The River Queen (33 page)

“This is one of the last free places,” Jerry says. “I just love being out here.”

We sit, each with a stick, poking at the fire. “You're probably right about that.”

“Where else can you just stop and spend the night? That's all gone. Freedom is pretty much over in this country.” As the fire crackles, we talk about America, about Bush, and God, and our families. We finish our beers. Soon I am tired and I turn in. The sound of the cicadas and crickets fills the night. The only other sound is an outboard motor, which races incongruously up the river. The moonlight shines into the cabin, casting a dappled light on my wall. The North Star rises right over Missouri. I see Orion from my window. I realize I am cold. I'm surprised by the chill in the night air. I crawl into my sleeping bag. I snuggle inside, and before I know it I am asleep.

I awake to the cabin filled with brightness. It is the middle of the night but a light shines in like a beacon. Are we being abducted by aliens? Or is it the police, coming to arrest us? Looking out, I see a passing barge, the kind that Jerry feared. But it moves slowly, causing no wake.

42

I'
M UP
before six, working on my knot. Jerry has instructed me to do it backward. As he eases us off our sandbar at six a.m., I lie in bed, rope in my hands, struggling to get it right. Take it apart in its reverse order, he has told me. Then you will see how it is made.

I am taking it apart as we head toward the gas dock in Cape Girardeau. It is a pristine morning and from my nook I see the river bend. I am sad to leave our beach on the shore. Gazing out, the water churns. Behind us Dusky's Bar recedes. I go back to my rope. I see how it comes into its hole. How it winds around the tree. It is seven a.m. and I haven't had my coffee, but I'm working away. Once I've analyzed the knot, I try it for myself. I try it three or four different ways.

Finally I think I've got it. I slip into a pair of flannel pants and a sweatshirt. Jerry has boiled water and I drop my three bags of Folgers into my Citgo cup. Then I go up to the helm where he is at the wheel. I hold it up to him and he takes a look. He holds my knot in his hands as if it's a dead animal. “You're missing a loop,” he tells me. Clutching the piece of rope, I go back to my nook, determined to get it right.

I am practiced in this kind of thing. I recall a rainy, spring morning and I am three or four years old. My mother says to me that I can play in the den, but I can't disturb my father because he is doing our taxes. But of course if I go into the den, I am going to disturb him. I have nothing else to do. The den has sliding doors and I like to slide them back and forth. I can do this hundreds of times in an hour. Another thing I like to do is sit on the couch that looks out onto the garden and blow my breath onto the glass, then scribble on it.

I do not know how to write. I do not know how to read. But my father, for lack of anything better to do with me, writes my name across the top of a yellow pad.
MARY
. “There,” he says, “that's your name. Now you write it.”

He knows I can't, but it is a distraction good for half an hour or so. I take a pencil and the yellow pad. I am surprised by the point of this pencil. My father always kept his pencils very sharp. I do not know if I have ever held a pencil before, but I grip it in my left fist. I hold it the way you'd hold a knife if you were planning on stabbing someone in the chest.

I start to copy what my father has written at the top of the page. I do not know why, but I recall this moment with perfect precision. The grayness of the day. My father's somber, serious face. The yellow pad and
MARY
written across the top. I work for what seems like a very long time and, when I am satisfied, I stop. I take the pad to the card table where my father works. My nose just reaches the table. I can smell my father's cologne, his fresh-shaved face. And the slight odor of talc I have always associated with him. Now I see my father's finger coming down as he points to the page. “The R is backward,” he says.

I have certainly read worse critiques of my work over the years, but this was the first. It did not make me want to stop. To the contrary, it made me want to persevere. I went back to the scratchy carpet, the pencil hard in my tiny fist, and I struggled until I got it right.

*   *   *

Haruki Murakami writes, “Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.”

I have underlined this quote. Committed it to memory. How a rush of water can become a heart. It is not why I planned this journey in the first place, but it has become a large part of the reason to me. I am trying to understand why I have decided at this time to undertake this. But my heart is a river, gushing forth too.

There is perhaps only one story I really have to tell. It is the one I could not tell until now. It is the story of home and the one I have wanted to write for years. I wanted to write about my father as I knew him and not as others saw him. But his long life prevented me from doing so. This journey began in a different place but it has taken me where I never thought it would. What began as an adventure and a lark has become a passage into memory, childhood, and the past. I began writing some of this material long ago, when my father was alive. But I knew that no one would read it until he was dead.

I waited for him. As a little girl, I waited every day for my father to come home. I waited with his slippers, newspaper, and robe. A courtesan. His lady-in-waiting. He would come in, beaming, and for a while it was good. But then a minor incident would happen. Some small thing would go wrong. “If there's a wrong way to do something, you'll find it.”

I recall carrying a tray of dishes from our playroom back to the kitchen. I am holding the tray and my father says, “You're carrying too many dishes. You're going to drop them.”

The tray I had a good grip on moments before starts to slip from my hands. The dishes crash to the floor. “I told you,” he says, “you were going to drop that tray.”

I ran up to my room, sobbing. I stood in a tightfisted pout, a stubborn pose it would take years of love and therapy to untie. My mother came up and told me to apologize. “Just say you're sorry,” she begged.

I went downstairs where my father was hammering some paneling in the basement. “I'm sorry, Daddy,” I said, though I'm not sure for what.

He turned, knelt, and held me as I cried. That was what he wanted. He wanted me to be sorry. And I was. I would do everything right. If I did it all right, then no one would be mad at me again.

If there is a secret vein I still have to mine it is this. I grew up trying to figure out how to get it right. I lived in terror of the left-on lightbulb, the horror of the incorrectly buttered piece of bread. (“Always break your bread before you butter it”—a tongue twister for me). The way to eat soup. With cold soup the spoon went one way, with hot soup the other. “Let me let you in on a secret,” he'd begin, and then we knew what was coming. He was articulate and precise. A dry drunk, a friend once referred to that rage.

The dragon eyes would turn red. The fire that almost came out of the nose. In fairy tales I knew what the dragon looked like. He looked like my father.

Once he lost his temper with Kate. She was about eight years old and she and her friend Amanda had gone to visit my parents in Florida for a winter break. They were at dinner and one of the girls burped. They both started laughing and couldn't stop. For some reason, my father thought they were making fun of him.

When he asked what they were laughing at, they only laughed more. He asked, “Are you making fun of me?”

They shook their heads, trying not to convulse. Then he flared. “I've been around for ninety-five years and I know when someone's lying to me!” He screamed at them and ordered them to leave the table. It is a scene I know only too well. In a sense it is a reality check for me.

My mother decided to separate the two girls until they calmed down. She put Amanda in a bathroom and locked Kate in my parents' walk-in closet, where she spent the better part of an hour, trying on my father's wigs.

43

“B
Y GEOGRAPHICAL
standards the lower Mississippi is a young, even infant stream, and runs through what is known as the Mississippi Embayment, a declivity covering approximately 35,000 square miles that begins 30 miles north of Cairo to Cape Girardeau,” John M. Barry writes in
Rising Tides.
It is here at Cape Girardeau that the true head of the Mississippi Delta, which will extend to the Gulf of Mexico, begins. Already I feel the landscape flattening where the banks are rich in alluvial soil.

As we approach the gas dock at Cape Girardeau, a cruiser speeds toward us. It is a big white boat and it's coming full throttle. There is a woman on the deck, shouting and waving something in her hands. I think there's something wrong with her boat or someone on board. “Excuse me!” she yells. “Excuse me!”

“Hey,” Tom says, “she's racing us for the dock.”

Jerry glances at the cruiser out of the corner of his eye. “Well, we are here first,” Jerry replies. He is concerned that we were low on fuel and relieved that we've gotten here at all. But the cruiser keeps coming. I have no idea what she wants. It seems as if there is some kind of emergency. A heart attack. Her boat's on fire. But Tom and Jerry chose to ignore her.

The woman is screaming and shaking something in her hand and I now see it's a set of keys. For some reason I think they are our keys or that she has a message for us. Then I realize that they just want to tie up on the dock ahead of us.

She shouts again as they come closer, this time with attitude in her voice. “Excuse me!” I recognize her as the woman with the Bernese Mountain Dog from Hoppie's Landing. She and her husband are doing the Great Loop. On the bow I see the other woman, who has the Irish Wolfhound.

“Hey, hello!” she's shouting, shaking these keys.

Jerry sees her and, disgusted, turns away.

“We've got the key to the gas dock,” she cries. She shouts that the gasman gave it to them the night before so they could take their dogs for a walk in the morning. “So if you'd just move your boat, we can walk our dogs.”

Jerry shouts back. “You are welcome to tie up to us and we'll carry your dogs onto the dock.”

But she is adamant and insists that we move. “We have the key,” she says. “The gasman gave it to us.”

Still Jerry won't budge. He looks at me and says, “We're already tied up here. They can tie up to us.”

“We can't tie up to you. How're we going to get our dogs off the boat?”

“We'd be glad to help you there,” Jerry offers.

I'm not really sure of the proper boat etiquette at this moment. But suddenly the woman screams at us: “You should change your name because you aren't
Friend Ship.
You're bullshit.”

“Ouch,” Tom says, pretending to ward off a blow.

“Whew, that hurt,” Jerry grabs his heart and goes into the cabin. As she's cussing us out, my binoculars focus on the name of their boat and I groan. Of course, it's
Bronx Cheer.
Just my luck that the only rude people we've met thus far on the trip have to come from New York.

There is silence for a few moments as their boat makes a wide circle. When we hear the voice come over the radio, Jerry quips, “I knew he'd call.”

“Hello,
Friend Ship,
this is
Bronx Cheer.
Come in, please.”

Jerry gives me one of his shrugs. “
Bronx Cheer,
this is
Friend Ship.
I read you.”

“I'm not sure if my first mate explained very well what we want to do.”

Jerry flicks the guy off. “His first mate,” he says to me. “Glad I don't have to live with that first mate.” Then he puts him back on again.

“We have the key to the fuel dock. We don't want fuel. We just want to tie up and give our dogs a walk.”

“I understand that,” Jerry replies. “That is why I invited you to tie up to me.” There are some grumbling sounds on the radio and the captain says he'll get back to us.

“Why don't we just move?” I ask Jerry.

“Because,” he says, “we were here before they were. I don't want to have to maneuver the boat twice. I don't want to take any risks. What if their boat doesn't start and we can't get to the dock? We might be here all day. We're here. We'll stay here. Safety first. And besides, they were rude. And they were also inconsiderate at the gas dock at Hoppie's. Remember that boat that wouldn't move out of the way?” Jerry nods in their direction. “That was them.” He gets back on his radio. “If you'd like to tie up to our boat, we'll help your dogs get onto the dock.”

“The dogs are very heavy.”

“We can handle that,” Jerry says, and I see Tom flexing his muscles in Charles Atlas poses on the bow.

There is another pause, a sigh. “Thank you, Captain. We'd appreciate your help.” As they come alongside us, I take the bow and drop the bumpers down. Jerry holds the boat at midship. Tom takes his newly purchased air mattress down from the fly-bridge and puts it on the floor. “What's that for?” I ask.

“So the dogs don't hurt themselves.” He puts blankets over it as well. As soon as they're tied up, the women hand Tom the huge Bernese Mountain Dog, which Tom deftly lifts and places on all fours on the deck as if they are ballet dancers, completing a delicate jump. He does the same with the Wolfhound. Then he assists the four adults to move onto our boat and onto the dock. Not a word is spoken. No apology is heard.

As they head up through the gas dock gate to the walkway along the levee, Tom turns to me and says, “Friendship is all about attitude. And I don't have to take any of her wake.” Then he laughs his head off.