Chapter 15
Everett Shaw was not a man who spied. It took him most of a week to forgive himself for what he was about to do.
He argued it through at his desk in the mill office, the way he argued a doubtful contract.
The widow he hoped to marry had taken a stranger into the middle of her household.
Not improperly, nothing improper, he would knock down any man who said so.
But into the middle of it all the same, at her table, on her roof, beside her son.
And nobody in Camden Bluff could answer the first question about the man.
If he were hiring a foreman, he would ask after his history. He was proposing to trust this man, however unwillingly, with a household worth more than any mill. A prudent man verified. That was all this was, he told himself. He knew it was not all, and did it anyway.
He did not hire anybody underhanded. What he used was what he had, which was the river.
Freight moves on paper, and paper moves with men who know men.
Everett wrote to three commission agents, with a packet captain of his long acquaintance besides.
He asked, in the dry language of business, what was known of a boatman called Louie Morritt, lately of the Camden Bluff levee.
Then he waited, hating it, and tended his mill.
The answers came back inside a fortnight, and they agreed with one another.
Louie Morritt was known on four rivers, and known well. Sober, the captain wrote, which on the river was no small word. Steady in a wreck, honest with a cargo, close-mouthed past the ordinary.
Twice, the captain had seen Morritt go into the water after other men’s cargo, and once after a deckhand nobody else missed till morning.
Whatever the man was running from, it had never yet been work or water.
Had turned down mate’s berths more than once, always the same reason given, that he didn’t care to be tied to one boat. Never stayed anywhere a full season.
Signed on, worked faultless, drew his pay. Went ashore at some landing with no reason a man could see, then turned up two months later on another boat, another river.
And then the last of it, the part Everett read three times.
You ask where his people are, the old captain wrote.
He has none. It’s known among boatmen, the way such things get known.
He’s one of those the trains brought west, an asylum child out of New York.
Bound out to some farm and run off from it, or from the next one, or the one after.
There’s a many of them on the river. It’s the trade that asks no questions.
As to the name, Morritt is what he gave at fourteen when he first signed on.
A boy that age gives the name he likes. Nobody ever came looking for him under that one or any other.
He is a good boatman, Shaw, none better.
But you ask what he is, and the plain answer is nobody, from nowhere, headed the same place.
Everett sat with that letter a long evening, and took no pleasure in it. That surprised him. He had expected, being honest, at least the taste of a point scored.
Instead, he kept thinking of the man’s hands teaching the widow’s boy to splice a rope.
He poured himself a small brandy, which he did four times a year, and sat with it untouched.
It would be easy enough to burn the letters and say nothing.
Easy, and its own kind of lie. If she chose the boatman blind, and the river took the man back, the not-telling would be partly his.
A man could not court a woman with one hand and keep her in the dark with the other.
But a decent man does his duty even when it sits ill, and Everett Shaw had never once shirked a duty in his life.
On the last Friday of September, with her promised answer only days away, he called at the eating-house in the quiet of mid-afternoon.
The children were at school, and the tables stood empty.
“I’d not have come with this,” he said, hat in hand, “if you weren’t deciding what you’re deciding. You’d have every right to show me the door. But I’d sooner lose you honest than win you blind, so I’ll say it, and you’ll do with it what you see fit.”
Ada stood very still by the stove. “Say it, then.”
He laid it out plainly, without triumph, reading nothing aloud, for he had burned the letter and would not play the prosecutor with documents. The boatman was an orphan-train child. An asylum boy out of New York, placed to strangers and run off, grown up wild on the river the way such boys did.
No family, no land, not an acre or a kinsman to his name anywhere on this earth. And the name itself, Morritt, was a boy’s invention, picked at fourteen to sign a crew book with. Nobody knew what he had been called before. Likely nobody ever would.
“He is not a bad man,” Everett said. “I’ll say that too, because it’s true, and you’d find out I’d hidden it.
Every soul on that river speaks him honest. But honest isn’t rooted, Ada.
He has never stayed one full season anywhere.
Never once, in near twenty years. That is not a habit; that is the whole nature of the man, and habits like that don’t break because a town is pretty. ”
Ada said nothing. Her hands had gone cold around each other. He looked older today, she noticed, in some distant working part of her mind. This was costing him too. Some men would have relished the errand. He plainly did not, and that made it worse to hear.
“Think of the children,” he went on gently, and every word landed like a stone laid on a scale. “I don’t ask you to think of me. If it’s not to be me, I’ll bear it.”
Ada did not move.
“But think of Will, who follows him now like a first mate. Think of your girl, who loves him. What happens to those children the morning the river takes him back? And it will take him back. It’s all he has ever known.
You’d be tying your little ones to a man who is, when everything is said and counted, precisely nobody.
No people, no place, no name. Nobody, Ada.
And your children deserve to be somebody’s. ”
The clock ticked. Out on the river a boat blew for the landing, long and mournful. Neither of them heard it.
“You’ve said your piece,” Ada said at last. Her voice came out stranger than she meant it to. “And kindly, I know. Kindlier than most men would have managed it.”
“I’d take it back if I could. Not the facts. The needing to say them.” He turned his hat once more, and set it on. “Whatever you answer, Ada, I’ll stand by my regard for you. That doesn’t expire on the first of October.”
Then he was gone, and the room was empty. Ada Baldwin stood alone by her stove with the cold going through her like well water.
It was true. That was the first thing, and the worst. She had asked the dark the same three questions Verena had asked. Here at last were the answers, and they were worse than none. No people. No place. Not even a name.
The quiet man at her corner table had made himself up at fourteen, out of nothing, the way a boy whittles a whistle. Everything solid she had let herself lean toward was a made thing floating on a river.
An orphan-train child. Bound out, run off, and never once stayed.
She should have felt the ground close, sensible and final, under the choice.
Everett had given her, in kindness, the very proof a sensible woman needed.
Instead, she stood in her quiet kitchen shaking.
The words had gone through her front-to-back, striking something on the way that Everett Shaw knew nothing about.
Precisely nobody. No people, no place, no name.
Ada put her hand flat on the stove shelf and held on.
For what was she? Under the good dress, under the good name, under the eating-house, the account book, the pew at the Methodist church.
She was an asylum child out of New York, bound out at a landing.
Her people were unknown, her place invented, her very name handed to her across a table like a plate.
The name Ada had been picked for her by a grieving woman because the true one didn’t suit. Somewhere under twenty respectable years there was a girl with no answers to any of the three questions. That girl had heard every gentle word Everett said as if it had been said of her.
Bound out. The words even smelled the same, cinders, lye soap, a strange clean bed. She had stood in a row on a platform not a mile from this stove. She had been looked over, then taken home like dry goods.
Nobody, Ada. And your children deserve to be somebody’s.
He could not know. He had meant it about the boatman, only the boatman.
It would have horrified him, courteous man, to learn what else his words had hit.
The town’s kind amnesia had done its work so well that even the man courting her had forgotten what she was.
She had almost forgotten it herself. It had taken this, a warning against a drifter, to stand her face to face with the oldest fact in her keeping.
She and the boatman were one and the same.
The same, root and branch. Two asylum children off the trains, renamed, unmade, sent west into the churn.
One of them had been caught by kind hands and grown up rooted, pitied, provided for.
The other had gone to the hard farms and run.
He had kept running, making himself a name out of river air, because nobody had troubled to give him one.
That was the whole difference, and it was luck. Luck, nothing else under heaven, had handed her the parlor and handed him the churn. She had known it for one hour on a platform twenty years ago, then spent the rest of her life being helped to forget it.
The town had let her be somebody so long, so kindly, that she had taken it for a fact of nature. It was not. It was a gift somebody had chosen to give a nobody child off a train. Nobody had chosen to give the boy anything at all.
Ada stood in her kitchen until the school let out. The children’s voices came up the hill, and the bread wanted setting for the supper crowd.
Then she wiped her face with her apron and built up the fire. She fed forty men with her hands, while her mind walked the levee the whole evening long.
Days, now. She owed a good man a sensible answer in days. And she had just learned the only thing in the world that could make that answer harder.