Dead water - Barbara Hambly [36]
“She call herself a lady, an' go on about how great her family is,” muttered the girl, settling herself by the rail beside Rose and January so that January could look at her bruised and bleeding ear. “Maybe Michie Binoche, that owns my mama, ain't no more than a contractor, but I seen decent white folks in my time, an' Miss Skippen ain't one of 'em, no matter what she say. When Michie Molloy buy me for her, an' bring me home to that house he got for her, I could see she didn't have a thing but what he buy her. Every one of them dresses she got is spang new, some of 'em just delivered by the dressmaker that week. . . .”
“That doesn't mean she isn't respectable,” objected Sophie, who'd come down to fetch water from the galley to rinse a coffee-stain from her mistress's cuff. “When poor Madame fled from her husband in Cincinnati, she tells me she had to escape with only the clothing she stood up in, lest he pursue her and force her to live with him and endure his abuse again. I am myself a good Catholic,” she added, crossing herself, “and of course I believe that divorce is wrong, but in cases like that . . . But what I mean is, Madame is a most respectable woman, even if she is . . . even if she has found a man who loves and cherishes her.”
“Oh, Mr. Molloy love an' cherish Miss Skippen, all right, with her hangin' on his arm, an' feelin' faint, an' goin' on about her finishin'-school, an' how she ain't never been with a big, strong gentleman like him before.” Julie's lips tightened, and she gazed out over the rail at the brown water, prickled and studded with the groping black fingers of snags, and the tangled gray wilderness of the banks. “He should see her when he ain't there, an' she got a couple glasses of plum brandy in her, singin' about the three old whores from Winnipeg. He'd wonder what finishin'-school she went to, to learn that.”
“And I suppose that if she did go to a finishing-school,” sighed Rose later, after January had ascertained that no more damage had been done to Julie's ear by her mistress's blow than nail-scratches, “she still would not be able to support herself in anything but poverty or prostitution. For Miss Skippen was right, you know, when she said that the world is unkind to girls who find themselves alone in it.”
She settled herself against the heaped cordwood in the shade, watching the deck-hands as they walked along the rail, long poles in their hands. As the river shallowed with summer, the bars that the current laid down before every point, on every bend, went from annoyances to be edged around to outright perils. Though noon was far past, Kevin Molloy remained in the pilot-house, and January could hear his voice bellowing curse-riddled instructions to the little crew of leadsmen who had rowed ahead of the Silver Moon in the skiff.
Their shouts echoed over the flat brown water, above the engine's slow throb: “Half one . . . half one . . . quarter one . . .”
“Move along port there, y'idjits! Is it blind y'are?”
“Half one.”
And ahead of the boat—January could see it when he walked to the rail and squinted along the 'tween-decks at the glaring water—the water lay glassy over the bar. Behind it was the dead water, where no current stirred the stagnation, like the poverty that trapped him in New Orleans, when there was not enough money to float him over the bar.
In the low water of summer, even the smallest logs and drifts and reefs became objects of endless slow negotiation, of wearily muscling through, as the deck-hands even now were readying themselves for the chancy prospect of “walking” the boat over the submerged wall of gravel and mud that blocked further passage up-river. And he shivered at the thought of years ahead of doing just that: laboriously pushing through small illnesses, minor catastrophes that even a few dollars in the bank would solve.
People lived like that, he knew. Some even held on to their joy while they did it.
He walked back to Rose. “Do you think Miss Skippen would have appreciated a chance to learn Greek and mathematics, instead of fancy