Fevre Dream (9 page)

Jeffers shrugged. “Perhaps we were hailed.”

Marsh begged his pardon and went on up to the pilot house. Dan Albright was at the wheel. “Was there a hail?” Marsh asked.

“No, sir,” answered Albright. He was a laconic sort. He answered what you asked him, barely.

“Where we stopping?”

“Woodyard, Cap’n.”

Marsh saw there was indeed a woodyard up ahead, on the west bank. “Mister Albright, I do believe we wooded up not an hour ago. We can’t have burned it all already. Did Hairy Mike ask you to land?” The mate was supposed to keep track of when a steamer needed wood.

“No, sir. This is Captain York’s order. The word was passed along that I was to put in at this particular woodyard, whether we wanted wood or not.” Albright glanced over. He was a trim little fellow, with a thin dark moustache, a red silk tie, and patent leather boots. “Are you telling me to pass by?”

“No,” Abner Marsh said hastily. York might have warned him, he thought, but their bargain gave Joshua the right to give queer orders. “You know how long we’re goin’ to be here?”

“I hear York has business ashore. If he don’t get up till dark, that’s all day.”

“Damn. Our schedule—the passengers will be askin’ no end of bothersome questions.” Marsh frowned. “Well, I suppose there’s no help for it. We might as well take on some more wood long as we’re here. I’ll go see to it.”

Marsh struck up a bargain with the boy running the woodyard, a slender Negro in a thin cotton shirt. The boy wasn’t much for dickering; Marsh got beech from him at cottonwood prices, and made him throw in some pine knots too. As the roustabouts and deckhands meandered over to load up, Marsh looked the colored boy square in the eye, smiled, and said, “You’re new at this, ain’t you?”

The boy nodded. “Yassuh, Cap’n.” Marsh nodded, and was starting to turn back to the steamer, but the boy continued, “I jest been here a week, Cap’n. Ol’ white man useta be here got hisself et up by wolves.”

Marsh looked at the boy hard. “We’re only a couple miles north of New Madrid, ain’t we, boy?”

“Thass right, Cap’n.”

When Abner Marsh returned to the
Fevre Dream,
he was feeling very agitated. Damn Joshua York, he thought. What was the man up to, and why did they have to waste a whole day at this fool woodyard? Marsh had a good mind to go storming up to York’s cabin and give him a good talking to. He considered the idea briefly, then thought better of it. It was none of his business, Marsh reminded himself forcibly. He settled down to wait.

The hours passed slowly as the
Fevre Dream
lay dead in the water off the woodyard. A dozen other steamers slid by downriver, much to Abner Marsh’s annoyance. Almost as many came struggling upstream. A brief knife fight between two deck passengers in which no one was injured provided the afternoon’s excitement. Mostly the passengers and crew of the
Fevre Dream
lazed about on her decks, chairs tilted back in the sun, smoking or chewing or arguing politics. Jeffers and Albright played chess in the pilot house. Framm told wild stories in the grand saloon. Some of the ladies started talk of getting up a dance. And Abner Marsh grew more and more impatient.

At dark, Marsh was sitting up on the texas porch, drinking coffee and swatting mosquitoes, when he happened to glance toward shore in time to see Joshua York leave the steamer. Simon was with him. They stopped by the cabin and talked briefly to the woodyard boy, then vanished down a rutted mud road into the woods. “Well, I’ll be,” Marsh said, rising. “With not even a by-your-leave or a hello.” He frowned. “No supper neither.” That reminded him, though, and he went on down to the main cabin to eat.

The night went by; passengers and crew alike grew restless. Drinking was heavy around the bar. Some planter started up a game of brag, and others began to sing, and one stiff-necked young man got himself hit with a cane for calling for abolition.

Near midnight, Simon returned alone. Abner Marsh was in the saloon when Hairy Mike tapped him on the shoulder; Marsh had left orders to be summoned as soon as York came back. “Get your roustas aboard and tell Whitey to get our steam up,” he snapped at the mate, “we got us some time to make up.” Then he went to see York. Only York wasn’t there.

“Joshua wants you to go on,” Simon reported. “He will travel by land, and meet you in New Madrid. Wait for him.” Heated questioning drew nothing more out of him; Simon only fixed Marsh with his small, cold eyes and repeated the message, that the
Fevre Dream
was to wait for York at New Madrid.

Once steam was up, it was a short, pleasant voyage. New Madrid was a bare few miles downriver from the woodyard where they had been tied up all day. Marsh gladly bid the desolate place farewell as they steamed off into the night. “Damn that Joshua,” he muttered.

They lost almost two full days in New Madrid.

“He’s dead,” Jonathon Jeffers opined when they had been tied up for a day and a half. New Madrid had hotels, billiard parlors, churches, and diverse other recreations not available in woodyards, so the time spent at the landing was not near as boring, but nonetheless everyone was anxious to be off. A half-dozen passengers, impatient with the delay when the weather was good—the boat seemed in fine fettle, and the stage was high—came up to Marsh and demanded a refund of their passage money. They were indignantly refused, but Marsh still seethed and wondered aloud where Joshua York had got himself to.

“York ain’t dead,” Marsh said. “I’m not sayin’ he ain’t goin’ to wish he was dead when I get ahold of him, but he ain’t dead yet.”

Behind the gold spectacles, Jeffers’ eyebrow arched. “No? How can you be so sure, Cap’n? He was alone, on foot, going through the woods by night. There are scoundrels out there, and animals, too. I do believe there have been a number of deaths around New Madrid the last few years.”

Marsh stared at him. “What’s that?” he demanded. “How do you know?”

“I read the papers,” said Jeffers.

Marsh scowled. “Well, it don’t make no difference. York ain’t dead. I know that, Mister Jeffers, I know that for a fact.”

“Lost, then?” suggested the clerk, with a cool smile. “Shall we get up a party and go look for him, Cap’n?”

“I’ll think on that,” said Abner Marsh.

But there was no need. That night, an hour after the sun had set, Joshua York came striding up to the landing. He did not look like a man who had spent two days off by himself in the woods. His boots and trouser legs were dusty, but other than that his clothing looked as elegant as on the night he had left. His gait was rushed but graceful. He bounded up the stage, and smiled when he saw Jack Ely, the second engineer. “Find Whitey and get the steam up,” York said to Ely, “we’re leaving.” Then, before anyone could question him, he was halfway up the grand staircase.

Marsh, for all his anger and restlessness, found himself remarkably relieved at Joshua’s return. “Go ring the goddamned bell so them that went ashore know we’re leaving,” he told Hairy Mike. “I want to get us out on the river again soon as we can.”

York was in his cabin, washing his hands in the basin of water that sat atop his chest of drawers. “Abner,” he said politely when Marsh came rushing in after a brief, thunderous knock. “Do you think I might trouble Toby for a late supper?”

“I’ll trouble you to ask why we been wastin’ all this time,” Marsh said. “Damn it, Joshua, I know you said you’d act queer, but
two days
! Ain’t no way to run a steam packet, I tell you that.”

York dried his long, pale hands carefully, and turned. “It was important. I warn you that I may do it again. You will have to accustom yourself to my ways, Abner, and see that I am not questioned.”

“We got freight to deliver, and passengers who paid for passage, not for loungin’ around at woodyards. What do I tell them, Joshua?”

“Whatever you choose. You are ingenious, Abner. I provided the money in our partnership. I expect you to provide the excuses.” His tone was cordial but firm. “If it is any solace, this first trip will be the worst. On future trips, I anticipate few if any mysterious excursions. You’ll get your record run without any trouble from me.” He smiled. “I hope you can be satisfied with that. Take hold of your impatience, friend. We’ll reach New Orleans eventually, and then things will go easier. Can you accept that, Abner? Abner? Is anything wrong?”

Abner Marsh had been squinting hard, and scarcely listening to York at all. He must have had an odd look on his face, he realized. “No,” he said quickly, “just two days, that’s all that’s wrong. But it’s no matter. No matter at all. Whatever you say, Joshua.”

York nodded, seemingly satisfied. “I am going to change, and bother Toby for a meal, and then go on up to the pilot house to learn more of your river. Who has the after-watch tonight?”

“Mister Framm,” said Marsh.

“Good,” York said. “Karl is very entertaining.”

“That he is,” replied Marsh. “Excuse me, Joshua. Got to get down below and see to things, if we’re goin’ to get underway tonight.” He turned abruptly and left the cabin. But outside, in the heat of the night, Abner Marsh leaned heavily on his walking stick and stared off into the star-flecked darkness, trying to summon up the thing he thought he’d seen across the cabin.

If only his eyes were better. If only York had lit both oil lamps, instead of just one. If only he had dared to walk closer. It had been hard to make out, all the way over there on the chest of drawers. But Marsh couldn’t get it out of his mind. The cloth on which York had been wiping his hands had stains on it. Dark stains. Reddish.

And they’d looked too damn much like blood.

CHAPTER NINE

Aboard the Steamer
Fevre Dream,
Mississippi River,
August 1857

Day after tedious day slipped by as the
Fevre Dream
crept down the Mississippi.

A fleet steamer could run from St. Louis to New Orleans and back in twenty-eight days or so, even allowing for intermediate stops and landings, for a week or more at wharfside loading or unloading, and for a reasonable amount of bad weather. But at the pace the
Fevre Dream
was keeping, it was going to take them a month just to reach New Orleans. It seemed to Abner Marsh as if the weather, the river, and Joshua York were all conspiring to slow him down. Fog lay over the water for two days, thick and gray as soiled cotton; Dan Albright ran through it for some six hours, cautiously steering the steamer into solid, shifting walls of mist that faded and gave way before her, leaving Marsh a mass of nerves. Had it been up to him, they would have laid up the moment the fog closed in rather than risk the
Fevre Dream,
but out on the river it was the pilot who decided such things, not the captain, and Albright pressed on. Finally, though, the mists grew too thick even for him, and they lost a day and a half at a landing near Memphis, watching the brown water rush past and tug at them, and listening to distant splashes in the fog. Once a raft came by, a fire burning on its deck, and they heard the raftsmen calling out to them, vague faint cries that echoed over the river before the gray swallowed raft and sound both.

When the fog had finally lifted enough so that Karl Framm judged it safe to try the river again, they steamed for less than an hour before coming up hard on a bar as Framm tried to run an uncertain cutoff and save some time. Deckhands and firemen and roustabouts spilled ashore, with Hairy Mike supervising, and walked the steamer over, but it took more than three hours, and afterward they crept along slow, with Albright out ahead in the yawl, taking soundings. Finally they got clear of the cutoff and into good water again, but that was not the end of their troubles. There was a thunderstorm three days later, and more than once the
Fevre Dream
had to take the long way around a bend in the river because of snags or low water in the chutes or cutoffs, or move along slow, paddles barely turning, while the sounding yawl edged out ahead with the off-duty pilot and an officer and a picked crew to drop lead and call back the news: “Quarter twain,” or “Quarter less three,” or “Mark three.” The nights were black and overcast when they weren’t foggy; if the steamer ran at all, she ran carefully, at quarter speed or less, with no smoking allowed up in the pilot house and all the windows below carefully curtained and shuttered so the boat gave off no light and the steersman could more easily see the river. The banks were pitch and desolate those nights, and moved around like restless corpses, shifting here and there so a man couldn’t easily make out where the deep water ran, or even where water ended and land began. The river ran dark as sin, with no moonlight or stars upon it. Some nights it was hard even to spy the nighthawk, the device partway up the flagpole by which pilots gauged their marks. But Framm and Albright, different as they were, were both lightning pilots, and they kept the
Fevre Dream
moving when it was possible to move at all. The times when they tied up were times when
nothing
moved on the river, except rafts and logs, and a handful of flatboats and small steamers that didn’t hardly draw nothing at all.

Joshua York helped them along; each night he was up in the pilot house to stand his watch like a proper cub. “I told him right off that a night like that weren’t no good,” Framm said to Marsh once over dinner. “I couldn’t learn him marks that I couldn’t rightly see myself, could I? Well, that man’s got the damndest eyes for the darkness I ever seen. There’s times I swear he’s seein’ right into the water, and it ain’t nothin’ to him how black it gets. I keep him by me and tell him the marks, and nine times out of ten he sees ’em before I do. Last night I think I would have tied her up halfway through the dog watch, but for Joshua.”

But York delayed the steamer as well. Six additional landings were made on his order, at Greenville and at two smaller towns and at a private wharf in Tennessee and twice at woodyards. Twice he was gone all night. At Memphis York had no business ashore, but elsewhere he dragged out their layovers intolerably. When they put in at Helena he was gone overnight, and at Napoleon he held them up three days, him and Simon, doing God knows what off by themselves. Vicksburg was even worse; there they idled four nights away before Joshua York finally returned to the
Fevre Dream
.

The day they steamed out of Memphis, the sunset was especially pretty. A few lingering wisps of mist took on an orange glow, and the clouds in the west turned a vivid, fiery red, until the sky itself seemed aflame. But Abner Marsh, standing alone up on the texas deck, had eyes only for the river. No other steamers were in sight. The water ahead of them was calm; here the wind sent up a series of ripples, and there the current flowed around the wicked black limbs of a fallen tree jutting out from the shore, but mostly the old devil was placid. And as the sun went down, the muddy water took on a reddish tinge, a tinge that grew and spread and darkened until it seemed as if the
Fevre Dream
moved upon a flowing river of blood. Then the sun vanished behind the trees and the clouds, and slowly the blood darkened, going brown as blood does when it dries, and finally black, dead black, black as the grave. Marsh watched the last crimson eddies vanish. No stars came out that night. He went down to supper with blood on his mind.

Days had passed since New Madrid, and Abner Marsh had done nothing, said nothing. But he had done a considerable amount of thinking about what he had seen, or what he hadn’t seen, in Joshua’s cabin. He couldn’t be sure he had seen anything, of course. Besides, what if he had? Perhaps Joshua had cut himself in the woods . . . though Marsh had looked closely at York’s hands the following night, and had seen no signs of a cut or scab. Perhaps he had butchered an animal, or defended himself against thieves; a dozen good reasons presented themselves, but all fell before the simple fact of Joshua’s silence. If York had nothing to hide, why was he so damn secretive? The more Abner Marsh thought on that, the less he liked it.

Marsh had seen blood before, plenty of it; fistfights and canings, duels and shootings. The river ran down into slave country, and blood flowed easily there for those whose skin was black. The free states weren’t much better. Marsh had been in bleeding Kansas for a time, had seen men burned and shot. He had served in the Illinois militia when he was younger, and had fought in the Black Hawk War. He still dreamt at times of the Battle of Bad Axe, when they’d cut down Black Hawk’s people, women and children too, as they tried to cross the Mississippi to the safety of the western shore. That had been a bloody day, but needed; Black Hawk had come a-warring and a-raiding over to Illinois, after all.

The blood that might or might not have been on Joshua’s hands was different, somehow. It left Marsh uneasy, disquieted.

Still, he reminded himself, he had made a bargain. A bargain was a bargain to Abner Marsh, and a man was bound to keep those he made, whether good or bad, whether with a preacher or a sharper or the devil hisself. Joshua York had mentioned having enemies, Marsh recalled, and a man’s dealings with his enemies were his own business. York had been fair enough with Marsh.

So he reasoned, and tried to put the whole matter from his mind.

But the Mississippi turned to blood, and there was bleeding in his dreams as well. Aboard the
Fevre Dream,
the mood began to grow bored and somber. A striker got careless and was scalded by the steam, and had to be set ashore at Napoleon. A roustabout ran off at Vicksburg, which was crazy, it being slave country and him a free colored man. Fights broke out among the deck passengers. It was the boredom and the thick, suffocating wet heat of August, Jeffers told him. Trash gets crazy when it gets hot, Hairy Mike echoed. Abner Marsh wasn’t so sure. It seemed almost like they were being punished.

Missouri and Tennessee vanished behind them, and Marsh fretted. Cities and towns and woodyards drifted by, days turned into tortuously slow weeks, and they lost passengers and cargo because of York’s layovers. Marsh went ashore, into saloons and hotels popular with steamboatmen, and listened, and didn’t like the gab he heard about his boat. For all her boilers, one story ran, the
Fevre Dream
was built too big and heavy, and wasn’t very fast at all. Engine trouble, another rumor claimed; seams near to bursting on the boilers. That was bad talk; boiler explosions were greatly feared. A mate from some New Orleans boat told Marsh in Vicksburg that the
Fevre Dream
looked sweet enough, but her captain was just some no-count upper-river man who didn’t have the courage to run her full out. Marsh nearly broke open his head. There was talk about York as well, him and his queer friends and their ways. The
Fevre Dream
was starting to get herself a reputation, sure enough, but it was not one that Abner Marsh was over-partial to.

By the time they came steaming into Natchez, Marsh had had quite enough.

It was an hour shy of dusk when they first sighted Natchez in the distance, a few lights burning already in the ruddy afternoon, shadows lengthening from the west. It had been a fine day, but for the heat; they’d made their best time since leaving Cairo. The river had a golden sheen to it, and the sun shimmered upon it like a burnished brass ornament, gaudy as all get-out, rippling and dancing when the wind breathed upon the water. Marsh had taken to bed that afternoon, feeling a bit under the weather, but he got himself out of the cabin when he heard the whistle shriek, in answer to the call of another steamer that came high and sweet over the water. They were talking to each other, Marsh knew, an ascending and a descending boat deciding which would pass to the right and which to the left when they met. It happened a dozen times each day. But there was something in the voice of the other boat that called to him, dragged him from his sweaty sheets, and he came out of the texas just in time to see her pass; the
Eclipse,
swift and haughty, the gilded device between her chimneys glittering in the sun, her passengers thick on her decks, smoke rolling and tumbling from her. Marsh watched her recede upriver until only her smoke could be seen, a strange tightness in his gut all the while.

When the
Eclipse
had faded like a dream fades in the morning, Marsh turned, and there was Natchez up ahead of them. He heard the bells sounding the signal for a landing, and their whistle called again.

A tangle of steamers crowded the landing, and beyond them two cities waited for the
Fevre Dream
. Up on its lofty, precipitous bluffs was Natchez-on-the-hill, the proper city, with its broad streets, its trees and flowers, and all its grand houses. Each one had a name. Monmouth. Linden. Auburn. Ravenna. Concord and Belfast and Windy Hill. The Burn. Marsh had been in Natchez a half-dozen times in his younger days, before he’d had steamers of his own, and he had made it a point to go walking up there and see all those storied houses. They were goddamned palaces, every one of them, and Marsh didn’t feel quite comfortable there. The old families who lived inside them acted like kings, too; aloof and arrogant, drinking their mint juleps and their sherry cobblers, icing their damned wine, amusing themselves by racing their highbred horses and hunting bears, dueling with revolvers and bowie knives over the slightest trifling affront. The nabobs, Marsh had heard them called. They were a fine lot, and every goddamned one of them seemed to be a colonel. Sometimes they showed up on the landing, and then you had to invite them aboard your steamboat for cigars and drinks, no matter how they behaved.

But they were a curiously blind bunch. From their great houses on the bluffs, the nabobs looked out over the shining majesty of the river, but somehow they couldn’t see the things that were right underneath them.

For beneath the mansions, between the river and the bluffs, was another city: Natchez-under-the-hill. No marble columns stood there, and there were precious few flowers either. The streets were mud and dust. Brothels clustered round the steamer landing and lined Silver Street, or what was left of it. Much of the street had caved into the river twenty years ago, and the walks that remained were half-sunken and lined with tawdry women and dangerous, cold-eyed, foppish young men. Main Street was all saloons and billiard rooms and gambling halls, and each night the city below the city steamed and seethed. Brawls and brags and blood, crooked poker and Spanish burials, whores who’d do most anything and men who’d grin at you and take your purse and slit your throat in the bargain, that was Natchez-under-the-hill. Whiskey and flesh and cards, red lights and raucous song and watered gin, that was the way of it by the river. Steamboatmen loved and hated Natchez-under-the-hill and its milling population of cheap women and cutthroats and gamblers and free blacks and mulattoes, even though the older men swore that the city under the bluffs today wasn’t nothing near as wild as it had been forty years back, or even before the tornado that God had sent to clean it out in 1840. Marsh didn’t know about that; it was wild enough for him and he’d spent several memorable nights there, years ago. But this time he had a bad feeling about it.

Briefly Marsh entertained a notion to pass it by, to climb on up to the pilot house and tell Albright to keep on going. But they had passengers to land, freight to unload, and the crew would be looking forward to a night in fabled Natchez, so Marsh did nothing for all his misgivings. The
Fevre Dream
steamed in, and was made fast for the night. They quieted her down, damped her steam and let the fires die in her guts, and then her crew spilled from her like blood from an open wound. A few of them paused on the landing to buy frozen creams or fruit from the black peddlers with their carts, but most streamed right down Silver Street toward the hot bright lights.