HE WAITED at the rail outside her door until Gladys returned, and then he watched the river, still broken with the passing of the last boat, shattered like his feelings. He wondered if there was a physics to one’s mistakes, a chain of reactions that ran away toward infinity like waves or a sounding whistle chasing along a watercourse for miles and miles. And what could he do but make right his mistakes when he could, or unable to do that, catch some other fellow’s mistake and fix it? Across the river one of the last packet boats serving St. Louis rang its deck bell, the heavy notes skating across the water and up the sloped and cobbled bank into the city. He watched it leave, and then Gladys came out carrying a pail.
“What time will the ambulance come for her?”
“They said daybreak.”
“Will all three of them fit into it?”
She was walking away to the stern, but stopped and turned to him. “Two. The fireman’s done crossed over.”
THE NEXT MORNING started off warm and humid. The mates and kitchen staff still able to work disinfected the cafe, mopping everything down with bleach. The ambulance came and left while Sam was swabbing under the tables. Later, he went down to the bandstand and began playing the piano. August walked in with his hands in his pockets. He was letting his hair grow and it was oiled back out of his way and tucked over his pale ears.
Lily dawdled behind him, her face still four years old, oblivious, carrying a coloring book folded over a single- row box of crayons. She opened it on a table and pulled the chair out with both hands, then kneeled on its seat to begin coloring. “I don’t have a brown,” she complained.
“Use black,” Sam told her.
August leaned against the piano. “Lucky,” he whispered, “what do you think about Mom?”
“I think she should’ve gone to the hospital a couple days ago.”
“I know. I’m scared.”
The statement froze his fingers, and he put his hands in his lap. “You saying your prayers?”
“I’ve been praying for two days straight.”
Sam closed his eyes a moment. He wasn’t August’s father, and the Wellers weren’t his responsibility. He would help Elsie as far as he could, but ultimately that wouldn’t amount to much. “You want me to go up the hill with you to see her?”
He shook his head. “I’m scared I’ll catch it and give it to Lily. The cabin boy that died wasn’t but twelve years old, and strong as a country ox.”
“Zach?”
“Yes.”
“That’s kind of scary, all right. Scary as hell.”
“The captain says we won’t go anywhere for ten days, and that’s if nobody else comes down hard with it.”
“Good practice time, sounds like.”
August sat down on the bench beside him, facing away from the keyboard. “I don’t want Lily to wind up with Uncle Bruton.” He looked over at his sister. “I’ll kidnap her myself if it comes to that.”
“Your mom’s a tough lady. She’ll pull through.”
“God, I hope so.” He slumped forward and closed his eyes.
Sam tried to remember if he had ever been that worried. When he thought of the sickness that took his first child, the baby’s trembling eyelids, his blue lips, he knew that he had.
“You go on and take a walk. Get your mind on something else.”
August stood up. “Can you watch her?”
“Well, I guess so.”
He walked forward toward the main stairs and Lily saw him go, then turned to Sam, a crayon bearing down on a page. “I’m hungry.”
The piano key cover snapped down like a fact. “Let’s get you a sandwich in the cafe.”
“It smells bad.” She pinched her nose.
“That smell is medicine to get rid of the sickness.”
“It always smells bad.”
He took her by the hand, which was sticky and soot-smudged. “We’ll wash our hands and go get a sandwich.”
“I don’t want to wash my hands.”
“Come on and let me show you how it’s done.”
BEFORE SUPPER, they left Lily with Gladys and walked to the hospital, and at the main desk, when they asked to see Elsie, the receptionist called someone on the phone. When they saw a tall nurse walk down the hall toward them, a woman with iron-gray hair and a solemn stride, when they looked at her eyes and the way she held her hands, one over another in front, when they saw her face, a face good at telling the worst, they knew Elsie was dead.
August collapsed in a chair and covered his face with his hands. Sam spoke with the nurse for a few moments, then stood staring down the long hall after her retreating steps. He remembered visiting Elsie sick in bed, and that was hard enough. He didn’t want to see her now. When he asked August if he wanted to, the boy trembled and shook his head.
“I’m scared.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, I don’t want to.”
For himself, he chose to remember her in a close-fitting gown the color of pearl, bouncing the notes of “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine” as the hundreds on the dance floor quick-stepped and the river breeze streamed through the windows and the shoreline moved past like the dreary real thing it was, the thing made of smokestacks and shabby houses and overworked souls, all gilded by Elsie’s gliding voice, her flash of blond hair, the spark of hard work showing in her song, in her eyes. He wanted to dwell in the remembering, but he was obliged instead to turn to August and pull him out of the chair. “I’m sorry, Gussie. Cry all you want.” And the boy did, against Sam’s cheap second-mate coat. After a while he walked him down the echoing hallway, trying hard to think of something to say, and in the entry, he pulled him aside and told him, “Never forget that you had her for fifteen years. A lot of kids never had anything like those fifteen years.”
Captain Stewart paid the expenses for the body to be shipped to Cincinnati. Sam went up with August and Lily, who had cried a little without understanding why. After the burial Mass, there was a family meeting, some shouting on August’s part, bitter accusations and dismissals from Ted’s brothers, quiet resignation from Elsie’s aged parents, and the result was that when Lucky got off the train days later, broke and hungry in St. Louis’s grand station, August stepped off behind him, Lily asleep in his arms.
IN MID-JUNE the boat was far north of Hannibal playing an isolated town, a place of machine shops and foundries stretching up the mountainside. The afternoon crowds were mostly families of running and screaming children, and Sam had to keep an eye on Lily to make sure she wasn’t knocked down a stairway. He played piano for the two o’clock and convinced her to sit beside him on the bench and turn pages, though he knew the music, and it didn’t matter if she turned two pages at once. Sometimes she wandered away in the middle of a song, and he’d have to play looking over his shoulder, and one time when she’d wandered out among the dancers and gotten bumped to the floor, he had to stop playing and charge out to drag her back up onto the bandstand as she bawled and rubbed her calf.
