Chapter 5
The day began for Ada Baldwin an hour before it began for anybody else in Camden Bluff.
In the dark before first light, she was down in the kitchen, raking the stove alive, setting the first bread of the morning.
By the time the sun found the river, the coffee was on, the ham was sliced, and the long tables wore fresh oilcloth.
When the first boat whistled below the bluff, Baldwin’s was ready for whatever the water sent up the hill.
Summer mornings, the work was almost pleasant.
Silver light came up off the river while she worked, and swallows cut past the kitchen window.
The whole town below her smelled of woodsmoke and wet stone.
Year in, year out, she had stood at that stove.
She could have found the coffee mill blindfolded.
That was the whole trick of her life, and she knew it. Be ready before the day is. A widow who waits to be caught up with gets caught.
The eating-house had been her husband’s notion, back when the town was smaller.
Feed the boats, Henry used to say, for the boats are always hungry.
He had built the long room himself, and the porch that watched the river.
The sign out front he had painted too. The weather had worn his lettering soft, but she would not repaint it.
His hand had made those letters. They could fade at their own pace.
Henry Baldwin had been dead three years now.
The fever had taken him in a single August week, a big laughing man burned down to nothing before the month turned.
It had nearly taken Will too. Some nights she still woke listening for two sets of breathing down the hall.
Then she had to remind herself that one of them was under the churchyard grass.
Three years. Three years of doing the work of two people on the sleep of half a one.
She had kept the eating-house going by main strength, because the choice was that or charity.
Charity she had swallowed enough of as a child to last her.
She fed the boat crews, the drummers, and the mill hands.
Her accounts she kept in a school copybook.
She mended her own roof shingles until she got too proud to fall off a ladder.
Her children she raised above the clatter of the landing.
The children were the reason for all of it.
Will was ten, dark and watchful, his father over again in miniature. He hauled wood, toted water, and did a man’s worrying on a boy’s shoulders. Since Henry died, he had appointed himself the guard of the house. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody could talk him out of it.
Cissy was six, fair where her brother was dark, and afraid of nothing on this earth.
She had been barely three when her father died and did not carry the weight of him the way Will did.
Life to Cissy was a porch to run on, a landing full of interesting strangers, and a mother who could be begged for stories.
Stories ruled bedtime in that house.
“The river one,” Cissy would demand, nightgowned and imperious. “The two children in the little boat.”
And Ada would tell it the way she had told it a hundred times. She never had to think where it went. The old story ran in her like something learned before memory, which was near enough the truth of it.
Where the story had come from she could not say. It had simply always been with her, the way her own hands had.
The town of Camden Bluff, meanwhile, had plans for the widow Baldwin.
Nobody had ever said so straight out. It came at her sideways, as was the way of towns.
After church, a neighbor woman would squeeze her arm and say what a fine man Mr. Shaw was, and how hard it must be managing alone.
The storekeeper let it be known he thought the mill-owner steady as a courthouse.
Even the preacher smiled on the pair of them together, gentle and public, like a man blessing a crop he expected to come in.
One church supper, a neighbor woman had counted the years off on her fingers for Ada’s benefit.
Three since Henry, ten since Mr. Shaw’s poor wife.
Then she had smiled like a woman closing a hymnbook.
Everett Shaw. The town had him picked, weighed, and all but wedded to her.
Ada understood it. She could even agree with it, in the daylight part of her mind. He was a good man, a kind one, and he had been patient with her mourning past what most men would have been. Marrying him would settle everything that three hard years had not settled.
It was only that a person’s daylight mind is not the whole of a person. Somewhere below it lived a stubborn entity that would not say yes yet, and would not tell her why.
Into the middle of all this, off a June packet, had come the boatman.
She noticed him the first evening only as she noticed any stranger. A lean, dark, quiet man at the end of a table, tired past his years. She had sent him up to Mrs. Hale’s for a room and thought no more about him.
Except that he had come back the next day. And the day after that.
Boatmen passed through Baldwin’s like the river itself, downbound and gone.
This one had taken a room by the week and stayed.
Nobody could quite say what he was about.
He was civil to everybody. He said almost nothing.
Every night he paid for his supper like a man settling a debt, and he tipped past all reason for a man in patched canvas.
“Louie Morritt,” said Mrs. Hale, who knew everything within three days. “Off the boats. Keeps his room neat as a pin, keeps his own counsel. Now what does a river man want in Camden Bluff going on two weeks?”
Ada could not say. But she had begun, against her own better judgment, to be aware of him.
Part of it was plain gratitude. He was no trouble, in a room full of men who often were.
He ate what was set down, thanked her like he meant it, stacked his own dishes at the end.
When the Belle’s crew got loud one evening, a look from the corner table quieted them faster than her broom handle ever had.
Part of it was harder to put a name to.
It was the way he watched her. Not the way men watched her, which she had spent ten years learning to step around. There was nothing hungry in it, nothing sly. He watched her the way a man watches a road he thinks he has traveled before, trying to place a bend in it.
Grave, she decided. That was the word for him. A grave attention, and it followed her around the room while he ate. It never once made her feel unsafe.
That was the strange part. It should have unsettled her, a stranger’s eyes keeping that kind of watch.
Some evenings it did, and she resolved to speak to him about his manners.
Other evenings, carrying her lamp up the back stairs, she felt instead that the room below was somehow better guarded than it used to be.
She did not care for either feeling. A sensible widow, all but promised to a good man, had no business having any feelings whatsoever about a drifter’s eyes.
So she did what she did with everything unmanageable. She fed it supper and kept moving.
Will, meanwhile, had declared war.
He said nothing, for that was not his way.
His way was to be present. Whenever the boatman’s plate went down, Will found a reason to be near that end of the room.
He wiped tables that were already clean, or stacked wood that was already stacked.
By the wood-box he would stand, his father’s dark eyes leveled like two barrels, watching the stranger the way the stranger watched his mother.
Most men chaffed the boy, or ignored him, or worse, tried to buy him with a penny. The boatman did none of it.
He nodded to Will, man to man, one time each evening. Then he let him be.
“I don’t like him,” Will announced in the kitchen, three nights running.
“You don’t know him,” Ada said.
“Don’t want to. What’s he staying around for? Boats leave every day.”
“His business is his own, so long as he pays for his supper. Now stop looming over the customers, or I’ll put you to scrubbing pots where you can loom at your own reflection.”
Will retired, unconvinced. In the doorway he turned, and for a moment his young face was so exactly Henry’s that her breath caught.
“Pa wouldn’t like him either,” he said, and was gone up the stairs before she could answer.
Ada stood a while by the stove with a dish towel in her hands.
The unfairness of it stung, and the truth of it stung worse.
Not the part about Henry. Henry had liked everybody; that was half of what she had loved in him.
No, the sting was in what stood behind Will’s words, plain as a fence post. The boy had lost one man from that house.
He meant to lose no others, and he counted every stranger at the table as a thief come early.
Three years she had spent teaching her son that they were safe. One quiet boatman had put him back on watch in a fortnight.
She ought to want the man gone, for Will’s peace if nothing else. She stood there hunting for the wanting, and it would not come.
Later, with the children asleep, she carried the lamp through the empty dining room, straightening benches. At the corner table she paused, her hand on the wood. It was the one with its back to the wall and its eye on the river.
He always sat just there where a man could see the door, the water, and everything between.
“Louie Morritt,” she said to the empty room, trying the shape of it.
The name held no meaning to her. There was no earthly reason it should.
He was a stranger, two weeks off a downbound packet, and he would be gone when whatever business held him let him go.
Camden Bluff was full of good people she had known her whole remembered life.
It made no sense at all that the house felt more like itself with a nameless drifter eating quiet in the corner of it.
She took her lamp and went up to bed.
At the top of the stairs she stopped, the way she did every night.
The small window there looked down the dark slope to the river.
A lamp still burned in the top of Mrs. Hale’s house on Front Street.
She wondered, before she could stop herself, whether the boatman was sitting up by it.
What did a man with such tired eyes wait up for?
Wondering about him. Now that was new, and it would not do.
Ada Baldwin blew out her lamp, said her prayers, and instructed her heart to be sensible.
It was the first instruction her heart had ever taken from her poorly. And far down under the sense, something older than the name she wore had begun, very quietly, to listen for him.