Chapter 17
The downbound packet lay at the landing with her fires lit, breathing smoke into the gray of first light. Louie Morritt walked away from her, up the hill, to say a coward’s goodbye.
He had settled with Mrs. Hale in the dark before five. His whole life hung from one shoulder in the old canvas bag. The boat would blow for departure inside the hour. A sensible man would have been aboard her already, drinking deck coffee with his back to the town.
Instead, he climbed the path he had climbed all summer, one last time, telling himself lies at every step. The town was still asleep around him. Gray cats came home along the fences from their night’s business, dew stood on every rail, and no smoke showed anywhere yet but hers.
He would say a word to the children, that was all.
Cissy was owed that much, and Will more.
He would not trouble their mother, who had asked him plainly to go.
If she was at her stove, he would stand in the doorway and thank her for a hundred suppers.
Then he would wish her every happiness, and walk back down to the river with his hat on straight.
Two minutes. A man could do two minutes of anything.
The eating-house was awake, the way it was always awake before the town. Woodsmoke stood up from the kitchen chimney into the still morning. Lamplight fell out the open door and lay yellow on the porch boards. The smell of the first bread came out to meet him on the path.
He never reached the door.
Cissy came out of it first, in her nightgown and her mother’s shawl, with Louisa the doll under one arm. She was carrying the doll toward the porch rail, to show her the boat lights on the water, which was a ceremony of theirs. Halfway there, she saw him on the path.
She saw the bag next.
Louie watched all of it happen in her small face, the gladness, then the bag, then the understanding no six-year-old should be quick at.
Boats leave every day, her mother had said.
Cissy had been raised on a landing. She knew what a man’s whole life on his shoulder meant, at first light, with a packet getting up steam below.
“You’re going away,” she said.
“Cissy...”
“You’re going away on the boat.” Her voice did not wobble.
It went flat and fierce instead, her chin coming up.
For one heartbeat she was so entirely her mother that it stopped his breath.
“Everybody goes away on the boat, or the train, or up to the churchyard. I knew it. Will said you’d stay, and I knew it. ”
There was no answer to make, so he did not insult her with one. He came up the last of the path and crouched down to her height. Nobody on a platform had ever once crouched down to his.
“I came to say goodbye to you,” he said. “That’s the truth, and it’s a poor thing, but it’s what I have. You’ve been the best friend I ever had in any town on this river, and I’ll carry you with me the whole way down it.”
“Then don’t go.”
“Cissy.”
“You can’t.” Now the fierceness cracked, and underneath it was the older hurt.
That was what undid him, for he had felt it himself once, on a platform half a mile from this porch.
Not anger. Bargaining. She was hunting, desperate, for the one thing that might hold the world together.
He watched her hunt for it, and watched her find it.
“You can’t go,” Cissy said, “because you never finished. You never finished one single story, you always said tomorrow, and now there won’t be one.
And Mama’s story doesn’t have an end at all.
You fix everything. You fixed the dock, the roof, Will’s boat, so you have to fix that.
Tell me how Mama’s story ends. The children in the little boat.
Tell me the end, and then...” Her voice went to pieces all at once, six years old in a nightgown in the cold. “Tell me the end, and then you can go.”
The morning stood very still.
And Louie, crouched on the path with his life on his shoulder, understood. The river had run him to ground at last, in the gray light, at a child’s pleading. There was nowhere further to drift.
Because he knew the end. He had made the end.
He had built it in the dark of a cattle car, twenty years ago, out of nothing, for a crying girl.
Finished and untold, he had carried it up a thousand miles of water, waiting for the one listener it belonged to.
It was the last thing left in his keeping.
Give it up, and he was empty. Give it up here, now, out loud, and there would be no taking it back, ever, from anyone.
He looked past Cissy, and there in the kitchen doorway, with the lamplight behind her, stood Ada.
How long she had been there he did not know.
She had a cup in one hand, a dish towel over her shoulder, and she was not moving.
Her eyes went from the child to the bag on his shoulder to his face, and stopped there.
Twenty years seemed to hang in the air of that porch, weightless, waiting on his next word.
Louie set the bag down on the path.
“All right,” he said quietly. “All right, Cissy. The end. But it has to be told proper, so listen.”
He knelt down all the way, on both knees, so his eyes were level with hers. Below on the river the packet blew her first whistle, long and low, calling her people to her. He heard it the way you hear weather in another county.
“You remember where we always leave them,” he said.
“The boy at the oars, the girl in the bow, and the river running on ahead. Well. One morning, early, the river changed under them. The water went wide and slow, wider than any water they’d ever seen.
The boy stood up in the boat and looked.
Away down at the end of everything, he saw it.
The end of the river. Where it had been running to the whole time. ”
“Was it the sea?” Cissy whispered.
“Bigger. It was the end. Hush now, and ride the last of it with them.”
Cissy had gone absolutely still. Behind her, in the doorway, the cup had begun, very slightly, to tremble against its saucer.
“They were afraid, the both of them,” Louie said.
“All that way they’d talked about the place at the river’s end, where nobody is ever sent away.
Now here it came, and what if it wasn’t so?
What if they’d rowed the whole world for nothing?
The girl came and sat by the boy, taking hold of his sleeve, the way she did when the nights were bad.
And round the last bend they went together. ”
The whistle blew again, below. He did not hear it at all now.
“And there was no city there,” he said. “No gates, no towers, no crowd of folks waiting. There was only a green bank in the morning sun, with a willow on it, and room for one small boat to tie up.”
“Like ours,” Cissy breathed.
“Like theirs. And the girl began to cry, because she thought the story had lied to them. But the boy had gone very quiet, the way you go when you finally understand a thing that’s been true all along. And he took her two hands, so.”
Louie took Cissy’s two small hands in his.
“And he said to her, Don’t cry. Look. We heard it wrong from the start, that’s all.
It was never a place, the place at the river’s end.
It was never somewhere you get to. It’s somebody.
It’s the one who rode the whole river with you and never once put you out of the boat.
As long as we’re in reach of each other, we’re there, don’t you see? We’ve been there the whole way down.”
The porch was silent. The morning was silent. All the world’s noise had gone somewhere else.
“So they tied up the little boat to the willow,” Louie said, “and that was the end, because it doesn’t need any more.
Two children found out they’d been home for years, and just hadn’t known what to call it.
Nobody ever sent either one of them away again, not ever, as long as they lived.
Because you can’t be sent away from a person who won’t let go of your hand.
That’s the end, Cissy. That’s how it always ended.
It took the boy the longest time to get it told. ”
Cissy let out a long, shuddering breath, the sound of a child receiving a gift she means to keep forever.
And behind her, at the kitchen doorway, a cup shattered on the floorboards.
Louie rose and turned, slow.
Ada stood among the pieces of the cup with her hand still shaped around where it had been.
The dish towel had slipped from her shoulder.
Every drop of color had left her face. She was white as salt, white as split wood.
Across the porch she stared at him, her lips parted around a breath that would not finish.
For she had told that story a thousand nights, to her children, to herself, to the dark.
She had reached for its ending her whole remembered life and touched nothing.
She had tried a hundred endings on it, and every one had slid off, wrong, like somebody else’s coat.
The true one existed, finished, somewhere, in the one place she could never go.
There was one soul alive who could know how that story was meant to end.
One soul, in all the world. The one who made it.
And here he knelt on her porch at first light, with his life in a bag at his feet. He was telling that ending to her daughter, in the same low voice that had been landing behind her breastbone all summer long.
“Cissy,” Ada said. Her voice came from a long way off, from twenty years off, and it did not shake, which was the strangest part of all. “Take Louisa in to your brother, and stay in with him a while.”
“But, Mama, the cup...”
“Mind the pieces as you go.”
The child went, wide-eyed, on tiptoe through the wreckage, and the door of the children’s room closed, soft, somewhere inside the house.
Then there were only the two of them, in the cold morning, with a broken cup and twenty years lying on the floor between them. Below the bluff, unheard by either one, the downbound packet blew her last whistle, swung her bow into the current, and went south without him.