The River Between Us Read online

  Mary had a little lamb.

  With her it used to frolic.

  It licked her cheek in play one day

  And died of painter’s colic.

  Mary had a little lamb.

  Her father killed it dead,

  And now it goes to school with her

  Between two hunks of bread.

  When they rung down the curtain, I don’t know that Delphine liked that part any better than the drama. She fanned fitfully and plucked at her skirts. Because of the corsets, you could hear her breathing.

  The next time the curtain went up, the stage was bare. The audience was invited to come up and dance. It reminded me that we’d had a dance in town on the night Delphine and Calinda had first come here. The orchestra struck up a lively tune, a cakewalk called “Little Alligator Bait.”

  People hung back. It wasn’t our kind of dancing. It wasn’t a square dance called by Mr. Chilly Attabury. But couples edged onto the stage. Then in this night of wonders, Noah was bowing over Delphine, putting out his hand for all our world to see. My land, he was handsome, though defiant around the eyes. Delphine pressed her feather fan against her bosom and cast great fringed eyes up at him. He was asking her to dance, and it was a waltz. She held back only a short while.

  “Mama,” I muttered, “does Noah know how to do that kind of dancing?”

  “We’re fixing to find out,” she replied.

  The stage was half full of couples waltzing, or trying to. But when Noah led Delphine onto the floor, all eyes were upon them. Her hoopskirts were wide enough to drive every other woman off the stage and overboard. Her shawl was filmy net, the evening being hot as day. Her black dress was cut low to show the curve of her plump shoulders. A bouquet of artificial cabbage roses bloomed on her breast. When she reached high to plant her little mitted hand on Noah’s shoulder, she engulfed him with her feather fan. And away they waltzed, her leading.

  It was a sight to behold, and everybody beheld it. Behind us, the same women who’d resented Delphine’s bonnets stood now to study the drape of her skirts. The men were all standing up too, bug-eyed. They saw the Confederate spy bewitching the local boy. And given half a chance, Noah would have shortened the ears of any man who called him on it.

  Wonder followed wonder. A shadow fell o’er me, and there was Dr. William Hutchings, bowing. I’d never been near him. And he was old. He was twenty-five if he was a minute. He put out his hand. Delphine had hesitated prettily. I shrank. He looked to Mama. “Mrs. Pruitt, might I have the honor of a waltz with your daughter?”

  Mama said he could have me, and he led me in a trance up on the stage. His coat was swallow-tailed, and the points of his high collar bit into his beard. “That’s a mighty pretty dress you’re wearing, Miss Pruitt,” he remarked.

  “Well, it’s Delphine’s,” I explained, every curl aquiver, “and I don’t know as I can waltz.”

  It was a right pretty dress, yellowish tussore with ribbons run through.

  “If you find the waltz is beyond you,” Dr. Hutchings said, “you need only climb onto my boots, and I will do the steps for us both.”

  This was so odd a notion that I forgot my fears and settled into the doctor’s arms. I found I could waltz, if only for that evening, though I clumped some in my winter shoes. But Dr. Hutchings was an expert dancer. Being along in years, he’d no doubt had much practice. We turned in the dazzle of light, and the petticoats rushed round my ankles. I was pretty nearly some other girl entirely.

  But waltzing is work, especially in this climate. Even Delphine, who never minded the limelight, seemed ready to rest when we were returned to our chairs. She was flushed, though whether from the dance or the nearness of Noah her eyes didn’t say.

  Then everything changed.

  One of the black men, the fiddler, crept to the edge of the stage and peered down at our row. He pointed his bow and called out, “Calinda!”

  It silenced the room. Delphine, who sat between us, was motionless. Calinda stuck out her chin at the fiddler and then looked away.

  “Danse, Calinda, bou-djoumb! Bou-djoumb!”

  Calinda shrugged him off, and my heart thumped. It was as if something had come up the river to claim her. I didn’t know whether to fear for her or not.

  “Allons danser, Calinda,” the man said, seeming to plead with her.

  C’est pas tout le monde qui connaît

  Danser les danses du vieux temps,

  he sang.

  Delphine murmured what he was singing, though she never looked my way:

  It is not everyone who knows

  How to dance the old-time dances.

  The room held its breath when Calinda rose at last from her chair. She glided straight-backed to the steps and onto the stage, her face a grave mask. Her tignon was patterned in palm leaves. Her skirts were three layers of gauzy indienne, each a different color. Of course she was a dancer. Why hadn’t I seen it the first time I ever laid eyes on her? She was a dancer in every step, every turn of her head.

  The Melodiers struck up, and the strange, quick music tugged at her skirttails. Her beautiful hands came up to grab the air. She held back from the song, then plunged into it:

  Allons danse Calinda

  Danser collés Calinda,

  Allons danse Calinda,

  Pour faire fâcher les vielles femmes,

  the bandsmen sang.

  Delphine, whose fan moved in time with the music now, chanted:

  Let’s dance the Calinda,

  Dance the Calinda close together,

  Let’s dance the Calinda

  To make the old ladies mad.

  The music quickened, and Calinda writhed like a sack of serpents. But her face was sober as Noah’s, and her eyes elsewhere. Them who’d stood up to watch Delphine stood on their chairs now, to see Calinda’s thrashing skirts, her bare feet drumming the floorboards. There may have been some who covered their eyes at this wild and wanton dance, but they were behind me and I didn’t see.

  I thought I’d pass out from the surprise of it, and the music that took you by the throat. Mama was a statue beside me. The audience began to keep time by clapping. Delphine fanned faster and swayed in her seat, a mirror reflecting Calinda’s every move. When Calinda’s head began to revolve to the music, so did Delphine’s. They were both being called back by the mysterious place where they’d begun. I seemed to smell all the scents that traveled in their trunks, the spice and sweetgrass, the coffee and damp.

  At last overcome, Delphine sprang out of her chair. She rushed to the edge of the stage, where Calinda was throwing her skirts, awash in the music.

  “Danse, CoinCoin!” Delphine cried out, not herself at all. “Danse!” she shrieked, pounding the stage with her fist.

  It might have gone on till morning. The song had no beginning and no end. But Calinda had danced herself into a frenzy. Her face was wet, and I saw she was crying. I didn’t know she could. She plunged down the steps and up the aisle past the astonished crowd and away up the hill home.

  Cass would have cut out after her, but Mama caught her. Delphine turned back blind from the edge of the stage. The black on her eyelashes ran in lines down her face. I saw then just how far from home she was.

  The song shuddered to a stop, and the Melodiers carried their instruments off the stage. Delphine collapsed into her chair. She dropped her head on my shoulder for a moment while the muttering crowd filed out behind us.

  “The fiddler knew her,” I said.

  “All New Orleans know her.”

  Delphine was recovering, reclaiming herself. “You have not live until you see her at the balls, on Wednesday nights, you know. Her and twenty or thirty like her, in the tignon, you see, and the skirts. You have not live until you see them dance the Calinda. It is a famous song, from the islands where . . .” She tapered off and closed a door in her mind.

  “Her real name isn’t Calinda?” I said into the silence. Mama and Cass and Noah listened.

  “Mais non, chère,
” Delphine said absently. “She is called that because no one dances to the song as well. No one like my CoinCoin. All New Orleans is there to regard the spectacle. Ev’ry man. She is CoinCoin, an ancient name, older than the islands, back, back before . . .”

  Another door closed inside her. She shut her fan and said no more.

  If life was a storybook, that would have been the night Noah left us for the war. From the showboat stage, his face aglow in the footlights, he’d as good as announced his love to Grand Tower. He had someone to leave behind him when he went.

  But he stayed on till the eve of our sixteenth birthday in September. I hated the birthday we shared from that day forward. He went as the other boys did, in the night to spare us good-byes. “Like a thief in the night,” Mama said, trying in vain for bitterness to keep her heart from breaking.

  Her eyes lost their faint glint of hope and went dead. They only sparked again when I did my poor best to comfort her. Though we rarely touched, I put my hand on her arm then for however that might help. But she jerked herself away as if my touch had burned her. I had nothing she wanted. She wanted Noah.

  But he was gone from us, and the time the showboat come was a bright dream I must have had before the world went dark.

  Chapter Nine

  Noah was no hand to write, though better than I’d feared. But the days between his letters were long and shapeless. Then a scrawl of pencil stub on torn paper would come in a used envelope turned inside-out. Mama wouldn’t touch it. But she couldn’t do anything else until she heard me read it out to us all while she stared away at nothing, straining at the bit to see his face.

  He’d joined the Thirty-first Illinois Infantry Regiment, organized after the awful defeat at Bull Run. He wrote a soldier’s letters from up by Jacksonville, at Camp Dunlap. I squinted to find my brother between the lines. He was a little boastful at first for what he’d done, a little proud of not having a bath since he’d left home. Pleased with himself for not getting the trots when half the camp was down sick. “Beans’ll kill more of us than bullets,” he wrote.

  At this first hint of dysentery in the camp, Calinda went to work, pouring her blackberry cordial cure for the runs into every bottle she could find a cork for. It was like her to see the truth behind Noah’s letters before the rest of us.

  They issued them no weapons up at Camp Dunlap, and no uniforms either. Noah wrote to say the legs of his butternut jeans were growing beards. They were given rations of salt pork and dry beans to cook for themselves if they could, or eat raw. That and thirteen dollars a month was their pay.

  It was an army that didn’t know how to be an army, and it treated its soldiers like beasts of the field.

  “Men and boys, lost in a pasture!” Delphine said, shrugging elaborately at the helplessness of the other sex, and maybe Yankees.

  Even after the first frost, the boys were still living outdoors, no canvas to sleep under, no blankets between them and the ground. We didn’t have blankets, but we bundled up our patchwork quilts. Then when we were wondering how to send them off, we heard the Thirty-first had been ordered down to Cairo, to Camp Defiance.

  I’d have kept that news from Mama if I could. She’d come to terms with Noah soldiering up by Jacksonville, farther from the South than we were ourselves. But everybody said that our war, the war on the river, would be waged from Cairo. In our ignorance we still couldn’t believe they’d send boys unprepared into battle, though I suppose Cass knew better, in the way she knew things.

  Two terrible weeks followed without a line from Noah. But we had word from Cairo. When Dr. Hutchings learned there weren’t enough army doctors to go around, he shut up his Grand Tower office and went down there on his own.

  The accounts he sent back were posted by the landing. Ail Grand Tower read them because the Thirty-first was an Egyptian regiment, made up of our boys.

  Dr. Hutchings reported that half the Thirty-first were down with measles, and the other half were drunk. Cairo had shut its saloons and was anxious for battle to begin to get the soldiers off their streets and out of their gutters.

  Delphine and I read the doctor’s words and resolved to keep them from Mama. But somehow she knew.

  It was October now with the days dwindling around us. I’d become a fitful sleeper, staring at the dark ceiling half the night, listening to Cass’s soft snore from the trundle at my feet. The brittle leaves skating across our windows sounded too much like hands scratching to get in. I heard every little noise in the sighing house. No scuttle in the walls got past me.

  Then one night I knew someone was down in the kitchen. I’d dreamed of Noah and somehow thought he’d found his way home. I’d dreamed his hand was knocking at the kitchen door. Some stirring from below brought me around, and I came bolt awake. The floorboards were cold when I put a careful foot out of bed.

  At the top of the stairs I saw no light from the kitchen. Still, somebody was there. I wished for Paw’s fowling piece as I started down with nothing in my hands. I was quiet, but anything with ears could hear the popping of the stairs.

  The only light came from the last embers on the hearth. A figure stood there by the kitchen table. In the first moment it was a haunt with long, tangled gray hair hiding its face. Hearing me, the ghost turned, and I saw who it was.

  “Mama?” I hung there in the doorway.

  I hadn’t startled her. She seemed to think she’d sent for me, and maybe she had. She stood there in her old nightdress worn paper-thin, without a shawl. “Mama, you’ll catch your death.”

  “I hope I do,” she said. “I can’t live like this. I want him back.”

  “Mama, we all want him back.”

  “He’s bad sick, you know,” she said. “He is. I know things. Where do you think Cass gets it? She gets it from me. I want him back. Go get him.”

  She rapped the table with her knuckles. I imagine now her eyes burned brighter than the embers, like something crouching out in the timber. I felt the heat of her eyes on my face.

  “Did you hear me?” she said in a terrible whisper. “He’s sick. My boy’s sick. Go to him. Nurse him till he can travel. Then bring him back to me.”

  It wasn’t Mama at all. The floor yawned at my feet.

  “Are you deaf?” she said in a cold voice I’d never heard.

  “Mama, if I could find him, they wouldn’t let me have him. He’s a soldier.” My head throbbed. How could I reason with her? “If he got well, Mama, they’d send him into battle.”

  “Go get him,” she said, hearing nothing. “Wait till daylight. Then get out. Don’t come back without him.”

  I was crying like a lost child now. This wasn’t the Mama I’d known. Who was this heartless stranger?

  “Mama, I can’t. I wouldn’t know how. You and me’ll go. We’ll look for Noah together.”

  She laughed then, and I wish I could forget that laugh. “I see what you’d do. You’d lure me away from this house. And what if he’s started home already? What if he come home and found me gone?”

  She whipped around, quick, her hair flying, like she heard Noah’s footfall on the porch. And I saw I’d lost her. She’d been whittled to madness by her fear.

  She looked back at me, one last time. The merciful dark hid her face. “I waited for his paw to come home. I wore out with waiting, and what for? I won’t wait for Noah. I ain’t got that kind of time now. Don’t come back without him. I can spare you. I can’t spare him.”

  That blow sent me staggering. I’d have cut and run from her, but another figure stood behind me in the shadows of the hall, another ghostly figure. I was too numb for fear now. It was Calinda, tall as the door in the long pillar of her nightdress. She was always to be Calinda to me. Her real name, her African name, CoinCoin, came from too far away. I wanted to throw myself into her arms. I needed to be in somebody’s arms.

  “Light a lamp,” Calinda said. She’d heard it all, or enough. With a shaking hand I brought fire on a straw from the last ember to the lamp. Mama had slumped
onto a chair. She was staring away from me, as if I should be gone already.

  “This one, we take her up to her bed,” Calinda said, and we did. We got Mama between us, and she even leaned on me, heavy up the stairs. But when we got her into bed, she turned her face to the wall.

  Still, it wasn’t daylight. We went back down to the kitchen, and Calinda made a pot of her powerful New Orleans coffee.

  It didn’t warm me. The cold of the floor climbed my legs. My heart was frozen. I reeled at how quick my life had come to an end. I couldn’t go, and I couldn’t stay.

  I didn’t doubt but that Noah was sick. He’d have the trots by now, the way they were eating. We’d heard about the pneumonia the boys had brought with them from the wet ground they’d slept on at Jacksonville. We knew about the measles, and there was typhoid talk. Dr. Hutchings had said Cairo was a pesthole.

  But how could I go? I didn’t know where the world was, nor how to get there.

  Gray light streaked the window. Calinda sat across the table from me, hung in shawls, warming her long hands on the mug. “Me, I stay at ’ome,” she said a moment before I asked her to go with me. “I see to things here.”

  Calinda was such a miser with her words that you believed every one of them. Still, I had to say, “But they’s sickness down there, and you know the cures.” Did it dawn on me that I was asking her to help her enemies, if that’s what our side was to her?

  Her arms were folded now, and her face seemed darker in the brightening day. “I send the cures with you, you and Delphine.”

  Delphine? What earthly good would—

  “If you go among men,” Calinda said, “she come in handy. She is meant for men.” And Calinda said no more.

  We went to Cairo, Delphine and me, in the great journey of my life. We went to try and find Noah, if he was alive, and bring him back if we could. Delphine was fierce to go, though whether it was monotony that moved her or love for Noah, I was in no position to ask.