Chapter 7
Monday morning, early, Louie went at last to work the town.
He had meant to begin the morning after he landed.
Every day since, he had found the asking one more day’s rest ahead of him.
The truth of that was simple, and he knew it.
While the question stayed unasked, the last hope stayed alive.
Two weeks of that was as much as a man could respect himself through.
He had done it a hundred times in a hundred towns, and the doing had long ago worn into a shape.
Start with the church, for churches keep written records.
Then the courthouse. Then the store, where all talk passes sooner or later.
Last, the old men by the water who keep the years the way squirrels keep nuts.
They will share them with any stranger who has the patience to sit.
A hundred towns. He told himself this one was no different, and knew better with every step.
The Methodist church stood white and plain at the top of Church Street. Its preacher was a young man new from Illinois, no use to Louie at all. But the old register books went back past the war. The young preacher, obliging, laid them out on a table in the vestry and left him to look.
Louie turned the pages slowly, down twenty years of a town’s remembering. Marriages, christenings, burials. The ink went from black to brown as the years climbed. Half a dozen times his heart jumped at the head of an N. Half a dozen times the name ran on into Nancy, or Naomi, or Nathaniel.
No Nora. Not married, not christened, not buried. Two hours of pages, and the name was simply not in the book.
He gave particular care to the marriages.
A girl of the right age would likely have wed these last ten years, and a bride’s given name stands plain in a register.
Ellens went by under his finger, Marthas, Sarah Janes, two deMorritts of them, every one somebody’s daughter. Not one of them was a Nora.
“An orphan girl, you say.” The young preacher had come back with coffee, kind enough.
“Off the trains? There were children placed here, I’ve heard folk mention it.
Before my time, I’m afraid. You might ask at the courthouse.
Or honestly, sir, ask the old men on the levee.
They remember what the county never wrote down. ”
The courthouse clerk was a dry, exact little man who did not care to be interested, then got interested despite himself.
“Sixty-eight.” He said the year like a drawer he was pulling open.
“Placement papers would be probate, if they’re anywhere.
We had a fire in seventy-one, mind. Lost a wall of records.
” He went away a long while among his shelves.
When he came back dusty to the elbows, he laid down what he had found.
Three children, bound out off the orphan trains, their papers survived by luck. A boy, Thomas. Another boy, Albert. One girl, Susannah.
“That’s the whole of it?”
“That’s what the fire left, mister. What burned, burned.”
The store was easier and worse. Easier because the storekeeper liked to talk, worse because he talked so much and knew so little.
Orphan train, sure, he’d heard tell of it before his people even came to the county.
A girl called Nora? He rolled the name around like a boy tasting a penny candy, hopeful, wanting to be of use.
No. Couldn’t say he’d ever heard a Nora, not in Camden Bluff.
Now there was a Nora Hutchins down at Lexington way, but she’d be seventy if she was a day.
By Thursday, Louie had gone through the town the way a man drags a river.
He asked at the mill office and the wharf boat.
He asked the oldest deacon of the Baptist church.
There was the midwife everybody called Granny Price, who had caught half the county in her hands.
There were the two dressmakers, a saddler, the ferryman above town.
Always he asked careful, casual, a man tracing a dead friend’s kin, the story worn so smooth it told itself.
Blank looks. Shaken heads. The same sentence over and over, until it took on the sound of a door closing. No Nora hereabouts, mister. Not that I ever knew.
The old men on the levee were his last line, and by rights his best.
There were four of them, more or less, on the bench by the wharf boat. Old rivermen and one old teamster, watching the water the way other men watch a fire. It cost him three afternoons and a plug of tobacco to be let into the talk.
He did not grudge the time. The talk ran where old river talk runs, boats burned, boats raced, the flood of forty-four, pilots dead, channels moved. He sat and whittled, putting in a word where a word fit. Waiting was a thing he knew how to do. Nobody learns it younger than an orphan learns it.
Then, on the third afternoon, in a quiet, he laid his question down gently, like a man setting a nightline.
The train of sixty-eight. The children on the platform. A little girl, six years old, brown eyes, crying fit to break.
“I mind that train,” the old teamster said at last, and Louie’s heart came up his throat.
“You do.”
“Surely. Hauled freight past the landing that same morning. All them little ones lined along the platform like crockery at auction.” The old man shook his head slow.
“Hard sight. Folks came from three counties, picking and choosing. I mind a little bit of a girl crying, now you say it. Little small thing.”
“Her name was Nora.” Louie kept his voice level the way a man holds a boat level in a crosswind. “The family that took her would have been Camden Bluff people. Well fixed. A tall woman, a lot of buttons. The girl’s name was Nora.”
Silence, while four old men thought back down twenty years.
“Names,” the teamster said finally. He spat, gentle and sorrowful, over the edge of the wharf.
“Mister, them children’s names came off with their coats.
Whatever that little one was called before, she’d have been called something else by supper.
That’s how it was done. Kindest meant folks in the county did it quickest.”
“Then the woman. The buttons. A family that took a girl child that spring.”
The old men looked at one another, then at the river. One by one they came up empty. Twenty years. Families had died out, moved to Kansas, gone to Texas after the panic. Buttons, mister. Every church-going woman in Missouri had buttons.
“I’m sorry,” the teamster said, and had the grace to mean it. “It’s a long time, and we was watching the river, not the platform. She could be anybody now. She could be anywhere.”
He worked his tobacco a moment. “Folks that took train children mostly kept it quiet after, mister. Let them grow up town folks, no questions asked. It was thought the kindest way. There’s grown people in this county today that came off them trains, and you’d never pick them out, nor would their neighbors go telling. ”
Louie thanked them and walked north along the levee until the town gave out. There he stood a long time, where the willows came down to the water.
So. There it was.
He had always known it could end this way.
He had just never let himself stand in the place where it did.
Twenty years of rivers, eleven states, a thousand landings, every dollar he did not eat spent on the going.
All of it had run downhill to this one town, because this was where the trail began, and a trail must begin where it begins.
The town had looked at him kindly, shaken its head, and closed the door.
He knew the feel of a closing door better than most men living.
Enough of them had shut behind him, farm after farm, that a boy had learned the sound early.
The river was the only place that never once sent him on.
He had let himself think this town might hand him something back. That was all the hope had ever been.
The willow leaves turned over silver when the wind came up the water. Evening was making down the river, the way it had made down a thousand evenings of asking.
The name was gone. That was the plain end of it. They had taken it off her at six years old, the way you’d take a tag off a parcel. Twenty years of Missouri had grown over the place where it had been.
Somewhere, a grown woman walked around under some other name, not knowing she had ever been Nora, not knowing a soul on earth was looking. If she was alive at all. If the fever years had spared her. If.
He should take the morning boat.
He made himself say it, standing in the willows.
The search here was done, and done honest. South, then.
There were landings below he had never combed, Boonville, Rocheport, a dozen wood-stops with a family apiece.
The method had always been the same. When a town is empty, you go to the next town.
You do not stand in the willows feeling the ground give way. You go on.
The river ran at his feet, brown and patient, offering to carry him the way it had carried him his whole life.
And Louie stood there not wanting to go.
He stood turning that over, trying to make it honest. Weariness, he told himself.
Twenty years of it, come due all at once.
A man had a right to be tired. A man could rest a week in a clean room, eat a widow’s good cooking, let his hope mend before he hauled it south again.
There was sense in that. Any boatman would say so.
It was a true reason, and it was not the reason. He knew both things at once.
The reason had brown eyes and flour on her forearms. The reason was a lamplit room where being nobody felt, for an hour every evening, like being somebody expected.
He had no right to it. It belonged to another man’s future, a good man, a man with a painted house.
Every evening he spent at that corner table, he was warming himself at a fire that would never once be his.
Knowing all of it, every word, Louie turned and walked back along the darkening levee toward the light on the hill.
The supper crowd had thinned when he came in. Ada Baldwin looked up from the long table she was clearing, and what she saw stopped her hands.
“You look like bad news found you,” she said. Not prying. Just seeing him.
“It’s been looking a while,” Louie said. “I reckon it was owed.”
She studied him a moment. Then she went to the kitchen without a word. She came back with the coffee pot, with a wedge of pie he had not ordered, and set both down at his corner table.
“Peach,” she said. “Against bad news. Sit down, Mr. Morritt.”
“I’d not want to put you out, ma’am.”
“You’ll put me out arguing. The pie wants eating, and you’re the only mouth left in the room.”
He sat. She poured, easy and unhurried, as if a drifter’s low spirits was well worth ten minutes of a busy woman’s evening. Back in the kitchen, Cissy’s voice was demanding something. Will’s answered it, low, older than his years. The ordinary sounds of a house going toward bed.
It was only kindness, the same she’d have dealt any tired man off the water. He knew that. A drifter had no earthly right to take it for more.
He took it anyway, one more night, and could not for his life have said what he was staying for.
Three feet away, the girl he had hunted through eleven states poured his coffee, singing under her breath. And neither of them knew.