THE GREAT STEAMBOAT RACE Page 2

  “That settles it,” his cousin said with glee. “There’s bound to be a race. And such a race, mon vieux, as never yet enlivened the monotony of what you’re pleased to call the Father of Waters. The Atchafalaya is off to collect the horns of the White, so she will also acquire the Princess’s and the Shotwell’s. What force on earth or in heaven will stop Miles Parbury from coveting a bunch of trophies like that? And Drew’s trespassing in his regular trade!”

  “I can think of one thing that might stand in his way,” said the reporter dryly.

  “Oh!”—with a dismissive wave. “You know whose tune Cato Woodley dances to—who better? So does our mysterious Hamish Gordon, for all he conjured up the funds to build the new boat. She is very fast, you know: the Nonpareil.”

  “Yes, very fast,” said the reporter, and slapped his telescope shut with a plunging noise before returning it to the tubular leather case that hung at his belt. The Atchafalaya was already into Greenville Bend.

  THE DEATH OF THE NONPAREIL

  30TH APRIL 1863

  “To a white officer who counseled magnanimity toward the rebels, one Negro soldier explained:

  “ ‘O lieutenant! its very well for you to talk; you can afford to: you haven’t got anything partic’lar against them folks. Your back ain’t cut up as mine is. You ain’t heard screamin’ wimmin, and seen the blood run out at every lick, just ‘cause a woman wouldn’t leave her husband and sleep with the overseer. They never done you such things; but I could kill ‘em easy,—children, wimmin, and all.’”

  —John W. Blassingame,

  Black New Orleans

  This amazing Mississippi!—huge, brown-green, sluggish yet fretful, more akin to organism and process than to a mere feature in landscape, not just because of its length and its width and its changeability, but because of its power over people…

  Gazing at it, Captain Miles Parbury often found hovering in his mind a heathen sense of sympathy for savages who worshiped trees and storms. This river of rivers (and in his mind the of struck echoes: Song of Songs, King of Kings!), this colossal snake like the one which—so said Lyceum lecturers—the ancient Norse had pictured as engirdling the world, exhibited caprice. It was infinitely easy to mistake that for malice. Seeing a town stranded when the river took a notion to create a cutoff—a town that perhaps you yourself had godfathered by carrying its citizens-to-be upstream and bringing the saws and axes, the planes and hammers and nails they needed to erect their homes, amputated suddenly from the commerce it relied on and becoming gangrened—or meeting it when it drifted toward you piece by piece, here scraps of flotsam which could be fended off by deckhands wielding poles, there an entire cabin which obliged oncoming steamers to run aground until the danger was past and the channel clear… that was what made the river’s intolerance of humans credible.

  And who should sense it more keenly than Miles Joseph Parbury?

  His family had been better off than their neighbors. Without being rich, they were “comfortable.” They had their own landing stage where steamers called with provisions like tea and coffee and necessaries such as cloth and gunpowder, while their frame house boasted a second storey that was more than just an attic. Additionally they could afford a hired hand.

  But not a slave. Too risky an investment.

  With such advantages, it was natural they should talk in terms of sending their youngest son Miles away to school, instead of being educated by his parents and the circuit minister.

  From infancy, however, the boy stammered—a sign that his gifts were not preacherly. He grew tall and beanpole-lean. At twelve he overtopped his father, and though there was little muscle on his frame he had skills enough to help in the building of a barn designed to hold a full year’s crops.

  And at fourteen he had awakened from dismal exhausted slumber following a night of storms and watched it, containing all they had contrived to store, float off in an unfamiliar waste, disgustingly flat, with the repulsive sheen of a new-flayed hide. They were luckier than some nearby families; their house was on ground just high enough not to wash away. Nonetheless much hunger followed the flooding, and his father took to drink and blasphemy.

  Therefore at fifteen Miles ran away and rode a timber raft to New Orleans, head full of adolescent dreams about his (middle) namesake. Success proved elusive; however, he was intelligent, and the fact that his beard was growing early enabled him to pass for older than his age. He found jobs along the waterfront, and lived frugally, and after a couple of years went home with riches in his poke—a hundred dollars scrimped by nickels at a time.

  Only on his return there was no sign of the wooden stage he had so often helped to mend after high water, nor of the house beyond. Nothing was to be found but level mud and the river following a different course, and he could get no word of his kin from the neighbors, save a grudging rumor that most likely they had drowned.

  He cursed awhile, and when he ran out of objurgations he set his lantern jaw and went to sign on as a pilot’s cub, for of all the people he had met or heard of none but the steamboat pilots tamed the Mississippi. It was precarious, like taming lions; still, it was the best there was.

  Since then he had weathered countless setbacks while working his way up to sole ownership of one of the finest boats on the river. Yet he had never felt such a sense of menace as today.

  The water posed no extraordinary threat. It was normal that the swollen current should undercut the banks and turn loose trees to sink or swim. If they swam they could smash the buckets off a steamer’s wheel; if the sank they became snags or sawyers, according to whether they lay up- or downstream, and could open a hull like a knife spilling the guts of a butchered hog. True, they were more numerous this year than he had ever known them, but that was because since the outbreak of war snagboats had been treated as military targets. Those that had not been sent to the bottom had been withdrawn.

  Having become a master pilot before achieving captaincy of his own boat, Parbury was skilled enough to read the ripple written on the surface by a shoal or a bar or the embryo of a towhead, yet not too proud to learn what had been forced on him the past couple of years, new inscriptions due to sunken barges which towboats had abandoned.

  Not to mention casualties of war. Their traces were likewise novel.

  Until now, however, he had never realized how much he owed to “Uncle Sam’s toothpullers,” which had been drawing the worst of the river’s fangs since long before he set foot in a pilothouse.

  Silently he offered thanks for the eyesight which had remained keen enough to let him locate the deep channel in all this waste of water without spectacles, even. Most of his friends and colleagues, including many younger than himself, were obliged to resort constantly to telescopes.

  Friends…?

  His mind wandered, in a fashion he would never tolerate were a steamboat to act that way. Among those he had called friends were several he would not see again until the war was over, and among those there were a handful he would not wish to meet, whichever way the Lord decreed that victory should smile, for they had taken the opposing side.

  Or, worst of all, as though they could usurp the status reserved by the Creator for natural, impersonal forces—like this river: neither side.

  Creeping up on him unbidden, that thought focused the bitter truth about the special nature of this voyage. It was foolish to imagine that the river might be an enemy. He had succumbed to that idea for a while, forgivably; years of experience had taught him better. Enemy was a way of saying human.

  Only another person could make plans to kill you.

  The Mississippi, then—so Miles Parbury had concluded after countless hours alone in pilothouses like this one, standing a routine watch with the leather bench behind him innocent of pilots “looking at the river,” his knowledge of the world confined to what could be discerned through smeared glass, his communication with it limited to the speaking tube on the breastboard, his control over events shrunk to his grip on a wheel so hu
ge it was half concealed even from himself and the curt signals he could issue by tugging the brass knobs on the bell ropes—this river was a risk but not a menace.

  On the other hand…

  Repulsed four times in his attempt to capture Vicksburg, the Northern general Ulysses Grant had been reported as abandoning his Memphis base and moving down the west bank. Whether he had been instructed to select another target, or whether he planned to cut back and tackle the city from a different direction, was unclear. Either way, Vicksburg needed reinforcements and supplies.

  Some of each were carried by the Nonpareil, reduced to a shabby parody of her former self. Cotton bales were stacked along her guards and decks: so had often been the case before, but this trip they were not for sale at journey’s end. Instead, they were on board because those dense masses of fiber offered cheap and light protection against bullets. The main burden under which her engines labored despite being—to quote her chief engineer Hiram Burge, whom the repetition of this phrase seemed to afford private satisfaction—“overdue” pause “for overhaul,” consisted in men wearing gray uniforms, a few with Sharps and most with Springfield rifles, plus their ammunition and a batch of rations. Sacks of cornmeal and rice, sides of bacon, jugs of whiskey and rum reserved (so claimed the manifest) for medicinal use, lay higgledy-piggledy among sealed cartons containing paper money that assured the bearer of specie when the bills were presented at the Bank of the Confederate States of America.

  Additionally her sides were hung with the flimsy armor, thanks to which she and other conscript Mississippi steamers had been baptized “tinclads.”

  There was little in the life of Miles Parbury that he could love. True, he had married—but he came to the wedding naked of relations, while his wife boasted a family large enough to fill the bride-side of the church. A few of his colleagues from the river had to trim the list. True, also, he now had a son, but it would be years yet before there was anything for him to share with young James comparable to what he had shared with his father and brothers.

  And sometimes he could not quite work out what had brought him to marry his wife, or her to accept him.

  His boat, though: this marvelous creation that could outwit the river-serpent! He had designed this Nonpareil—and her predecessor too, but she had not belonged to him; not until she was three years old had she paid off the loans that financed her.

  This one, by contrast…! She was all his, exclusively and absolutely. Devised by him, invented, made real, and set afloat without a debt to weigh her down.

  Until…

  This puzzled him. Often he lay restless into the small hours trying to make sense of that one key decision: to put her at the disposal of the Confederate forces. His attachment to the Southern cause was founded on no love of slavery, for he shared the opinion held by most steamboaters, to the effect that freemen made more economic deckcrew because when they fell sick they could be discharged at no great cost, whereas a slave had to be paid for. No more had any abstract principle of states’ rights persuaded him. In strictest truth he did not have a reason, for to him this war was elemental, like the river’s abolition of a city. He would as soon have known how to defy such process as a thunderstorm. To be told it was the sum and consequence of countless human choices signified nothing. Reason did not touch Miles Parbury on that level; it had not done so when he was in his teens, nor did it now. He had grown competent enough with words, though he still stammered occasionally, but speech was of secondary importance to him. Mainly, he sensed phenomena. Once, shortly before the war, an acquaintance had invited him to try a newfangled device imported from France, called a velocipede, and bet him a dollar he could not balance on it at his first attempt. He was puzzled that anyone should be so eager to lose money, for to him it was by no means half as difficult as what he took for granted every day of his working life. He could feel a boat’s rudder respond to increasing density of silt; that fractional extra resistance sufficed to warn him of changes in the river’s flow which other pilots had to learn of by reading the reports posted in their association’s “parlor.”

  Perhaps there were ways of perceiving the world that transcended sight? Often as a boy he had heard the complaints of poultry and barnyard animals when a storm was approaching. Cooped and penned, they could not see the darkling sky.

  By whatever means, he could tell that even for wartime this was a bad day. There was mist that threatened to grow up and be fog. There was a certain color, a certain drift to the water…

  A shiver ran down Captain Parbury’s spine.

  The date was 30th April. The year was 1863. And the Nonpareil was laboring upstream at Petit Gulf with a record-breaking load of men and munitions and necessities of war. She had just left astern, to larboard, Waterproof Landing, and to starboard, Zachary Taylor’s Old Farm. The next island would be Number 111; the next town, Rodney; while beyond that and a single bend away was Bruinsburg.

  A bad day.

  Caesar struck—

  No. He had more than one name now. He had been forced to adapt the second when he enlisted. Curt, the recruiting sergeant had said that most niggers took the name of the owners they had formerly belonged to. He would not; his memories were too bitter.

  Puzzled by the ways of these strangers, the first white men he had met who promised to pay him a wage instead of buying and selling him, but anxious to comply with their demands, he had cast around and eventually said, “How ‘bout de place whe’ I was bo’ned?”

  Hearing even as he spoke how his carefully-articulated English was lapsing back toward his childhood dialect, as always when he was under pressure. But it made small odds. Those who surrounded him were northerners, and one variant of southern speech must sound pretty much like another to their ears.

  With relief he heard the supervising officer give his verdict.

  “Oh, why not? My family is called after some town in England, I believe! Mark him down the way he wants and let’s continue.”

  There were dozens of other recruits behind Caesar, and a good few of them were black also; this was a time when any manpower was precious.

  Pen poised, stifling a sigh, the sergeant said, “Where was it, then?”

  Abruptly Caesar was embarrassed all over again, this time in advance of the question he knew to be inevitable.

  “At Pré du Lac Plantation—suh.”

  And, as surely as night after day:

  “How in tarnation d’you spell that?”

  Caesar had to swallow. “I—uh—I never was to’t to write it! But I rec’lec’ it’s French! Mist’ess wan’ed make it over, call it Lakefield, only mas’er said it wrong to change a name wen’ back befo’ de Purchase!”

  The officer heard him out with a grin half-amused, half-annoyed. Now he repeated, “Lakefield? That settles it. I was about to ask whether the accent was acute or grave! But had it been Près-du-Lac it would have gone over into Lakeside! Write it this way, then!”

  He filled out the next line of the roll with careful capitals.

  “That’s done,” the sergeant snapped. “Move on!”

  But Caesar lingered.

  “May I not see,” he ventured, “how it’s written?” The crisis past, all of a sudden he spoke the way the lady of the Great House had tried to inculcate.

  The officer gave a harsh laugh that turned into a cough. He said, “The simplest way, of course! This is the age when grace and style and all of what they called aristocratic is being washed away, drowned like those clapboard towns they keep founding along the Mississippi and naming after heroes and great cities! And for this catastrophe, this calamity, this disaster, I am to sacrifice my life without an enemy I can hate as much as you hate yours!”

  The laugh tried to begin again, failed, had to be stifled in a handkerchief. When it was withdrawn, it showed red.

  During that brief time the ex-slave Caesar had the chance to look on a white man as just another human being victimized—like so many people he had known in childhood—by consumpti
on.

  Also he memorized his surname and how to write it. Therefore…

  Caesar Predulac, wearing that name with as much discomfort albeit as much pride as his stained and torn blue uniform, struck blow after weary axe-blow at a fallen tree, chopping kindling wood because he had been ordered to. His personal opinion was that it was too wet to burn; however, he had early learned that in the army too one obeyed superiors without questioning their judgment.

  His aim was untidy because he was indescribably tired. His weariness was so extreme, he could have believed that his spirit was about to separate from his body: not to die, but to retreat temporarily elsewhere.

  He wanted not to think about that, though. To leave the body? That notion harked back too far in his childhood, all the way to the stinking sheds on the edge of the plantation where he had been taken by his mother, watched her don bram-bram sonnettes and close her eyes and stamp around a packed-earth floor while black hands beat on drums made from old barrels…

  Exhaustion suddenly obliged him to let the axe drop and lean on it a moment. His mother… she was dead. He had been twelve when she succumbed to childbed sickness bearing what would have been her fifth daughter, her eighth child, but died likewise. Children… he had been married, and had two of his own, probably still alive. He had been seventeen then; now, as near as he had been able to tell the recruiting sergeant, he was twenty-one. Of course, his wedding had been over the broomsticks, but at least it had been a Big Marriage and not a little one, even though it bore no resemblance to weddings at the Great House, with a hundred guests and forty carriages and—

  “Chaw?”

  The question, a single upturned word, brought him from past to present. He stood among willows on the west bank of the Mississippi. Behind and around were the rest of the gun battery which had accepted him because at the siege of Vicksburg they had suffered terrible losses and—for the moment at least—cared as little about the color of this man named Caesar as about the color of the horses they had commandeered on the way south.