Fevre Dream (37 page)

Marsh read more than just newspapers. Thanks to Joshua, he’d worked up a taste for poetry, of all the damn things, and he looked at an occasional novel, too. He also took up wood carving, and made himself detailed models of his steamboats, as he remembered them. He painted them and everything, and did them all to the same scale, so you could put them alongside each other and see how big they’d been. “That was my
Elizabeth A.,
”he told his housekeeper proudly the day he finished the sixth and biggest model. “As sweet a boat as ever moved down the river. She would have set records, except for that damned ice jam. You can see how big she was, near three hundred feet. Look at how she dwarfs my ol’
Nick Perrot
there.” He pointed. “And that’s the
Sweet Fevre,
and the
Dunleith
—had a lot of trouble with the larboard engine on her, a lot of trouble—and next to her that’s my
Mary Clarke
. She blew her boilers.” Marsh shook his head. “Killed a lot of people, too. Maybe it was my fault. I don’t know. I think about it sometimes. The little one on the end is the
Eli Reynolds
. Not much to look at, but she was a tough ol’ gal. She took everything I could give her, and a lot more, and kept her steam up and her wheel turning. You know how long she lasted, that little ugly stern-wheeler?”

“No,” the housekeeper said. “Didn’t you have some other boat, too? A real fancy one? I heard—”

“Never mind what you heard, goddamn it. Yes, I had another boat. The
Fevre Dream
. Named her after the river.”

The housekeeper made a rude noise at him. “No wonder this ain’t never become the town it might have, with folks like you goin’ on about the Fevre River. They must think we’re all sick up here. Why didn’t you call it right? It’s named the
Galena River
now.”

Abner Marsh snorted. “Changing the goddamn name of the goddamn river, I never heard of such goddamned foolishness. Far as I’m concerned it’s the Fevre River and it’s goin’ to stay the Fevre River no matter what the hell the goddamned mayor says.” He scowled. “Or you neither. Hell, the way they’re lettin’ it silt up pretty soon it’s goin’ to be the goddamned Galena
Creek
!”

“Such language. I’d think a man who reads poetry would be able to keep a civil tongue in his head.”

“Never mind about my goddamned tongue,” Marsh said. “And don’t go yapping that poetry around town neither, you hear? I knew a man who liked those poems, that’s the only reason I got them books. You just stop buttin’ your nose in and keep my steamboats clean of dust.”

“Certainly. Will you be making a model of that other boat, do you think? The
Fevre Dream
?”

Marsh settled into a big overstuffed chair and frowned. “No,” he said. “No, I ain’t. That’s one boat I just want to forget about. So you just get to dusting and stop pesterin’ me with your damned fool questions.” He picked up a newspaper and began to read about the
Natchez
and Leathers’s latest boast. His housekeeper made a clucking noise and finally commenced to dusting.

His house had a high round turret facing south. At evening, Marsh would often go up there, with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, sometimes a piece of pie. He didn’t eat like he used to, not since the war. Food just didn’t seem to taste the same. He was still a big man, but he had lost at least a hundred pounds since his days with Joshua and the
Fevre Dream
. His flesh hung loose on him everywhere, like he’d bought it a couple sizes too large, expecting it to shrink. He had big droopy jowls, too. “Makes me even uglier than I used to be,” he would growl when he glanced in a mirror.

Sitting by his turret window, Marsh could see the river. He spent a lot of nights there, reading, drinking, and looking out on the water. The river was pretty in the moonlight, flowing past him, on and on, like it had flowed before he was born, like it would flow after he was dead and buried. Seeing it made Marsh feel peaceful, and he treasured that feeling. Most of the time he just felt weary or melancholy. He had read one poem by Keats that said there wasn’t nothing as sad as a beautiful thing dying, and it seemed to Marsh sometimes that every goddamned beautiful thing in the world was withering away. Marsh was lonely, too. He had been on the river so many years that he had no real friends left in Galena. He never had visitors, never talked to anyone but his damned annoying housekeeper. She vexed him considerably, but Marsh didn’t really mind; it was about all he had left to keep his blood hot. Sometimes he thought his life was over, and that made him so angry he turned red. He still had so many goddamned things he’d never done, so much unfinished business . . . but there was no denying that he was getting old. He used to carry that old hickory walking stick to gesture with, and be fashionable. Now he had an expensive gold-handled cane to help him walk better. And he had wrinkles around his eyes and even between his warts, and a funny kind of brown spot on the back of his left hand. He’d look at it sometimes and wonder how it had got there. He’d never noticed. Then he would cuss and pick up a newspaper or a book.

Marsh was sitting in his parlor, reading a book by Mister Dickens about his travels on the river and through America, when his housekeeper brought in the letter to him. He grunted with surprise, and slammed down the Dickens book, muttering under his breath, “Goddamn fool of a Britisher, like to chuck him in the goddamn river.” He took the letter and ripped it open, letting the envelope flutter to the floor. Getting a letter was pretty rare by itself, but this one was queerer still; it had been addressed to Fevre River Packets in St. Louis, and forwarded on up to Galena. Abner Marsh unfolded the crisp, yellowing paper, and suddenly sucked in his breath.

It was old stationery, and he remembered it well. He’d had it printed up some thirteen years before, to put in the desk drawer of every stateroom on his steamer. Across the top was a fancy pen-and-ink drawing of a great side-wheel steamer, and FEVRE DREAM in curved, ornate letters. He knew the hand too, that graceful, flowing hand. The message was short:

Dear Abner,

I have made my choice.

If you are well and willing, meet me in New Orleans as soon as possible. You will find me at the Green Tree on Gallatin Street.

—Joshua

“Goddamn it to hell!” Marsh swore. “After all this time, does that damned fool think he can just send me some goddamned letter and make me come all the goddamned way down to New Orleans? And with never a word of explanation, neither! Who the hell does he think he is?”

“I’m sure
I
don’t know!” his housekeeper said.

Abner Marsh pulled himself to his feet. “Woman, where the hell did you go and put my white coat?” he roared.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

New Orleans,
May 1870

Gallatin Street by night looked like the main road through hell, Abner Marsh thought as he hurried along it. It was lined with dance halls, saloons, and whorehouses, all of them crowded, filthy, and raucous, and the sidewalks seethed with drunks and whores and cut-purses. The whores called after him as he walked, mocking invitations that turned to jeers when he ignored them. Rough, cold-eyed men with knives and brass knuckles appraised him with open contempt, and made Marsh wish he didn’t look quite so prosperous and quite so goddamned old. He crossed the street to avoid one throng of men standing in front of a dance hall and hefting live oak cudgels, and found himself in front of the Green Tree.

It was a dance hall like all the others, a hellhole surrounded by other hellholes. Marsh pushed his way inside. The interior was crowded, smoky, and dim. Couples moved through the bluish haze, shuffling vaguely in time to the loud, cheap music. One of the men, a thickly-built unshaven lout in a red flannel shirt, staggered around the dance floor with a partner who looked to be unconscious. The man was squeezing her breast through her thin calico dress as he supported her and dragged her about. The other dancers all ignored them. The women were all typical dance hall girls, in faded calico shifts and tattered slippers. As Marsh looked on, the man in the red shirt stumbled and dropped his partner and collapsed on top of her, and a hoot of laughter went up. He cussed and got unsteadily to his feet while the woman lay sprawled out. Then, as the laughing subsided, he leaned over her and grabbed her by the front of her dress, and pulled. The cloth ripped, and he yanked the garment off and tossed it aside, grinning. She had nothing on underneath except for a red garter around one white, meaty thigh, with a little dagger stuck through it. The pommel was pink and heart-shaped. The man in the red shirt had started unbuttoning his pants when two bouncers moved in on either side of him. They were massive red-faced men with brass knuckles and thick wooden clubs. “Take ’er upstairs,” one of them growled. The man in the red shirt started cussing a streak, but finally he lifted the woman onto a shoulder and staggered off through the smoke, accompanied by more laughter.

“Want to dance, Mister?” a slurred female voice whispered in Marsh’s ear. He turned and scowled. The woman must have weighed as much as he did. She was pasty white and naked as the day she was born, except for a little leather belt with two knives hanging from it. She smiled and stroked Marsh’s cheek before he turned away from her abruptly and pushed through the crowd. He made a circuit of the room, trying to find Joshua. In one particularly noisy corner a dozen men were crowded around a wooden box, belching and swearing as they watched a rat fight. Around the bar men stood two deep, near every one of them armed and glowering. Marsh muttered apologies and pushed past a weedy looking fellow with a garrote looped through his belt, who was talking intently to a short man wearing a brace of pistols. The man with the garrote stopped and eyed Marsh unpleasantly, until the other shouted something at him and drew him back into conversation. “Whiskey,” Marsh demanded, leaning against the bar.

“This whiskey will rot a hole in your stomach, Abner,” the barkeeper said softly, his quiet voice penetrating right through the din. Abner Marsh let his mouth fall open. The man behind the bar smiling at him wore rough-woven baggy trousers held up by a cord belt, a white shirt so dirty it was almost gray, and a black vest. But the face was the same as it had been thirteen years before, pale and unlined, framed by that straight white hair, a bit messy now. Joshua York’s gray eyes seemed to shine with their own light in the dimness of the dance hall. He extended his hand across the bar, and clasped Marsh on the arm. “Come upstairs,” he said urgently, “where we can talk.”

As he came around the bar, the other barkeep stared at him, and a wiry weasel-faced man in a dark suit charged up to him and said, “Where the hell you goin’? Git back there an’ pour them whiskeys!”

“I quit,” Joshua told him.

“Quit? I’ll hev yer damned throat slit!”

“Will you?” said Joshua. He waited, looking around the suddenly hushed room and challenging them all with his eyes. No one moved. “I’ll be upstairs with my friend if any of you care to try,” he said to the half-dozen bouncers who lined the bar. Then he took Marsh by the elbow and led him through the dancers to a narrow back stair. Upstairs was a short hall lit by a single flickering gas jet, and a half-dozen rooms. Noises were coming from behind one closed door, grunting and moaning. Another door was open, and a man was sprawled in front of it, face down, half-in and half-out of the room. As he stepped over him, Marsh saw that it was the red-shirted man from downstairs. “What the hell happened to him?” Marsh said loudly.

Joshua York shrugged. “Bridget probably woke up, clubbed him, and took his money. She is a real darling. I believe she’s killed at least four men with that little knife of hers. She carves notches on that heart.” He grimaced. “When it comes to bloodshed, Abner, my people have very little to teach your own.”

Joshua opened the door to an empty room. “In here, if you will.” He shut it behind them, after turning on one of the lamps.

Marsh sat heavily on the bed. “Goddamn,” he said, “this is a hell of a place you got me to, Joshua. This is as bad as Natchez-under-the-hill was twenty, thirty years ago. Damned if I ever expected to find you in a place like this.”

Joshua York smiled and sat down in a frayed old armchair. “Neither will Julian or Sour Billy. That is the point. They are searching for me, I know. But even if they think to search Gallatin Street, it will be difficult. Julian would be attacked for his obvious wealth, and Sour Billy is known here by sight. He has taken off too many women who have never returned. Tonight there were at least two men in the Green Tree who would have killed him on sight. The streets outside belong to the Live Oak Boys, who might beat Billy to death just for the fun of it, unless they decided to help him.” He shrugged. “Even the police won’t come to Gallatin Street. I am as safe here as I would be anywhere, and on this street my nocturnal habits draw no notice. They are commonplace.”

“Never mind about that,” Marsh said impatiently. “You sent me a letter. Said you’d made your choice. You know why I come, but I ain’t sure why you sent for me. Maybe you better tell me.”

“I scarcely know where to begin. It has been a long time, Abner.”

“For both of us,” Marsh said gruffly. Then his tone softened. “I looked for you, Joshua. For more goddamned years than I care to think about, I tried to find you and that steamboat of mine. But there was just too goddamned much river and not enough time nor money.”

“Abner,” said York, “you might have had all the time and money in the world, and you would never have found us on the river. For the past thirteen years, the
Fevre Dream
has been on dry land. She is hidden near the old indigo vats on the plantation that Julian owns, some five hundred yards from the bayou, but quite thoroughly concealed.”

Marsh said, “How the
hell
. . .”

“It was my doing. Let me start from the beginning, and tell you all of it.” He sighed. “I must go back thirteen years, to the night I took my leave from you.”

“I remember.”

“I went upriver as quickly as I could,” Joshua began, “anxious to get back, worried that the thirst would come upon me. Travel was difficult, but I reached the
Fevre Dream
on the second night after my departure. She had moved only slightly. She now stood well away from the shore, the dark water rushing around her on both sides. It was a cold, foggy night when I approached her, and she was absolutely dead and dark. No smoke, no steam, not a flame showing anywhere, so silent that I almost missed her for the fog. I did not want to return, but I knew I must. I swam out to her.” He hesitated briefly. “Abner, you know the sort of life I have led. I have seen and done many terrible things. But nothing prepared me for that steamer the way I found her, nothing.”

Marsh’s face grew hard. “Go on.”

“I told you once that I thought Damon Julian was mad.”

“I recollect it.”

“Mad and heedless and dreaming of death,” Joshua said. “And he had proven it. Oh, yes. He had proven it. When I pulled myself up onto deck, the steamer was deathly quiet. No sound, no movement, just the river rushing past. I wandered through the boat unmolested.” His eyes were fixed on Abner Marsh, but they had a far-off glazed look, as if they were seeing something else, something they would always see. York stopped.

“Tell me, Joshua,” Marsh said.

York’s mouth grew tight. “It was a slaughterhouse, Abner.” He let that simple statement hang in the air for a moment, before he went on. “Bodies were everywhere. Everywhere. And not intact, either. I walked through the main deck, and found corpses . . . among the freight and back with the engines. There were . . . arms, legs, other body parts. Ripped loose. Torn off. The slaves, the stokers Billy had bought, most of them were still in the manacles, dead, their throats torn out. The engineer had been hung upside down above the cylinder, and cut so . . . he must have bled down onto . . . as if blood could take the place of oil.” Joshua gave a small grim shake of his head. “The number of dead, Abner. You can’t imagine. And the way they were torn, the grotesque mutilations. The fog had seeped onto the boat, so I could not see the whole at once. I walked, I wandered, and these things would suddenly appear before me where, an instant before, there had been nothing but vague shadows and a drifting veil of fog. And I would look at whatever new terror the mist had yielded up to me, and move away, and take only two or three steps before the vapors dissolved yet again to reveal something even more vile.

“Finally, sick at heart and filled with a wrath that burned in me like a fever, I went up the grand staircase to the boiler deck. The saloon . . . it was more of the same. Bodies and pieces of bodies. So much blood had been spilled that the carpet was still wet with it, even then. Everywhere I found signs of struggle. Dozens of mirrors were shattered, three or four stateroom doors had been smashed in, tables were overturned. On one table that still stood there was a human head upon a silver platter. I have never known more horror than I did as I walked the length of that saloon, those terrible three hundred feet. Nothing moved in the darkness, in the fog. Nothing living. I moved back and forth listlessly, not knowing what to do. I stopped before the water cooler, that great silver ornamental water cooler you had placed at the forward end of the cabin. My throat was very dry. I picked up one of the silver cups and turned the handle. The water . . . the water came slowly, Abner. Very slowly. Even in the darkness of that saloon, I could see that it was black and viscous. Half . . . clotted.

“I stood with the cup in hand, looking about blindly, my nose filled with the smell . . . the
smell,
I have hardly mentioned that, the smell was terrible, it . . . you can imagine, I’m sure. I stood in the midst of it all watching that agonizing slow trickle from the water cooler. I felt as though I was choking. My horror, my outrage, I . . . felt them rise within me. I tossed the cup across the cabin, and I screamed.

“Then the noises began. Whispers, thumpings, begging sounds, weeping, threats. Voices, Abner, living human voices. I looked about me, and grew even sicker, even more angry. At least a dozen stateroom doors had been nailed shut, their occupants imprisoned within them. Waiting, I knew, for tonight or the night after. Julian’s living larder. I began to tremble. I moved to the nearest door and started to pull loose the boards that held it shut. They pulled out with a loud creaking sound, almost a cry of agony. I was still working on that door when he said, ‘Dear Joshua, you must stop that. Dear lost Joshua, come back to us.’

“When I turned, they were there. Julian smiling at me, Sour Billy at his side, and the others, all the others, even my own people, Simon, Smith and Brown, all of them that were left . . . watching me. I screamed at them all, wild and incoherent. They were my people, and yet they had done
this
. Abner, I was filled with such loathing . . .

“Later, days later, I heard the whole story, learned the full depth of Julian’s madness. Perhaps it was my fault, in a sense. In saving you and Toby and Mister Framm, I brought on the death of more than a hundred innocent passengers.”

Abner Marsh snorted. “Don’t,” he said. “Whatever happened, it was Julian that had done it, and him that has to answer for it. You weren’t even there, so don’t go blamin’ yourself, you hear?”

Joshua’s gray eyes were troubled. “So I have told myself many times,” he said. “Let me finish the story. What had happened—Julian had woken that night to find us gone. He was furious. Wild. More—those words sound too feeble to convey what must have been his rage. Perhaps it was the red thirst in him that woke, after all those centuries. Moreover, it must have looked to him as if destruction were near to hand. His pilots were all gone. The steamer could not move without a pilot. And he must have known that you intended to return, to attack by day and destroy him. He could not have guessed that I would come back instead, to save them. No doubt my treachery and Valerie’s desertion filled him with fear, with uncertainty about what would come next. He had lost control. He had been bloodmaster, and yet we had acted against him. In all the history of the people of the night, it had never happened before. I think, during that terrible night, that Damon Julian thought he saw the death he both hungered for and feared.

“Sour Billy, I learned later, urged that they go ashore, split up, travel overland separately and meet again in Natchez or New Orleans or somewhere. That would have been sensible. But Julian was past sense. He had just entered the main cabin, his madness seething in his eyes, when a passenger approached him and began to complain that the steamer was far behind schedule, that she had not moved all day. ‘Ah,’ Julian said, ‘then we must move it immediately.’ He had her taken a bit farther out, so no one could get to shore. When it was done, he returned to the main cabin, where the passengers were dining, and approached the man who had complained, and killed him, in full view of all.