The pilot stole a glance at the child. “Hello, little miss.”
“Good morning, Mr. Brandywine.” She fluffed her dress around her dangling legs.
The pilot nudged the
“I know.” She nodded.
Saul, a retired Pullman porter too old for railroad service, tapped at the door and Sam waved him in. He carried a bright, triple-plated tray and sat it on the cold pilothouse stove. “I brought you a biscuit with your coffee, sah.”
“Thank you. I’ll eat it when I go off in an hour.”
Saul turned the cup handle out on the tray, and when he swung around to leave, he noticed Lily for the first time. “Little ma’am, would you like me to go and get you one of those cookies they’re bakin’ fresh down in the kitchen?”
She looked at him squarely. “I’m not supposed to talk to niggers.”
Sam looked at the old porter and his face was unmoving, hardened by a lifetime of blows. Saul kept his smile and said, “Yes, little ma’am.”
Mr. Brandywine slid a hand from the wheel. “Sam, come over and just stand here and hold her steady. Don’t do anything but hold it in one spot.”
He hesitated, looking out at the water sliding by. “I’m no wheelman.”
“Just for a minute.”
They changed places, and the pilot walked over to the lazy bench and gave Lily a serious look. “Little miss, would you hurt someone’s feelings on purpose?”
Lily shook her head.
“Well, lots of people use the word ‘nigger,’ and I know you’ve heard it thrown around by those folks who stole you, but let me tell you, it hurts people’s feelings. Would you want Saul here to call you something like ‘nasty grits’?”
She began to get the idea she’d done something wrong and straightened her back. “That’s ugly. I’m not nasty grits.”
Mr. Brandywine put his many-creased face close to hers and trapped her with his glossy little eyes. “It hurts your feelings to be called that, does it?”
She nodded.
“So it’s ugly to call Saul here a ‘nigger.’ That pretty young mouth of yours should have nicer words come out of it. You can refer to him as a Negro or a colored man.”
She looked at Saul, whose expression was still unreadable, and he was waiting, as he had all his life. “I’m not supposed to talk to a Negro,” she said.
Saul laughed, and no one in the pilothouse could tell exactly what the laugh meant. He turned for the door and was gone.
Sam called out, “Mr. Brandywine.”
The pilot was watching the porter through the aft glass. “What?”
“There’s a towboat rounding the upper end of this island.”
The pilot still didn’t turn around. “Do you not see a big white house with green shutters and a gallery sitting on the bluff over the next bend?”
Sam scanned the east side in a panic. “I think so.”
“Well, put the flagstaff on the front door.”
He turned the wheel and began to sweat as the boat swung a few degrees, then began to drive at the hallway of the farmhouse three miles away. Behind him, he heard Brandywine say, “You feel the weight of my hand on your shoulder, girl?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“When you insult someone it puts a weight on you. Oh, you don’t feel it until you get older, like me, but that’s when you get to thinking and thinking about all the hurt you caused people in your life with your smart little mouth and your wise little cracks. Now, do you feel this hand on your other shoulder?”
“Yes.”
“Each pain you cause people, little miss, is a weight, and the older you get, the more they burden you like stones until you’re bent over and near buried by them all.”
The shore was coming up, and the towboat had fully materialized on the port side pushing ten loads of heaped block coal. “Mr. Brandywine?”
But he was staring intently into Lily’s sharp blue eyes. “Do you not see the big gray rock some lovesick fool has painted a heart on off to your right about five hundred yards?”
Sam swung his head in several quick scans of the riverbank. “I see it.”
“One hundred yards this side of it, split the difference between it and that descending tow.”
“But-”
“It’s all water in this spot, son, and this here is a boat,” he snapped. The girl’s eyes watched his own steadily, and Brandywine knew what he told her would stick. She was too smart, young as she was, for something not to stick. “Somebody has taught you it’s all right to hurt people’s feelings, to try and make them less than you are. And I’m here with my bent-down shoulders to tell you for a fact that it’s not.”
He stepped back to the wheel, slapping Sam’s hand off a spoke. “You and that child can leave now. It’s going to get busy here directly while I try not to knock all that coal back to the mine.” He pulled a long, bluesy note from the whistle, and Lily covered her ears.
A WEEK LATER above Cairo, Sam shared a table with Elsie after the last trip of the day. Her color wasn’t good, and the corners of her mouth branched with the start of wrinkles. She ate her food with a habitual motion that showed she enjoyed none of it. More than once she began a conversation by blaming him for all her troubles, saying things like, “You brought back my child, but it wasn’t the same child.” At this meal she told him, “Those people made her different. She’s not sweet. She’s less mine.”
Even Sam realized he was the worst person to talk to like this, because accusations stuck to him like beggar lice. “I’m sorry about everything,” he said this time.
She wiped her mouth with a napkin and threw it in her lap. “And August isn’t the same. He’s still using his talent, at least, but he doesn’t talk to me anymore. He used to tell me jokes, one a day, and say how much he liked to hear me laugh, and Ted used to say the same thing.”
“He’s doing well with the band. He’s off the boiler gang.”
“He’s learning, all right, but it’s as if he’s gone from kid to old man overnight.”
Nothing was good for her, everything had changed for the worse, and he could tell that no matter what happened for the rest of her life, she would blame her misfortune on the fact that a department-store floorwalker had allowed himself to be bested by a pair of back-woods thugs. He knew that event followed event, and that it was his bad luck to be first in a string of bad fortune. But once or twice some little spark of resentment flared up at her badgering, and he was tempted to ask what she and Ted were doing the moment the child was spirited away from them. How long had they been distracted while looking at men’s coats or women’s dresses while Lily was swept into a topcoat or lured away with a handful of candy? And hadn’t he begged Ted not to go after Skadlock? He tightened his finger in the handle of his cup as though he wanted to break it off.
Elsie drained her coffee. “You look like you have something to say, Lucky.”
He started to open his mouth, his shoulders trembling with the burden of her accusations. “I’ve got to move on,” he said. “I’ve got to replace about fifty lightbulbs.” He pushed through a door out onto the deck and stood there watching dark water sluice by. What good would it have done to have said anything? At worst it would’ve taken away the balm of blaming him for everything, making her look to herself, and most people never think to blame themselves until they’re old and have time for thousands of second thoughts.
