Fevre Dream (35 page)

“Do they?” Joshua looked sad. “Perhaps they do. Perhaps we all should die. We are out of place in this world your race has built. Your kind has killed all but a handful of us. Perhaps it is time to slaughter the last survivors as well.” He smiled grimly. “If that is what you intend, Abner, then remember who I am. You are my friend, but they are blood of my blood, my people. I belong with them. I thought I was their king.”

His tone was so bitter and despairing that Abner Marsh felt his anger fading. In its place was pity. “You tried,” he said.

“I failed. I failed Valerie, and Simon, failed all those who believed in me. I failed you and Mister Jeffers, and that infant as well. I think I may even have failed Julian, in some strange way.”

“It ain’t your fault,” Marsh insisted.

Joshua York shrugged, but there was a cold grim look in his gray eyes. “Past is past. My concern is with tonight and tomorrow night and the night after. I must go back. They need me, though they may not realize it. I must go back and do what I can, however little it may be.”

Abner Marsh snorted. “And you tell
me
to give it up? You think
I’m
like that damned fool kept comin’ at you? Hell, Joshua, what about
you
? How many times has Julian bled you now? It appears to me you’re just as damned stubborn and stupid as you say I am.”

Joshua smiled. “Perhaps,” he admitted.

“Hell,” Marsh swore. “All right. You’re goin’ back to Julian, like some egg-suckin’ idyut. What the hell do you want me to do?”

“You had better leave here as quickly as you can,” Joshua said, “before our hosts get more suspicious than they are already.”

“I’d figured out that much.”

“It’s over, Abner. Don’t come looking for us again.”

Abner Marsh scowled. “Hell.”

Joshua smiled. “You damned fool,” he said. “Well, look if you must. You won’t find us.”

“I’ll see about that.”

“Maybe there’s hope for us yet. I’ll return and tame Julian and build my bridge between night and day, and together you and I will outrun the
Eclipse
.”

Abner Marsh snorted derisively, but down inside he wanted to believe. “You take care of my goddamned steamboat,” he said. “Ain’t never been a faster one, and she better be in good repair when I get her back.”

When Joshua smiled it made the dry, dead skin around his mouth crackle and tear. He lifted a hand to his face and tore it away. It peeled off whole, like it was only a mask he’d been wearing, an ugly mask full of scars and wrinkles. Beneath it his skin was milky white, serene and unlined, ready to begin anew, ready for the world to write upon it. York crumbled his old face in his hand; wisps of old pain and flakes of skin sifted through his fingers and fell to the floor. He wiped his hand on his coat and held it out to Abner Marsh. They shook.

“We all got to make choices,” Marsh said. “You told me that, Joshua, and you was right. Them choices ain’t always easy. Someday you’re goin’ to have to choose, I think. Between your night folks and . . . well, call it good. Doing right. You know what I mean. Make the right choice, Joshua.”

“And you, Abner. Make your own choices wisely.”

Joshua York turned, his cloak swirling behind him, and went outside. He vaulted over the balustrade with easy grace and dropped the twenty feet to the ground like it was something he did every day, landing on his feet. Then he was gone, vanished, moving so quick he seemed to fade into the night. Maybe he turned himself into a goddamned mist, Abner Marsh thought.

Away off on the distant shine that was the river, a steamer sounded her whistle, a faint melancholy call, kind of lost and kind of lonely. It was a bad night on the river. Abner Marsh shivered and wondered if there’d be a frost. He shut the balcony doors and walked on back to bed.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Fever Years:
November 1857–April 1870

Both of them were true to their word: Abner Marsh kept on looking, but he did not find her.

They left Aaron Gray’s plantation as soon as Karl Framm was strong enough to travel, several days after Joshua York had vanished. Marsh was glad to be gone. Gray and his kin were getting mighty curious by then about why there was nothing in the papers about a steamboat explosion, and why none of their neighbors had heard of it, and why Joshua had taken off. And Marsh was getting tangled up in his own lies. By the time he and Toby and Karl Framm got themselves upriver, the
Fevre Dream
was gone, as he’d known she would be. Marsh returned to St. Louis.

Through the long dreary winter, Marsh kept up his search. He wrote more letters, he loitered around the riverfront bars and billiard halls, he hired some more detectives, he read too damn many newspapers, he found Yoerger and Grove and the rest of the crew of the
Eli Reynolds
and sent them up and down the river, cabin passage, looking. All of it turned up nothing. No one had seen the
Fevre Dream
. No one had seen the
Ozymandias
either. Abner Marsh figured they’d changed her name again. He read every goddamned poem Byron and Shelley ever wrote, but this time it was no use. It got so bad he had the damn poems memorized, and he even went on to other poets, but the only thing he found that way was a sorry-looking Missouri stern-wheeler named the
Hiawatha
.

Marsh did get one report from his detectives, but it told him nothing he hadn’t figured out already. The side-wheel steamer
Ozymandias
had left Natchez that October night with about four hundred tons of freight, forty cabin passengers, and maybe twice as many deckers. The freight had never been delivered. Neither the steamer nor the passengers had ever been seen again, except at a few woodyards just downstream of Natchez. Abner Marsh read over that letter a half dozen times, frowning. The numbers were way too low, which meant that Sour Billy was doing one damn poor job—unless he’d kept them down deliberate, so Julian and his night folks could have an easy time of it. A hundred and twenty people were gone, vanished. It gave Marsh a cold sweat. He stared at that letter and remembered what Damon Julian had said to him:
No one on the river will ever forget your Fevre Dream.

For months Abner Marsh was plagued by terrible nightmares of a boat moving down the river, all black, every lamp and candle extinguished, the big black tarpaulins hung all around the main deck so even the ruddy light of the furnaces could not escape, a boat dark as death and black as sin, a shadow moving through moonlight and fog, hardly seen, quiet and fast. In his dreams she made no sound as she moved, and white shapes flitted about her decks silently and haunted her grand saloon, and inside their staterooms the passengers huddled in fear, until the doors opened one midnight, and then they began to scream. Once or twice Marsh woke up screaming as well, and even in his waking hours he could not forget her, his dream boat cloaked in shadows and screams, with smoke as black as Julian’s eyes and steam the color of blood.

By the time the ice was breaking up on the upper river, Abner Marsh was faced with a hard choice. He had not found the
Fevre Dream,
and the search had brought him to the brink of ruin. His ledger books told a grim story; his coffers were almost empty. He owned a steamboat company without any steamboats, and he lacked even the funds to have a modest one built. So, reluctantly, Marsh wrote his agents and detectives and called off the hunt.

With the little money he had left he went downriver, to where the
Eli Reynolds
still sat in the cutoff that had wrecked her. They fitted a new rudder to her, and patched up her stern wheel a little, and waited for the spring floods. The floods came, the cutoff became passable once more, and Yoerger and his crew nursed the
Reynolds
back up to St. Louis, where she was fitted with a brand new paddle, a new engine with twice the push, and a second boiler. She even got a new paint job, and a bright yellow carpet for her main cabin. Then Marsh launched her into the New Orleans trade, for which she was too small and too shabby and altogether poorly fitted, so he could continue his hunt personally.

Abner Marsh knew even before he started that it was near hopeless. Between Cairo and New Orleans alone, there was some eleven hundred miles of river. Then there was the upper Mississippi above Cairo all the way to the Falls of St. Anthony, there was the Missouri, there was the Ohio and the Yazoo and the Red River and about fifty other secondary rivers and tributaries navigable by steamer, most of which had tributaries of their own, not to mention all the little creeks and streams and cutoffs that were navigable part of the year, if you had a good pilot. She could be hiding up any one of them, and if the
Eli Reynolds
steamed past and missed her, it would mean starting all over again. Thousands of steamboats plied the Mississippi river system, with newcomers entering the trade every month, which meant lots of damned names to sort through in the papers. But Marsh was nothing if not stubborn. He searched, and the
Eli Reynolds
became his home.

She did not get much trade. The biggest, fastest, most luxurious steamboats on the river competed in the St. Louis-to-New Orleans run, and the
Reynolds,
old and slow as she was, attracted little custom away from the great side-wheelers. “It’s not just that she’s fast as a snail and twice as ugly,” Marsh’s New Orleans agent told him in the fall of 1858, while giving notice to take another job. “It’s
you,
too, damned if I ain’t telling the truth.”

“Me?” Marsh roared. “What the hell you mean?”

“Folks on the river talk, y’know. They say you’re the unluckiest man ever to own a steamboat. They say you got some kind of curse on you, worse’n the curse on the
Drennan Whyte
. One of your steamers blew her boilers, they say, and killed everybody. Four got crushed up in an ice jam. One got burned after everybody on her died of yaller fever. And the last one, they say you wrecked her yourself, after you went crazy and beat your pilot with a club.”

“Damn that man,” Marsh swore.

“Now, I ask you, who the hell is goin’ to ride with a cursed man like that? Or work for him either. Not me, I tell you that for sure. Not me.”

The man he’d hired to replace Jonathon Jeffers begged Marsh more than once to take the
Reynolds
out of the New Orleans trade, and have her work the upper Mississippi or the Illinois, where she’d be better suited, or even the Missouri, which was rough and dangerous but enormously profitable if your steamboat didn’t get smashed to splinters. Abner Marsh refused, and fired the man when he persisted. He figured there was no chance that he’d find the
Fevre Dream
on the northern rivers. Besides, during the last few months he’d been making secret stops by night at certain Louisiana woodyards and deserted islands in Mississippi and Arkansas, taking on runaway slaves and bringing them up north to the free states. Toby had put him in touch with a bunch called the Underground Railroad, who made all the arrangements. Abner Marsh had no use for the goddamned railroads and insisted on calling it the underground river, but it made him feel good to help, kind of like he was hurting Damon Julian somehow. At times he’d hunker down with the runaways on the main deck, and ask them about night folks and the
Fevre Dream
and such, figuring that maybe the blacks knew things that white folks didn’t, but none of them ever told him anything useful.

For nearly three years, Abner Marsh continued his hunt. They were hard years. By 1860 Marsh was heavily in debt due to the losses incurred in running the
Reynolds
. He had been forced to close the offices he had maintained in St. Louis, New Orleans, and other river towns. Nightmares no longer troubled him as they had, but he grew more and more isolated with the passage of years. At times it seemed to Marsh as if the time he had spent with Joshua York on the
Fevre Dream
was the last real life he had known, that the months and years since were drifting past as if in a dream. At other times, he felt just the opposite, felt that
this
was real, the red ink in his ledger books, the deck of the
Eli Reynolds
under him, the smell of her steam, the stains on her new yellow carpet. The memories of Joshua, the splendor of the great steamboat they had built together, the cold terror that Julian had stirred in him,
these
things were the dream, Marsh thought, and no wonder they had vanished, no wonder that folks along the river thought him mad.

The events of the summer of 1857 became even more dreamlike as, one by one, those who had shared some of Marsh’s experiences began to drift out of his life. Old Toby Lanyard had gone east a month after they had returned to St. Louis. Being returned to slavery once had been enough for him, now he wanted to get as far from the slave states as possible. Marsh got a brief letter from him early in 1858, saying that he’d gotten a job cooking in a Boston hotel. After that he never heard from Toby again. Dan Albright had found himself a berth on a spanking new New Orleans side-wheeler. In the summer of 1858, however, Albright and his boat had the misfortune to be in New Orleans during a virulent outbreak of yellow fever. It killed thousands, including Albright, and eventually led to the city improving its sanitation so it wasn’t quite so much like an open sewer in summer. Captain Yoerger ran the
Eli Reynolds
for Marsh until after the season of 1859, when he retired to his farm in Wisconsin, where he died peacefully a year later. When Yoerger had gone, Marsh took over captaining the stern-wheeler himself, to save money. By then only a handful of familiar faces remained among the crew. Doc Turney had been killed and robbed in Natchez-under-the-hill the previous summer, and Cat Grove had left the river entirely to go west, first to Denver, then to San Francisco, and eventually all the way to China or Japan or some such godforsaken place. Marsh hired Jack Ely, the old second engineer from the
Fevre Dream,
to replace Turney, and took on a few of the other crewmen who’d served on the vanished side-wheeler as well, but they died or drifted on or took other jobs. By 1860, only Marsh himself and Karl Framm were left of all those who had lived through the triumph and terror of 1857. Framm piloted the
Reynolds,
for all that his skills entitled him to a much bigger and more prestigious boat. Framm remembered a whole lot of things he wouldn’t talk about, even to Marsh. The pilot was still good-natured, but he didn’t tell near so many stories as he used to, and Marsh could see a grimness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Framm wore a pistol now. “In case we find them,” he said.

Marsh snorted. “That little thing ain’t goin’ to hurt Julian none.”

Karl Framm’s grin was still crooked, and his gold tooth caught the light, but there was nothing funny in his eyes when he answered. “Ain’t for Julian, Cap’n. It’s for me. They ain’t getting me alive again.” He looked at Marsh. “I could do the same for you, if it comes to that.”

Marsh scowled. “It ain’t comin’ to that,” he said, and he left the pilot house. He remembered that conversation for the rest of his days. He also remembered a Christmas party in St. Louis in 1859, given by the captain of one of the big Ohio boats. Marsh and Framm both attended, along with every other steamboatman in the town, and after everybody had been drinking some they got to telling river stories. He knew all the stories, but it was kind of peaceful and reassuring somehow to hear folks telling them all over again to the traders and bankers and pretty women who hadn’t ever heard none of them. They talked about Old Al the alligator king, about the phantom steamer of Raccourci, about Mike Fink and Jim Bowie and Roarin’ Jack Russell, about the great race between the
Eclipse
and the
A.L. Shotwell,
about the pilot who’d run a nasty stretch of river in the fog even though he’d gone and died, about the goddamn steamboat that had brought smallpox up the river twenty years before and killed something like twenty thousand Indians. “Ruined the hell out of the fur trade,” the storyteller concluded, and everybody laughed, except Marsh and a couple of others. Then someone went through the brags about the impossibly big steamers, the
Hurricano
and the
E. Jenkins
and such, that grew their own wood with forests on their hurricane decks, and had wheels so big they took a whole year to make a full turn. Abner Marsh smiled.

Karl Framm pushed through the crowd, a brandy in his hand. “I know a story,” he said, sounding a little drunk. “ ’S true. There’s this steamboat named the
Ozymandias,
y’see . . .”

“Never heard of it,” somebody said.

Framm smiled thinly. “Y’better hope you never
see
it,” he said, “cause them what does is done for. She only runs by night, this boat. And she’s dark, all dark. Painted black as her stacks, every inch of her, except that inside she’s got a main cabin with a carpet the color of blood, and silver mirrors everywhere that don’t reflect nothing. Them mirrors is always empty, even though she’s got lots of folks aboard her, pale-looking folks in fine clothes. They smile a lot. Only they don’t show in the mirrors.”

Someone shivered. They had all gone silent. “Why not?” asked an engineer Marsh knew slightly.

“Cause they’re
dead,
”Framm said. “Ever’ damn one of ’em, dead. Only they won’t lie down. They’re sinners, and they got to ride that boat forever, that black boat with the red carpets and the empty mirrors, all up and down the river, never touching port, no sir.”

“Phantoms,” somebody said.

“Ha’nts,” added a woman, “like that Raccourci boat.”

“Hell no,” said Karl Framm. “You can pass right through a ha’nt, but not the
Ozymandias
. She’s real enough, and you’ll learn it quick and to your sorrow if you come on her at night. Them dead folks is
hungry
. They drink blood, y’know. Hot red blood. They hide in the dark and when they see the lights of another steamer, they set out after her, and if they catch’er they come swarming aboard, all those dead white faces, smiling, dressed so fine. And they sink the boat afterward, or burn her, and the next mornin’ there’s nothing to see but a couple stacks stickin’ up out of the river, or maybe a wrecked boat full of corpses. Except for the sinners. The sinners go aboard that
Ozymandias,
and ride on her forever.” He sipped his brandy and smiled. “So if you’re out on the river some night, and you see a shadow on the water behind you, look close. It might be a steamer, painted black all over, with a crew white as ha’nts. She don’t show no lights, that
Ozymandias,
so sometimes you can’t see her till she’s right behind you, her black wheels kicking up the water. If you see her, you better hope you got a lightnin’ pilot, and maybe some coal oil on board, or a little lard. Cause she’s big and she’s fast, and when she catches you by night you’re finished. Listen for her whistle. She only sounds her whistle when she knows she’s got you, so if you hear it, start countin’ up your sins.”