The River Rose (20 page)

"So you did," he agreed. "Never in my life did I expect to meet a woman that likes beef better than cake. You're an original, Jeanne, and you're delightful."

They talked through the entire meal, sometimes interrupting each other, and with much laughter. The conversation ranged from cotton to books to music to fabrics, as Jeanne told George how Marvel couldn't wear wool. They spoke of favorite nature scenes, of streams and hills and sunsets and forests. George told her about the exciting sprawling city of New York, and she told him of places and people she'd seen on the river.

"I think it was the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen," Jeanne said dreamily. "There at Widow Eames' landing. It was just me and my father and mother, sitting outside on the main deck. The sun was crimson, and the sky was purple and royal blue and the river was dark and mysterious and quiet. We didn't say anything for an hour, as we watched." She sighed deeply. "It was the last sunset I ever saw with my mother and father."

He leaned close to her, then slowly reached up and touched her hair. He took a thick shiny curl between his two fingers and savored the feel of it. "Your hair is lovely, Jeanne, and a man could get lost in your eyes."

George Masters had known many women, but he had never seen one exactly like her. He considered her, noting that she was shapely and her eyes mirrored some sort of wisdom he was not accustomed to seeing in women. She was looking at him silently, and a woman's silence, George knew, could mean many things. He was not sure what it meant in her, for she was mysterious to him. He felt a slow run of excitement as if he were on the edge of a discovery.

She had courage, simplicity, and a tremendous capacity for emotion, he knew. She wasn't smiling at that moment but the thought of a smile hovered around her mouth. Her nearness suddenly sent off shocks within him and carefully and slowly he reached out and brought her forward and kissed her. She didn't resist; she yielded to him. He felt some sort of wild sweetness that was here, something that he had not found in any other woman. He had felt desire before, but this was a deeper feeling, a need in him that had never been satisfied. He thought that this, that she, might take the last loneliness and incompleteness from him. Finally, after years of searching, George Masters knew love.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

A soft knock, and then silence. Jeanne sat up in bed, startled, and looked around with wild eyes. She was in the cabin, her cabin, the captain's cabin on the
Helena Rose
. She still hadn't gotten accustomed to her new home. Cold gray light came in the eastern windows, and Jeanne knew it was dawn on the day of the first run of the
Helena Rose.

Beside her Marvel stirred, then peeped over the three quilts covering the bed. "That's Roberty. He's funny, he just knocks and runs away."

"He's just shy," Jeanne said, climbing out of bed and going to the door. Outside, as usual, was a copper kettle full of steaming water and a breakfast tray holding biscuits, a wedge of cheese, link sausages, boiled eggs, and a tin coffeepot with the delicious aroma of fresh coffee rising from it. Jeanne was pleasantly surprised to see the
Memphis Appeal
from the last two days rolled up neatly on the side of the tray. "Someone's brought us the newspaper," she said.

Marvel sat up and rubbed her eyes. "Mr. Clint bought them for us. I told him how much we liked reading newspapers, and when he went to the Post Office yesterday he bought those."

"That was nice of him. How did everything go yesterday, Marvel? Did you have a good day?"

"Oh, yes. I did my daily reader and spelling, and then we had dinner and it was so good, it was ham sammiches. Me and Roberty made our own, and—"

"Roberty and I."

"Roberty and I made our own and we had pickles. Then I was down in the boiler room, I mean the firebox, playing with Mrs. Topp and Avaymaria, and Ezra watched me to make sure I didn't get into no nonsense. Then some men were yelling outside and Mr. Clint and Mr. Vince went outside and yelled back at them. Then a man came and talked an awful lot about coal—"

"Just a minute," Jeanne interrupted. "What men were yelling outside?"

"I don't know," Marvel answered. "Mr. Clint said it was nothing a fine lady needed to hear about, and I guess he meant me 'cause I was the only lady there. Can I have a sausage?"

"May I have a sausage, and you can just get yourself up here to the table and eat a proper breakfast," Jeanne said. "I'm sorry, Marvel, but this is a very important day, so I'm going to hurry and get dressed and go talk to Mr. Hardin. When you've finished and you get dressed, you may come down to the main cargo deck for awhile before you start your lessons."

Jeanne had bought new clothes with some of her inherited money. She was a sensible woman, and knew that the frilled, beribboned, ruffled, hoop-skirted dresses that fashionable women wore would never do to pilot a riverboat, so she had bought plain gathered skirts and plain white blouses. Hurriedly she pulled on a dark blue skirt and blouse, tied up her hair in a matching blue ribbon, and grabbed her new blue shawl. When she went outside, the first pale yellow rays of the sun were tentatively creeping out behind the city.

She came into the boiler room, and Ezra looked up from loading one of the furnaces. "G'mornin', Cap'n."

"Good morning, Ezra. Has Mr. Hardin come down yet?"

"Oh, yes'm. He's back in the engine room, with Vince, checking everything over last minute."

Clint came out then, wiping his hands on a rag. "Good morning, Captain Jeanne. First run, first day! The
Rose
is rarin' to go."

"Everything is all right then? You're sure?" Jeanne asked anxiously.

"Yes ma'am, that engine is running so smooth she hums a tune. And yesterday I talked to our coal shipper, the wagons should be here any minute now, and Vinnie's already got the roustabouts lined up to help us load."

"Good. What about the mail?"

"I went to visit the postmaster yesterday, just to make sure we were all set. The mail cart will be here before eight o'clock."

Jeanne nodded. "It seems that you have everything well in hand, Mr. Hardin. I'm going on up to the wheelhouse, call me if you need me." She went up to the pilothouse, pulled out a chart, and sat down on the bench. She studied the chart for a long time, muttering to herself. After a while she leaned back, closed her eyes, and prayed: "Dearest Lord Jesus, help me, please. Help me remember, help me know, help me be strong and sure." With her eyes closed and whispering prayers, visions of the little river, and of her father standing at the wheel, rose in her mind.

WITHIN TWO HOURS THE
Rose
was carrying a full load of coal and three sizable sacks of mail. Clint came into the pilothouse, and Jeanne saw with dismay that he was literally covered in coal dust. In the morning sun she could see little puffs floating in the air from his shirt. His face was black, his hair was sooty, but Jeanne noticed with surprise that his hands were clean. "We're all ready, Captain," he said. "She's steaming, she's loaded, and she's ready to go."

"Did you load coal? I thought you had roustabouts," Jeanne said.

"Yeah, well, I'm a man in a hurry. Got a beautiful lady waiting on me. Uh—I mean the
Rose
, not you. Not that you're not beautiful, but—"

"Never mind, Mr. Hardin," Jeanne said dryly. "I know what you mean. All right, go on below, I'm ready here."

He opened the pilothouse door, then turned and asked, "You are all right, aren't you, Jeanne? You don't need anything? Or want to discuss anything?"

"No, thank you," she said coolly. "I'm fine."

"Okay. If you need anything, just holler. You know," he said, pointing to the speaking tube. Then he left.

In a few minutes the lazy wisps of steam coming from the
Rose'
s 'scape pipes turned into shrieking columns of wet steam, the smoke from the stacks billowed, and then she was on her way.

Eight days later Jeanne jauntily sounded the steam whistle, a loud alto shriek, and rang the Big Bell, the great brass one mounted on the hurricane deck, as they pulled back into Memphis. Jeanne even showed off a bit, pulling hard and fast very close to the docks before sounding the engine room bell for All Stop. The
Helena Rose
, like the trim lady that she was, surged proudly until she was checked, and then she came to a gentle rolling halt.

Within a few moments Jeanne heard shouts from the main deck and the creaks of the great capstan turning as Vince and Ezra lowered the landing stages. She stood, staring ahead without seeing, the triumphant smile fading. Jeanne took a deep shuddering breath, then had to make herself loosen the death grip she had on the pilot's wheel. Her shoulders sagged, her knees trembled, and like an old woman she took the three steps back to the bench and collapsed on it. "Thank you, God," she said wearily. "Thank you, God."

Thirty minutes later George Masters was there, and he admitted to Jeanne that he was paying an errand boy to keep a lookout for when the
Rose
docked, and to run to the Gayoso to alert him. The next night he took her and Marvel to the Courtier Restaurant. Then the
Rose
left for her second run, loaded with textiles and canvas and five hundred windows that gave Jeanne nightmares worrying about breaking them before they unloaded them in Little Rock. They had one more run before bleak January slipped into the first bright days of February. When Jeanne and Clint balanced the books for January, the
Helena Rose
had made a clear profit of three hundred and forty-two dollars.

"One hundred and seventy-one dollars for one month," Jeanne marveled. "At the Gayoso I made fourteen dollars and forty cents a month."

"Told you so," Clint said, grinning crookedly.

"Told me so what?"

"Told you so everything," he replied.

IN JUST THREE TRIPS
,
life had settled into a regular routine on the
Helena Rose
. Jeanne was in the pilothouse all day, of course. Marvel studied her
McGuffey's Pictoral Primer
and
First Reader
in the mornings. At first she had stayed in the cabin alone, but after a few days she began taking her books and dolls down to the boiler room. Ezra had made her a little seat out of three crackerboxes, and a few days after Ezra had made her makeshift chair, Clint showed up with a lavish embroidered brioche cushion for it. It was wildly out of place in a riverboat's boiler room—as was Marvel herself—but she loved it, and took it to the cabin with her every night for Avaymaria to sit on. Roberty cleaned Marvel's little corner of the firebox, and her chair, twice a day with ammonium chloride. Vinnie rasped, "That two square feet of this boat's clean enough to serve a lord's luncheon on."

Roberty wasn't really much use as a crewman; he was too small. He struggled mightily to bring one single log from the deck to the firebox to feed the hungry boilers, and there were few cargoes with items small enough that he could help load and unload. After seeing him half kill himself trying to drag a fifty-pound sack of coal on board, Clint had told him, "Boy, you're gonna bust a lung trying to haul stuff like that. Now I know you want to work, and you are a good worker. But you don't have to haul wood and cargo. You help out Ezra in the galley, you keep everything so clean it's kinda embarrassing to be on such a prissy riverboat, and you help out Captain Jeanne and Marvel. So from now on you just keep on with what you're already doing and leave the wood to me and Ezra and Vinnie and the cargo to the roustabouts."