamplight, a drifter walking uphill to a rented bed. Neither one lay awake. Neither one had the least idea, that first night, of what the river had just done.
It had carried him a thousand miles, through twenty years, past every town in reach of the water. And it had set him down, at last, at the very door he had been searching for.
The river was done with its work now.
The rest it left to them.