Dance on the Wind (47 page)

“Damn, but it’s good to get back down here,” the pilot exclaimed with a gush of excitement. “Put all that river behind me.”

“Till May comes round again,” Ovatt reminded them all. “We go and load up a brand-new flatboat with another season’s cargo.”

“We still got us that damn walk back to Kentucky afore we do,” Root said, his dour expression quite a contrast to the healing Kingsbury’s.

“Just a thousand miles—every one of ’em making you hunger for seeing the Ohio again,” Ovatt said.

Hames called out, “Titus—you figure on walking north with us, don’t you?”

Nodding emphatically, Bass replied, “I ain’t staying down here in this country. Nosirree.”

“Good to hear: we can likely use your rifle on the Natchez Road,” Kingsbury declared. “Feed this bunch on our way home.”

Ovatt turned to the youth and asked, “You changed your mind and decided on heading back to your family’s place, Titus?”

He watched the passing of those lacy whitecaps stirred up by the wind like the bobbing of so many white-headed doves before he answered. “Nothing much left for me back there.”

“Maybeso you’d like to join on with us,” the pilot said. “With Ebenezer gone … well, we’re a man short—and besides: you’ve already made yourself one of the crew. Come downriver, twice’t a year with us! It’s a damned fine life for a young’un like yourself.”

As a matter of fact, Titus had already been working that over in his mind these last few days, ever since the night they escaped that mob on the Natchez wharf.

“There’s girls, Titus,” Ovatt said. “You seen ’em too. They come down to the bank to watch you pass. Wave to you. And you can call back to them, vow them of your love!”

“Figure I know what you got on your mind, Heman Ovatt,” the woman declared sourly.

“Just what any youngster like Titus here got on his mind too!” Heman replied.

“We’d like to have you join us,” Kingsbury repeated, getting serious once more. “Ain’t that right, Reuben?”

“It be a life just made for you, Titus Bass,” Root added.

With a slow, undecided wag of his head he finally raised his eyes to look at the crewmen seated here and there about the boat. Then he gazed at the woman one last time. “No. I been figuring on it some—and … this don’t rightly seem the life for me. Not that it ain’t a good life and all. But last few weeks … ever since Ebenezer, them Injuns and all—”

Kingsbury said, “I know just how you might feel, son. After Eb was kill’t … we got you tangled up in that business back at Annie Christmas’s gunboat. But cain’t you see? That was for Ebenezer too, settling a score for the man.”

“We done it for Mathilda too,” Ovatt said.

The pilot seemed to study Bass’s face for a few moments, then shrugged with resignation as he added, “Maybeso there’s too damned much of the wrong kind of excitement on the river for our young friend here.”

“Maybe too damn much …,” Titus began, then sighed and finished, “I ain’t never killed a man.”

“Them red bastards gonna kill you if’n you didn’t kill them!” Ovatt argued.

“Worse’n that,” Titus continued, “I never afore see’d a man die like Ebenezer Zane done.”

“You pay me heed: that’s one thing there’s plenty of in a boatman’s life,” Kingsbury explained. “Lot of dying.”

Ovatt nodded. “But I allays s’posed all that dying went right along with all the living.”

“So what you figure to do, Titus?” Root asked.

With a shrug Bass answered, “Figured to get back to the Ohio, make my way yonder to Louisville, where I was bound away for when I run onto you and Ebenezer.”

“Still got your sights set on finding work there?” Ovatt inquired.

“If I can’t find none, maybeso I’ll get on up to St. Louie eventually. Finally see what that place got to offer a man.”

“The hull damned world, that’s what,” the woman said, stunning them all. “That St. Lou there’s one of the four doors what opens onto the rest of the world, Titus. Don’t you see?”

“Four doors?” Root asked at the rudder.

“Up yonder’s Orlins,” Beulah explained. “That’s the southern door out to the world. A man can mosey on all the way up the Mississippi to find the northern door to them English lands, the lakes and rivers and all that country beyond where it grows mighty cold. Then, from Pittsburgh and Cincinnati country, you head east over the mountains where a body can go to the edge of the ocean, sailing off to just about anywhere.”

Bass listened to her words with not just his ears, but even more so with his heart, pounding as it was. Finally he asked, “St. Louie’s the w-western door?”

“That’s what I hear tell.”

Kingsbury leaned toward her to ask, “You ever heard of what’s out there?”

For a moment she cocked her head to the side, as if trying to pull something from her memory. “Only what I heard when Jefferson’s bunch—them explorers—come back years ago. You see, them other three doors—north, south, and east—they all open onto water. Water’s the way you get to the rest of the world.”

“But not from St. Louie?” Ovatt asked.

“Shit,” Root growled. “Everybody knows St. Louie’s on the river. Sure as hell a man can get west on the water.”

“I s’pose that’s true,” the woman agreed matter-of-factly. “But I heard there’s tall mountains atween St. Louie and the far ocean. Ain’t no river through them mountains what takes you to t’other side.”

Mumbling his unintelligible complaints while he scratched at the side of his hairy face, Root finally responded, “I don’t figure a man got any business going to no place where there ain’t a river to take him. I’m a waterman. Borned beside the river, raised up on it—figure I’ll live and die riding the rivers.”

“If there ain’t a river going there, Reuben don’t figure it’s worth the journey,” Kingsbury explained to Titus.

“Got to admit, Reuben’s got him something there,” Ovatt stated. “I allays found me everything I needed on the river, or right beside it.”

Turning from the boatmen, Titus peered intently at the woman. “You ever hear anything more about that country out there?”

“Only what I hear’d listening to menfolk talk up and down the river after Jefferson’s men come back from that far ocean.”

Bass leaned forward, excitement coursing through him. “They say anything about them mountains?”

“Only that they was so tall they touched the sky,” the woman replied, a look crossing her face that told him she understood. “Mountains higher’n anything we can’t even imagine out there.”

“And goddamned red-bellied Injuns too!” Kingsbury snarled.

“’Thout no big, fine rivers out there,” Root began, “sounds to me like that be country fit only for Injuns, and not at all fit for the likes of civil folk.”

“There gotta allays be a place for Injuns and wild critters,” Ovatt said. “Place where we can put ’em so just plain white folks like us can go on about our business of living.”

“Listen to you!” the woman cried. “Like you fellas was the cocks of the walk, wherever you choose to set down your boots!”

“Damn right—we are that!” Kingsbury shouted exuberantly. “Ever’ last one of us is half horse, half alligator—”

“Don’t even let me ever hear you go on and on about how you can whup up, outride, outdrink and all that better’n any other man alive.”

“We’re rivermen!” Root exclaimed. “By damn, we’re ring-tailed roarers—”

“By bloody damn, you just get us to Orlins,” Beulah interrupted the boatman’s verbal strut. “Then we’ll see if you can get us back north to Kentucky all to one piece.”

Kingsbury leaned forward from his perch to slap her
on her ample rear. Whirling quickly on him, she squinted a flinty glare at first, but no sooner did it quickly soften into a grin.

“Why, Mr. Pilot,” she said, cocking her head coyly, “you do appear to be mending quite nicely.”

“I am at that,” Hames replied.

But now the woman doubled up a sizable fist and held it below the pilot’s nose. “But if I ever catch you taking a swat at my behind parts again, I’ll do even worse to you than you got visiting that whore’s gunboat.”

With a wide grin of his own Kingsbury ducked behind his arms as if about to be pummeled. “I hear you, ma’am. Won’t never have me grabbing for a feel of your behind parts no more.”

“Maybe since’t you ain’t making yourself useful steering this here broadhorn—you can grab one of them poles and do us some fishing for lunch.”

“I can do that,” Kingsbury said, starting to rise.

She laid a firm hand on his shoulder and shoved him back down on that rough bench beneath the awning. “And while you’re fishing, mister riverman—suppose you think about how you just might treat a lady proper, and not like one of your whores.”

Hames gazed up into her face, immediately contrite. “I’m sorry if’n I offended you, ma’am. Didn’t mean to treat you bad—”

“Not like them women you pay to hike up their skirts for you!” she said.

Titus listened and watched, amazed—never having heard a woman talk in such a bold-faced manner to a man. At least one who was not a foul-mouthed, hard-case whore.

“Just get to your fishing there, Pilot,” the woman ordered. “And prove to me you’re of some use besides rutting with poxed-up pay-women, making yourself tumble drunk at every river stop, and shoving your way into a fight at the drop of a boot.”

Hames glared, saying, “It’s fish you want, then fish you’ll get, woman.”

By midday Kingsbury had pulled all sorts of creatures from the waters of the lower Mississippi: besides perch
and trout, he had hooked some buffalo fish, carp, and sturgeon, along with pike and even a soft-shelled turtle. Over the coals of her sandbox fire Beulah cooked the pilot’s catch, feeding them all until they were ready to burst.

“Maybe you’ll do,” she admitted to Kingsbury as he started from the warmth of the fire, intending to relieve Heman Ovatt at the stern rudder. “Maybe you are the sort of man what can provide for a woman proper.”

The pilot stopped, turned back to look closely at her face, then said, “If ever a man was intending to get himself tied up to one woman, I figure one like you ought to do a man nicely too.”

Bass watched her kneel back over the sandbox fire, her cheeks flushing with the compliment—Kingsbury grinning proudly as he took the long rudder pole from Ovatt.

As Heman resettled himself at the starboard oar, he winked to Titus. “Jesus God—look lively there, young’un. We’ll be tying up in Nawlins afore nightfall!”

New Orleans.

How he stretched and craned his neck to see something of it far down that broad stretch of endless bayou cluttered with cypress where Spanish moss hung eight, sometimes ten feet long, like great gray beards tossing in the wind.

To come here at last.

So he could finally get on with starting back for that Kentucky country … just as soon as they sold off the cargo, along with all the timber in Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat.

He was a thousand times farther away from home than he had ever been and right now was sensing a dull ache with that longing for familiar faces and well-known places and the reassuring smells that told him he was home … but that was purely impossible. There was no longer a home.

He was adrift and free, dancing on the wind.

But before he did return to that faraway Ohio River country, there still lay all those miles of wilderness they had yet to cross. On a road that would take them right through the red savage heart of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations.

Any way he looked at it, that spelled Injun country to Titus Bass.

If he had believed Louisville, and later Natchez, to be bustling, sprawling river ports—Titus was in no way prepared for what greeted him when they neared the levee at New Orleans.

Their Kentucky broadhorn was but one of more than three hundred tied up along the length of a serpentine wharf, boats lashed together three and four abreast. The great clusters of unloaded flats cluttered against the New Orleans wharf reminded Titus of sprawling and forlorn stacks of empty chicken coops. In addition, there were more than a hundred of the bigger keelboats with their low-roofed cabins squatting midship atop their decks.

But beyond them in the deep harbor lay anchored the astonishing wonder that made his young eyes widen and his mouth gape: those tall-masted schooners and other oceangoing vessels ribbed in their dull-white canvas now tucked away high above their decks and crews, massive sailing creatures that rose out of the water at least as tall as three of his pap’s cabins would be if stacked one on top of the other.

Kingsbury’s crew tied up at the far north end of the levee for a seven-dollar fee paid to that dog-faced wharfmaster who plied the waters of the New Orleans harbor in a rowboat propelled by six oarsmen, each one with skin blacker than any Negro Titus had ever seen and all wearing the same smart waist-length jacket with gold braid and brass buttons that glimmered brightly in the Mississippi sun. The six sat quietly, nonetheless watchful, as the man ordered them to tie him alongside the flatboat just come from upriver. Kingsbury and the rest listened from the gunnel as the wharfmaster accounted for the docking fee and held out the possibility of severe penalty for nonpayment.

“We’ll pay,” Kingsbury growled, stuffing his hand into Ebenezer Zane’s satchel of coins. “Ebenezer Zane allays paid what toll was due you.”

“I thought I recognized you,” the wharfmaster replied, his eyes searching the boat quickly, craning his neck
this way and that as Kingsbury counted the coins into the man’s beefy palm. “Where’s Ebenezer Zane himself?”

The question was barely out of his mouth when the woman appeared from the awning, his jaw dropping agog in surprise.

“Dead,” Kingsbury declared. “Buried him upriver. T’other side of Natchez.”

Tugging down on the points at the front of his waistcoat, the man stated solemnly, “I’m sorry … sorry to hear that. He was a good man—the best. Well, hmmm. You understand you’ll have to have Zane’s bills of lading for all this cargo if you intend to sell it here to New Orleans.”

“We got ’em,” Kingsbury replied confidently, and stuffed his hand down into a flat rawhide pouch, pulling out a handful of papers.

Without another word the man clambered over the side into his boat and made a small, almost insignificant gesture with one hand. The six ebony oarsmen dipped their wood to water and stroked away along the levee as the wharfmaster settled midship, on about his business.