Fevre Dream (27 page)

“Fine,” said Marsh, sinking into a chair. He almost sat on the books of poems, jammed uncomfortably into his pocket. He pulled them out, leafed through them quickly, glancing at a few titles, then set them aside. They were poems all right. Marsh sighed. “Fetch out the books, Mister Green,” he said. “I want to take a look at ’em.”

“Yes, Cap’n,” Green said. He went over and pulled them out. Then he saw something else, picked it up, and brought it over to Marsh with the ledgers. “Oh,” he said, “I almost forgot about this.” He handed Marsh a large package, wrapped with brown paper and cord. “Some little man brought this by about three weeks back, said you was supposed to pick it up but never showed. I told him you were still off with the
Fevre Dream
and paid him. I hope that was all right.”

Abner Marsh frowned down at the package, snapped the cord with a twist of his bare hand, and ripped away the paper to open the box. Inside was a brand new captain’s coat, white as the snow that covered the upper river in winter, pure and clean, with a double row of flashing silver buttons, and
Fevre Dream
written in raised letters on every damn one. He took it out and the box fell to the floor and suddenly, finally, the tears came.

“Get out!”
roared Marsh. The agent took one look at his face and was gone. Abner Marsh rose and put on the white jacket, and buttoned up the silver buttons. It was a beautiful fit. It was cool, much cooler than the heavy blue captain’s coat he’d been wearing. There was no mirror in the office, so Marsh couldn’t see what he looked like, but he could imagine. In his mind he looked like Joshua York, he looked fine and regal and sophisticated. The cloth was so brilliantly
white,
he thought.

“I look like the cap’n of the
Fevre Dream,
”Marsh said loudly, to himself. He stamped his stick hard on the floor, and felt the blood run to his face, and he stood there remembering. Remembering the way she’d looked in the mists of New Albany. Remembering the way her mirrors gleamed, remembering her silver, remembering the wild call of her steam whistle and stroke of her engine, loud as a thunderstorm. Remembering how she’d left the
Southerner
far behind her, how she’d gulped down the
Mary Kaye
. He remembered her people as well; Framm and his wild stories, Whitey Blake spotted with grease, Toby killing chickens, Hairy Mike roaring and cussing at the roustabouts and deckhands, Jeffers playing chess, defeating Dan Albright for the hundredth time. If Albright was so smart, Marsh thought, how come he could never beat Jeffers at chess?

And Marsh recalled Joshua most of all, Joshua all in white, Joshua sipping his liquor, Joshua sitting in the darkness and spinning out his dreams. Gray eyes and strong hands and poetry. “We all make our choices,” whispered the memory.
Morn came and went, and came, and brought no day.

“GREEN!” Abner Marsh roared at the top of his lungs.

The door opened and the agent poked his head in nervously.

“I want my steamboat,” Marsh said. “Where the hell is she?”

Green swallowed. “Cap’n, like I said, the
Fevre Dream
—”

“Not
her
!” Marsh said, stamping his stick down hard. “My
other
steamboat. Where the hell is my
other
steamboat, now that I need her?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Aboard the Steamer
Eli Reynolds,
Mississippi River,
October 1857

On a cool evening in early autumn, Abner Marsh and the
Eli Reynolds
finally left St. Louis and headed downstream in search of the
Fevre Dream
. Marsh would just as soon have left several weeks earlier, but there had been too much to do. He’d had to wait for the
Eli Reynolds
to get back from her latest trip up the Illinois, and check her over to make sure she was fit for the lower river, and hire himself a couple of Mississippi pilots. Marsh had claims to settle as well, from planters and shippers who’d entrusted St. Louis-bound freight to the
Fevre Dream
down in New Orleans, and were irate at the steamer’s disappearance. Marsh might have insisted they share his loss, but he’d always prided himself on being fair, so he paid them off fifty cents on the dollar. There was also the unpleasant task of talking to Mister Jeffers’ relations—Marsh figured he could hardly tell them what had
really
happened, so he finally settled for the yellow fever yarn. Other folks had brothers or sons or husbands still unaccounted for and they pestered Marsh with questions he couldn’t answer, and he had to deal with a government inspector and a man from the pilots’ association, and he had accounts to square and books to go over and preparations to make, and it all toted up into a month of delay, frustration, and bother.

But all the while, Marsh kept on looking. When the letters that Green had sent out on his behalf got no response, he sent out more. He met incoming steamers as often as he could find the time, and asked after the
Fevre Dream,
after Joshua York, after Karl Framm and Whitey Blake and Hairy Mike Dunne and Toby Lanyard. He hired a couple of detectives and sent them downriver, with instructions to find out what they could. He even borrowed a trick from Joshua, and started buying newspapers from all up and down the river system; he spent his nights poring over the shipping columns, the advertisements, the lists of steamboat arrivals and departures from cities as distant as Cincinnati and New Orleans and St. Paul. He frequented the Planters’ House and other river haunts even more than was his custom, and asked a thousand questions.

And learned nothing. The
Fevre Dream
was gone, it seemed, just plain gone from the river. No one had seen her. No one had talked to Whitey Blake or Mister Framm or Hairy Mike, or heard anything about them. The newspapers didn’t list her coming or going.

“It ain’t sensible,” Marsh complained loudly to the officers of the
Eli Reynolds,
a week before their departure. “She’s three hundred sixty-foot long, brand new, fast enough to make any steamboatman blink. A boat like that has got to get noticed.”

“Unless she went down,” suggested Cat Grove, the
Eli Reynolds’
short, wiry mate. “There’s places on the river deep enough to drown whole towns. Could be she sunk, with all aboard.”

“No,” said Marsh stubbornly. He hadn’t told them the whole story. He didn’t see how he could. None of them had been aboard the
Fevre Dream;
they’d never believe him. “No, she ain’t sunk. She’s down there somewhere, hidin’ from me. But I’m goin’ to find her.”

“How?” asked Yoerger, the captain of the
Eli Reynolds
.

“It’s a long river,” Marsh admitted, “and it’s got lots of creeks and smaller rivers and bayous leadin’ off it, cutoffs, and chutes, and bends, and all kinds of places a steamer can hide where she won’t be seen easy. But it ain’t so long that it can’t be searched. We can start at one end and go to the other, and ask questions along the way, and if we reach New Orleans and we still ain’t found her, then we can do the same on the Ohio and the Missouri and the Illinois and the Yazoo and the Red River and wherever the hell we got to go to find that goddamned boat.”

“Could take a while,” said Yoerger.

“And if it does?”

Yoerger shrugged, and the officers of the
Eli Reynolds
traded uncertain glances. Abner Marsh scowled. “Don’t you worry your head about how long it’s goin’ to take,” he snapped. “You just get my steamboat ready, you hear?”

“Yes sir, Cap’n,” Yoerger said. He was a tall, stooped, gaunt old man with a quiet voice, and he’d been working steamboats since there had
been
steamboats, so nothing much surprised him anymore, and his tone said as much.

When the day came, Abner Marsh wore his white captain’s coat with the double row of silver buttons. It seemed fitting somehow. He ate himself a huge supper at the Planters’ House—the provisions on the
Eli Reynolds
weren’t too good, and the cook was barely fit to scrub out Toby’s fry pans—and walked down to the landing.

The
Eli Reynolds
had her steam up, Marsh saw with approval. Still, she didn’t look like much. She was an upper river boat, built small and narrow and low for the shallow tight streams where she had to ply her trade. She was less than a fourth as long as the vanished
Fevre Dream,
and about half as wide, and full-loaded she could carry maybe 150 tons of cargo, against the thousand tons of the larger steamer. The
Reynolds
had only two decks; there was no texas, and the crew occupied the forward portion of the cabins on the boiler deck. She seldom had any cabin passengers anyway. A single big high-pressure boiler drove her stern wheel, and she was as plain as all get out. She was near empty of cargo now, so Marsh could see the boiler, sitting well forward. Rows of plain whitewashed wooden pillars supported the upper decks, looking like rickety stilts, and the columns that held up the weathered promenade roof were square and simple, plain as a picket fence. The aft wheelhouse was a big square wooden box, the stern wheel a sorry-looking afterthought, its red paint faded and streaked from long use. Elsewhere paint was flaking. The pilot house was a damn wood-and-glass outhouse set atop the steamboat, and the stubby chimneys were unadorned black iron. The
Eli Reynolds
showed her age sitting there in the water; she looked terribly weary and a bit lopsided, as if she was about to keel over and sink.

She was a damn unlikely match for the huge, powerful
Fevre Dream
. But she was all he had now, Abner Marsh reflected, and she would have to do. He walked on down to the steamer and climbed aboard, across a stage that had been badly worn by the tread of countless boots. Cat Grove met him on the forecastle. “All ready, Cap’n.”

“Tell the pilot to take her out,” Marsh said. Grove shouted up the order, and the
Eli Reynolds
sounded its whistle. The blast was thin and plaintive, and hopelessly brave, Marsh thought. He clomped up the steep, narrow stair to the main cabin, which was dim and cramped-feeling, barely forty foot long. The carpet was bare in spots, and the landscapes painted on the stateroom doors had long since faded into dullness. The whole interior of the steamer had an odor about it of stale food and sour wine and oil and smoke and sweat. It was unpleasantly hot, too, and the single plain skylight was too grimed-over to admit much light. Yoerger and the off-duty pilot were drinking cups of black coffee at a round table when Marsh entered. “My lard aboard?” Marsh asked.

Yoerger nodded.

“Not much else aboard, that I saw,” Marsh commented.

Yoerger frowned. “I figured you’d like it that way, Cap’n. Loaded up, we’d be slower, and there’d be more stops to make, too.”

Abner Marsh pondered that, and nodded in approval. “Good,” he said. “Makes sense. My other package get delivered?”

“In your cabin,” Yoerger said.

Marsh took his leave and retired to his stateroom. The bunk creaked beneath him when he sat down on its edge, opened the package, and took out the rifle and shells. He examined it carefully, hefting it in his hand, sighting down the barrel. It felt good. Maybe your ordinary pistol or rifle shot was nothing to the night folks, but this was something else again, custom made to his order by the best gunsmith in St. Louis. It was a buffalo gun, with a short, wide, octagonal barrel, designed to be fired from horseback and stop a charging buffalo in its tracks. The fifty custom shells were bigger than any the gunsmith had ever made before. “Hell,” the man had complained, “these’ll blow your game to pieces, won’t be nothing left to et.” Abner Marsh had only nodded. The rifle wouldn’t be worth much for accuracy, especially in Marsh’s hands, but it didn’t need to be. At close range it would wipe Damon Julian’s smile clean off his face, and blow his goddamn head off his shoulders for good measure. Marsh carefully loaded it up, and mounted it on the wall above his bed, where he could sit up and snatch it down in one easy motion. Only then did he let himself lie back.

And so it began. Day after day the
Eli Reynolds
steamed downriver, through rain and fog, through sunshine and overcast, stopping at every town and steamboat landing and woodyard to ask a question or two. Abner Marsh sat up on the hurricane deck, in a wooden chair beside the steamer’s old cracked bell, and watched the river for hour after hour. Sometimes he even took his meals up there. When he had to sleep, Captain Yoerger or Cat Grove or the mud-clerk took his place, and the vigil went on. When rafts and flatboats and other steamers went sliding by, Marsh called out, “You there! You seen a steamer named the
Fevre Dream
?” But the answer, when he got an answer, always came back, “No, Cap’n, we sure ain’t,” and the folks on the landings and in the woodyards told them nothing, and the river was full of steamboats, steamboats day and night, steamboats big and little, going up the river or down it or lying half-sunk by the banks, but none of them were the
Fevre Dream
.

She was a slow small boat on a big river, the
Eli Reynolds,
and she crept along at a pace that would make most steamboatmen ashamed, and her stops and her questions delayed her even more. But still the towns passed, the woodyards passed, the forests and the houses and other steamboats drifted on by in a blur of days and nights, islands and sandbars were left behind them, their pilot steered them deftly past the snags and sawyers, and they moved south, ever south. Sainte Genevieve came and went, Cape Girardeau and Crosno went by, they put in for a bit at Hickman and longer at New Madrid. Caruthersville was lost in fog, but they found it. Osceola was still and Memphis was loud. Helena. Rosedale. Arkansas City. Napoleon. Greenville. Lake Providence.

When the
Eli Reynolds
came steaming into Vicksburg one blustery October morning, two men were waiting on the landing.

Abner Marsh sent most of the crew ashore. He and Captain Yoerger and Cat Grove met with the visitors in the main cabin of the steamer. One of the men was a big, hard sort with red muttonchop whiskers and a head bald as a pigeon’s egg, dressed in a black broadcloth suit. The other was a slender, well-dressed black man with piercing dark eyes. Marsh sat them down and served them coffee. “Well?” he demanded. “Where is she?”

The bald man blew on his coffee and scowled. “Don’t know.”

“I paid you to find my steamer,” Marsh said.

“She ain’t to be found, Cap’n Marsh,” the black man said. “Hank and me looked, I tell you that.”

“Ain’t sayin’ we found nothin’,” the bald man said. “Only that we ain’t got the steamer pinned down yet.”

“All right,” Abner Marsh said. “Tell me what you found.”

The black man pulled a sheet of paper from inside his jacket and unfolded it. “Most of your steamer’s crew and near all her passengers left at Bayou Sara, after that yaller fever scare. Next morning, your
Fevre Dream
steamed out. Went upriver, from all accounts. We found some woodyard niggers who swear she wooded up with ’em. Maybe they was lyin’, but I can’t see why. So we know the direction your steamer went in. We got enough folks to swear they seen her go by. Or they think they did, anyway.”

“Only she never reached Natchez,” his partner put in. “That’s . . . what . . . eight, ten hours upriver.”

“Less,” said Abner Marsh. “The
Fevre Dream
was a damn fast boat.”

“Fast or not, she got herself lost ’tween Bayou Sara and Natchez.”

“The Red River branches off in there,” Marsh said.

The black man nodded. “But your boat ain’t been in Shreveport nor Alexandria neither, and none of the woodyards we checked can recall any
Fevre Dream
.”

“Damn,” said Marsh.

“Maybe she
did
sink,” Cat Grove suggested.

“We got more,” said the bald detective. He took a swallow of coffee. “Your steamer was never seen in Natchez, you understand. But some of the folks you were lookin’ for were.”

“Go on.” Marsh said.

“We spent a lot of time on Silver Street,” he said. “Askin’ around. Man called Raymond Ortega, he was known there, and he was on your list, too. He came back one night, early in September, paid a social call to one of the nabobs on top of the hill, and a lot of calls down under the hill. Had four other men with him. One of ’em fits your description of this Sour Billy Tipton. They stayed about a week. Did some interesting things. Hired a lot of men, whites, colored, didn’t matter. You know the kind of men you can hire from Natchez-under-the-hill.”

Abner Marsh knew all right. Sour Billy Tipton had scared off Marsh’s crew and replaced them with a gang of cutthroats like himself. “Steamboatmen?” he asked.

The bald man nodded. “There’s more. This Tipton visited Fork-in-the-Road.”

“It’s a big slave mart,” the black partner said.

“He bought a mess of slaves. Paid with
gold
.” The bald man pulled a twenty-dollar gold piece from his pocket and set it on the table. “Like this. Bought some other stuff back in Natchez, too. Paid the same way.”

“What kind of stuff?” Marsh asked.

“Slaver’s stuff,” the black man said. “Manacles. Chains. Hammers.

“Some paint, too,” said the other.

And suddenly the truth of it burst on Abner Marsh like a shower of fireworks. “Jesus God,” he swore. “
Paint!
No wonder no one has seen her.
Goddamn.
They’re smarter than I thought, and I’m an eggsuckin’ fool not to have seen it straight off!” He slammed his big fist down on the table hard enough to make the coffee cups jump.