Chapter 16
Ada kept him back that Saturday night, after the last crew had gone down to the landing. The long room stood empty under the lamps.
She had not planned how to do it. All through the evening she had watched him at his corner table, quiet as ever, thanking Will for the pitcher. The whole time, Everett’s words had walked round in her. When he rose at last and reached for his hat, she heard herself speak.
“Mr. Morritt. Stay a moment, if you would.”
He stopped. His stillness told her he had been waiting for this, or for its like, all evening. Perhaps all summer.
She came out from behind the counter and stood with a table between them. A table between them was what she found she wanted tonight, and she hated wanting it.
“I’ll ask you something plainly,” she said, “and I’d take it kindly if you answered the same. There’s been talk brought to me. About you. I’d sooner have the truth of it from your own mouth than carry another man’s version of you around in my head.”
“Ask it, then.”
“Are you an orphan-train child?”
The lamplight stood still. Somewhere below, the river went on about its business.
She watched the question land, and knew at once, before he said a word, that it was true. Not because he flinched. Because he didn’t. He took it the way she had seen him take a barked shin on the dock, without sound. He went quiet and careful around a pain that was old acquaintance.
“Yes, ma’am,” Louie said. “I am.”
“Out of New York. Placed out, bound to a farm, and run off from it.”
“Bound to a farm, then another, then more. Five places in two years, near as I can count them.” His voice stayed level, and it was the levelness of a man carrying a full load across ice.
“Some were hard, some only indifferent. I ran from the last of them at fourteen and went to the river. The river doesn’t ask.
That part of the talk is true too, I expect. ”
“And your name.” She made herself say it. “Louie Morritt.”
For the first time, his eyes came up to hers, and what stood in them made her wish she had never begun this.
“There was a book,” he said. “When you sign on a boat, there’s a crew book, and a man wants a name to put in it. I was fourteen, and nobody had...”
He stopped. Started again, plainer. “The name I was born with went from me when I was a boy, ma’am, the way it went from all of us.
What they called me at the farms wasn’t worth keeping.
So when the book came round, I gave it a name I could stand to hear said.
I’ve paid every debt I ever owed under it.
It’s mine because I’ve made it mine. It’s the one thing I have that is. ”
He said it with an old, quiet, bone-deep shame, holding her gaze stubbornly the whole time. Ada’s heart broke, and her fear rose in the same breath. She could not have said which of them was stronger.
For she knew this shame. That was the terrible, secret part, the part she could tell no one in the room.
She knew it from the inside, the shame of the made name, the shame of being a thing handed across a table.
Every word he spoke landed in the oldest room of her.
What her heart wanted, plain, foolish, enormous, was to walk around the table she had put between them and say it.
I know. I am the same. We are the same thing, you and I.
And on the heels of that wanting came the fear, with Verena’s voice, with Everett’s, with the voice of every sensible year she had lived.
Five places in two years. Never a full season anywhere in twenty.
A man the wind could take, standing in her lamplight with her son’s rope-splices in his pockets and her daughter’s whole heart in his keeping.
Two children slept above this room who had already lost one man from their lives.
She was not a girl choosing for her own heart.
Whatever this shaking in her was, it did not get to spend her children.
“Why are you here, Louie?” she asked. It came out low, almost pleading, and his given name came out with it, the first time she had ever used it.
That’s the whole of what I need to know.
Not the farms, not the name, I don’t care what a book in a boat says.
Why Camden Bluff? Why my table, every night, four months?
And why my dock, my roof, my children? A man doesn’t do all you’ve done for chicken dinners. What are you here for?”
And Louie stood there, not answering her.
She watched him try. She would remember that always, afterward, how visibly he tried, like a man heaving at a stone set past his strength.
His mouth opened. His hand moved, some small helpless beginning of a gesture, and stopped.
For one strange moment she thought he had gone pale, the way he had gone pale that rainy night at his supper.
Then his face closed, the way water closes, and the moment was over.
“I can’t rightly say, ma’am,” he said, barely above a whisper.
“Can’t. Or won’t.”
He looked at the floor. It was answer enough, and it was the wrong one. Something in Ada finished breaking, quietly, without any sound at all.
Because she had been ready. That was the truth she would carry out of this room.
Against Everett, against Verena, against the whole sensible world, some reckless tide in her had been rising all evening.
It was ready to be handed one true thing to stand on.
One. He had only to put anything in her hands, any reason, any word with weight in it.
She would have weighed it against every warning in the county.
He had given her silence. Silence was the one thing she could not weigh.
“Then I’ll say my piece,” she said. Her voice stayed gentle.
That much she managed, for she found she could not be hard with him even now, and despised herself for it.
“I’m not angry at you. I want that understood.
Whatever you are, you’ve been nothing but good to this house, and I’ll say so to anybody.
But I have children, Louie. They’ve buried a father.
My boy follows you like you hung the moon.
My girl loves you like family. And you are a man who has never stayed anywhere, who can’t or won’t tell me why he’s here.
When you go, and men like you go, it will tear them like paper.
I can’t be watching that come and do nothing. ”
She drew a breath. It hurt the whole way down.
“So maybe you’d best move on. Before more harm is done than mending can reach. There’s boats every day, you’ve told me so yourself.”
Her eyes were burning now, and she kept them wide open, because she would not send this man off blinking like a fool.
“I’m sorry. I think you might be the best man I’ve ever fed in this room, and I’m asking you to leave it. I will never in my life be sure I did right. But they’re my children. Do you understand me? They’re all I have that’s mine.”
He took it, standing very still, and whatever moved in him moved deep, making no ripple she could read.
Then he said the proper things, steadily, in the voice she supposed boat crews used past weather. That he understood. That she was right to think of the children, that a woman ought never apologize for that. And that he’d settle with Mrs. Hale in the morning and be no further trouble.
At the door, he stopped. He did not turn around.
“The talk was right, ma’am, near enough,” he said.
“About the farms, the name, the rest. But you asked what I’m here for, and I’ll tell you the one piece of it I can.
I came to Camden Bluff looking for somebody.
Somebody I’d lost, a long time back. That’s the whole of my mystery. It was never anything worse than that.”
“And did you find them?” Ada asked, very quietly, behind him.
Louie looked out the open door, down the dark hill, at the river running black under the stars. It was carrying its boats away south, the way it had carried everything away from him all his life.
“No,” he said. “I ran out of time.”
Then he put on his hat and went down into the dark. Ada Baldwin stood alone among her lamps, one hand pressed hard against her mouth, until his footsteps faded off the planks. After that there was nothing left to listen to but the river.
Down on the levee, Louie walked slow, her words walking with him. Over and over they went through him, like a sentence he had heard read before.
She had said it kindly. That made it no different.
The oldest voice in his life had spoken up all the same, from the bottom of twenty years.
It spoke in the tone of agents, farm wives, hard men at auction tables.
There it is. You knew it was coming. It always comes.
You are a thing that gets sent away, and no dock you mend will ever mend that.
And the worst of it, the part that had stood in his throat while she asked him why, was that he could have answered her.
One word would have done it. She had begged him for a reason, ready, he had seen it in her face, ready to weigh anything he gave her.
The word had climbed all the way to his teeth and died there, strangled by the same two hands that always did the strangling.
Shame, that she should learn what he was and then be asked to believe the rest. And fear, worse. She might believe it, and be bound to him by pity, by twenty-year-old bread. Then he would go to his grave never knowing whether the woman had wanted the man.
Better to be sent away whole than kept out of mercy. That was what he told himself on the walk down the hill. He was still telling himself at the wharf boat, and it had not once sounded true.
At the window he asked, and the answer was simple, the way it always was. A downbound packet at first light. Deck passage for a man who’d work. He gave his made name and watched it written in one more book. Afterward, he stood a long while, looking up the hill at the one lit window.
As he always had. That was the size of it. Boats leave every day, and men like him leave on them.
But there was one thing left owing, one goodbye he could not make himself skip, though he knew a braver man would spare them both. At first light, before the boat, he would go up the hill one last time.
He told himself it was to say goodbye to the children.
Even that, he could no longer say honestly. He only knew he could not go down this river without once more seeing her face.