Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 6

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Julie spoke to Shep on his first day aboard. “When are you going to teach me to crack a whip like you can?” she asked him.

Now, what would she want to crack a whip for? “Beg pardon, mam?”

“Don’t you want to teach me?”

He decided it must be an obscure pleasantry, signifying nothing. Couldn’t be anything else. “It will be a pleasure, mam,” he said, with grave courtesy: and never thought of it again. His whole intention was to remain respectfully aloof, satisfied to admire her from a distance, as a creature upon another plane. And doubtless he would have been allowed to do exactly that, had Julie been of typical raising, in some Southern plantation’s Great House.

Julie had been born in a Great House—one of two at Ash Landing; but she had been left motherless at two or three, and her father never remarried. After the loss of his wife, Felicity, Jim Sam couldn’t stand the Great House any more. He still maintained it, in pretence that it was his residence; but he lived mostly aboard his boats, keeping his daughter with him, in the charge of a most singular slave woman called Caleese. Winters Julie went to school, still in the charge of Caleese, in the time-honoured Ursuline Convent, at New Orleans. But all summer long they rode the rivers; and whether Julie knew it or not, a child with virtually the run of a great floating palace, forever opening up a new world around every bend, was probably the luckiest child on earth.

By the time Julie could walk, Felicity was keeping mostly to her bed. Here Julie was brought at dutiful intervals, to be briefly shown; but mother and daughter had no meaning for each other. As for Jim Sam, he sometimes patted his daughter’s cheek, with what he imagined was a proper fatherliness, but without actually seeing her. Then, when Julie was two and a half, a small pointless occurrence led Jim Sam to notice her for the first time. And though it didn’t amount to anything as an event, in the upshot it changed the shape of Julie’s life, and Jim Sam’s as well; and in the long run even worked out to raise hell with Shep.

Once, deep in a black night through which he had kept the wheel, Jim Sam had tried to tell what had happened, and to explain the profound effect it had had upon him. He couldn’t do it. The whole thing somehow eluded him, turning into such drivel when he talked about it that he never mentioned it again.

This thing he tried to tell, and could not, had happened as he was tying up at home, after a trip of evil exasperations. The green crew had somehow managed an unlikely fouling of the mooring lines, suitable for carrying away either paddle wheel or a rudder. Have your choice, or hold out for both. Jim Sam threw up a window in the texas, with intent to holler them all dead in a heap, but the presence of ladies on the landing baulked him. He started down to admonish the blunderers by hand.

He had not seen Caleese carry Julie aboard; but as he whirled from the window, a little face appeared around the door jamb, and said “Pee-eek!”

At this point, that one time he tried to tell it, Jim Sam suddenly felt helplessly silly; but he blundered on.... His mindless reaction, damned well fit to be tied like he was, had come out in such a yell of fury as shook the timbers. “WHAT——” He never remembered what he had started to holler. Terror transformed the baby face—he saw that plain enough—and that was the instant that knocked the wind out of Jim Sam, leaving him in a jelly. Then the child fled, too scared to squall.

Julie was in the wide-eyed stage of innocence in which almost any infant animal is appealing. “Like a little pig. Like a new-hatched egg. I mean chickling. I mean chick, damn it ... Like a baby filly,” he groped to explain it. In an absurd gesture, he bent to indicate something about a foot off the deck. “There was this little punkin-faced smile—only about so high——”

Something he could not even try to convey was the glow of happy excitement he had seen in the little face. Or rather, he saw it afterwards, in retrospect, somehow imprinted in memory, without having seen it at all in the moment it was there.

He went after her, and picked her up, trying to comfort her; and soon Julie was crying, but her face buried in his beard, and her arms around his neck. Caleese appeared and tried to take her, but Jim Sam carried his baby around the boat for an hour. “It’s a wonder I didn’t bust out bawling myself,” he lamely trailed off. “I don’t reckon I’ll ever get it out of my damned head. That little face ...” He shut up, feeling ridiculous. Worst mushhead carryings-on he ever heard tell. No way to explain such a damned thing, apparently, without you lived it yourself. But one thing, there, was true. Even after he heard how foolish it sounded, as he told it, it stuck forever in his mind. It made a rebuff to his child impossible, though she glued on to him at every opportunity, worshipping him as if he were God.

She was now eighteen, two years beyond the marriageable age for Southern belles, and why she wasn’t married by this time was a mystery to Shep, until he knew Jim Sam better. Probably no father ever sees a young man good enough to marry his daughter, and Jim Sam Delorme was in a better position than most to put off losing his daughter to a nincompoop. But his days of resistance were numbered—he could see it himself; and this year he had retreated to the smaller, slower, less luxurious boats of his Missouri River Line for a possible last stand. These carried more freight than passengers, and the callow squirts (as Jim Sam saw them) of the Delta aristocracy never rode them at all. Most of the time Shep Daniels was the only young bachelor aboard.

He steered clear of Julie the rest of that first day, and part of another, but from there on he could find no way to manage it without seeming openly rude. Julie did not know he was acting under instructions—she would have laughed at the whole idea if she had. She supposed him to be absurdly shy. After all those summers on the packets she knew how to put even a Kentucky mule-boy at his ease; and now she went to work on him.

“I don’t believe you remember me at all,” she began.

“Mam?”

“A long time ago—I must have been only about twelve years old—you used to make this run once in a while with your father. Only you stayed down in the stockpens the whole while. Slept in the bedding straw apparently. I used to come down and try to talk to you, but you paid me no mind. You don’t remember that, do you?”

“Well—kind of—I guess.”

“I used to think you were wonderful. It took Caleese half the winter to break me of walking just like you did.”

“Aw, now, wait a minute!”

“Here—I’ll show you. This is exactly the way you walked then.” She took a turn on the deck in front of him, taking great wide-lurching, oopsy-daisy strides, arms swinging stiff from the shoulders except when she stopped, bent-kneed and with a stupid look, to cock her head and scratch it. Shep stared blank-faced for a moment before he decided it was all right for him to laugh.

“Before that,” Julie said, “Caleese had to break me of walking like my father. Like this——” She stuck out both her stomach and her jaw, folded her hands behind her, and stamped along the deck high-kneed, like a hackney. “Now do you believe me?”

“I believe every word you say,” he promised her.

“See you remember that.”

Captain Delorme watched Shep sharply for a few days, but apparently decided he was harmless, at least under the stony eyes of the strange, tall, gaunt Caleese. Shep was always puzzled by Caleese, for he had never seen any other slave woman anything like her. The Delormes probably knew where she came from, but nobody else seemed to know what her past had been. She must have been a quadroon, or perhaps an octoroon, for she was almost straight-haired and no darker than a new saddle. She spoke, besides English, French, Spanish, and Gullah; but only in the ominous-sounding Gullah, which is full of African fragments, could Shep hear anything of the Negro in her speech. Being assigned to Julie, she ordinarily would have been called Mammy, but her high-bridged nose, without prominence of chin, gave her a hawklike, forbidding look, and this, along with something baleful in her green-grey eyes, made the term preposterous. She preferred to be called Tia Caleese, tia meaning aunt in Spanish, and sometimes identified herself as Julie’s duenna. The rest of the slaves were afraid of her.

Caleese was in the background, silent but forever lurking, wherever Julie might be, and for a while Shep was bothered by this faintly spooky, black-garbed presence. But not Julie; she wasn’t inhibited by it in the least.

“You’re much improved,” she told Shep. “How come I was so invisible when you were a mule-boy? You seem to see me all right, now.”

“Well, shucks, heck, you’re a girl, now.”

“What did you think I was before, a small boy?”

“Well—about the same thing, virtually.”

“No difference at all between a girl and a small boy, huh?”

“Well ... to all purposes ... and speakin’ in reference to the top-minnow stage ... is there?”

“I only know what you tell me about these things,” she said. “And now I come to think of it, I have some questions to ask.”

Oh, no, you don’t. Not again. He had been watching Caleese out of the corner of his eye, to see if she would interfere with this drift, but she seemed to brood upon distances. “Thought I heard a mule bust loose, down below,” he said. He had already found out that Julie loved to upset him with remarks that would not have bothered him if any other girl had made them but that shocked and scandalised him coming from her. He started for the main deck stairs, in shameless retreat.

Julie giggled. “You come back here! I’ll be good, now. You’re exactly the colour of a ripe strawberry—you know that, don’t you? It’s very becoming.”

“What was the question?” he demanded.

“Well ... I know young ladies aren’t supposed to ask things like this. But— What makes a duck float?”

Jackassed again, by God. I don’t know how she does it. “I ought to paddle you!” he told her.

“I know.”

Sometimes, when he wasn’t with Julie, he worried about his father, and the stickery thing there was that he couldn’t figure out why. Looking back, it sifted down to nothing but a look in the old man’s eyes. If Pap’s going to leave me on the hook, he at least might give me something to get my teeth into, he thought unreasonably. Never saw that look before, short of a death in the family. We lose mules all the time. Most years come out bad in one place, good in another. This year it happens to be Missouri, that’s all. By God, if something’s happened to Trapper, and he’s keeping it from me, I’m going to murder him, so help me. Hell, nothing ever happens to Trapper. Trapper happens to other people. I’m just fidgety....

She stood close in front of him, and lightly touched his cheeks with the fingers of both hands. “Why don’t you grow a nice big beard? Like my father’s?”

“How’d you know us apart?”

“I’d know.”

The position in which she stood made it inevitable that his hands should go around her waist, but she squirmed away.

“Let go. Go put your grimy hands on Caleese—she’ll be here any sec.” He was surprised into sneaking a quick look at his hands, to see if they actually were grimy—they had so often been so. She smiled at that, but made her next words sound innocent.

“I don’t have any corsets on,” she explained.

Corsets! Mentioned to a man? The word alone would have brought a shriek of horror from the Old Ladies’ Deckchair Brigade, which would have considered her to be discussing the exploration of her anatomy. And the devil of it was, that was about it. The absence of her customary whalebone armour had made her seem to his hands as if she had nothing on at all. “What kind of iron man do you think I am?”

“That’s just what I can’t make out.”

And there he stood, knocked speechless again, by a bit of nonsense that could not have ruffled him in the slightest coming from any other girl on earth.

I wonder where Pap is. The telegraph runs down as far as Rolla. Wouldn’t you think he’d let me know what’s happening down there? No. Why should he? Never did it before. Doesn’t matter a damn where he is; nothing I can do about it from up here, anyway. I sure don’t know what keeps fretting me like this....

Lazily the Tealwing paddled up the current, taking two weeks to make Jefferson City, the little tree-shaded, country-town capital of Missouri, which most of the fast Delorme packets would have made from St. Louis in three days. Shep had time to get used to the haunting shadow of Caleese. She seemed to serve chiefly as a reassurance to Jim Sam, rather than any sort of barrier, and thus was a necessary element in the circumstance that Shep and Julie were now much together, at a time when he could never have tracked manure across the Delormes’ pillared portico at all. He got used to his new clothes except for the sleeves, which continued to seem too long when he stood up and too short when he sat down.

And he got used to Julie, who knew how to keep him at ease when she felt like it, which was most of the time. If she had caught him picking his nose, she would probably have been game to pick her own, to cover up for him. Flustering him was so easy for her that the temptation to turn him strawberry-coloured, at virtually the snap of her fingers, was sometimes irresistible; but even these sorties had the advantage of giving their relationship a frisky sense of intimacy, unjustified by length of acquaintance. And presently it began to dawn on Shep how sorry he would be when this trip was done.

Then, at Jefferson City, Shep’s brother appeared on the landing, all unexpected, and rode aboard; and he brought with him more puzzlement in one hunk than Shep had tripped over before in his life.