theater.
The girl would listen to Acy’s commands because she sensed she had to, obeying him because there was no one else to obey. She was a child with no options. Sometimes she cried, and this was always in some way connected to her mother. Lily had no notion of death and didn’t know what to make of this nervous couple who told her five times a day that they were her mother and father. She was a baby, disoriented in a baby’s world. But she was smart.
Acy ran a finger along his thin mustache. “Sing it right, will you?”
“Where’s Vessy? I’ll sing it to her.”
“Vessy’s at her shack.”
“What’s a shack?”
“It’s a nasty little place where stupid people live.”
The girl came up to him and put a hand on the arm of his chair. “Is Vessy stupid?”
Acy pulled his watch and frowned at it. “She’s an untrained gal from up in the hills. Her people are dirt poor and we had to train her to wear shoes.”
She looked at him, unblinking. “Did you give her shoes?”
“What? Why, yes. Otherwise she’d be tracking up the house.”
She walked over to the grand piano and pressed down two notes of an A chord. “Thank you for giving her shoes.”
He went to her, got down on his knees, and put his face next to hers. “Look, remember that the last person in the world you want to be like is Vessy. She’s bad. Don’t forget that Vessy is a bad person and you shouldn’t trust her. She’s hardly a step above a nigger.”
The girl put a finger in her ear and yawned. Acy stood and looked out the window where Willa was haranguing the gardener next to the cast-iron fence, the old man’s head bobbing under the storm of her words.
ON THE TRIP up to Cairo, Sam shared a meal with Elsie in the cafe. He thought about her singing and had to admit that he was a little bit infatuated, though he couldn’t reconcile the image of her extraordinary presence in front of the orchestra with the woman seated across from him at the cheap wooden table. She had the buttermilk skin of a healthy midwestern girl, and he admired Ted Weller’s luck in matching up with her. August walked in and joined them, looking from one to the other before sitting down tentatively, as if worried he might be interrupting something. A stranger watching them eat and talk and laugh might have mistaken them for a complete family. It was a pleasant meal that Sam would remember for years, probably because it would be the last such meal for a long time.
WHEN THE BOAT tied up at Cairo the dapper advance man was there with the new schedule and an armload of mail. The weather was windy and a rainstorm was building in from the west, so he brought the mail to the central staircase to give it out. Among the envelopes was a telegram he’d been given that morning at the Western Union office, where he was sending precise schedule times upriver. He shuffled the mail and called out names, announcing that the telegram was for Elsie. Sam got a long envelope from New Orleans, a letter from Linda, and sat down on the staircase to read it. She told him the family news, then neighborhood tales, said that she wasn’t feeling all that well, that perhaps it was the heat and dampness. She let him know she missed him around the house and complained that she’d had to fix the gas range herself, but he saw that as her way of saying she needed him. The letter was four pages long, and he read it twice. Several crewmen were leaning against bulkheads or seated on coils of rope, reading slowly to make the letters last. He looked around for Elsie and saw her standing by the capstan, the buttermilk color of her face gone gray, the winsome expression missing as if scraped off by a surgeon. When she put her face down into her hands, he walked over.
“Bad news?”
She didn’t look up. “Go find August and bring him to my cabin. Then leave us alone, Lucky.”
He turned toward the rain-stippled water, afraid to look at her. “Is something wrong with Ted?”
She put down her hands and looked past him, up the stairs toward the dance floor. Her voice was flat and tired. “He got blood poisoning from the first operation. He died yesterday.”
“God. If there’s something-”
“Go get August.”
On the trip back to the boiler galley he thought of how the boy was about to be delivered, with just a few of his mother’s words, to the land of adult sorrow. He stopped at the entrance, not wanting to take the next step, but then raised his foot over the sill. August was on a stool in the companionway reading through a smudged arrangement for a De Silva fox-trot.
He looked up and smiled. “Hey, Lucky. Get a load of these licks.”
Sam felt like a black cloud, drifting close. “Your mother sent me down to get you. Go on up to your cabin.”
“Sure. Did you hear me play the other night for those hillbillies?”
“You played like a champ.”
August hopped off the stool. “She got that new music for me in the mail? I saw the advance man on the dock.”
“I don’t know.” He pretended to study a steam gauge. “You’d better get up there quick.”
The boy ran through the furnace room and out into the sun. Sam walked back by the engines to let the Bentons know they’d have to take on another fireman for August’s shifts, then climbed to the restaurant and dawdled a few minutes at a table until little Mr. Brandywine saw him.
The pilot walked up stiff-legged and slapped a folder of papers against his chest. “Bring these up to the pilothouse, young man, and lay them out on the liars’ bench for me.”
He took the papers and looked at them dumbly. “What are they?”
“Well, if you have to know, they’re the channel reports up to Pittsburgh. Off with you before you forget where you’re going and lose them.”
He walked up to the Texas deck, and as he turned for the steps leading to the pilothouse, he passed the cabin that Elsie shared with August, and coming from inside was the thing he most feared hearing: the bawling, incoherent voice that signaled August’s fall from childhood into a wild, uncharted, dead-serious place cut off from fathers and all things those fathers teach and give. For a moment Sam stopped and shared the immeasurable and growing loss.
THE NEXT DAY he helped carry their bags up the hill to the streetcar that would bring them to the station. Elsie had drawn their pay and figured they’d have enough to bury Ted and begin installments on his medical bills. Beyond that, she didn’t know what they’d do. When the streetcar appeared far down the street, she grabbed his lapel and shook it.
“Lucky, you’ve got your own life to live. I appreciate what you’ve done to find Lily, coming along with us and all. But it’s not working.” She began to cry. “She’s out there in the world somewhere, but it’s too big a place. Just too big.” She put her forehead against his shoulder for a moment. “If I ever get some money I’ll hire someone to look for her. I really don’t know what else to do. I don’t have a cent. I don’t know if I ever will now that he’s gone.”
He looked up the long street at the stone and brick buildings, wondering how anyone ever put together the money to build them. No one he knew had more than a few dollars saved. “I’ll ride out this circuit on the boat. It might look like I haven’t done much, but I’ve put out feelers all along.”
“If you hear anything, you have my mother’s address in Cincinnati.”
“That’s right.” He gave August a pat on the arm. “So long, bud.”
