There were numerous reasons a man might not come back from a down-river trip, and most of them were dire. A family man, anyway. A young fellow you might picture running off on some new adventure found along the way, selfishly sending no word back to his anxious kin, but not a papa. “How was it you didn’t go along, his last trip?”
A brief silence. Berry said abruptly, “Come see the rest of my boat.” And led the way out the back, twin to the hatch in front.
Fawn stepped, blinking in the light glimmering off the water, onto what she decided was the boat’s back porch. A long, heavy oar mounted on sturdy wooden hinges extended at an angle from the roof above to the water below, and Fawn realized it must be the rudder. Berry or someone had dropped a few fishing lines out over the stern, tied to a cord with a little bell dangling off it.
“Catch much?” said Fawn, nodding to it.
“Now and then. Not much right here—there’s too much competition.” She glanced down the long row of flatboats, most of which also had similar lines sagging out into the water.
“Dag—my husband—is pretty clever at catching fish.”
“Is he?” Berry hesitated. “Does he know boats?”
“A lot more than I do, but that’s not saying much. I’m not sure if he’s ever been on a flatboat, but he can paddle a narrow boat, and sail. And swim. And do most anything he sets his mind to, really.”
“Huh,” said Berry, and rubbed her nose.
Fawn gathered her resolve. “How much would it cost to go on your boat? For two people and a horse?”
“Well, there’s this,” said Berry, and fell silent. Fawn waited anxiously.
Berry looked out over the bright river, absently rolling a fishing line between her fingertips, and went on, “We might find some extra room. But…two of my crew, the strong-arm boys who man my sweeps—those are the big oars on the sides—got themselves in some stupid fight up behind the Landing last night and haven’t come back.” She glanced over to the shore. “It’s beginning to look like they’ve run off permanent. Leaving just me, my brother, and old Bo to run this boat. Me, I can man—woman—the rudder, but I can’t do that all day and be lookout and cook the meals as well, which is what I had been doing. You say you can cook. Now, if this husband of yours is a good strapping farm lad with two strong arms who isn’t afraid of the water, Uncle Bo ’n I could likely teach him to man a sweep pretty quick. And we could make a deal for you to work your passage. If you’ve a mind for it,” she added a shade uncertainly.
“I could cook, sure,” said Fawn valiantly, stirred by the thought of the savings on their purse. Which, to her mind, was none too fat for a trip of this length, though she’d shied from confiding her money doubts to Dag. “I used to help cook for eight every night, back home. Dag, well…” Dag did not exactly fit Berry’s description of the sort of crewman she was looking for, though Fawn had no doubt he could man any sweep made. “Dag’ll have to speak for himself, when he comes.”
Berry ducked her head. “Fair enough.”
An awkward silence followed this, which Berry broke by saying lightly, “Fancy a mug of cider? We’ve got lots. It’s all going hard in the warm. I’ve been selling some to the boatmen here, who like it better fizzy, so I’ve not lost my whole trouble, but even they won’t drink it after it goes vinegar.”
“Sure,” said Fawn, happy for the chance to maybe sit and talk more with this intriguing riverwoman. Fawn had been stuck on one farm her whole life, till this past spring. She tried to imagine instead traveling the length of the Grace and the Gray not once, but eight or ten—no, sixteen or twenty—times. Berry seemed very tall and enviably competent as she led Fawn back inside, picked up a couple of battered tankards in passing, and turned the barrel’s spigot. The cider was indeed fizzy and fuzzy, but it hadn’t lost quite all its sweetness yet, and Fawn, who had been growing hungry, smiled gratefully over the rim of her mug. Berry led her back to the folding table, and they both pulled up stools.
“I wish it would hurry up and rain,” said Berry. “I was done asking around here the first day, but I’ve been stuck for ten days more. I need at least eighteen inches of rise to get the Fetch over the Riffle, and that’d be scraping bottom.” She took a pull and wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and said more diffidently, “You haven’t been long on the river, I take it?”
Fawn shook her head, and answered the real question. “No, we wouldn’t have heard anything of your people.” She added conscientiously, “Well, Whit and I wouldn’t. Can’t speak for Dag.”
“Whit?”
“My brother. He’s just along for the ride as far as the Grace. He’ll go home with the glass-men tomorrow.” Fawn explained about Warp and Weft, and Whit’s financial schemes. With half her cider gone, Fawn felt bold enough to ask, “So how come you stayed home this past fall?” Fawn knew exactly how agonizing it was not to know what disaster had befallen one’s beloved, but she couldn’t help thinking Berry might have been lucky not to have shared it, whatever it had been.
“You really got married this summer?” said Berry, in a wistful tone.
Fawn nodded. Beneath the table, she touched Dag’s wedding cord wrapping her left wrist. The sense of his direction that he had laid in it, or in her, before Raintree had almost faded away. Maybe, with his ghost hand coming back, he could renew the spell? Groundwork, she diligently corrected her thought.
“I thought I would be wed by then, too,” sighed Berry. “I stayed behind to fix up what was going to be my—our—new house, see, and so papa left my little brother with me, because I was going to be a grown-up woman. Alder, my betrothed, he went with papa too, because he’d never been down the river, and papa thought he ought to learn the boatman’s trade. We were to be married in the spring when they all came back with the profits. Papa said this was going to be his best run ever. ’Course, he says that every fall, whether it’s true or not.” She drank more cider. “Spring came back to Clear Creek, but they never did, not any of the three or their hired hands. I had everything ready, everything—” She broke off.
Fawn nodded, not needing a list to picture it: linens and cooking gear all assembled, bride bed built and feather ticks stuffed and maybe all of it garnished with embroidered coverlets, curtains hung, food laid in, the house cleaned and repaired and all sprigged out. Wedding dress sewn. And then the waiting: first with impatience, then with anger, then with helpless fear, then with fading hope. Fawn shivered.
“Strawberry season came and went, and I left off fussing with the house and started fussing with this boat instead. The only kinsman who’d give me a hand was my uncle Bo, who’s my mama’s older half-brother that never married. The rest of my cousins have got no time for him ’cause they say he drinks too much and is unreliable, which is true enough, but half-help’s better than none, I say. And none was what I got from the rest of ’em. They said I’d got no business going on the river by myself, as if I didn’t know ten times as much about it as any of them!”
“Think you’ll find ’em? All your lost menfolk?” asked Fawn shyly.
“They’d have to be stuck somewhere pretty tight, you’d figure.” She didn’t name the more likely possibilities: a boat broken on rocks or snags and all drowned, or eaten by bears or those appalling southern swamp lizards Dag had described, or bitten by rattlesnakes, or, even more likely and grimly, all dying of some sudden gut-wrenching illness, on a cold riverbank with no one left to bury the last in even an unmarked grave.
“That’s why I named my boat the Fetch and not just the Finder, which was the first name I’d thought of. I’m no fool,” said Berry, in a lower tone. “I know what all might have been. But I scorned to go on living with the not-knowing-for-sure for one more week, when I had a boat to hand to go look for myself. Well, partly to hand.” She tilted up her tankard to drain the cider. Swallowing, she continued, “Which is why I want a crew to hand, as well. If the rise comes up sudden, I don’t want to be stuck waiting for those two scared-off fools to show themselves.”