distantly, and from the engine room farther to the rear of the Natchez, O’Flaherty also called out: ‘Cap’n? M’God, what’s happened here?’
The hissing steam around Wilbur died as O’Flaherty cut off the flow to the pipes. O’Flaherty hurried forward, glancing at Carpenter before crouching down alongside Wilbur’s impossibly disconnected and bleeding body, ignoring the Wilbur standing behind him dripping cooling steam.
‘O’Flaherty,’ Wilbur said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m right here. Behind you. Look at me, man.’ He reached out to touch the engineer on the shoulder; his hand, pressing hard, went straight into the man, leaving behind a spreading wet stain on his coveralls. O’Flaherty, for his part, jumped up and slapped at his shoulder with a curse.
‘Feck, I’m burned. I t’ought I shut off—’ He stopped. He stared at Wilbur. His face went pale. ‘Sweet bleedin’ Jaysus, ’tis the cap’n’s haint,’ he whispered, his Irish-accented brogue heavy as he scrambled backwards away from Wilbur like a scuttling crab, pushing with his feet and hands.
They both heard growing cries of alarm from the foredeck: Eleanor’s voice, as well as the deeper shouts of sleepy deckhands roused by the gunshots. O’Flaherty found his footing and went running toward the sound. With a glance back at the bodies (That can’t be me. That can’t be me lying there dead.) Wilbur followed. O’Flaherty had let the door to the boiler room shut behind him. Wilbur reached out to push it open; the door didn’t move but his hand went through it as it had into Carpenter and O’Flaherty. Wilbur drew back and tried again with the same result. This time, he continued to push – his entire body passing reluctantly through the door, like pushing through a sheet of gelatin.
He didn’t pause to wonder at that; he went through the corridor, among the stacks of crates, and out onto the foredeck. A couple of deckhands had gathered there, trying to find the source of the disturbance. O’Flaherty was holding Eleanor, who struggled in his grasp, trying to go toward the boiler room. ‘Yah should’nah see the cap’n that way,’ O’Flaherty was telling Eleanor, ‘nor his haint.’
‘I need to … I need …’ Eleanor gasped, then broke into a deep sobbing as she sagged in O’Flaherty’s arms.
‘He’s gone, Missus Leathers. Gone. I’m so sorry,’ O’Flaherty whispered, clutching her. Wilbur could see the two mugs of coffee, still sitting on the foredeck rail. ‘At least he took that bastard Carpenter with him.’
‘Eleanor, he’s wrong. I’m not dead.’ Wilbur moved behind O’Flaherty so he could look into Eleanor’s face. ‘I’m right here.’ Her gaze stared through him, a wisp contained within the fog-draped sunlight, as Eleanor continued to sob in O’Flaherty’s arms. He could feel his body cooling, water puddling where he stood. ‘Eleanor, O’Flaherty – talk to me!’ Neither of them responded.
Wilbur reached out – careful not to press too hard – to touch Eleanor’s shoulder. He saw the fabric of her robe darken as his fingertips touched her, drops of water spreading out and steaming in the cooler air as Eleanor drew back in alarm. He pulled his hand back, startled. His world and New Orleans reeled around him suddenly in a drunken, wild dance.
‘I’m not dead,’ he whispered to Eleanor, to the fog, to the boat, to the river. ‘I’m here. I’m not dead. I’m right here.’
No one answered.
In the Shadow of Tall Stacks
Part 2
‘Right here’ Wilbur Leathers stayed. For sixty-five years.
He had no choice. When Eleanor left the Natchez later that day in 1951, Wilbur tried to follow her and found he could not. It was as if an invisible wall had been erected around the steamboat, one that would not allow him to pass.
Eleanor had vanished into New Orleans and never returned to the boat again; the body that was Wilbur-but-not-Wilbur was removed by the police coroner, followed by that of the internally boiled Carpenter. Both corpses were taken away, presumably to autopsies and eventual burial. Wilbur would never know.
He remained on the Natchez, never aging: not as the Natchez changed owners over the slow decades; not as new men (and now a woman) stepped aboard to captain her; not as innumerable crewmembers came and went; not as the Natchez herself aged and became steadily more shabby before undergoing renovations, a cycle that had now been repeated twice over. ‘Steam Wilbur’, they started to call him: the crewmembers and the passengers who glimpsed him as he found he could materialize himself at will when the steam was up on the boat. ‘Steam Wilbur’: the most famous haint on what was known now as the most haunted steamboat on the Mississippi.
Only he was the only haint. All the other supposed ghosts existed only in the pamphlets the current owners of the boat distributed, with sometimes lurid details of the ‘haints’ aboard. Wilbur had seen the pamphlets and read the stories of the ghosts who reputedly were aboard: for instance, eleven-year-old Lizbeth Hamilton, touted as a ‘wispy, translucent figure seen on the darkest nights on the main deck, where she died in a tragic fall.’ Wilbur had actually witnessed Lizbeth’s death in 1978 as the Natchez was steaming downriver from St Louis and passing Cape Girardeau. Lizbeth had been dressed in a Billy Joel T-shirt and jeans, her brown hair in pigtails with strands escaping from baby blue ribbons. It had been windy and rather cold that October night, with a light drizzle spraying the decks. Lizbeth’s parents had booked passage for Vicksburg to meet relatives. The Natchez, under new ownership and new captainship again, was – in Wilbur’s view – growing increasingly shabby and sloppily run. Lizbeth had left her parents’ cabin on the boiler deck; Wilbur heard her running footsteps from where he was prowling on the texas deck, and he glanced over the railing in time to see her slip on a thin layer of ice that had formed on the deck. Her momentum took her to the railing; she clutched at it, screaming in panic, but the railing was loose and Wilbur heard the crack of rotten wood. Lizbeth went over still holding the broken railing, falling hard onto the main deck and breaking her neck.
But no ghost had risen from her poor corpse. No ghost haunted the main deck, or any other. Not the passenger named Robert who messily committed suicide in 1958 in his stateroom; not the wife found by her husband in flagrante delicto with another man in 1963 – her lover fled naked for his life before jumping overboard to safety, but the husband had strangled his unfaithful wife to death before the then-captain and crew, alerted by the uproar, overpowered him; not the drunken and clumsy idiot who managed to fall backward over the railing into the thrashing paddle wheel in 1988.
Those who died on the Natchez – and there had been a few more over the years – never stayed on the Natchez. Wilbur had no other haints as companions, despite the owners’ advertisements, intended to entice and titillate potential passengers.
Of which there were currently quite a few. The Natchez was readying to leave her home port of New Orleans and head upriver, first to St Louis, then back down the Mississippi a bit to the confluence of the Ohio and on up the Ohio to Cincinnati, where the steamboat would be part of Cincinnati’s periodic Tall Stacks festival. Many of the passengers had booked passage specifically to attend the festival, though there were also those who were traveling to one or another of the towns and cities along the way.
For Wilbur, the Tall Stacks festivals were a somewhat bittersweet reminder of old times: a dozen or so steamboats lined up along Riverboat Row, even if the majority of them weren’t real steamboats anymore but pale imitations – diesel-powered excursion boats whose paddles were there purely for decoration, or overgrown abominations like the American Queen.
