The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [19]
The water, which I knew was below me, seemed distant and unreachable, as unreachable as the girl who, a year ago, had stepped into the brown river about a mile above Palmyra and emerged an hour later about a mile below Quincy. Frank had conspired with me to row a boat we borrowed from friends of his, to carry my shoes and stockings and petticoats and dress, to watch out for and serve as a screen against passing steamers and other craft. The water had been brown, of course, though it looks blue from above, on top of the bluff, and it was full of debris—branches and logs, pieces of broken-up boats and other planks and boards. There were shoes and a pair of pantaloons, a shirtsleeve and two hats and an old cap, caught upon rocks and snags. Half sunk in the mud were bottles and bits of metal, pieces of rope and a bent barrel hoop or two, bits of leather straps, broken fragments of tin and brass and iron. There was a raccoon carcass and the skull of a horse, the hind limb of a deer. The true grandson of my father, Frank picked up what looked useful or salable, until I stopped that and got him to row with me to the tiny cove where I sent him off and undressed down to my shift. When I had pushed into the water, he rowed himself to a group of rocks and retrieved the things I’d left there.
The first time I stepped into the river, I was just about the age of the girl across the cabin from me, twelve. I had taught myself to swim that summer, by spying on the boys and mimicking their actions. My mother thought I was visiting Beatrice, who thought I was visiting Alice, who thought I was at home. That first time I stepped into the river, I was royally self-assured, until I took two strokes and felt the continental power of the brown water seize me and drag me from shore. Two strokes turned into a spluttering ten by the time my feet found the bottom again. But seven years later, when I was nineteen, I knew parts of the river very well, and I knew how to use and relish the six-miles-per-hour push of the water, to go down and over, down and over, how to not be afraid, and to not even attempt a swim unless the river was low and its tributaries more or less dried up. I knew how to hold my breath and dive, how to keep an eye out for logs and debris. I knew that some of the boys swam the river all summer. I knew that there was a drowning when I was fourteen and a drowning the summer I was seventeen. I knew that every man on the river chased the boys back from the big water but that the boys flocked there even so, building rafts, stealing boats, catching catfish and suckers. You couldn’t stay away from the river; at least I couldn’t.
The notion to swim across it came over me suddenly, mostly because that August the river was lower than it had been in years. All sorts of sandbars and islands were dry ground that no one had ever seen before. Even so, the Quincy bluff always made the river faster and deeper than it was farther downstream or upstream. The choice was narrow but fast, or wide and not as fast. But I can’t say I really made a choice. It was like going off with Mr. Newton. One day I knew I was going to do it, and two days later, when Frank got a boat, I did it. The whole time we were rowing across, I was feeling the push of the river against the boat, feeling it try to turn us around or turn us over. Every time we took a boat it was that way, and you could lose a boat in the Mississippi in a second. I knew that. But you always learn