Fevre Dream (8 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Aboard the Steamer
Fevre Dream,
Mississippi River,
July 1857

Abner Marsh cut a wedge of cheddar from the wheel on the table, positioned it carefully atop what remained of his apple pie, and forked them both up with a quick motion of his big red hand. He belched, wiped his mouth with his napkin and shook a few crumbs from his beard, and sat back with a smile on his face.

“Good pie?” asked Joshua York, smiling at Marsh over a brandy snifter.

“Toby don’t bake no other kind,” Marsh replied. “You should of tried a piece.” He pushed away from the table and stood up. “Well, drink up, Joshua. It’s time.”

“Time?”

“You wanted to learn the river, didn’t you? You ain’t goin’ to learn it settin’ to table, I’ll tell you that much.”

York finished his brandy, and they went up to the pilot house together. Karl Framm was on duty. He was lounging on the couch, smoke curling up from his pipe, while his cub—a tall youth with lank blond hair hanging down to his collar—worked as steersman. “Cap’n Marsh,” Framm said, nodding. “And you must be the mysterious Cap’n York. Pleased to meet you. Never been on a steamer with two captains before.” He grinned, a wide lopsided grin that flashed a gold tooth. “This boat got almost as many captains as I got wives. Of course, it stands to reason. Why, this boat got more boilers and more mirrors and more silver than any boat I ever seen, so it ought to have more captains too, I figure.” The lanky pilot leaned forward and knocked some ashes from his pipe into the belly of the big iron stove. It was cold and dark, the night being hot and thick. “What can I do for you gentlemen?” Framm asked.

“Learn us the river,” said Marsh.

Framm’s eyebrows rose. “Learn you the river? I got myself a cub here. Ain’t that right, Jody?”

“Sure is, Mister Framm.”

Framm smiled and shrugged. “Now, I’m learnin’ Jody here, and it’s all been arranged, I’m to get six hundred dollars from the first wages he gets after he’s been licensed and taken into the association. I’m only doin’ it so cheap cause I know his family. Can’t say I know your families, though, can’t say that
a-tall
.”

Joshua York undid the buttons on his dark gray vest. He was wearing a money belt. He brought out a twenty-dollar gold piece, and placed it on top of the stove, the gold gleaming softly against the black iron. “Twenty,” said York. He set another gold piece atop it. “Forty,” he said. Then a third. “Sixty.” When the count reached three hundred York buttoned up his vest. “I’m afraid that is all I have on me, Mister Framm, but I assure you I am not without funds. Let us agree to seven hundred dollars for yourself, and an equal amount for Mister Albright, if the two of you will instruct me in the rudiments of piloting, and refresh Captain Marsh here so he can steer his own boat. Payable immediately, not from future wages. What say you?”

Framm was real cool about it, Marsh thought. He sucked on his pipe thoughtfully for a moment, like he was considering the offer, and finally reached out and took the stack of gold coins. “Can’t speak for Mister Albright, but for myself, I was always fond of the color of gold. I’ll learn you. What say you come on up tomorrow during the day, at the start of my watch?”

“That may be fine for Captain Marsh,” York said, “but I prefer to begin immediately.”

Framm looked around. “Hell,” he said. “Can’t you see? It’s
night
. Been learning Jody for near a year now, and it’s only been a month I been lettin’ him steer by night. Running at night ain’t never easy. No.” His tone was firm. “I’ll learn you by day first, when a man can see where’s he runnin’ to.”

“I will learn by night. I keep strange hours, Mister Framm. But you need not worry. I have excellent night vision, better than yours, I suspect.”

The pilot unfolded his long legs, stood up, and stalked over and took the wheel. “Go below, Jody,” he said to his cub. When the youth had gone, Framm said, “Ain’t no man sees good enough to run a bad stretch of river in the dark.” He stood with his back to them, intent on the black starlit waters ahead. Far up the river they could see the distant lights of another steamer. “Tonight is a good clear night, no clouds to speak of, a half decent moon, good stage on the river. Look at that water out there. Like black glass. Look at the banks. Real easy to see where they’re at, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” said York. Marsh, smiling, said nothing.

“Well,” said Framm, “it ain’t always like that. Sometimes there ain’t no moon, sometimes there’s clouds covering everything. Gets awful black then. Gets so a man can’t see much of nothin’. The banks pull back so you can’t see where they are, and if you don’t know what you’re doin’ you can steer right into ’em. Other times you get shadows that hulk up like they were solid land, and you got to know they ain’t, otherwise you’ll spend half the night steerin’ away from things that ain’t really there. How do you suppose a pilot knows such things, Cap’n York?” Framm gave him no chance to reply. He tapped his temple. “By memory is how. By seeing the dern river by day and rememberin’ it, all of it, every bend and every house along the shore, every woodyard, where it runs deep and where it’s shallow, where you got to cross. You pilot a steamer with what you know, Cap’n York, not with what you see. But you got to see before you can know, and you can’t see good enough by night.”

“That’s the truth, Joshua,” Abner Marsh affirmed, putting a hand up on York’s shoulder.

York said quietly, “The boat up ahead of us is a side-wheeler, with what appears to be an ornate K between her chimneys, and a pilot house with a domed roof. Right now she’s passing a woodyard. There’s an old rotten wharf there, and a colored man is sitting on the end of it, looking out at the river.”

Marsh let go of York’s shoulder and moved to the window, squinting. The other boat was a long way ahead. He could make out that she was a side-wheeler right enough, but the device between her chimneys . . . the chimneys were black against a black sky, he could barely see them, and then only because of the sparks flying from them. “Damn,” he said.

Framm glanced around at York with surprise in his eyes. “I can’t make out half that stuff myself,” he said, “but I do believe you’re right.” A few moments later the
Fevre Dream
steamed past the woodyard, and there was the old colored man, just like York had described. “He’s smokin’ a pipe,” Framm said, grinning. “You left that out.”

“Sorry,” Joshua York said.

“Well,” said Framm thoughtfully, “well.” He chewed on his pipe, his eyes on the river ahead. “You surely do have good night eyes, I’ll give you that. But I’m still not sure. It ain’t hard to see a woodyard up ahead on a clear night. Seein’ an old darkie is a mite harder, with the way they blend in and all, but still, that’s one thing, and the river is another. There’s lots of little things a pilot has got to see that your cabin passenger would never notice a-tall. The look of the water when a snag or a sawyer is hidin’ underneath it. Old dead trees that’ll tell you the stage of the river a hundred miles farther on. The way to tell a bluff reef from a wind reef. You got to be able to read the river like it was a book, and the words is just little ripples and eddies, sometimes all faded so they can’t be made out properly, and then you got to rely on what you remember about the last time you read that page. Now you wouldn’t go try readin’ a book in the dark, would you?”

York ignored that. “I can see a ripple on the water as easily as I can see a woodyard, if I know what to look for. Mister Framm, if you can’t teach me the river, I’ll find a pilot who can. I remind you that I am the owner and master of the
Fevre Dream
.”

Framm glanced around again, frowning now. “More work by night,” he said. “If you want to learn by night, it’ll cost you eight hundred.”

York’s expression melted into a slow smile. “Done,” he said. “Now, let us begin.”

Karl Framm pushed back his slouchy hat until it sat on the back of his head, and gave a long sigh, like a man who was inordinately put upon. “All right,” he said, “it’s your money, and your boat too. Don’t come botherin’ me when you tear out her bottom. Now listen up. The river runs pretty straight from St. Louis down to Cairo, before the Ohio comes in. But you got to know it anyhow. This here stretch is called the graveyard from time to time, cause a lot of boats went down here. Some, you can still see the chimneys peeping up above the water, or the whole damn wreck lyin’ in the mud if the river’s low—the ones that are down under the waterline, though, you better know where they lie, or the next damn boat comin’ down is goin’ to have to know where
you
lie. You got to learn your marks, too, and how to handle the boat. Here, step on up and take the wheel, get the feel of her. You couldn’t touch bottom with a church steeple right now, it’s safe enough.” York and Framm changed places. “Now, the first point below St. Louis . . .” Framm began. Abner Marsh sat himself down on the couch, listening, while the pilot went on and on, meandering from the marks to tricks of steering to long stories about the steamers that lay sunken in the graveyard they were running. He was a colorful storyteller, but after every tale he’d recollect the task at hand and meander back to the marks again. York drank it all in, quietlike. He seemed to pick up the knack of steering quickly, and whenever Framm stopped and asked him to repeat some bit of information, Joshua just reeled it back at him.

At length, after they’d caught and passed the side-wheeler that had been running ahead of them, Marsh found himself yawning. It was such a fine sharp night, though, that he hated to go to bed. He hoisted himself up and went down to the texas-tender, coming back with a pot of hot coffee and a plate of tarts. When he returned, Karl Framm was spinning the yarn about the wreck of the
Drennan Whyte,
lost above Natchez in ’50 with a treasure aboard her. The
Evermonde
tried to raise her, caught fire and went to the bottom. The
Ellen Adams,
a salvage steamer, came looking for the treasure in ’51, struck a bar and half sank. “The treasure’s cursed, y’see,” Framm was saying, “either that or that old devil river just don’t want to give it up.”

Marsh smiled and poured the coffee. “Joshua,” he said, “that story’s true enough, but don’t you go believing everything he says. This man’s the most notorious liar on the river.”

“Why, Cap’n!” Framm said, grinning. He turned back to the river. “See that old cabin yonder, with the tumbly-down porch?” he said. “Good, cause you got to recollect it . . .” and he was off again. It was a solid twenty minutes before he got distracted by the story of
E. Jenkins,
the steamer that was thirty miles long, with hinges in the middle so it could make the turns in the river. Even Joshua York gave Framm an incredulous look for that one. But he was smiling.

Marsh retired about an hour after he’d eaten the last of the tarts. Framm was amusing enough, but he’d take his lessons by day, when he could damn well see the marks the pilot was talking about.

When he woke, it was morning and the
Fevre Dream
was at Cape Girardeau, taking on a load of grist. Framm had elected to put in there sometime during the night, he learned, when some fog closed in around them. Cape Girardeau was a haughty town perched up on its bluffs, some 150 miles below St. Louis, and Marsh did some figuring and was pleased with their time. It was no record, but it was good.

Within the hour the
Fevre Dream
was back on the river, heading downstream. The July sun was fierce overhead, the air thick with heat and humidity and insects, but up on the texas deck it was cool and serene. Stops were frequent. With eighteen big boilers to keep hot, the steamer ate wood like nobody’s business, but fuel was never a problem; woodyards dotted both banks regularly. Whenever they got low the mate would signal up to the pilot, and they’d put in near some ramshackle little cabin surrounded by big stacks of split beech or oak or chestnut, and Marsh or Jonathon Jeffers would go ashore and dicker with the woodyard man. When they gave the signal, the deckhands would swarm ashore at those cords of wood, and in three blinks of your eye it would be gone, stowed aboard the steamer. Cabin passengers always liked to watch the wooding operations from the railings on the boiler deck. Deck passengers always liked to get in the way.

They stopped at all manner of towns as well, causing no end of excitement. They stopped at an unmarked landing to discharge one passenger, and a private dock to pick one up. Around noon they stopped for a woman and child who hailed them from a bank, and close to four they had to slow and back their wheels so three men in a rowboat could catch them and clamber aboard. The
Fevre Dream
didn’t run far that day, or fast. By the time the westering sun was turning the broad waters a deep burnished red, they were in sight of Cairo, and Dan Albright chose to tie up there for the night.

South of Cairo the Ohio flowed into the Mississippi, and the two rivers made an odd sight. They wouldn’t merge all at once, but kept each to itself, the clear blue flow of the Ohio a bright ribbon down the eastern bank, against the murkier brown waters of the Mississippi. Here too was where the lower river took on its own peculiar character; from Cairo to New Orleans and the Gulf, a distance of nearly 1100 miles, the Mississippi coiled and looped and bent round and about like a writhing snake, changing its course at the merest whim, eating through the soft soil unpredictably, sometimes leaving docks high and dry, or putting whole towns under water. The pilots claimed the river was never the same twice. The upper Mississippi, where Abner Marsh had been born and had learned his trade, was an entirely different place, confined between high, rocky bluffs and running straight as often as not. Marsh stood up on the hurricane deck for a long time, looking at the passing scenery and trying to feel the
difference
of it, and the difference it would make to his future. He had crossed from the upper river to the lower, he thought, and into a new part of his life.

Shortly after, Marsh was jawing with Jeffers in the clerk’s office when he heard the bell sound three times, the signal for a landing. He frowned, and looked out Jeffers’ window. Nothing was visible except densely wooded banks. “I wonder why we’re landin’,” Marsh said. “New Madrid’s the next stop. I may not know this part of the river, but this sure ain’t New Madrid.”