Chapter 8
The rain came up the river on a Tuesday evening, and it emptied the town the way rain does.
No boat was due before morning. The mill hands went straight home to their suppers, and the drummers kept to the hotel.
By dusk, the eating-house stood all but deserted.
When Louie came up the hill with his collar turned, the long room held nobody but the family.
Two small neighbor children were waiting out the wet till their mother fetched them.
“You’d be the only customer in Camden Bluff,” Ada said, taking his dripping hat. “I hope you brought an appetite worth cooking for.”
“I was raised not to waste a kitchen’s time, ma’am.”
“Then sit, and we’ll see.”
It was the plainest evening of the world, and afterward he would remember every grain of it.
The lamps burning early against the gray.
Rain on the porch roof, steady as a mill wheel.
Will at the family table over his schoolbook, frowning like his sums had insulted him.
The two neighbor children, a boy and a girl, on the bench by the stove with Cissy between them.
All three scrubbed shiny, restless as crickets.
Steam stood on the windows. Out past them, the river showed only as a darker dark, with the rain stitching the lamplight where it fell past the glass.
Ada brought him ham and greens, then set the coffee where his hand would find it. She went back to the stove for her mending basket, and sat down among the children in the warm.
“Now then,” she said. “Which is it tonight?”
“The river one,” said Cissy, as if there were any other. “From the sandbar.”
“You had the sandbar last night, greedy. We’ll start where the plums ran out.”
Louie ate, easy for once, the rain making a wall around the bright room. A story for the children, on a wet evening. He thought no more of it than that. Afterward he would remember that too, how he sat there like a man on a track with his back to the train.
“Now you’ll remember,” Ada said, threading her needle, “how the two children came down the river in their little boat. The boy and the girl that nobody in the whole world wanted, only each other.”
The fork stopped halfway to Louie’s mouth.
“And the boat, Mrs. Baldwin,” the neighbor boy prompted. “Tell the boat.”
“Blue,” said Cissy, before her mother could. She said it like a lesson, proud. “Blue like a jay’s wing, with one white stripe painted round her, and sound as a barrel.”
“So she was,” Ada said. “The rope that held her in the reeds was old and gray, but the boat herself was sound as a barrel, just as you say. And the river she rode on was the longest river there ever was. It went past everything. Past the last houses and the last dogs. Past the meadow where the fireflies came down so thick at dusk, the children thought the stars had landed there to rest.”
At the family table, Will had stopped frowning at his sums to listen. Too old for stories, listening all the same, the way boys do, with his eyes kept on the page.
The room had gone strange.
That was the only word Louie’s mind would give him. Strange, the way the river goes strange before weather, the surface the same and everything under it moving. He set his fork down very carefully, because his hand had begun to shake, and he did not yet know why.
He knew why. Part of him had known from the word blue. The rest of him sat in the lamplight and argued, one excuse after another, while a widow told her mending basket about the firefly meadow.
A common story. Every family had river tales. Children’s stories ran alike the whole country over, boats and rivers, lost children, wasn’t that the shape of half of them?
“Tell the deer,” the neighbor girl begged.
“The island of the tame deer,” Ada said, “where the deer had never once been hunted, so they came and ate from the girl’s hand. They followed the boat along the shore a whole afternoon, splashing in the shallows, till the girl cried from not being able to keep them.”
Not a common story. His story.
His own, whole, all of it. The meadow, the island, the little blue boat he had built out of nothing, whispered piece by piece under the rattle of a westbound train. Twenty years and a thousand miles from this room. Told to one living soul in all the world. One.
The girl in the story cried from not being able to keep them. He had made that up for Nora because Nora had cried at everything, and it had made her laugh instead.
Louie gripped the edge of the table the way a man grips a gunwale.
The room was tilting. The lamps swam long and yellow.
Under him, twenty years folded shut, all at once, like a fan snapping closed in a fist. Eleven states.
Four rivers. A thousand landings, a thousand supper tables, a thousand kindly faces shaking no.
And the whole time, at the end of the list, a woman stood at a stove with his story in her mouth. In the very town where he had lost her.
The widow Baldwin. The widow Baldwin was Nora.
He looked at her then, the way a man looks at the sun coming up over a country he thought he knew. Everything he had been too blind to see came home at once, striking him like the flat of a hand.
Brown eyes. He had been six kinds of fool.
Every evening for two weeks he had looked into them, hunting a girl called Nora all the while, and seen nothing.
He had been looking for a child. A thin, starved little face had rounded into sweetness, the way faces do, and the crying six-year-old was gone from it.
But the gravity in her, older than her years, that he had marked the first evening. The steadiness of a person who had once watched everything she owned handed off a train platform. He had seen all of it and read none of it.
And the voice. The voice he had not been able to walk away from, that had landed on him the first night like a word he almost knew.
He had heard that voice before it ever had a woman in it. He had heard it at six years old, whispering under train wheels. How does it end? Do they get there? Promise me.
The rain went on against the glass. The stove ticked. Nobody in the warm room knew what had just happened, except the one man who could not move.
“On they went,” Ada said softly, to the children, to the rain, “down the long brown river, past every town and every stranger. Because away at the end of it, farther than any map goes, there was a place for them. And at that place, it didn’t matter who you were, nor where you came from, nor what you had lost. Nobody asked.
Nobody ever sent you away. Once you came to that place, you belonged, and no soul on earth could ever send you off again. ”
“Do they get there?” the neighbor boy demanded.
Cissy sighed at him, worldly, six years old. “It doesn’t end. Mama’s story never ends. It just goes on down the river.”
“Every story ends,” the boy said stoutly.
“Not this one.” Ada bit her thread. For half a breath something crossed her face, some small old shadow, there and gone. “This one I never got the end of. So the children just go on, night after night. It’s the going on that’s the good part, anyhow. Now, the storm, or the bee tree?”
The storm, they voted. She sewed and told it. The boat driven up on the bar, the two cracked boards, the three days mending with pine pitch. The children brave over their little fire while the thunder walked the hills.
Word for word. Board for board. Day for day.
Louie sat with his supper going cold, his heart slamming his ribs like a fish in a boat bottom. He did the only thing left in the world to do. He watched her.
Nora. Alive. Not in Kansas, not in Texas, not lying under some prairie churchyard with the fever dead. Alive, grown, standing in lamplight ten feet from his chair, with children of her own gathered at her knee. His story ran on in her still, its beginning long forgotten.
She had waited. Without even knowing she was waiting, she had waited all the same. Her half of the bargain she had kept, twenty years, the way she’d promised him in the dark with her small hand in his.
And she had no idea. That was the other half of it, and the cruel half.
She was not waiting for him. She was mending a shirt in a warm room, a settled woman with a settled life, a good man’s ring all but on her hand.
The boy from the train was not a person to her.
He was not even a memory. He was a story with no ending, a dream she thought she’d had once on a train coming west.
If he stood up now and said her name, she would not know it.
Worse. She would be frightened. A strange man off the river, white-faced at her table, claiming twenty-year rights in her own kitchen with her children by the stove. He could lose her in one sentence, this time for good.
The thought went through him like December water.
On its heels came the room, too bright, too small, the rain too loud, his own breath not fitting in his chest. He had to get out.
Twenty years of weather was breaking loose inside him.
It could not, it must not, break loose here, in front of her children, in front of her.
He got up. The bench scraped loud in the quiet.
Ada looked over, and whatever was in his face brought her to her feet with the mending still in her hand. “Mr. Morritt?” she said. “You’re white as the tablecloth. Are you unwell?”
“The supper was fine, ma’am.” His voice came from somewhere a long way off, level by pure main strength. “Finest yet. I’m only tired. I’ll say goodnight.”
“You’re sure? It’s coming down hard out there.”
“Rain and I are old friends. Goodnight, Mrs. Baldwin. Goodnight,” he said to the children, to the room, to all of it. Then he found the door and got himself out.
The rain took him the moment he was off the porch.
He went down the dark hill blind, walking anywhere, walking nowhere, until the lights of the town were behind him.
The levee ran black and empty under the downpour.
There, alone in the hammering dark, with the river running beside him, Louie Morritt stopped and came apart at last. Twelve years old was the last time he had let himself come apart that way.
He had found her.
He had found her. She was ten feet away, and she was a whole world gone.