“What would you have the girl look out of,” retorted Andy, not very brilliantly. “Her ears?”
Julie could not but know of this antagonism toward her. Some perverse streak in her otherwise rich and gentle make-up caused her to find a sinister pleasure in arousing it.
Windy’s victory was more definitely dramatic, though his defensive method against Parthy’s attacks resembled in sardonic quiet and poise Julie’s own. Windy was accounted one of the most expert pilots on the Mississippi. He knew every coil and sinew and stripe of the yellow serpent. River men used his name as a synonym for magic with the pilot’s wheel. Starless night or misty day; shoal water or deep, it was all one to Windy. Though Andy’s senior by more than fifteen years, the two had been friends for twenty. Captain Andy had enormous respect for his steersmanship; was impressed by his taciturnity (being himself so talkative and vivacious); enjoyed talking with him in the bright quiet security of the pilot house. He was absolute czar of the Mollie Able and the Cotton Blossom, as befitted his high accomplishments. No one ever dreamed of opposing him except Parthy. He was slovenly of person, careless of habit. These shortcomings Parthy undertook to correct early in her show-boat career. She met with defeat so prompt, so complete, so crushing as to cause her for ever after to leave him unmolested.
Windy had muddy boots. They were, it seemed, congenitally so. He would go ashore in mid-afternoon of a hot August day when farmers for miles around had been praying for rain these weeks past and return in a downpour with half the muck and clay of the countryside clinging to his number eleven black square-toed elastic-side boots. A tall, emaciated drooping old man, Windy; with long gnarled muscular hands whose enlarged knuckles and leathery palms were the result of almost half a century at the wheel. His pants were always grease-stained; his black string tie and gray shirt spattered with tobacco juice; his brown jersey frayed and ragged. Across his front he wore a fine anchor watch chain, or “log” chain, as it was called. And gleaming behind the long flowing tobacco-splotched gray beard that reached almost to his waist could be glimpsed a milkily pink pearl stud like a star behind a dirty cloud-bank. The jewel had been come by, doubtless, in payment of some waterfront saloon gambling debt. Surely its exquisite curves had once glowed upon fine and perfumed linen.
It was against this taciturn and omnipotent conqueror of the rivers that Parthy raised the flag of battle.
“Traipsin’ up and down this boat and the Mollie Able, spitting his filthy tobacco and leaving mud tracks like an elephant that’s been in a bog. If I’ve had those steps leading up to the pilot house scrubbed once, I’ve had ’em scrubbed ten times this week, and now look at them! I won’t have it, and so I tell you. Why can’t he go up the side of the boat the way a pilot is supposed to do! What’s that side ladder for, I’d like to know! He’s supposed to go up it; not the steps.”
“Now, Parthy, you can’t run a boat the way you would a kitchen back in Thebes. Windy’s no hired man. He’s the best pilot on the rivers, and I’m lucky to have him. A hundred jobs better than this ready to jump at him if he so much as crooks a finger. He’s pulled this tub through good many tight places where any other pilot’d landed us high and dry on a sand bar. And don’t you forget it.”
“He’s a dirty old man. And I won’t have it. Muddying up my clean . . .”
Parthy was not one of your scolds who takes her grievances out in mere words. With her, to threaten was to act. That very morning, just before the Cotton Blossom was making a late departure from Greenville, where they had played the night before, to Sunnisie Side Landing, twelve miles below, this formidable woman, armed with hammer and nails, took advantage of Windy’s temporary absence below decks to nail down the hatch above the steps leading to the pilot house. She was the kind of woman who can drive a nail straight. She drove ten of them, long and firm and deep. A pity that no one saw her. It was a sight worth seeing, this accomplished and indomitable virago in curl papers, driving nails with a sure and steady stroke.
Below stairs Windy, coming aboard from an early morning look around, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, sank his great yellow fangs into a generous wedge of Honest Scrap, and prepared to climb the stairs to the Cotton Blossom pilot house, there to manipulate wheel and cord that would convey his orders to Pete in the engine room.