The Tilted World (26 page)

He lifted Dixie Clay back onto the burden boards and climbed back to his stern thwart, pausing to duck a tree limb that rose from a logjam.

“Ingersoll?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry about that thing I said, about you being crooked and taking bribes.”

“Aw, that’s all right.”

“No, it’s not, and I’m sorry I said it.”

“Let’s not worry about it anymore, okay?”

She nodded.

C
loser yet to Greenville, more boats. What looked like stepping-stones across the river: the dun breasts of drowned geese. Then the pilings of a dislocated dock, Ingersoll slowing, steering wide.

“Look there,” she said.

He raised his eyes: the Wyatt Bridge, low over the water, with a sign,
GREENVILLE, 10 MILES.

They would make it.

He began to hum, and then the hum grew corners and became words:

Let me in, please, Charlie: no one here but me;

I’m speaking easy: give me a pint of stingaree.

He broke off the throaty baritone to ask: “You know that one, Dixie Clay?”

She shook her head.

“You should. ‘Blind Pig Blues,’ by Barbecue Bob.”

“Ream me out some more.”

Blind pig, blind pig, sure glad you can’t see me

For if you could, it would be too tight for me.

“You like it?”

“I like it.”

I’m slipping slipping slipping, trying to dodge United States law

I’m loaded down with bootleg, like to make them yammies bawl.

He stopped singing to plunge his hand over the gunwale and shove them off a treetop, and then he settled again.

Dixie Clay turned around in the boat. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I knew you’d come. I can’t understand how I knew, but I did. When I was in that tree, and I thought I couldn’t hold on much longer, I told myself, ‘Hold on. He’s going to find you.’ ”

“And now we’re going to find Willy. We’re not far.”

She nodded, then turned back to the water. “Hand me a sleeve of those crackers, Ingersoll. We’re going to find our Willy.”

Chapter 18

A
s they got closer to Greenville and the sun ginned the cottony fog, they spotted more navy seaplanes and rescue boats and a molasses tanker filled with refugees. Still the only land was the levees, which dropped off to water on either side, and they could barely see the levees at all because they were dense with people and livestock. Dixie Clay and Ingersoll were still seven miles out when the
Delta Belle
appeared, ancient side-wheel transient pressed back into service, tornadoing black smoke. She was heading south, Vicksburg, said Ingersoll, who motored their boat closer to the dangerous trunk-clotted bank so it wouldn’t be crushed by debris the
Belle
churned up. They bobbed there and Ingersoll cut the motor to save gas and stretched, twisting his torso, and she heard his spine crack. A few wild swans squabbled among the reeds and Dixie Clay tossed them the last saltine, then turned back to watch the riverboat’s progress.

“When I was a girl,” she said, holding the rocking gunwale with her good hand, “my father used to tell me about going to see a showboat, the
Floating Palace,
how thrilling it was coming around the bend, blasting the calliope, with white plumes of steam.” She turned on the bench and picked up the empty potted meat can and bailed some water overboard. “The show started at dark, they could hardly stand the wait. He said they ate pink popcorn.” She could still hear the way her father said POP-corn. It was strange to think about him now. She existed in a realm his imagination could not pierce.

Ingersoll must have heard homethoughts in her voice, for when she looked up, he was studying her. She shrugged a shoulder. He pivoted the outboard motor up and pulled leaves and vines from the propeller. Her father would like this man, if he ever met him. Though she’d have a lot of explaining to do. She looked at Ingersoll’s profile, slab of hair hanging over his eyes, bump in his nose where it’d been broken, strong jaw with stubble that didn’t quite hide the dimple he must not have liked. He was the kind of man who grew better looking the longer you knew him. Whereas Jesse began to tarnish the moment you took him off the shelf.

Jesse wasn’t the only person she’d misjudged because of his looks. There was Uncle Mookey, too. She remembered standing before the still with her arms crossed while Mookey hunkered on his heels to eat his dinner. Had she tapped her foot? No, not that bad. But she’d disdained his company. Filling jars with whiskey, she’d shrunk back to avoid brushing his fat, hairless white arms. What had happened in Hobnob, what Mookey had done to blow the levee—in some ways, she was to blame.

The
Delta Belle
gave a moan as it drew abreast, burdened with white women and children, filthy and despondent and laden with parcels, every surface covered. Children stood on top of an improbable piano and others balanced on the boiler and the pilothouse; others clung to the king posts like monkeys. They were the ones who weren’t evacuated until the day after the levee break—the poorest ones. Jeannette wouldn’t be on this boat, that much was clear.

In front of the steamer floated a fat stump, which Dixie Clay realized was no stump, but a black bear cub. It was paddling from one levee to the other. Where was its mother? Dixie Clay sprang off the bench and yelled “Watch out” toward the steamer, foolishly—the captain couldn’t hear her, and even if he could, he wouldn’t change course. The cub roundly, earnestly paddled with high paws and a black nose lifted from the water. It crossed in front of the steamer and Dixie Clay couldn’t be sure as the cub was blocked from sight but she thought he’d made it. Some of the passengers on the Texas deck were gazing down and must be watching the bear, though none had a reaction that indicated its fate. They seemed dazed, deadened, even the children. Finally the steamer was past. Ingersoll pulled the rip cord and they slapped into the wake, spray hitting their faces.

In another mile, the levees were even more crowded, every inch crammed with cattle and squatting Negroes and shoulder-to-shoulder tents constructed of old quilts or cotton sacks. She turned her head, scanning, as if Willy would be held aloft, waiting for her to claim him. What she saw instead was miserable humanity, lumps of people as if dipped in a slurry of wet clay, shapeless as crawfish mounds. A braying mule scrambled in the mud to climb back on the levee, failing, flailing, sliding deeper into the river. No one helped it.

They motored by these strange bitter tableaux and Dixie Clay recalled the famous Mississippi River panorama that toured through Birmingham, the “three-mile painting” that had to be unscrolled before the audience. But this unscrolling was the painting’s opposite—no ragtime-romantic scenes of heroic battles against Indians but a sullen seethe broken occasionally by a brown arm tossing a playing card onto the pile, another flashing a pink palm before swinging against a child’s bottom.

Ingersoll steered nearer the levee to avoid another steamer, which gave a blast of its horn, but Dixie Clay didn’t watch it pass. Instead, she watched a shrunken woman, dark as a chestnut, sitting on an upended bait bucket, leaning over a cane. Her eyes latched on Dixie Clay’s and she pushed heavily on her cane with her elbows jutted out like vulture’s wings to rise and then, still glaring, she lifted her cane into the air and shook it at Dixie Clay. She kept shaking it until Ingersoll motored them around the bend. Dixie Clay’s forearms prickled with gooseflesh, someone walking on her grave.

She was ill. She knew that. She’d been bonechilled for a day and a night and a day, but she felt hot. Her arm throbbed, her elbow cannibalized in the puffy flesh, her breathing painful. And now her vision bleared. She was a girl on Independence Day with a fever, watching from her bedroom as Lucius and his friends crushed lightning bugs and smeared the phosphorescent paint across their cheeks. She was swooning at that upstairs window.
Come down, Dixie Clay, come down.
She was swooning at the top of a flight of stairs.
Come play.
She felt herself listing and only when her fingers touched the water did she snap to.

Maybe she was going mad.

No. Focus on Willy.

She went to picture his face and nothing was there.

She couldn’t remember what he looked like.

“What? What is it, Dixie Clay?”

She didn’t know her shoulders were quaking until he asked.

“I can’t picture him.”

“What?”

“I can’t picture Willy! I can’t see his face!”

She whirled around in the boat. Ingersoll was scanning the levee as if looking for a place to dock, though there was none. He faced her and leaned forward. “Listen,” he said. “Close your eyes.”

“Oh my God! I can’t picture him! I can’t—”

“Damn it, close your eyes!”

She closed them.

“Do this for me. Will you do this for me? I want you to take a deep breath.”

She did, or thought she did.

“No, slower. I’ll count to five, and you breathe in through your nose, and then I’ll count to five, and you breathe out through your mouth.”

He counted. She breathed.

“Now, I need you to do something else. I need you to think about Willy sneezing. Okay? No, keep your eyes closed. Good. Okay, remember how every time he sneezes, he does it twice, real fast? One sneeze, and the other right on the heels of it? And after, he gives a little noise, like a sigh. Can you hear it?”

She could. She remembered how he sneezed. Twice, one sneeze following another. She could hear the high sweet register of his “Choot! Choot!” She could see his neck snapping forward. She had the sneeze back. She heard the breathy sigh he always gave after. She had the sigh back, too. He always looked a little stunned after sneezing, not sure what had happened or if it would happen again.

“Do you remember,” Ingersoll continued, “his funny squinched-up face when he soils his diddie?”

She did. She could see it and she could smell it. Washrag of warm water, get it up in there. Suds on those little round sugar-lump buns.

“I remember,” she told him. Her eyes were still closed.

Fresh diddie, smelling of the breeze on the laundry line. Metal chill of the pin between her lips.

“What else do you remember? You tell me, now. What else, Dixie Clay?”

She started with the smallest thing: his knee. She pictured how it looked when he flexed his leg and the roll of fat puffed on top, kneecap practically without function as he hadn’t even tried to crawl, skin still so soft. The knee came back, and the thigh creased twice with rolls of fat, like someone had snapped rubber bands there. Another crease at the ankle, like someone had screwed the foot on. She described it to Ingersoll.

“What else?”

Willy’s chin—chins, really. When he smiled his neck looked like a stack of pancakes. She retrieved the chins and the yogurt smell when she’d press her upturned freckled nose in the creases. She described it.

“What else?”

His “b” sound, and his exploratory “ah-ah-aaaaaah,” and his “eeeee” when she’d draw his foot sole along her bottom teeth, like the squeal of curling ribbon against the scissor blade.

“What else?”

Her sharp chin playing the xylophone of Willy’s rib cage.

Tiny pinprick chill bumps on his legs when she took him from his sink bath. How fast his hair dried as she toweled it, springing into wisps.

Crease of lint between his first and second toes, how’d you get there, lint?

His fist gripping the teething biscuit, how he’d gnaw one end and then flip his fist to gnaw the other but never loosened his grip to gnaw the middle. The sodden biscuit bearing the impression of his knuckles when she’d pry it out at last.

In this manner, bit by bit, she sculpted him aloud while Ingersoll fought the river and prodded her, until she had her baby whole. Her arm was still aching but also now aching to hold his body, body that she knew, that no one alive knew like she knew.

Dixie Clay opened her eyes then and turned back around in time to see a jewelwing damselfly, wings like stained glass, alight on the prow and hitch a ride. Her vision wasn’t blurry anymore and she was breathing fine.

This was Ingersoll’s doing.

He’s helping me. He’s helping me, and I’m allowing him to.

For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. She’d sandbagged her heart. It had felt like strength and she’d had no choice, she’d had no choice but to be strong, so she was strong. But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.

She did another of the count-to-five breaths.

Then: “I love you, Ingersoll.”

“I know.”

She turned and he was smiling.

A
s they neared the wharf, Ingersoll swerved to avoid a Standard Oil barge pulling out and belatedly blasting its horn. Corrected, then swerved back to avoid a rusty tanker. Finally he gave up on wedging into the sloping concrete wharf and instead brought them close beside the retaining wall at the end of Washington Avenue, topped with sandbags. He yelled to a Negro sitting on top to catch his rope and secure them, and the Negro did and then removed sandbags so they had a kind of passageway. The Negro called that he’d fetch a board to be laid as a gangplank but Dixie Clay shook her head, no time. Instead, Ingersoll grasped her around the waist and lifted her toward the levee and she stretched her leg but fell short of toeing the sandbag and there was a moment when her boot hung in space. Then a pair of brown hands reached to steady her foot. She still wore the sling, but from the sandbags a palm reached out and she grasped it with her good hand and heaved herself through.

Ingersoll propelled himself with the same grasped hand. “Obliged,” he said.

“Sho now. But you done gone the wrong way. White folks E-vacuating, not IN-vacuating.”

“Yeah. But we’re searching for somebody.”

“Everybody hereabout searching for somebody.” The Negro gestured and Dixie Clay followed with her gaze. Some Negroes were sitting on blankets, some on boxes or valises, some clutched chickens, and one family with eight children sat in cane-back chairs of descending size around a table centered on a rug, like they’d simply moved their parlor outdoors. She looked at the Negro, who still held his arm out, the skin beneath his eyes purple, and she thought, for the first time, that she was not alone in the enactment of a great drama, a great tragedy, that all these people, and there were thousands, all were suffering and seeking, her story merely one story, her despair merely one despair.

The Negro met her gaze and dropped it. “Red Cross lady yonder,” he said, and thumbed over his shoulder.

Dixie Clay viewed the city below them, water lapping the buildings halfway up the bottom floors, boats paddling through streets like Venice, rowboats in the middle and motorboats nearer the curb where the water was deeper. All along the levee near the wharf, men were banging hammers into lumber. A milk wagon pulled alongside them.

Ingersoll turned to the driver. “What are they building?”

“Scaffolding,” answered the driver. “Right now you can walk above the water from the levee to the Red Cross HQ, to the second floor of the American Legion, to the Opera House, to the Cowan Hotel.”

“Who’s in Greenville? In charge, I mean. Has President Coolidge come?”

“Nope.”

“Does he plan to?”

“Doesn’t look like it. But he telegrammed his support.” The driver snorted. “Them builders don’t leave a body much room to get on by, do they?” He clucked at his horses, who began to skirt the workers, hoofing down the slick levee incline, and momentum started pulling them toward the water, first the horse’s fetlocks, then water up to the wagon axles, the horses straining and white-eyed, and then the wagon began to float and the driver uttered a curse and dropped the reins to clasp his cap and the whole floating wagon flipped over, milk cans clattering into the water and bobbing.

“Come on,” Ingersoll said, and took her by the hand and they too skirted the workers and darted along the sandbags toward the wharf, through Negroes unloading crates stenciled
EMERGENCY SUPPLIES,
National Guardsmen aback horses, piles of bricks and rubble, workers building latrines from scrap lumber, a cluster of invalids on cots, three men dragging a dead heifer onto a tarp. The stench was terrible. She was glad for the trotline of Ingersoll’s hand. Finally, they were at the bottleneck opening of the sandbags, and an administrator, a man with glasses and a clipboard and a Red Cross armband, was registering female passengers and also arguing with a man in a tweed suit who was clutching an enormous silver tea urn by its double handles.