The River Queen (23 page)

As we move past the lock and dam and Quincy isn't far, Jerry and I pause on the bow, just gazing at the river. We are silent for a few moments and then I ask Jerry what scuppers are. “Scuppers,” I say. “You used the word this morning. You told Tom to push the dead bugs out of the scuppers.”

Jerry nods, remembering. “It's those holes in the gunwales,” he says. “They're so you can swab the deck. Rinse it off and the water will go out. You know you can put scupper valves on so that a boat doesn't take on a lot of water. I heard about a guy once who had a small commercial vessel, nice little boat he used to take people out fishing. He put scupper covers on, but he put them on backward. They ran into a storm and they took on a lot of water, but it didn't drain. They didn't know where the water was coming from and before they figured it out, they lost an engine, which can happen if you get an engine soaked. And then the boat broached and then—” Jerry makes a whistling sound through his teeth and a hand motion which seems to indicate a boat going down.

“And then?”

“Two people drowned. Just a little mistake, but that's what can happen if you do something wrong. You don't even have time to bend over and kiss the ground.”

29

W
HEN
I was young, my mother had a passion for Abraham Lincoln. She was proud of the fact that the president who freed the slaves came from her home state of Illinois. I don't remember my mother reading that much literature when I was a girl, but she had shelves and shelves of books on Lincoln. Biographies, historical accounts, his speeches and writings. She was actually a bit of a Lincoln scholar, definitely a buff. She used to say if television existed during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he would never have been elected because he was ugly and had a high, squeaky voice.

Later, for mysterious reasons, her affections for powerful men switched to such role models as O. J. Simpson and William Kennedy Smith, but in my formative years it was Lincoln who attracted her. My parents were actually married on the same date as Lincoln was assassinated—a fact that, despite my mother's interest in the president from Illinois, was perhaps lost on them, but not on me.

When I was ten or so and my brother seven or eight, our mother took us to Springfield, Illinois. We saw the Lincoln museum, the capital building, the log cabin where Abe was said to have lived. I recall that log cabin. How it seemed so tiny for a man who grew to be so big in every sense of the word. My mother was quick to point out that such greatness came from such modest beginnings. We paused before the table where Lincoln as a young student read by candlelight late into the night.

My mother was a progressive in her politics. This was one of the many ways she and my father differed. He was a lifelong conservative (he and I fought bitterly during the Vietnam War years), though he voted for Clinton and Kerry before he died. But my mother espoused liberal causes, even if she did not exactly live by them in her own life.

Once, though, after the Chicago riots of 1968, she accosted a group of Weathermen at a lunch counter. She asked them how many people were members of their organization and they gave her a rather small number. Then she asked how many people rioted during the Democratic convention and they gave her a much larger number. “Oh, just like my synagogue,” she told the scruffy crew of boys as she paid for her cup of coffee and sandwich. “Nobody pays dues, but everyone shows up for the holidays.” The only time I ever saw her weep over anyone was when John F. Kennedy was killed. And she always forgave Bill Clinton his sins, which she considered “nobody's business but his own.”

Though I cannot say that my relationship with my mother has ever been uncomplicated, she always emphasized reading, learning, knowledge of the world. Not that she was a big reader, but I was. As a girl I read everything I could get my hands on. When I was reading a book I truly loved, my mother let me stay home from school. She wrote letters to my teachers saying I was ill and needed to stay in bed. At least the latter part was true. I finished
Little Women, Jane Eyre,
and
Gone With the Wind
in this way. When I returned to school and the nurse asked how I was feeling, I had to remember to lie.

We leave the main channel and sail up a tight canal past Bay Island. Egrets line the banks as we make our way to the Quincy Bay Small Boat Harbor, where we tie up at the courtesy dock. Tom and Jerry opt for a long lunch at the marina restaurant, but I want to see the town.

I stroll through Kessler's Park along the river up to the town square. In the shade of tall trees I stand before the statue of Stephen A. Douglas. It was here that they had their sixth debate. In a tone filled with irony and intelligence, Lincoln drove home his legal arguments against slavery and stated as he would so many times that the Constitution of the United States declares that all men are created equal.

I have to admit that Quincy is, as the drunken people on the boat said the night before, a nice town. It is true that its main street is spelled Maine Street (only later do I realize that Vermont and New Hampshire precede it). The dresses on display in the shop windows are circa 1950 and even then I'm not sure my mother would have worn them, but the town square is lovely and I enjoy the shade. I'm standing beneath the trees, wondering if my father ever stood here. And where he might have lived and worked.

I am not on some secret discovery, some mystery tour. I do not expect to unearth anything I didn't know. I doubt that he had a clandestine past or lived another life, though he played his personal feelings close to the vest. I just would like to walk in his steps one more time and perhaps better understand a person I'm not sure I really knew.

Two elderly women are sitting on a park bench and for some reason I think they might know. “Excuse me,” I ask. They look identical as if they must be sisters. “But do either of you know where an old department store might have been?”

“Oh maybe you mean the old Carson Pirie store?”

“I think it was over there on the corner of Fifth.”

The other shakes her head. “I'm not sure it was.”

“Well, it was definitely on a corner nearby.”

Then the younger one says, “You should go over to the library. You know, they have a local history room. Maybe you can find out something there.…”

I head along Maine, then down Sixth until I find the library. When I walk into the library, I am struck by the coolness inside. Air conditioning. I've been in the heat and elements for days. My skin is bronzed. I am wearing no makeup. I am filthy, sweating, and I've been more or less in the same clothes, not to mention underwear, for days. Suddenly I find myself in a room full of people in ironed blouses, crisp linen shorts. They have pedicures and shaved legs.

I am feeling like a derelict and must look the part as I ask the librarian if someone can help me with some Quincy, Illinois, history. She tells me that Iris Nelson is the librarian who works in the historic section and points through some double glass doors.

Iris Nelson is shelving some old phone books in the historic section of the library. She's an attractive blond woman, wearing a salmon-colored blouse and beige slacks. I'm in baggy pants, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. I tell her that my dad lived in Quincy and may have worked at Carson Pirie Scott. I want to see if there is any record. Iris begins to take down telephone books and census reports from the early 1920s. But I am fixated on her manicure. As she sits across the table from me, I stare at her nails—perfectly trimmed, painted a shade of salmon pink to match her blouse. Now I do feel like someone who has just gotten off the boat, which, of course, I have.

We can't find my father's name in the resident census or employers' directories, but I tell Iris that I am interested in the history of Quincy and Hannibal. She starts talking about Illinois as a free state and how Missouri came into the Union as a slave state. Iris sits down. “You know,” she says, “the trailhead for the Underground Railroad was here in Quincy. There is a great abolitionist tradition in this town.”

I recall my high school history days and some of the things my mother taught me. Illinois, which had been part of the Northwest Territory, which included Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, became a state in 1818. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery in the territory or in the states that were eventually formed as a result of it. While Illinois had seen some slavery under the French and British rule, it would soon die out. It would continue in some way in the form of “indentured servitude.” But basically by 1839 the Illinois prairie was populated by farmers and artisans who had not practiced slavery in thirty years. Free people throughout Illinois worked for wages and liberal-minded settlers came from all over the continent to live in Illinois.

But Missouri was another story and its history is diametrically opposed to its neighbor across the river. Missouri was part of the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson had bought from France for fifteen million dollars. Under the French and Spanish, slavery had been allowed in the territory and it was deeply entrenched. When Missouri sought to become a state in 1817, it asked to enter as a slave state. However, this would have upset the balance between free and slave states. After much debate in Congress, the Missouri Compromise was reached. Missouri was admitted as a slave state and the northern portion of Massachusetts was carved out to become the free state of Maine.

From their beginnings Illinois was a free state and Missouri a slave state and what separated them was a short mile of river. No other state this far north was a slave state and Missouri essentially became an island of slavery in an otherwise free territory. As Iris Nelson is explaining to me about Quincy's role in the Underground Railroad, I'm thinking about
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and Jim, the runaway slave. At one point in the novel Huck considers bringing Jim across the river, but then makes some excuse. The bounty hunters might catch Huck this way. But in truth, as Iris explains it to me, many slaves made their way from Missouri to the start of the Underground Railroad in Quincy in this way. It would have been a sensible thing for Huck to try.

“So,” I ask Iris, “why didn't Huck just bring Jim across the river? It would just be a mile, right, and he'd reach freedom?”

Iris gives me a knowing smile. “Right. But then Mark Twain wouldn't have had a story to tell, would he?”

After an hour or so I leave the library. I learned nothing about my father's presence here, but I did learn some things about Mark Twain and slavery in Missouri. Now my idea of going to Cairo on the
River Queen
feels tainted. As I walk back into town, it's boiling hot and I'm dying for an iced coffee, but nothing is open. I head back toward the river.

We push on into the hot dry heat of the late afternoon. There's twenty river miles and one lock and dam between Quincy and Hannibal and Jerry wants to make it before dark. As we head south, Jerry is poring over our maps. It's broad daylight so it can't be that he's worried about shoals or getting lost. “What is it, Jer?” I ask. “What're you looking for?”

“I'm looking for that island your dad told you about.” The island. I'd almost forgotten that it would be between Quincy and Hannibal. But Jerry remembered. Now I'm looking too. Somewhere in this stretch of twenty miles is the island my father visited with his friends. I want to know its name. I want to know where it is. I wish I could call him and ask.

I shake my head. “It's all right,” I tell Jerry. “We can't really know, can we?”

And Jerry nods, agreeing with me. “Nope,” he says, a resigned sound to his voice, “I guess we can't.”

HANNIBAL

30

“Y
OU KNOW
,” my father began, “the river is different up here than it is in Hannibal.” I'd taken him out to breakfast at Heinemann's in Whitefish Bay in Wisconsin. My father loved breakfast and I was glad to have him alone. My mother was jealous of the attention he always received. It made her angry when we'd sit and talk to him, and she believed, perhaps rightly so, that we were ignoring her. But, as my father liked to say, you couldn't get a word in “edgewise” if she was around.

That morning my father was all dressed up in a brown camel coat, brown fedora, tweed jacket, and silk tie. He was cold even though it was spring. At that time in his life, he was always cold.

We both ordered scrambled eggs, hash browns, crisp, and wheat toast. He was living dangerously and asked for a glass of fresh squeezed juice. “I'm going to be 103 years old,” he told the waitress, and she almost fell on the floor.

“I'm going to squeeze that orange juice myself,” she said and she went to pay special attention to our order. I was asking him about the river. It didn't take much prodding. He started talking to me about Hannibal. “In Hannibal you can see across it. Up north here there's all these islands. You don't even know where the other side is. You know I lived in Hannibal, don't you?”

“Yes, of course, I know.” He told me about living in Hannibal a dozen times. In fact he's told all of his stories dozens of times and it seemed as if he'd reached the end of the line with no more to tell. I braced myself for a rerun.

“Well, I lived in Hannibal. Right next to the house Mark Twain lived in. He'd been dead, oh, ten years when I lived there, and I don't think he'd been back to Hannibal in twenty, but they still remembered him. You know why they called him Mark Twain, right?”

“It's the pilot's cry when they're marking the depths…”

“That's right. His real name was Samuel Clemens.” Of course I knew all of this. I knew that Samuel Clemens tried out many pseudonyms before he landed on the one that became his signature. “See, if you listen, you learn. Anyway, his house wasn't any bigger than four booths in this restaurant.”