"A man without a wife, 'he ain't a whole man at all, he's just a shadow walking around without no one to cast him."
His hand rose briefly to his shirt front, touched it questioningly, dropped again. "I keep hearing music. Is there a band playing on the streets somewhere around here ?"
"There's a band playing, sure enough," she confirmed, unsmiling. "A special kind of band, for just one person at a time to hear. For just one day. I heard it once. Today's your day for hearing it."
"I'd better be on my way!" He bolted for the door, flung it open, chased down the walk and gave a vault into the waiting carriage that rocked it on its springs.
"To the Canal Street Pier," he sighed with blissful anticipation, "to meet the boat from St. Louis."
3
The river was empty, the sky was clear. Both were mirrored in his anxious, waiting eyes. Then a little twirl of smudge appeared, no bigger than if stroked by a man-sized finger against the God-sized sky. It came from where there seemed to be no river, only an embankment; it seemed to hover over dry land, for it was around a turn the river made, before straightening to flow toward New Orleans and the pier. And those assembled on it.
He stood there waiting, others like himself about him. Some so close their elbows all but grazed him. Strangers, men he did not know, had never seen before, would never see again, drawn together for a moment by the arrival of a boat.
He had picked for his standing place a pilehead that protruded above the pier-deck; that was his marker, he stood close beside that, and wouldn't let others preempt it from him, knowing it would play its part in securing the craft. For a while he stood with one leg raised, foot planted squarely upon it. Then he leaned bodily forward over it in anticipation, both hands flattened on it. At one time, briefly, he even sat upon it, but got up again' fairly soon, as if with some idea that by remaining on his feet he would hasten the vessel's approach.
The smoke had climbed now, was high in the sky, like dingy black ostrich plumes massed together and struggling to escape from one another. Under its profusion a black that was solid substance, a slender cone, began to rise; a smokestack. Then a second.
"There she is," a roustabout shouted, and the needless, overdue declaration was immediately taken up and repeated by two or three of those about him.
"Yes sir, there she is," they echoed two or three times after him. "There she is, all right."
"There she is," Durand's heart told him softly. But it meant a different she.
The smokestack, like a blunted knife slicing through the earth, cleared the embankment and came out upon the open water bed. A tawny superstructure, that seemed to be indented with a myriad tiny niches in two long even rows, was beneath it, and beneath that, only a thin line at this distance, was the ungainly black hull. The paddles were going, slats turning over as they reached the top of the wheel and fell, shaking off spray into the turgid brown water below that they kept beating upon.
She made the turn and grew larger, prow forward. She was lifesized now, coursing down on the pier as if she meant to smash it asunder. A shrill falsetto wail, infinitely mournful, like the cry of a lost soul in torment, knifed from her, and a plume of white circled the smokestack and vanished to the rear. The City of New Orleans, out of St. Louis three days before, was back home again at its namesake-port, its mother-haven.
The sidewheels stopped, and it began to glide, like a paper boat, like a ghost over the water. It turned broadside to the pier, and ran along beside it, its speed seeming swifter now, that it was lengthwise, than it had been before, when it was coming head-on, though the reverse was the truth.
The notched indentations went by like a picket fence, then slower, slower; then stopped at last, then even reversed a little and seemed to lose ground. The water, caught between the hull and pier, went crazy with torment; squirmed and slashed and choked, trying to find its way out. Thinned at last to a crevicelike canal.
No more river, no more sky, nothing but towering superstructure blotting them both out. Someone idling against the upper deck rail waved desultorily. Not to Durand, for it was a man. Not to anyone else in particular, either, most likely. Just a friendly wave of arrival. One of them on the pier took it upon himself to answer it with a like wave, proxying for the rest.
A rope was thrown, and several of the small crowd stepped back to avoid being struck by it. Dockworkers came forward for their brief moment of glory, claimed the rope, deftly lashed it about the pile top directly before Durand. At the opposite end they were doing the same thing. She was in, she was fast.
A trestled gangway was rolled forward, a brief section of lowerdeck rail was detached, leaving an opening. The gap between was bridged. A ship's officer came down, almost before it was fixed in place, took up position close at hand below, to supervise the discharge. The passengers were funnelling along the deck from both directions into and down through the single-file descent-trough.
Durand moved up close beside it until he could rest his hand upon it, as if in mute claim; peered up anxiously into each imminent face as it coursed swiftly downward and past, only inches from his own.
The first passenger off was a man, striding, sample cases in both his hands, some business traveler in haste to leave. A woman next, more slowly, picking her way with care. Gray-haired and spectacled; not she. Another woman next. Not she again; her husband a step behind her, guiding her with hand to her elbow. An entire family next, in hierarchal order of importance.
Then more men, two or three of them in succession this time. Faces just pale ciphers to him, quickly passed over. Then a woman, and for a moment-- No, not she; different eyes, a different nose, a different face. A stranger's curt glance, meeting his, then quickly rebuffing it. Another man. Another woman. Red-haired and sandybrowed; not she.
A space then, a pause, a wait.
His heart took premature fright, then recovered. A tapping run along the deck planks, as some laggard made haste to overtake the others. A woman by the small, quick sound of her feet. A flounce of skirts, a face- Not she. A whiff of lilac water, a snub from eyes that had no concern for him, as his had for them, no quest in them, no knowledge. Not she.
And then no more. The gangplank empty. A lull, as when a thing is over.
He stared up, and his face died.
He was gripping the edges of the gangplank with both hands now. He released it at last, crossed around to the other side of it, accosted the officer loitering there, clutched at him anxiously by the sleeve. "No one else ?"
The officer turned and relayed the question upward toward the deck in booming hand-cupped shout. "Anyone else ?"
Another of the ship's company, perhaps the captain, came to the rail and peered down overside. "All ashore," he called down.
It was like a knell. Durand seemed to find himself alone, in a pool of sudden silence, following it; though all about him there was as much noise going on as ever. But for him, silence. Stunning finality.
"But there must be-- There has to--"
"No one else," the captain answered jocularly. "Come up and see for yourself."
Then he turned and left the rail.
Baggage was coming down now.
He waited, hoping against hope.
No one else. Only baggage, the inanimate dregs of the cargo. And at last not even that.
He turned aside at last and drifted back along the pier-length and off it to the solid ground beyond, and on a little while. His face stiffly averted, as if there were greater pain to be found on one side of him than on the other, though that was not true, it was equal all around.
And when he stopped, he didn't know it, nor why he had just when he did. Nor what reason he had for lingering on there at all. The boat had nothing for him, the river had nothing for him. There was nothing there for him. There or anywhere else, now.