Summer of Pearls Page 3

  She screamed.

  “Mama?”

  “Ben!” she cried, trying to move the piano.

  “I’m all right, Mama. There’s water in here.”

  “Help!” she yelled. “For God’s sake, somebody come help me!”

  A man appeared at the back end of the saloon. “Come on, lady! This way!”

  “The piano!” she yelled. “My son’s in there! Help me move the piano!”

  “Forget about the damned piano, woman! Get out this way!” The man was gone.

  She whimpered in terror. Water was coming up through the hole in the saloon floor.

  “Mama! I can’t reach the door!” she heard Ben say.

  She clawed at the door until her fingernails were bloody. She beat against it with her fists, then kicked it, trying to break it in, but she wasn’t a very large woman and the door was solid wood. “Ben?” she cried again, trying to preserve some chord of normalcy in her voice.

  “Mama, it’s getting deeper!” he yelled through the door.

  “Swim, son!” she shouted, tears gushing down her face. “And if the room fills up, you hold your breath!”

  Ben didn’t answer.

  “Do you hear me, Ben?”

  “Yes,” Ben said.

  “I have to get help, son. I’ll come back as quick as I can.”

  “Don’t go, Mama!” her son’s voice said.

  She had to tear herself away from the door and the piano and her son. “Swim, son!” she yelled, so he would hear her going away. “Keep swimming!” She wanted to crawl back to him, but there was no time. She was thinking rationally now. She was trying to save him. But she felt as if she were deserting him, leaving him to drown alone.

  Billy Treat had gone under six times for drowning people, bringing most of them up to Reggie, who was strong enough to pull them into the yawl. Other boats were arriving now, and he could no longer see anyone floundering in the water. The five horses had people clinging to their tails as they stroked toward the wharf. The horses had made several trips, and they were exhausted. People were settling down, helping each other. Then a woman emerged from the passenger cabin of the sinking steamboat and began screaming bloody murder.

  “My son! Ben is in there! The piano!”

  Billy swam to her and climbed onto the tilting boiler deck. “Where is he? Where’s your son?”

  The woman gripped him with hysteria, but spoke quite plainly. “The piano slid against the door, and I can’t open it. Ben is in there. He can’t get out!” She virtually shoved him into the flooding cabin.

  Billy Treat waded to the door with the piano before it. “Hey!” he yelled. “You in there?”

  “Help!” the voice said. “The water’s getting deeper. I can’t get out.”

  Billy put all the strength he had into moving the piano, but he couldn’t lift it or slide it away from the door. “Can you swim?”

  “Yes!”

  “I’m coming right back for you! Keep swimming!”

  The water was knee-deep in the saloon now, and deeper in Ben’s room, which was on the sinking side of the boat. Billy waded to the aft end of the passenger cabin.

  “Where’s Ben?” Ellen cried when she saw Billy come out alone. “Where’s my boy?” Some of the men had forced her into a boat.

  “Ellen!” cried a man from another boat. “Where’s Ben?”

  Billy knew it had to be the boy’s father. He didn’t answer the mother’s questions, or the father’s. He just dove into the water and disappeared. He felt his way under the boiler deck, around a few bales of cotton lodged there, and to the submerged engine room on the main deck. He found the door handle and swam into the darkness. Feeling around, he soon located Judd Kelso’s iron capstan bar. He knew where Kelso kept it, because he had considered many times throwing it overboard. Of course that wouldn’t have solved anything. Kelso could always find something else to hit the rousters with.

  He noticed, just before he broke the surface, that his lungs were aching. The swimming underwater was beginning to take its toll on him. Once he had been among the best in the world, but he hadn’t done it in a long time.

  The woman screamed wildly when he came up. He only waved the bar at her, taking no time to explain. The men held her in the boat. Otherwise, she would have rushed back in to try to save her son.

  Billy knew the old Glory of Caddo Lake well. He was thinking about how she was put together as he made his way through the water in the saloon, now deep enough to swim through. The cheapest, thinnest wood was between the staterooms. The paneling that formed the walls between staterooms and saloon was pretty thick. The doors were solid. There wasn’t much time. Ben’s room was almost completely under water now. He decided to tear through the thin wood partitioning the rooms.

  “Keep swimming, Ben,” he said when he got to the piano. “I’m coming through the wall of the next room to get you!”

  “I’m swimming!” the boy cried.

  He admired this boy who was being brave, trapped in that dark room as the bayou squeezed his air out. He forced himself to relax for ten seconds and took long, deep breaths. Then he slid through the open door of the room next to Ben’s and disappeared underwater.

  It took a full minute of hard work to punch a small hole in the wall with the capstan bar, but Billy could not see wasting the seconds it would take to go up for air again. The boy might not have seconds. He didn’t know how far the boat had sunk as he worked. Maybe the boy was drowning now. Billy had stayed under longer than this before. No need to go back now. Go forward! In the dark, he tore at the boards he had loosened until he had two of them broken away. There was enough room to squeeze through now.

  Every little moment became an eternity. His lungs ached for air. They racked him all the way up to his eyeballs. But he had already decided to swim into Ben’s room, hoping he would find an air pocket left there. It was a big gamble, but he was not going to take a chance on letting that boy drown. He couldn’t take the guilt of leaving someone to die while he lived. Not again. He would rather drown with Ben, a boy he didn’t even know.

  He bumped his head in the very uppermost corner of the room and felt air on his face. His lungs had already started sucking. If there had been no air, he would have drowned. Then the hands of the boy pulled him under, and he thought he would drown anyway.

  “Hey!” he said, coming up again, gasping. “Take it easy!”

  They treaded water together, the tops of their heads jammed against the upper corner of the stateroom. They didn’t speak, as Billy was gasping for air. They could hear a couple of men grunting through the wall, trying to move the piano above them.

  “You holding out all right?” Billy finally asked, having caught some wind.

  “Yes, sir,” Ben said. “Who are you?”

  “Name’s Billy Treat. Here, get on my back. Now, listen to me and take long breaths. Stop swimming, just relax. I’ll keep you up. Listen while you breathe deep and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Shut up, I said. Just listen. Now, when the water gets to our chins, you’re going to take in as much air as your chest can hold. We’ll go under together. Don’t swim. Let me pull you. You just relax and hold your breath. I made a hole in the wall down there. I’ll help you through it, then come through after you and we’ll swim out through the door of the next room. Easy.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Shut up, I told you. Breathe deep. Don’t worry. You can hold your breath that long. Just relax and let me swim for you.”

  Someone was beating on the door above them, shouting, “Ben! Ben!”

  “Don’t answer,” Billy said. “Save your breath. It’s time now. Ready?” They breathed deeply together. “Go!”

  Ellen was standing in the yawl, weeping, wringing her hands. Her husband and another man had gone in after the stranger with the iron bar, but no one had come out. She could tell that Ben’s room was all the way under water now. She was trying to h
old on to some hope, but it was growing thin. She prayed aloud, though no one understood her words, muffled by the sobs.

  Then, through the blur of her tears, she saw a movement down the half-hooded saloon. A man emerged. Not her husband, and not the stranger with the iron bar. Then, there was John. John Crowell, her husband! Was he smiling or crying? He reached back into the saloon and pulled someone else into the morning light. It was the stranger, and the stranger had ahold of Ben! Merciful God!

  3

  I GUESS I SHOULD GET AS MUCH CREDIT AS ANYBODY FOR MAKING BILLY Treat an instant hero in Port Caddo. I was the boy he rescued from the sinking Glory of Caddo Lake the day her boilers blew. I’m Ben Crowell. I’ve told the story a thousand times since then, and people always think I’m spinning yarn when I do. But I won’t water it down just to make it more believable. I’ve been known to branch out a little, mind you, but never when I talk about that summer.

  Anyway, saving me made Billy a hero overnight, because by the next day, my father had printed a special extra-edition of the Port Caddo Steam Whistle. Pop was wise enough not to celebrate my rescue until the third page. The event was a catastrophe, after all, and a terrible blow to the town’s spirit and economy. Seven men were killed, a lot of property destroyed, and our favorite steamboat sunk. The first two pages of the paper quite properly lamented the whole thing as a horrible tragedy.

  But my pop was an unquenchable booster and knew he had to keep the spirit of the town going. On page three, he started listing acts of heroism. A woman from Jefferson had taken off her dress and stuffed it with floating pieces of firewood to make a raft for some children to float on. One of the big, strong deckhands had held up a collapsed portion of the forward passenger cabin with his back so people could crawl out under it. The people of Port Caddo, in general, had done all they could to ease the plight of the victims.

  There was a big mystery concerning the five horsemen who had jumped their mounts into the bayou. Nobody in town knew who they were. They simply disappeared after the last of the passengers had been rescued. My pop didn’t say so in the paper, because he didn’t print rumors, but most folks believed they belonged to Christmas Nelson’s outlaw gang, which was supposed to be hiding out in the woods around Caddo Lake.

  The stranger, Billy Treat, got a whole column all to himself. He had gone under seven times to pull near-drowning people to the surface. Everybody in Port Caddo was talking about how long he could hold his breath. A minute, two minutes, five minutes. Who was this Billy Treat? Was he part turtle, or what?

  My rescue was the most detailed account in the special edition, which only made sense, seeing as how the editor was my pop. So I figure I had as much to do as anybody in making Billy the new Port Caddo hero. He was already my own personal hero. I knew that the moment he stood me safely on the wharf.

  I remember collapsing beside Judd Kelso and looking back over the bayou. The Glory of Caddo Lake had settled crooked on the bottom, only her texas sticking out. The pilothouse was gone. I wondered what had become of Captain Gentry. Then I saw him, hung in a fork of a cypress tree, bent backward, his head almost cut clean off. A huge section of boiler plate was in another tree near him.

  Embedded in the wharf, not far from me, was a cotton bale, dry as a candlewick. The explosion had thrown it all the way there from the boat. My mother was clinging to me, sobbing. People were helping others out of boats, onto the wharf. Many were crying and all were drenched and shivering. Some people were hurt bad. I saw more blood than I had ever seen before, and I had experienced a lot of fishhooked fingers, skinned knees, and bloody noses.

  That’s when I really got scared, after the danger was all over for me. I might have stayed shook up for a long time if it hadn’t been for Billy.

  “Ben!” he said. “Get up and grab this corner!”

  Billy and my pop were lifting one of the deckhands to the wharf, using a blanket as a stretcher. I stared at Billy in disbelief. I thought I was a victim and didn’t have to do anything. My mother thought so too, and she held me back and probably gave Billy some kind of fierce look.

  “Come on,” Billy said. “You’re all right. Help these hurt people.”

  He was right. There was nothing wrong with me. I had just been treading water for a few minutes, that’s all. I had a knot on my head where the explosion had thrown me against a bedpost or something in my sleep and knocked me silly for a minute or two until the water seeped into my room and got my attention. But I wasn’t really hurt.

  I pulled away from my mother’s arms and grabbed the corner of the blanket, which had a knot tied in it, making it easier to hold on to. The man in the blanket was the poor scalded deckhand Billy had saved. His skin looked blistered and horrible. He was unconscious, but moaning. I never learned his name, but I knew him from the Glory’s frequent visits to our town. He was the one who sang the low notes of the coonjines.

  Billy jumped onto the wharf. “Kelso! Get up and help,” he ordered.

  Judd Kelso was lying there on his back with his hands over his face. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not? You hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Billy sneered with disgust and gave me a signal with his eyes to lift my corner of the blanket. I watched his every move and followed his directions. He was helping people, and I wanted to be just like him.

  I don’t know how things got organized so quickly that morning, but by the time Billy and I and my pop carried the scalded deckhand past the constable’s one-cell log jailhouse and up to high ground where the cobblestones started, old Jim Snyder had already turned his general store into sort of a makeshift hospital. There was a bed there where we lay the deckhand down.

  Billy motioned at me to make another run with him down to the wharf and we started out, me right on his heels. Suddenly, I bumped into his back, for Billy had stopped dead in his tracks. I followed his eyes and found his stare locked on Pearl Cobb, who was wrapping a man’s foot in bandages.

  Some people believe in love at first sight. I think it’s rare, but it happens. What I saw in Billy’s face was love at first sight, only I didn’t know it at the time, because just about every man alive looked at Pearl the same way, unless his wife happened to be with him. I was probably the most unabashed Pearl-gazer in Port Caddo. I had a crush on her something fierce.

  Nobody appreciates the beauty of a full-grown woman more than a fourteen-year-old boy. He has no point of reference. He doesn’t have enough experience with women to know how to judge one from the other. He doesn’t even know what to look for. He just looks up one day and sees beauty, and it is absolute. Later, he grows up, gets particular, and starts ranking women and giving scores and silly things like that. But that first beauty a boy sees when his loins go to surprising him is flawless. All of a sudden he feels like as big an aching idiot as ever lived, and he loves it.

  That was how Pearl Cobb made me feel. She was a little darker-skinned than your typical white gal, as if tanned by the sun, though I rarely saw her out in the daylight. Women envied her hair, long and dark and full. It possessed a sculpted quality, yet bounced and floated as free as clouds when she moved.

  That’s when Pearl got to you, when she moved. I don’t think women can learn moves like that. Some things you’re simply born with. I don’t think she could help it. Just the way she was put together made her turn heads when she walked, and even when she just brushed her hair back from her face.

  And as faces go, you can take your Mona Lisas and your moving-picture stars. Pearl had them all beat. I guess now I would have to say her features were perfectly proportionate, or something like that—her cheeks round, her lips full, her nose small and cute, her jaw straight and delicate. I might try to tell you about her eyes, how they melted you, embraced you too briefly, shamed you. But when I was fourteen, all I knew was the sheer truth of their large, shining beauty.

  Don’t think I didn’t notice more than he
r eyes. Pearl had other attractions. A scribe couldn’t copy her curves. They defied duplication. No mere line or graduated plane could render likeness to any part of her. You could cast her in gold and not capture the living, breathing loveliness of her. You could stare at her like a fool for fifteen seconds, soaking in her beauty, then turn away and not trust your own recent memory of her perfection, so you would have to look again to be sure.

  And I don’t know if she made her own dresses or bought them, but how she got them to cling to her—as I wanted to do—is something I haven’t figured out to this day.

  Pearl worked in old man Snyder’s store and lived alone in a little room upstairs. She was a hard worker, kept the place real clean and organized, made perfect change, and balanced the books. About the time I turned fourteen, I started loitering around the store quite a bit. I didn’t have any money to buy anything, and Pearl probably knew it. I think she took pity on my innocence, but maybe she just took advantage of it.

  She got me to run all kinds of errands for her, taking groceries to old folks who couldn’t get around and things like that. There wasn’t any money in it for me, just a nice word from Pearl every now and then, maybe a smile. Once in a while she would stroke my sweaty mop of boy’s hair with her sensuous fingers. I guess she was just scruffing up my hair a little bit, but it felt like the embrace of pure tingling passion to me.

  I was only vaguely aware back then of Pearl’s reputation. I had heard some old biddies refer to her as “white trash.” I figured they were jealous. Then one day Cecil Peavy, my friend and fishing partner, called her a slut, and we had a knock-around fight over it. Us boys from proper families grew up sort of innocent back then. I wasn’t even real sure I knew what a slut was, but the way Cecil said it made me mad.

  Slowly it began to dawn on me as I caught morsels of men’s talk about her, and listened to some new instinct of my own, what the secret was about Pearl. It took some thinking to sort it all out, and some time to verify it—and even then, I was still a little fuzzy on the details—but the truth was that Pearl could be bought, if a fellow was lucky enough to come by her fee.