The River Queen (34 page)

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Laura Ingalls Wilder, Tennessee Williams, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Jess Stacy, Scott Joplin, Burt Bacharach, J. C. Penney, Dale Carnegie. Inside the southern flood wall of Cape Girardeau I stroll the Missouri Wall of Fame. Among other things Cape Girardeau prides itself in being home to Rush Limbaugh. I opt, however, to skip the Rush Limbaugh self-guided tour, which includes the hospital where he was born, the middle school he attended, and the barbershop where he once shined shoes.

Instead I amble through the rather happening little town, past a Furniture Elimination Outlet, Nick's Family Sports Pub, Mudsuckers Liquid Lounge (alas
FOR RENT
). I pause at the Yacht Club to see if I can get a couple of scrambled eggs, but the waitresses, puffing away, tell me they don't open until noon.

I keep walking past the First Baptist Church, which is closed and for lease, then pop into a café. A jazzy version of “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” plays, and I order a cappuccino and scrambled-egg croissant. The only misstep is the maraschino cherry in the canned fruit compote. Otherwise I am in heaven. After breakfast I see a red-tailed hawk gnawing on a pigeon in a park.

In the visitor's center I run into Jerry, who is chatting it up with the ladies there. “Hey, Jerry,” I say, “they let you out again?”

He chuckles as he's signing the guestbook. “Oh, look,” one of the women says, “he's a lefty.”

“I'm a lefty too,” I chime in, but they only have eyes for Jerry.

“All the best people are lefties,” one of the women says. “You know, my brother was a left-handed surgeon and he had trouble finding instruments.” I silently commiserate.

Jerry wants to get breakfast somewhere. He also says he needs to find navigational maps for the Ohio. “We have no maps of that river,” he tells me.

And I tell him about the little jazz café. “You can skip the fruit compote,” I say. “It tastes like…”

“The bottom of an owl's foot.”

“Exactly.”

Jerry cocks his head. “Is that Norwegian?”

“No,” I say, “actually I think it's Yiddish.”

“Thought so.” Then he heads off to find my café.

44

W
E ARE
going to Paris, Jerry says. I picture sidewalk cafés, the Louvre. “Not
that
Paris,” Jerry adds as I imagine our
River Queen
lifting herself out of the river and carrying us across the seas. Apparently there is a place called Paris, Tennessee, and we are now headed to a marina called Paris Landing, where Jerry thinks he can moor his houseboat for the winter. “Okay, Paris, Tennessee, it is.” I take a sip of my coffee, which is hot, and slurp so as not to burn my tongue, which is still sore from the last time I burned it.

“Don't slurp,” Jerry says.

“Okay.” I head into the bathroom and on the way out close the door. “And don't slam the door,” he says. Then I leave it ajar and he tells me not to leave it open. For whatever reason he is in a bad mood and starting to remind me of my father so I decide to go topside where Tom is piloting.

“I'm giving our captain wide berth,” I tell him and Tom nods, understanding.

“Yeah, sometimes you gotta do that.” That's all he says. He'll never say a disloyal word about Jerry. But a few miles out of Cape Girardeau he says, “Why don't you take over for me now?”

I take the wheel just below Buffalo Island as we come into Dog Tooth Bend. Here the river arches and we're going to go several miles east, then north before we're heading south again. A beautiful, long S curve. It's twenty river miles to zero and I'm at the helm. The river is wide and there isn't a thing along its flat, scrub banks. Not a house or a grain elevator. The river is empty as well. The sun streams down with afternoon light. We could be anywhere in the world.

Tom checks his cell phone and he's got a message from his aunt Sue. “She told me I forgot to cut Grandma's grass. I guess she forgot I'm out of town.”

“Grandma?”

“Yeah, my mother's mom. She's been around a long time, but Aunt Sue kinda raised me. You know the older she gets, the more she looks like my mom.” He takes a deep sigh. “I just stick to her like glue.” We're in the delta now—flat, green land without a house or building in sight stretches as far as the eye can see. From this land and its flooding comes some of the richest farmland in the world.

Dog Tooth Bend becomes Greenleaf Bend. Another big, gentle curve. We're moving fast, it seems to me, and I'm right. Jerry comes topside to announce that we're averaging twelve miles per hour now. That's because we have no locks and dams to slow us down and also because the river, as it narrows, is growing swifter. “I want to go slower,” I tell him.

“We're getting good mileage,” Jerry says. “Less than a gallon a mile at speed. That's good because we're going on two engines.”

But I don't want this trip to end. I'm just starting to see the river. To see its ripples and whirls. To read its surface the way I'd read any good book and learn to look at what lies beneath. There are no more secrets from me. I know so much more than when I began. This river has become a friend.

I gaze down at the water and suddenly it is boiling with swells and eddies and backward swirls. So much for no more secrets. “What's this?” I ask as we continue up Greenleaf Bend.

“It's an uneven bottom,” Jerry says. “Because of the delta. It collects silt.”

I nod, taking this in.

The sun burns into the horizon as I hold the wheel. Even through the eddies where I feel the tug, no one tries to take it away from me. We ride silently on the flybridge, knowing our journey on the Mississippi is coming to an end. I ease us around one more S curve bend.

“So what do you think of the way our girl is piloting?” Tom says with a laugh, poking me in the arm.

And Jerry pays me what I assume must be his highest compliment. “What girl?” he says.

We are approaching zero. I invite Tom or Jerry to take the wheel, but they both refuse. “You take her to zero,” Tom says. “This one's for you.” As a surprise Jerry pulls out a bottle of apple fruit wine, apparently the only wine to be had at Fred's Gas Station in Cape Girardeau and a few Dixie cups, which he fills. We pour ourselves glasses. I probably shouldn't drink and drive, but, as we pass beneath Cairo Highway Bridge, we click our paper cups together, take a gulp of sweet apple wine, and congratulate ourselves on getting here in one piece.

As we do, I see a flash, like lightning, coming from behind us. “What was that?” I ask Tom as he makes a small adjustment to the wheel.

“Oh, that was just your next idea.”

We come on to the Ohio. Ahead on a hill in Kentucky a giant white cross looms. The South is below us and I reach a deeper understanding of the term “sold down the river.” It was what slaves dreaded—to be sold deeper into the South.

Barges, lined up by the dozens, are moving tons of fuel, grain, manure, and plumbing supplies up and down the Ohio. Smokestacks to the south puff away and the sky is rimmed by a gray brown horizon of smog. I can see where the waters meet. A marriage, Jerry calls it. Below is the lower Mississippi, a river that for now eludes me. Behind is where we have been and ahead the Ohio, a big unknown. I'm glad I made the decision to stay with this boat. I know, as I leave the upper Mississippi behind, that I lay claim to its wide vistas and gentle bends, its white pelicans and locks and dams. I am a northerner to the core. For now there'll be no side-winding waterways for me.

Still, as we enter the lake-wide confluence and I hand the wheel to Jerry, Tom and I get a despondent look in our eyes. What had been a quiet, peaceful cruise is suddenly a bustling highway of commerce and trade. We don't like it. None of us does. A few miles up the Ohio we start to talk. We don't want to spend the night here. There are no marinas in sight. At least nothing for sure. We see a beach on the eastern end of the confluence and Jerry decides to make for it, then he balks. Because of the delta and the layers of silt the water is too shallow. And he doesn't like all the barges coming up and down. This time I see his point. We could get trapped here.

“Let's go for a ride,” Jerry says. He is turning the
River Queen,
scanning the banks of the Ohio, then making for the Cairo Highway Bridge. We pass beneath it once again and then it is clear. We are heading back up the Mississippi to find a beach where we'll bivouac for the night. None of us wants to drop anchor anywhere near where we came onto the Ohio. The sun is setting on the Missouri side as we head upstream. We go four or five miles around the bend, and then we see it.

A wide strip of pristine sand. There's a gravel elevator nearby, but it is silent with only a single barge off to the side. As deserted as we could hope for and, as we beach, we see that this sandbar is perfect for our last night on the Mississippi. We drop anchor and scramble onto the beach. Samantha Jean does her usual runs up and down and I walk across a surface made from silt and clay—a thick, crusty mud. Where it has dried, it is cracked.

Samantha Jean is racing up and down and Tom shouts, “Go get 'em, Sammy, big waves! Go get 'em, Girl!” I'm actually wishing he'd be quiet, but he keeps yelling and his voice echoes across the river. “Come on, Sammy, big waves, big waves!”

Then he calls to me, “Hey, Mary, can you get me the axe?”

“Gee, I thought you'd never ask.”

I go back inside and retrieve our axe and carry it up to Tom. As I walk along the beach, I feel like an ant on a Firestone tire. The clay grooves cut into my bare feet, but I don't care. The axe is heavy in my hand.

As I carry it to him, he keeps yelling at Samantha Jean. “Come on, Girl, here's a big one! Let's jump!” Jerry stands on the bow, laughing, sipping his beer. The male energy is starting to wear thin. I could do with some peace and quiet and a little less guffawing. On the other hand we've been on the boat for almost three weeks and no one is dead. It doesn't even occur to me to smash this axe into someone's skull. That in and of itself is a kind of miracle to me.

Instead I hand the axe to Tom and he heads off toward the end of the sandbar. He goes into a muddy, wooded realm and hacks away at some brush and comes back, as he always does, dragging huge logs. He builds the biggest fire he can make and we sit around it. Jerry throws some steaks we've been saving on the grill and keeps them there for about an hour, until I beg him to take mine off. They cook theirs twice as long and we eat without a word around the fire. As soon as dinner's done, Tom heads off to bed, but Jerry and I sit, sipping our beers until the embers cool. We sit in silence, heads tilted back, just gazing at the stars. Finally, reluctantly, we stumble off to bed, knowing that our nights on this river are done.

I wake early, take my coffee and journal for a long walk along the deserted beach. As I'm heading out, Jerry says, “Guess we had company.” I see where he is pointing. The tracks of two deer, heading past our boat, are carved into the sand.

UPSTREAM

45

I
N
1967 a black man was found hanging in a jail cell in Cairo, Illinois, and for Cairo, this was the beginning of the end. Protests erupted. The whites fled and many never returned. Since then the town has struggled. I have read reports about Cairo. The mayor was quoted as saying that what his town needs is a McDonald's and a mall. But nothing prepared me for the ghost town I saw.

As we pass the Civil War site of Fort Defiance, just up the Ohio, I decide I must stop at Cairo. But there is no courtesy dock so we have to bring the dinghy down. It is the only time we use it, and Jerry is very proud of the way it descends smoothly from the aft transom into the water. Tom and I hop on the dinghy and he drives me up to the levee and leaves me there. I tell him I'll give a shout when I'm ready for him to come and get me. He gives me a wary look. “You gonna be all right here?”

“I'm going to be fine.”

I walk through the gate in the flood wall onto
HISTORIC
8
TH STREET
. A wrought iron sign arches across the street, and I come to an avenue of boarded-up shops, plate glass shattered on the ground. A corner building on the main street is completely in ruins and in the distance I see another sign that reads
HISTORIC DOWNTOWN CAIRO
. In the middle of the road is a pedestal for a statue that was never installed. The beauty shop is closed. The flower shop too.

A black man sits on a folding chair in front of a boarded-up building. I say “Good morning” and he doesn't respond. He doesn't look away. He doesn't do anything. Behind him is a storefront where the windows have been soaped to read “Leadership? Cairo? Why?” I pause at the Gem Theater Restoration Project. Which has been halted.

Cairo, Illinois, which sits at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, used to be one of the most significant towns in the Midwest. During the Civil War it was of great strategic importance. On either side of the rivers were states sympathetic to the Confederate cause. They provided supplies to the Southern troops. Cairo was home to many regiments of the Illinois infantry and served as the staging area for Union army expeditions into Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

Now it is a town in ruins. The Mighty River Church is shuttered. In front of it prisoners in orange uniforms are picking up trash. All of them are black. Cairo was a place where many blacks settled after the Civil War. One of the prisoners looks up at me with red, rheumy eyes, and says, “Good morning, Miss,” and I say “good morning” back. Then he returns to picking up trash. In front of an insurance agency I eavesdrop on two men. The one says to the other, “Doing that in a place like this is suicide.”

“What is wrong with Cairo?” I ask a woman at a local newsstand. “Bad government,” she says. I suppose that's true, but the fact is Cairo hasn't found its Mark Twain; it hasn't embraced its Superman. There are no casinos, no waterfront development. The town feels as if it is falling down.