Dead water

tightened, and she gazed out over the rail at the brown water, prickled and studded with the groping black fingers of snags, and the tangled gray wilderness of the banks. “He should see her when he ain't there, an' she got a couple glasses of plum brandy in her, singin' about the three old whores from Winnipeg. He'd wonder what finishin'-school she went to, to learn that.”

“And I suppose that if she did go to a finishing-school,” sighed Rose later, after January had ascertained that no more damage had been done to Julie's ear by her mistress's blow than nail- scratches, “she still would not be able to support herself in anything but poverty or prostitution. For Miss Skippen was right, you know, when she said that the world is unkind to girls who find themselves alone in it.”

She settled herself against the heaped cordwood in the shade, watching the deck-hands as they walked along the rail, long poles in their hands. As the river shallowed with summer, the bars that the current laid down before every point, on every bend, went from annoyances to be edged around to outright perils. Though noon was far past, Kevin Molloy remained in the pilot-house, and January could hear his voice bellowing curse-riddled instructions to the little crew of leadsmen who had rowed ahead of the Silver Moon in the skiff.

Their shouts echoed over the flat brown water, above the engine's slow throb: “Half one . . . half one . . . quarter one . . .”

“Move along port there, y'idjits! Is it blind y'are?”

“Half one.”

And ahead of the boat—January could see it when he walked to the rail and squinted along the 'tween-decks at the glaring water—the water lay glassy over the bar. Behind it was the dead water, where no current stirred the stagnation, like the poverty that trapped him in New Orleans, when there was not enough money to float him over the bar.

In the low water of summer, even the smallest logs and drifts and reefs became objects of endless slow negotiation, of wearily muscling through, as the deck-hands even now were readying themselves for the chancy prospect of “walking” the boat over the submerged wall of gravel and mud that blocked further passage up-river. And he shivered at the thought of years ahead of doing just that: laboriously pushing through small illnesses, minor catastrophes that even a few dollars in the bank would solve.

People lived like that, he knew. Some even held on to their joy while they did it.

He walked back to Rose. “Do you think Miss Skippen would have appreciated a chance to learn Greek and mathematics, instead of fancy sewing and dancing, at your school?”

Rose sighed. “Probably not. And I suspect our pupil Cosette's mother, and Germaine's, are right, too, when they say they'd rather their daughters learned something that will be ‘of use' to them, to make them more ‘fascinating' to men.”

“You,” said January, “are fascinating to this man, Greek and mathematics and all. And I can tell you Cosette and Germaine love what you teach them, even if it is difficult. At least I found someone had taken the French copy of the Iliad from the study, and is reading ahead of where you're taking them through the Greek.” He sat beside her again, gathered her into his arm. “I'd like to take that knot-head Quince to your school, and let him preach there about sending ‘savages' who will ‘never be able to make a living' back to Africa because it's all they're mentally fit for.”

In the end, unable to find any place on the bar that had twelve feet of water, Molloy ordered the engineers to build up steam and rammed the bar head-on, the bottom scraping on the soft sand while the deck-hands heaved and shoved with their poles, to literally flounder the Silver Moon to the other side. Then the slow process was all to do again, with the leadsmen rowing ahead in the skiff, and the monotonous calls ringing over the water: “Half one . . . half one . . . quarter less twain . . . mark twain.”

Mark Twain was the magic word, safe water . . . barely . . . enough for the boat to get over the next bar. They stopped at Futch's Wood-Yard, and at Home Plantation to drop off bolts of cheap calico and osnaberg and some New Orleans newspapers, after making a wide detour around Claiborne Island—the chute behind the island, navigable in high water, was nothing but a slot of mud now—and reached Baton Rouge slightly after nine that night.

The entire population of the Grand Saloon, who'd been listening to January and Hannibal play, streamed out en masse in the humid night air to look at the torches and movement on the landing. Though he didn't think Weems would disembark here any more than he'd get off in Donaldsonville, still January kept watch, while Tredgold had another quarrel with Molloy over damping the fires long enough to collect passengers.

“Who the bloody hell will be about at this time of the night fixin' to go up-river?” bellowed the pilot, and Mrs. Tredgold sailed into the argument with: “As long as you're in the pay of this boat, you'll do as my husband orders. . . .”

Most riverboat pilots January had ever met would have walked off at that point, with some choice curse shouted over the shoulder. That Molloy didn't confirmed in January's mind that the pilot was, in fact, a fellow depositor in the Bank of Louisiana and suspected Weems of absconding with some or all of its funds.

“But whether the man intends to return the portion of them that aren't his, if he manages to locate Weems's trunks before we do,” said Hannibal, leaning his bony elbows on the rail and looking down at the landing in the torchlight, “is, as they say, another story.”

After a screaming-match of Olympian proportions between Molloy and Mrs. Tredgold, the Silver Moon remained in Baton Rouge until midnight. Tredgold went ashore—propelled by his wife—as did Ned Gleet, to prowl the barrooms of the waterfront district in quest of human bargains. He came back empty- handed and angry, and tried again to talk Jubal Cain into selling some of his slaves to him. This provoked a scene that was discussed in whispers on the stern deck the following day—since every body-servant on the boat had a wholly understandable loathing for both dealers.

“I never heard one man, black or white, lay out another so flat without raising his voice,” whispered Jim at the water-butts in the morning, as the Silver Moon steamed away from a brief stop at the sordid little settlement of Bayou Sara. “He called him a pusillanimous slime-trail an' I don't know what-all else, and Gleet backed down from it.” The gray-haired Davis valet glanced in the direction of the piled wood that hid the male slaves from the servants' end of the promenade. “And I tell you, if I was a white man and he called me that, I'd just say ‘Yes, sir' too.”

January nodded, and rubbed his eyes, gritty with the exhaustion of having stayed up most of the night watching for another chance to break into the hold. But either because of yesterday's incident, or because Thucydides had discovered the evidence of Queen Regine's presence on the boat, both the bow and the stern doors down into the hold were not only double-locked but, January suspected, unobtrusively watched as well.

Through the day the steamboat pecked and slogged and struggled its way upstream, sometimes seeming to