Chapter 11
By the middle of July, Ada Baldwin had to admit it. The boatman had become part of the shape of her days, and she could not account for how easily it had happened.
It had gone the way water goes into ground.
No single day of it could be pointed to.
There was only the sum of small things, morning after morning.
The dock stood true under her feet when she went down for the fish.
Rain or no rain, the kitchen ceiling stayed the color a ceiling ought to be.
The woodpile never sank low enough to worry her.
And the heavy end of every chore seemed to get quietly picked up by somebody before she reached it.
And every evening, at the corner table, there he sat. Quiet as the furniture, and somehow no more possible to imagine the room without.
That was the part that puzzled her when she let herself look at it.
She had known the man six weeks. Six weeks, against a whole remembered lifetime of Camden Bluff faces.
And yet there was Everett Shaw, whom she had known ten years, sitting in her parlor in his good broadcloth.
Across the coffee pot, he felt further off than this near-stranger felt across a crowded supper room.
It made no sense, and Ada Baldwin had built her whole life on things making sense.
She started, privately, to keep a count against it, the way she would tally a doubtful account. Small things. Evidence.
There was his voice. The supper room at full tide was a roar, forty boatmen, benches scraping, Cissy underfoot, the whole crowded clatter of a landing at dusk.
With her back to it all at the stove, she could pick his voice out of that noise the instant it spoke.
It was the way a woman picks her own child’s cry out of a schoolyard.
His was a low voice, unhurried, pitched to carry to one listener and no further. It landed somewhere behind her breastbone, every time, in a place she could not show a doctor.
It vexed her so much that she tested it once, on a Friday at the height of supper.
She stood over the gravy with her eyes shut, waiting.
Two boat crews, the mill men, forty voices.
When his came, ordering nothing, only thanking Will for the water pitcher, she caught it before the second word.
She opened her eyes, stirred the gravy hard, and called herself a fool in three ways.
The fooling did not stop her doing it again the next Friday. Nor the one after.
There was the way he told a story.
She had taken to lingering over the dish towels when Cissy captured him of an evening, and she had caught the trick of it.
He never finished. Every tale went along fine to the very best part, the catfish rising, the mule halfway over the river.
There his voice would go quiet. He would look at the ceiling, and allow that the rest of it would keep till tomorrow.
Cissy howled about it nightly, and nightly came back for more.
“A story keeps better than bread does,” he told her, grave as a deacon, prying her small fists off his sleeve. “You can’t eat tomorrow’s bread tonight. Nor tomorrow’s story either. Go to sleep, so it comes quicker.”
Ada stood in the kitchen doorway with a plate going dry in her hands. The whole world tipped very slightly, like a floor with one joist gone soft.
What had happened she could not name. Nothing had happened.
A drifter had told her daughter to go to bed, in words any man might use.
Yet something in her, some room she had never once stood in, had heard those words and known them.
The way you know a smell from a house you cannot remember living in.
For a moment, standing there, she was small.
That was the only honest way she could put it to herself afterward.
Not a memory. There was no picture in it, no place, no face.
Just a feeling, sudden and whole. She was very small, in a great dark, warm anyway.
She was safe the way a child is safe. Not because the dark was gone, but because something had planted itself between her and the dark. It would not be moved.
Then Cissy slammed the stair door, and the floor of the world came level again. Ada was a widow of twenty-six in her own kitchen, holding a dry plate, her heart going like she had run up the hill.
She told nobody. What was there to tell? That a customer had said bread, and her eyes had stung? The words made nothing. Spoken out loud to Mrs. Hale over the fence, they would make less than nothing, or worse. They would make talk.
Talk was one thing this town never ran short of, and a widow lived in the middle of it like a fish lives in water. She kept her snags to herself.
But it happened again. It kept happening all that month, little snags of the same kind, catching at her out of the plainest cloth.
He said of a leaky skiff that it wanted bailing with a shoe.
At the word shoe, of all the words in Missouri, her chest lurched, and she stood stupid over the beans until it passed.
One morning on the dock he whistled three notes, some tune too short to name. She had to set down the coffee pot and hold the table edge a moment. Why, she could not have told a soul.
She was not a fanciful woman. She had no time to be, and no taste for it. Every snag got the same sensible broom taken to it. She was tired. It was the hot weather. The man simply had a way about him that put a person in mind of things. If she could not say what, that only proved how tired she was.
The broom worked less well every week.
And then there was the story. Her own story, the river one, the one with no end.
She had never wondered about it. That was the strange truth she turned up when she finally went looking.
A woman who audited every account in her life had carried that story twenty years without once asking where it came from.
It was simply hers, like her hands, like her hair.
Her mother in the big house had never told it, Lord knew.
It had been in her before Camden Bluff, and she did not visit the time before.
In the flat way you know old facts, she knew she had come off an orphan train as a little girl.
Everybody knew it. It had never been hidden, only never spoken of, which in a small town is a different thing.
Her raising parents had been kind, God rest them, and they had loved her hard.
They had wanted, so plainly wanted, for the time before to be nothing.
So it was nothing. What does a child keep from six years old, if the six-year-old is never once asked?
A smell of cinders, maybe. A fear of train whistles she had never confessed to a living soul. And a story about two children in a little blue boat, going down an endless river to a place where nobody is ever sent away.
She had always supposed she dreamed it on the train, coming west. It was the kind of dream a scared child would have.
Only now, lying awake in the hot July dark with the whole house asleep, Ada found the old supposition would not lie flat anymore.
Because she had never once in twenty years been able to make up the ending.
She had tried. The children begged for one, and she was a grown woman with a good head.
For any other tale she could invent a dozen endings in a minute.
For that one, nothing would come. Every ending she tried on it slid off, wrong, like somebody else’s coat.
As if the true one existed somewhere, finished, and the story would take no substitute.
She caught herself, more than once that month, on the very point of asking him.
He knew stories. He had a hundred of them, from every reach of the river.
Over the coffee, easy as anything, she could ask whether he had ever heard tell of two children in a little blue boat.
Every time, at the last, something stopped her mouth.
She was afraid of both answers, with no notion which one frightened her more.
Dreams do not behave so. Dreams belong to the dreamer.
The thought frightened her more than she could find any sensible reason for.
If she had not dreamed it, then someone had given it to her.
Someone real, in the lost time before, had leaned close to a child she could not remember being.
A real voice had put that river, that little boat, into her keeping.
Then the face had gone, with the name, with everything else the train took.
A voice that had known how it ended, and never got to tell her.
“Stop it,” Ada said out loud, to the ceiling, in her sensible voice.
The ceiling, newly sound, said nothing back.
She got up and drank water at the window.
Below lay the dark slope, the river running under the stars, the one late lamp burning in the top of Mrs. Hale’s house.
Here she was, a widow with two children, all but promised to a good man.
And she was standing barefoot at a window at two in the morning over a bedtime story.
In the morning she would be sensible again. She was too tired now, that was all. Below the window the river ran on, patient, saying nothing.
But standing there, she caught herself doing what she had lately done far too often.
She was watching his lamp, and wondering about him.
What he waited up for. Where he came from, before the boats.
What it was he carried, this quiet man who mended docks he did not own.
Who told stories he never finished, watched her, and asked for nothing.
He watched her the way a man watches a road he has traveled before. She had thought that once, weeks ago, and been unsettled by it. She was more unsettled now, because she had begun, against every sensible fiber, to watch him back the same way.
As if she too were trying to place a bend in a road. As if somewhere far back, in the dark behind the story, the road might be the same road.
She did not connect it. Not that night. The truth was close now, waiting to be let in. Ada Baldwin, tired, sensible, twenty years out of practice at hoping, drew the curtain on it and went back to bed.
But the ground under her settled life had begun to move, very faintly, the way ground does above an old spring working toward daylight. And the last thing she thought, sliding into sleep, was not of Everett Shaw at all.
It was three whistled notes, the smell of cinders, and a dark that was warm.