Dance on the Wind

9

Ebenezer Zane chose to set off downriver in the worst possible weather yet to batter the valley that autumn.

The sky overhead hung just out of reach, every bit as cold and the color of a great slab of the rain-soaked granite that protruded from the barren, skeletal forest that formed both sides of the channel the Ohio carved out of this western land. Yellows, oranges, and reds had been long ago stripped from the trees, nipped by frosts, turned by the crawl of time toward winter, hurried on their way before every gust of the season’s winds. Everything smelled of dank decay and humus, coated with ice and frost.

And then the sky unleashed itself, beginning to fling down a sharp, needling sleet borne on the back of a twisting, thrashing gale.

Titus gulped the last of the coffee in the bottom of his tin cup and turned on the rough bench to pull on a second pair of moccasins, dragging them over the first he had tied over his thickest pair of woolen stockings. Not without their holes and worn fabric, they nonetheless still climbed to his knees. And they would simply have to do. Like the rest of what little he had plopped beside the table where he hunkered with the rest of the crew finishing their hearty breakfast of hominy and great slabs of bacon, as well as baskets filled with biscuits and plenty of steaming coffee. Here in the Kangaroo other rivermen tied up at the wharf were beginning to show up for a hearty meal. But they would have to do without this choicest of tables near the fireplace, where Ebenezer Zane stuffed the other four who would that morning dare the Great Falls of the Ohio with him.

“Looks to be you’re still dead set on killing yourself, Ebenezer,” one of the other pilots growled as he came up to the table, wagging his head.

“Plan on getting my boat all the way down to New Orleans before the devil even knows I’ve cleared out of Louisville,” Zane replied. “Have some coffee, John.”

The boatman took the offered cup, cradling it in both hands just under his nose, soaking in the steamy warmth and aroma. After that first sip he said, “Looks like snow out there.”

“I’d just as soon it did,” Hames Kingsbury commented.

Zane nodded. “Better that than the ice I fear most.”

“It’s froze to everything,” Heman Ovatt said. “Hard for a man to lock on to the gouger. Even an oar. Everything coated thick with ice, Ebenezer.”

“Nothing what can’t be chipped away.” Zane glanced at a wide-eyed Titus for a flicker of a moment, then said, “Snow’s fine by me.”

The boatman looked up from his coffee and replied, “You nary was one to be afeared of that river, Ebenezer. Afeared of what it could do to your boat.”

“No sense in being afeared now.”

“Times we wondered if you was born with any sense at all,” the older pilot commented with a snort. When he looked around over the rim of his cup and found no smiles among the others, he quickly sank back into his tin.

Other rivermen continued to crowd in as the minutes passed, some hobbling over from the tavern side, where they might well have slept off their liquor sprawled on a table or crumpled under a bench, perhaps lumbering in from one of the barmaids’ beds, most hurrying up from the wharf, where they had sought shelter aboard their flatboats bobbing in the crowded harbor while the white, icy arrow points had begun to lance out of the gray sky. At least half of those who entered the Kangaroo came over to make some greeting to Ebenezer Zane, more still to give their farewell—having heard the news that the pilot was pushing off downriver this nasty, forbidding day.

Three nights had Zane’s crew tarried there in Louisville while their steersman bartered himself more cargo, itself a bit of a problem to begin with, seeing how little of the deck a man could walk upon, crammed to the gunnels as it was with crates, kegs, and oaken barrels bound for the mouth of the Mississippi. It ultimately turned out they had taken on a load of oiled hemp destined for use on great oceangoing vessels—huge coils of coarse twenty-four-strand rope, each one a hundred feet long and looped into a bundle it took three stevedores to burden on board. There the coils were lashed down atop the rest of the cargo.

“That rope’s just about the only thing Ebenezer could’ve figured out for us to haul pitched up there on top of everything else,” Ovatt had declared yesterday as they’d secured the last coil.

Reuben Root spat into the water alongside as twilight sank around them. “Could’ve done ’thout it at all, to my way of thinking. Jest lookee the way we’re a’setting in the water now.”

“We’ll ride just fine,” Kingsbury said. “Got plenty of room left to draw water up the sides.”

“Which is just what we’re gonna do we hit them Falls,” Root replied with a sneer.

Kingsbury waved his arm for them all to follow him off the boat, saying, “Just pack that squeeze-box of your’n in some waxed paper and lock it up high—you won’t have a lick of trouble, Reuben.”

“Don’t none of you realize that extra cargo I just bought me after three days of haggling will make this trip all the sweeter for every one of us?” Zane asked them as they joined him on the wharf nearer the Kangaroo where they had moved the boat earlier in the day to begin their on-loading. There the broadhorn would remain moored until dawn.

All four carried belt weapons that night as they put solid land under their feet. Zane had assigned each of them a four-hour watch, keeping a fire burning in the sandbox there close by the stern rudder, something to warm their hands and coffee over too.

Bass glanced over the others as they put away their pistols, then said, “You didn’t gimme a watch, Mr. Zane.”

With something of a smile Ebenezer turned to Titus in the swelling darkness of that autumn evening. “These here men’re my crew, Titus Bass. They hired on for work such as this.”

“Back at the start you said you needed me through the Falls.”

“I did say that, and your help is much appreciated.”

“Then you count me like one of the rest—if I’m to work through to the other side of the Falls.”

Kingsbury nodded. “Boy’s got him a point, Ebenezer.”

“You’re up to taking a watch, are you?” Zane asked.

But before Bass could answer, Ovatt declared, “It’s lonely work. Out here by yourself. Just you and the river and any others what wanna raise some devilment with our load.”

“That’s right,” Root added. “The whole town knows we’re setting off come morning. Lonely and cold out here—’specially since’t Mincemeat gonna be inside ’thout you tonight.”

Bass turned back to Zane, steadfast. “I’ll take the watch you gimme. First, last, or middle. I figure to pull my share of the work for ’llowing me come downriver with you. All you done for me since we got here.”

Zane said, “I’ll see ’bout sending Mincemeat out to visit you.”

Wagging his head, Bass replied, “Treat me just like the rest of ’em here. I got work to do—don’t want a woman around.”

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Kingsbury exclaimed. “Did you hear that? Titus sure got serious about work, going and turning down a woman coming out to keep him warm—”

“Maybeso the rest of you learn something from Titus Bass here,” the pilot declared. “When you’re working, you keep your mind on work.”

Bass said, “Yessir. That’s what I was saying.”

“All right, son. With you added on, that shorts the watches to three hours apiece. Titus takes this first watch.” Ebenezer drew his two big-bored belt weapons out of his greasy red waist sash and handed them over, butt first, to the youth. “Here. Keep these handy. Rest of us be right up the slope at the inn. Any trouble, just call out or shoot. We’ll huff down here straightaway.”

His eyes got big as coffee saucers when the pistols came into his skinny hands, in awe at their sheer weight. All Titus did was bob his head as the four turned to go.

“You want supper brung out?” Ovatt asked.

“I’ll wait.”

“When he finishes, he can have his ale and stew,” Zane declared as the four slogged up the slope toward the Kangaroo in the cold. “And Mincemeat too.”

Bass thought he had struggled with loneliness before—those first nights in the forest. Believed he had battled cold too. But nothing like this: the dampness penetrated him to the bone despite the coffee and the fire he hunkered over, flames flutting in that tin sandbox he fed with more and more kindling. But, then, cold and lonely always seemed to go hand in hand, he brooded. Never had he been lonely on a summer night.

How easily he thought back to Amy then. Her memory still a bright thing he could feel inside his breast despite the miles and all the days. How sweet her mouth had tasted last summer, so unlike Abigail’s—her mouth strong with the whiskey and the tobacco. But it was not to be, he decided again, surprised that he still was making peace with that.

Had his father come searching for him? Had they finally given up? Would his folks ask of him all the way upriver to Cincinnati? Perhaps even this far downriver to Louisville, he convinced himself. Maybe not. Maybe his pap already figured it was for the best, ridding himself of a son not wanting to become a farmer. So much the better—and now they would go on with their lives.

But what of his mother? Strong as she was, he nonetheless worried most for her. She had always been the one to quietly set herself against her husband when it mattered: she who hid supper for Titus; she who had seen to it the new shirt and biscuits were set out where Titus could get his hands on them that dark morning of farewell. Such was the real remorse he felt, about his only regret, leaving the way he had without explaining to her. Sure even now that she would have understood.

There wasn’t a star he could make out in the sky overhead. Clouds thickened like coal-blackened cotton bolls, reminding him how his hands hurt, rubbed raw and cut, whenever they had to pick what little cotton they had taken to growing on a small patch of ground by the smokehouse. Better was the flax the family planted, woven with wool to make a strong cloth that would turn the weather without being as heavy as pure wool. Between that mixed cloth his mother had woven and the animal skins she’d tanned for coats, britches, and moccasins—a body could count on staying reasonably warm, no matter what the weather.

In such deep thought his watch passed, and it was with reluctance that Titus turned over the two horse pistols to Ebenezer, who came to relieve him three hours later.

“Likely there’s some stew left, but if not, they’ll get you a pullet or two and a loaf of that black bread. There’s plenty of beans to fill you up. But stay away from the spruce beer this night, Titus,” Zane had warned as he settled onto a crate to start his watch. “I need your head clear come morning.”

So until that dawn he had filled himself with nothing more than Abigail Thresher, as hungry as he was for her, having done his best to pay no heed to the taunts of the other three boatmen when they warned him the whore would have nothing more to do with him once Ebenezer Zane had gone, taking his fat river pilot’s purse with him.

“She said she likes me,” Titus had protested.

“Playing with your diddle ain’t the only thing Mincemeat gets paid for,” Root explained, always the one out to pop another man’s bubble. “She gets paid for saying what she’s told to say.”

“Ebenezer told her to tell me that?”

Kingsbury only shrugged. “Who knows?”

“She’s just a whore,” Ovatt said. “There’ll be others on the ride down. Why, if’n you was floating along with us, you could count on tasting some fine girls we reach Natchez-Under-the-Hill.”

“And all them sweet Creole girls down to Nawlins,” Kingsbury added with a smack of his lips.

“I ain’t got me any need to go south,” Titus argued with a doleful wag of his head. “West is where away I’m bound.”

“St. Lou?” Heman Ovatt asked.

“One of these days soon,” Bass answered.

Kingsbury said, “A man goes west—you’ll need money to give yourself a stake. That’s fur country out’n St. Louie. Ain’t white man country west of there. You’ll need fixin’s.”

“I’ll get me some work.”

“What the hell can a farm boy like you do to make a man hire you for pay?” Root inquired.

“I can find work,” Titus snapped quickly, wincing at the pain he’d felt with their talk about Abigail.

“Yes, you can,” Kingsbury replied quietly, holding a flat hand against Root’s chest to quickly silence the other boatman. “No doubt you’ll find work here in Louisville real soon.”

Titus had drowned himself in her flesh that last night, at least every time he awoke enough in rolling over against her, placing the woman’s hands on his flesh to harden it to stone once again. If in the end it was true that Mincemeat was feeling nothing more than any working girl who got paid to do what she was told, then—Titus decided—he’d sure as hell make sure Ebenezer Zane got his money’s worth out of that last night in Louisville.

As good as it felt with her at the moment, as excited as she could get him with her body, it was afterward that got him to thinking. Like he was doing now in this damp, fragrant tavern as they finished their coffee near the fireplace as if soaking up all this warmth for what ordeal was yet to come, waiting for Ebenezer to tell them it was time to push away.

And he wondered what it was that made a man want to stay on with a woman after they were through coupling. It had to be something more than just a man’s knowing he could climb atop that woman again whenever he wanted. There must surely be something else he had yet to learn of this mysterious tangle of things between a man and a woman—more than he had learned at the threshold from the pretty Amy Whistler, and now from that full-growed woman what could please a man no end and was called Mincemeat.

What made some men stay on and on with a woman, while at the same time urging him to move on from both of those he had known so far?

“It h’ain’t getting any better out there, Ebenezer,” Root grumbled from the open doorway where the cold air gusted. Beyond Reuben was a gray streaked with white slashes.

“Best us be going,” Zane said with resignation.

“We could stay over, sit it out,” Ovatt declared.

Ebenezer turned to them slowly, hitching up his belt, and smiled inside that hairy face. “We got everything tied down and we’re ready to put off. Nothing’s holding us no more. I want out of Louisville and put the Falls behind us.”

Kingsbury started, “Maybe Ovatt’s right, Ebene—”

“Any of you’s free to stay what wants to,” Zane interrupted, though his voice remained quiet and calm. He turned to the youngest among them. “Even you, Titus. No reason for you to get on that boat now. We’ll do just fine ’thout you.”

“Said you needed me.”

Zane shook his head. “Weather like this, it don’t matter much anymore. Best you stay.”

“I made a promise,” Titus said, sensing the curiosity of the other men nettling him. “You an’ me made us a bargain. I aim to keep up my end of it.”

Zane regarded him briefly, then took a step forward, slapping a hand down on Bass’s shoulder. “Good man.” Looking at the rest of them, he explained, “Any of the rest of you decide to stay, Titus here can take your place.”

For a moment they looked at one another, almost furtively, perhaps waiting for one of their number to stave in. Then before any of them could, Zane suddenly emboldened them with his words.

“Good for you, men. Like I always been proud of you—taking on this river, no matter what face it showed us. And now Heman’s got him a new man to help with the gouger when the water gets rough.”

Ovatt nodded at Bass. Titus swallowed, for the first time in his life feeling as if he was a part of something bigger than himself. One of these reckless men who would once again pit themselves against the icy river.

That was when Ebenezer held up a clenched fist at waist level, speaking not a word in explanation. Kingsbury immediately set his clenched fist atop Zane’s, then Ovatt’s atop his. When Root had added his to the top of the stack, they turned their eyes to Bass. Eagerly Titus slipped between the muscle-knotted shoulders of Zane and Kingsbury to join that small circle and made his short-fingered hand into a fist that looked so outsized by all the others.

With that fifth hand atop the rest, Zane declared, “This is the shaft that water and wind may bend but will never be broken as long as we stay together as one.”

“Let’s go to the Mississippi!” Kingsbury roared.

As the four men yelped and cheered, turning aside to sweep up their blankets and oiled coats, Titus stood for but a moment in that spot, somehow still sensing the power of those clenched, veined fists his had joined, no matter how briefly, feeling as if the others had just vowed to prop him up, support him, watch over him like one of their own. A short, strong staff carved of man’s will and camaraderie. In that moment all doubts took to the wing, freeing with them all remorse in leaving the Kangaroo and the woman behind.

Once more his life appeared black-and-white, without shades of indecisive gray. Just as it had when he’d determined to leave home behind, Titus sensed the certainty of what lay downriver. The sureness that he was being pulled on by what lay out there.

“You’ll stay with Heman,” Ebenezer ordered as the four of them pounded up the cleated gangplank, clambered over the gunnel, and began to scramble off in different directions as the sleet spat at them in gusty sheets out of a leaden sky.

Bass turned to find Root still onshore and leaning into his work, lunging against the thick rope that held the flatboat’s bow fast to the wharf. With the knot eventually loosened, he heaved the rope toward Ovatt, who began to coil it up near his feet as Root trudged back through the icy mud toward the last rope securing the stern. With that second knot freed, he flung the loose end of the rope to Zane while making sure the loop was still secured around one of the wharf’s stanchions. When Root had crawled on board and was dragging the cleated gangplank atop some of the crates, Zane dropped the free end of the rope and released them from the wharf. The thick hemp flopped to the surface of the ice-flecked water like a huge oiled snake suddenly dropping from a great height. Kingsbury began to haul in the rope as the pilot whirled about to seize up the long arm of his rudder.

“Push us free,” Zane ordered.

Root and Kingsbury took up fourteen-foot hardwood shafts, each of them going to the gunnels, where they planted the ends of their poles against the wharf and heaved with the thrust in their legs. Foot by foot, grunt by grunt, the two lunged against the poles, easing the laden flatboat out from the tangle of other craft moored at the wharf. Slow it was, the gray water slogging beneath them little by little. Back and forth Zane worked his rudder, shouting an order from time to time to Ovatt on the gouger as they edged on out into the middle of the harbor. Then, just beyond the last finger of land surrounding that cove on three sides, Titus felt the perceptible nudge of the Ohio against the hull beneath him. Now the water seemed to pick up speed, and the boat with it as they rounded that last glimpse of Louisville and Zane piloted them into the current.

“Sing out—you see anything a’floating!” Ebenezer called to the others. “We done this many a time, so ever’ one of you knows what we’re needing to draw for water!”

“What’s he talking about?” Bass inquired as he leaned on the short gouger pole across from Ovatt.

“This ain’t a high-water time to be floating down the Ohio,” Heman explained. “Come autumn and winter, water gets low so we might just see us a lot of planters and sawyers from here on out downriver. ’Specially when we get yonder to the Falls, where the water gets all boiled up.”

“What’s he mean by drawing water?”

“We’re heavy,” the boatman explained. “Sitting down in the water some, instead of riding on top. So we’re gonna need deeper water to run the chute.”

“Chute?”

“There’s three of ’em at the Falls. One of ’em’s better’n the others sometime during the year. Depending on how deep the river is, how fast she’s moving. It’s up to me to sing out to Ebenezer soon as I can tell which chute is the one he ought’n take us through the Falls.”

As the boat picked up speed, with the wind whipping the icy sleet into them out of the west, Titus felt his insides drawing up like someone had dashed them with pickling spice. Water was one thing. Swimming in it—hell, even floating on it was one thing. But this bobbing within an onrushing current, totally at the mercy of the Ohio as it suddenly narrowed itself southwest of Louisville, rushing them onward to the Great Falls, was quite another.

He quickly looked about at the other three boatmen. Root had one hand gripping the gunnel as the icy water began to slap against that side of the flatboat. Time and again he swiped his face clear of spray and sleet as he squinted downriver.

Then Titus heard the sound that made his blood go cold.

Turning with a jerk, he peered into the sleeting mist ahead of them. Not only was it that low rumble which seemed to pull them perceptibly closer still, but also his inability to make out the source of the nearing thunder which caused his belly to churn and flop. In all that gray he could find nothing ahead of them that gave him the slightest clue—nothing but the gradual narrowing of the river’s channel between its timbered, rocky banks.

“You hear it, don’t you?”

Without tearing his eyes from the far bend in the river, he nodded to Ovatt.

“That’s the Falls,” Heman went on. “You allays hear ’em afore you see ’em.”

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”

With a start Titus turned from downstream to look at Kingsbury, finding the boatman intent on watching the river channel as he clung to a rope with one hand, the other clamped on an oar he held just above the frothing water. Beyond Hames Kingsbury he watched Ebenezer at the stern, yanking downward on the soggy brim of his wool-felt hat, pulling up the woven muffler over the lower part of his face before he leaned against the rudder to urge the flatboat a little closer to the northern shore.

“Keep ’er coming some more, Ebenezer!” Ovatt bellowed into the growing noise of their plunge.

Zane asked, “It look to be the Indian chute?”

Ovatt nodded, shouting, “Not as bad as one time we rode through here!”

“Keep your eye peeled on that rock at the bend like I teached you!” Zane instructed. “You tell me when we reach that.”

“See the rock yonder coming at us,” Ovatt explained now, his voice quieter against the swelling of sound around them. “By the time we reach that rock on the north bank—Ebenezer’s gotta have to choose which’t chute he’s gonna put us through the Falls.”

“If he don’t do it then?”

“There ain’t much time left if he ain’t ready,” Heman replied. “See how he’s doing now? Lookee, see how he’s moved us into the middle channel of the river. That way he can go to the Kentucky chute. Or he can stay here in the river chute. Or the likeliest way at low-water time like it is now gonna be for him to jump us over into the Indian chute. Off the starboard side here,” he said, pointing off to the right shore.

“How come they call it Indian chute?”

“Hell, Titus. ’Cause that’s Indiana Territory there you’re floating by. That’s how come.”

Despite the rising growl of the water, the Great Falls of the Ohio weren’t actually falls at all. More precisely, they were a long series of terrible rapids that churned up the river to a froth between the banks, narrowing as the river passed Louisville. Anyone on the Ohio could plainly hear the water pounding on the rocks for as much as a mile upriver. A trip through the chutes was much, much easier at high-water time, anywhere from late spring to late summer, but as Heman Ovatt had explained, the rapids became all the more troublesome during the autumn and winter due to low water and many more exposed rocks. While a pilot always had his choice of which one of the three chutes he would select to negotiate the Falls—such a decision became critical to the lives of his crew and the safety of their cargo during low-water time. In earlier days of canoe travel on the Ohio, many of the more faint of heart even chose to put over to the Indiana side, unload, and portage their cargo past the rapids.

“Some cap’ns hire on a pilot back there at Louisville what knows the Falls,” Ovatt explained. “For two dollars there’s a few guides what make a good living just getting flatboats through the Falls.”

“But Ebenezer knows what he’s doing?” Titus asked, wanting an answer to dispel his uncertainty.

“He’s the sort would never let another man pilot his boat anyways. Sure enough—the Ohio might toss us around some this time o’ year—but Ebenezer gonna get us through.”

The growling belly of that thunder of water colliding with rocks grew until it seemed to drown out all other sound but the nerve-grating creak of the flatboat timbers. Looking at the icy, wet boards beneath his moccasins, Titus watched them shift and twist. He gulped, as if to swallow down the panic he felt for fear the boat would break apart as the river flung it toward the point where Ebenezer Zane would have to make his decision.

The closer they raced down the middle channel of the Ohio, the lower the clouds and sleeting mist sank down both slopes on either side of the river, clinging among the sycamores and birch, ash and poplar, then spilled onto the surface of the river itself. Swallowing the rock Zane used as his landmark.

Ovatt called out, “You see, Ebenezer?”

“Hell, no, I cain’t see it!”

“Can’t see the rock up there—what you want me to do?”

“We’ll just count to twenty. Should be there by then. Count ’long with me.”

Heman Ovatt tore his eyes away from Zane and stared off downriver just as the craft took a noticeable lunge to starboard, nearly loosening Titus’s grip on the gouger. Ovatt had begun to count, loudly, over the increasing noise of the water pounding on the sides of the flatboat, against the rocks around the far bend, and the increasing hammer of icy sleet beating against canvas and wood and flesh.

Every now and then during those next few seconds Bass caught snatches of Ebenezer’s voice counting along with Ovatt. The gouger’s voice rose in anticipation with each successive number as the entire crew struggled to catch a glimpse of something telltale along the starboard bank while the mist continued to swallow upon them.

“How’s he gonna see where to go?” Bass asked anxiously.

“He ain’t.”

“Heman!” Zane called out. “Less’n you got a better idee—I’m gonna set her in the Indian chute!”

“Fine by me!” the gouger called back, his voice sodden, flooded out in some spray as Ebenezer suddenly heaved his bulk against the rudder and set the flatboat creaking as it hurtled across the racing current.

Titus clung to the short gouger beside Ovatt and worked up nerve enough to ask, “We gonna put over and wait till we can see what’s ahead?”

Ovatt tongued his tobacco quid to the other side of his cheek, bent his head over the gunnel, and spit, the brown streamer smacking into the bow of the boat directly beneath him. “Ain’t nowhere in the Falls a boat can put over. We gotta ride it through.”

“R-ride it through,” he repeated without conviction.

“Ain’t nothing we can do now but ride, Titus. Just hold on and ride through the Falls—no matter if there’s hell on the other side.”

By the time Ovatt finished his words, they were all but swallowed up by the roar of irresistible liquid fury pitted against immovable granite. As the shifting winds nudged the sleeting mist this way and that, Titus captured a glimpse here and there of the shore on one side of the river or the other beneath the roiling fog. Closer and closer Zane moved them to the northern bank, the boat’s timbers complaining audibly, protesting the strain as the Ohio flung the five men and their flimsy craft ever toward the upstream opening of the Indian chute.

“We in it now!” Ovatt sang out at the top of his lungs.

Barely able to hear the man right beside him, Titus turned to glance at the other three boatmen. Able to accomplish nothing with their oars in the rapids, Root and Kingsbury had laid their oars aside and crawled to the stern of the boat, clinging to the gunnel close by Zane in the event the pilot needed their muscle on the main rudder.

“This the start of the Falls?” Titus asked.

Ovatt nodded, then pressed his lips against Bass’s ear, to yell, “It be just a matter of Ebenezer and the river now! Him alone agin it!”

Zane laid his weight against the rudder again and again. Moving the boat this way and that, feeling his way through the rocks and water and great gray slabs of icy granite, throwing his flatboat and its cargo toward one shore, then the other, as the other four men clung to the slippery gunnels, unable to assist, knowing only that the next few moments of their lives were most precious, for above them hovered the specter of an icy death.

For Titus this staring into death’s face had a cold, metallic taste to it. Almost like sucking on an iron fork.

Time and again the pilot steadied himself, bracing his great, powerful legs within that square yard of icy deck, holding his own against the cargo lashed on three sides about him, holding his own against the frothing river that sought to snatch the rudder from his grip. Over and over the boat seemed to exercise a mind of its own, the great force of the Ohio flinging the flatboat out of the current only to plop down with a crash, its unyielding sides of strong yellow poplar groaning against the unmitigated forces of nature at her rawest.

Bass wasn’t sure if he was shaking because of the cold—how wet he was, standing like the rest, soaked to the marrow with sleet, wind, and river spray. Or if he was trembling down to the very core of him out of undeniable fear. Either way, his teeth chattered like bone dice in a horn cup. Loud enough he was sure the others could hear them.

Then it struck him. He started to smile, looking at Ovatt. The gouger smiled back, both of them realizing that no more did the flatboat creak and groan. No longer did the river thunder about their ears. No more were they caught in the merciless grip of a watery hell.

There was only heaven. A quiet that slowly grew just the way the noise of the Falls had swelled and pounded at him. But now that pounding terror was behind them, and the persistent hammer of the sleeting rain was about all Titus could make out above the occasional dull slap of river against the flatboat’s sides as Ebenezer Zane worked the rudder into the current, moving them closer and closer to the Kentucky shore once again.

“Yonder’s Indiana,” Ovatt said, his voice strangely muted now in the absence of that thunder. “Place called Clarksville over there right about so. It sits at the bottom of the Falls—just about the last village of any size ’tween Louisville and St. Louie. Wish you could see it, but for the clouds.”

Titus could see very little of the Indiana shore, upstream or down. “Clarksville.”

“Named for George Rogers Clark. You hear of him?”

Wagging his head, Titus said, “No, I ain’t.”

“Hero of Vincennes. He kept the Northwest out of enemy hands many a year ago,” Ovatt explained in a reverent voice. “I see’d him once. Sure of it.”

“You seen Clark?”

“He was a old man then. Thin as a broom handle, all wored down with age. But every day he come to the river, folks said. An’ he’d wave to us what was going down. Clark’s the one opened this country—held back the enemy, and pushed back the Injuns across the Wabash.”

“What’s that?”

“Wabash? A river comes into the Ohio from the north. We’ll reach it soon enough. But for now, looks to be Ebenezer is about to put over to the Kentucky side and let you off.”

With a start Titus whirled about, finding the pilot indeed easing the flatboat ever closer to the south bank. His heart pounding, his mouth gone dry, and his throat feeling like he had daubed with tannic acid, Titus started to scramble over the crates and kegs and great coils of oiled hemp smelling fragrant in the moist, icy air. Root and Kingsbury were at the port gunnel, both with loops of rope over their shoulders by the time Titus clambered his way to midship. As Zane eased the stern of his cumbersome craft crosswise to the current, slipping them toward a muddy section of land, Reuben and Hames freed the ropes securing the small two-man skiff at the side of the flatboat and let it drop into the icy river with a splash. Leaping on board with their heavy coils of hawser rope, the pair quickly paddled toward shore. Beaching the skiff among the leafless brush, they slogged about in the frozen mud up to their ankles to knot their mooring ropes around a couple of trees with roots exposed by the relentless Ohio.

“Gimme a hand here!” Ovatt cried out at the capstan, where he began to turn the wheel with one of the short, stout, removable poles, walking round and round in that cramped area left free of deck cargo clutter. Already the flatboat was beginning to jolt and shudder as the ropes snapped, went taut with a creak, and the timbers groaned, Ebenezer’s Kentuckyboat bouncing against the current as she was drawn toward the bank.

“You heard the man, Titus!” Zane shouted. “Get up there and put your back into it so we can set you off on that shore.”

“Eb—Ebenezer?”

For a moment Zane watched Heman Ovatt and the others over the youth’s shoulder, then peered into the lad’s face. “What is it, Titus Bass? You of a sudden got something agin hard work?”

“No … no, sir! You won’t think ill of me if’n I go an’ break our bargain, will you?”

“Goddammit, boy!” Ovatt growled menacingly as he struggled against the capstan. “Get over here help me out!”

“Keep your back into it, Heman! Titus got something to say to me!” Ebenezer hollered. Then, squinting sternly at Bass with one eye, the pilot replied, “So you ain’t a man of your word, that it?”

“Nothing of the kind. I—”

Ebenezer interrupted, “Just how you figure on breaking our bargain? I brung you downriver like I said I would, and you rode with us through the Falls. Sounds to me we’re square.”

“But I didn’t do nothing to help us—”

“Nothing nobody could do. Allays just river an’ me”—then Zane’s eyes flickered to the sleeting heavens—“an’ God too what brung us through. It don’t matter none that I didn’t work you for your passage. But that ain’t breaking your bargain. You get on up there and help Heman haul us in to shore.”

His tongue felt pasty inside his mouth, his heart hammering and breath coming short and hard.

With sweaty palms Titus said, “I wanna stay.”

“Stay?”

Root and Kingsbury slogged down the muddy bank clutching the ends of their ropes, both of them intent on trying to overhear the talk. Ovatt continued to grunt, pushing round and round a step at a time there at the capstan among the ice-coated cargo lashed near the bow.

“Wanna stay on down the river with you fellas.”

“You know where we’re heading?”

“Natchez you said. On to Norleans.”

Zane wagged his head thoughtfully. “I dunno. Got me half a year’s earnings here.”

Bass said quickly, “I wanna go with you. See what’s there.”

“Thought you was wanting to go to St. Lou.”

He tried out a smile on Zane. “I figure it’ll still be there come next year. Plenty of time for me.”

“I was young as you once,” the wrinkled river pilot replied. “Seemed there was all the time in the world back then.”

For a moment Titus looked around him at the other three boatmen, then said, “You consider taking me?”

“Figure to hire on, are you?”

“A man don’t ride for free,” Root grumbled.

Bass nodded. “Reuben’s right. I don’t ’spect to ride for free.”

A grin grew within that great black tangle of hair Zane called his head. “I’ll work you, Titus Bass. I’ll work you hard.”

Bass gulped, asking, “That the hardest piece of river we go through to get to Norleans?”

Zane tilted his head back and roared with laughter, so deep and hearty was it that he showed his tonsils. “Just about, son.”

“Then I figure to ride the river with you fellas.”

Leaning forward, he held out his hand to the youth. “Good to have you with us, Titus Bass.” He straightened and hollered at the two on shore, “Loose that hemp, boys!”

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Kingsbury yelled in exasperation from the bank. “What in the goddamned hell?”

Zane waved his free arm, gesturing his crew in. “We’re bound for the Mississip with a new man!”

Grumbling, Root and Kingsbury freed the double-fist-sized knots from their moorings, then pushed off, paddling furiously, heading out into the channel to catch the flatboat while Ovatt hurriedly coiled in the hundred or so feet of loose hawsers across the wind-whipped surface of the Ohio.

Coming alongside, Reuben and Hames tied off the skiff to a pair of check-poles along the flatboat’s gunnel and clambered aboard.

Root asked of Zane, “This here green man you’re fixing to hire on—ain’t we gonna get him started right, Ebenezer?”

“How you mean—started right?” the pilot asked.

“Have the boy here scour and grease the anchor?”

Ebenezer chuckled. “You can sure be one mean son of a bitch, Reuben. No, sir. I never did cotton to pulling such pranks on a feller what sets foot on my flatboat for his first trip downriver.”

“Not even a li’l fun?” Root whined, disappointment now where glee had been.

“What you figure to have Titus Bass do to make fun for you, Reuben?” Kingsbury asked.

He turned to Hames, saying, “I was figuring on him cooning the steering oar.”

With a lusty guffaw Zane shook his bushy head like a lion’s mane. “No, Reuben—less’n you’re willing to coon it yourself.”

“Shit! I ain’t no green hand like him—”

“Hap that you remember I never made you do nothing of the kind when you was a green hand?” Zane snapped. “You hap to think back on that?”

Sullen, Root nodded.

Having watched and listened in confusion, Titus finally asked, “What’s cooning the steering oar?”

All four of the boatmen roared in great peals of laughter.

Nearly out of breath, Kingsbury finally explained, “On many a boat the old hands will play some mean trick on a new hand—something like Reuben wanted you to do.”

“Cooning the steering oar,” Zane continued, “means we’d have you climb out to the end of this here rudder of mine.”

Bass’s eyes grew big as coffee tins as he stared at the water flowing around the back of the boat where the pole sank beneath the river’s surface. He gulped. “You’d had me climb out there, hanging on to just the rudder pole?”

Root was still hooting, slapping his knee in merriment. “Make sure you touch the rudder out there now, Titus … or we don’t let you climb back onter the boat!”

“It’s easy enough,” Ovatt confided. “Just hang on with your arms and legs. I done it years afore.”

“Yeah!” Root roared. “Best you hang on real tight!”

“Or you get a cold bath in the river,” Kingsbury concluded with a shudder. “Like I done.”

“B-but, none of you gonna make me do that, are you?” Bass inquired.

“You’re part of the crew anyways,” the bushy-headed pilot replied. “I see no need for them silly games just to make these fellers laugh on your account.”

“I thankee for that, Mr. Zane,” Titus replied, wanting to sense some real gratitude, but not really sure how he should feel at that moment. Perhaps such a ritual of initiation was really necessary for him to become part of the crew. Maybe they never would accept him as one of their own if he didn’t suffer some of their lighthearted pranks.

“No need to thank me, Titus,” Ebenezer said, his eyes softening in that kind, hairy face.

Titus started to turn away, ready to head to the bow, where he intended to lend his muscle to Heman’s efforts at the gouger, when Zane caught him by the shoulder, saying, “Why’n’t you stay back here with me for now, Titus Bass? That’s easy rope work for Ovatt now—and I could use the company, I could at that.”

As Hames and Reuben reached the stern of the flatboat to tie the skiff off to a snubbing post before clambering up the side and over the gunnel, Titus settled in near Zane, his heart still hammering, desperately wanting this to be the right thing for him to do.

“I don’t figure I done enough yet to thank you, Ebenezer,” he began. “I was fixing on helping the rest of you get through the Falls. But I didn’t do nothing. ’Stead of troubling yourself with me—why didn’t you just leave me back at Louisville when I told you I was all for staying on there?”

Grinning into the slanting hammer of the wind-driven sleet, Zane replied, “I figured there was no other way to find out if you was a riverman or not—but to take you with us through the Falls.”

“So what’d you find out?”

The pilot tousled Titus’s hair, then peered on down the gray Ohio once more. “You’ll do to ride the river with, Titus Bass. By damned, you’ll do.”

Autumn was all but done for by the time Ebenezer Zane’s broadhorn reached the mouth of the Ohio. What ducks and geese and other species of winged creatures hadn’t already flapped their way overhead were destined to struggle out the winter here in the north: all manner of doves, redheaded woodpeckers, and nighthawks too. The sort that stayed behind.

One day on the trip they spotted some gray and black squirrels, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all sweeping down from the north bank, plunging into the river to bob and swim with all their might against the current, like a mighty exodus that crossed to the south. Hundreds of heads dotted the murky brown water all about the boat, hundreds more pressing behind. And every day the men watched the shorelines for bigger species. Titus was amazed at the growing numbers of bear and deer, turkey and fox, he spotted as they rode the river farther west, heading for the Mississippi.

And always they sang—ballads of death and love and hard-hearted maidens.

“Rise you up, my dear, and

present me your hand,

And we’ll take a social walk to

a far and distant land;

Where the Hawk shot the Buzzard and

the Buzzard shot the Crow.

We’ll rally in the canebrake and

shoot the Buffalo!

Shoot the Buffalo! Shoot the Buffalo!

Rally in the canebrake and

shoot the Buffalo!”

For the longest time he pondered that the old song said just what his grandpap had told him: there had been buffalo in the canebrakes. Which set Titus to brooding on how those who had gone before him had shot the buffalo until there were no more.

Then Hames Kingsbury would always lift Bass’s spirits by singing what had long been Ebenezer Zane’s favorite, sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”

“We are a hardy, freeborn race,

Each man to fear a stranger;

Whatever the game, we join the chase,

Despising toil and danger;

And if a daring foe annoys,

No matter what his force is,

We’ll show him that Kentucky boys

Are alligator-horses!”

Then Heman Ovatt started in on one of his own.

“Way down the Ohio

my little boat I steered.

In hopes that some pretty girl on

the banks will appear.

I’ll hug her and kiss her

till my mind is at ease,

And I’ll turn my back on her and

court who I please.”

When Root bellowed forth with “Bird in a Cage”:

“Bird in a cage, love,

Bird in a cage;

Waiting for Willie

To come back to me.

“Roses are red, love,

Violets are blue.

God in heaven

Knows I love you.

“Write me a letter,

Write it today.

Stamp it tomorrow,

Send it away.

“Write me a letter,

Send it by mail.

Send and direct it

To the Burlington jail.”

“Burlington?” Titus asked Ovatt. “Is he singing ’bout the Kentucky Burlington?”

“I don’t know no other Burlington.”

“Sing me ’nother of those I like,” Ebenezer commanded from the stern.

Kingsbury began to sing another to the tune of a 1766 hymn by Isaac Watts.

“I’m far from home, far from the wife,

Which in my bosom lay,

Far from my children, dead, which used

Around me for to play.

“This doleful circumstance cannot

My happiness prevent

While peace of conscience I enjoy

Great comfort and content.”

Titus took his eyes off Zane to ask of Ovatt, “Ebenezer married?”

“He was,” Heman replied.

“And had he children?”

“Them too.” But Heman warned, “Wouldn’t do for you to ask after them. It makes the man powerful sorry.”

“What happened to his family?”

“They was kill’t.”

“Injuns?”

“Long ago, when the children was but babes,” Ovatt explained. “All boys, they was. Their heads smashed in by Shawnee.”

Titus turned to gaze at the pilot, regarding the man studiously, wondering how it was to have one’s family taken by a sudden act of savagery, rather than merely an act of leaving.

Zane winked at Titus as he called out to Kingsbury, “Sing ‘The Boatmen’s Dance.’”

“High row, the boatmen row,

Floating down the river of Ohio.

The boatmen dance, the boatmen sing,

The boatmen up to everything.

And when the boatman gets on shore,

He spends his cash and works for more.

“Then dance, the boatmen dance.

Oh, dance—the boatmen dance.

Oh, dance all night till broad daylight,

And go home with the gals in

the morning!”

Float time between sunup and sundown shrank a little each day, and there were mornings when they awakened to find a rime of ice slicking their cedar water buckets. As much as they could through the long, cold evenings of enforced idleness they stayed close by the sandbox fire before they would crab off to their blankets beneath the oiled awning cloth.

With their singing and their storytelling filling the long days and into the nights, how Titus often sat in pure wonder of these men who had welcomed him into their life, sweeping him along in their adventure, showing him how to make it his own. Rivermen, some called them. Others called them boatmen. Every last one of these restless souls folks on down the Mississippi had lumped together and called Kentuckians—these were the rough, rowdy, ne’er-do-wells Titus had come to regard as uncles, men who had taken him under their wings, to watch over, to teach, to open up the widening world to a young runaway from Rabbit Hash, in Boone County.

And if Root, Ovatt, and Kingsbury were his uncles … then Ebenezer Zane must surely be like the father he wished he had been born to. An unfettered spirit, instead of a man like Thaddeus Bass, who lived out his days tied down to one place—his dreams, his very vision, content to take in no more than what he could see of the forested hills around him. Less than a mile, no more than two miles at most—that was all a man could see in that cramped country his father had chosen to live out his days.

How was it that a man could satisfy himself so easily? Titus asked. How could a man content himself with so small a world, when the rest of it lay right out there for the taking? Had his father never had a dream like his own? Or was it simply that the older a man became, the more tarnished and smaller, the less important and more unrealized his dream became?

It was during the days as they floated toward the Mississippi that he thought on such things, with every new sunset and all the miles they put behind them, sensing all the more just what he had chosen to leave back there—pulled by all that which lured him onward.

Few people lived southwest of Louisville that early in the new century. No longer so hilly and broken, the countryside slowly flattened into a rich and fertile region.

“Good for the farmers what’s coming,” Hames Kingsbury stated. “Only a matter of time before they fill it up too.”

Surveyed only nine years before, Henderson, Kentucky, was beginning to flourish as a crossroads for the state’s Green River region. Floating on past Diamond Island, the boatmen then swept past the mouth of the Wabash, the western boundary of Indiana and one of the largest navigable rivers in the Northwest Territory.

Early one afternoon Kingsbury took to singing a jaunty tune.

“Some row up,

Some row down.

All the way—

To Shawnee town.

Pull away—pull away now!”

“Ain’t far to Shawnee town now,” Ovatt declared, pointing downriver.

A few miles down from the Wabash they put to at Shawnee town, a wild and raucous river port then beginning to flourish on the north side of the Ohio, its new citizens finding easy profit in satisfying all a boatman’s hungers. A little farther on Ebenezer Zane brought them to Cave-In Rock on the “Indian side” of the Ohio.

“Times was, there was talk river pirates hid out in this place,” Hames Kingsbury explained to Titus as the crew put over to the north shore and climbed up to take in the legendary landmark.

“Pirates?” Bass inquired.

“Ain’t no pirates working the river like they done of a time not so long ago,” Ebenezer added. “Things pretty quiet nowdays.”

Inside the cave the boatmen showed Titus where they had first inscribed their names on the walls, beneath them the dates of their first trips down the Ohio. The walls were covered from floor to a full arm’s length above them with the names of hundreds of other river travelers.

“Here,” Reuben Root said, holding out his belt knife to Titus by the blade. “Scratch your name in there.”

As the youth finished the second S on his last name, Ovatt said, “You’ll have to ask Ebenezer what day it is. He’s the only one among us what pays heed to such things.”

“It’s your good fortune I do pay heed to such as that,” Zane replied. “It’s November the twenty-eighth, Titus.”

“So that means the year still is eighteen and ten.”

“Oh, you’ll know when we get to the new year, all right,” Kingsbury exclaimed. “That’s good cause for celebration with this bunch.”

“It’s my birthday,” Titus told them as he finished gouging out the last number.

“New Year’s Day?” Ovatt asked.

Nodding, he turned and handed the knife back to Root.

“Way I hope things to go, Titus,” Zane said, “we’ll be on the Trace come 1811.”

Titus asked, “The Trace? What’s that?”

“It’s the road we’re walking home from the Mississap, through Tennessee and on to Kentucky,” Kingsbury answered.

“A wilderness road that points us north,” Zane added, turning toward the wide mouth of the cave. “Time we was setting off again.”

Farther down the Ohio they passed the Cumberland River, commonly called the Shawanoe by the locals in the new nearby settlement of Smithtown, slowly spreading into the bottomland forest. In less than an hour they passed the Tennessee, both rivers flowing in from the south within a few miles of one another.

“That Smithtown is one place a man’s life goes damned cheap,” Root grumped as they passed by the wharf where a couple of dozen men came out of log cabins to hail the flatboat passing on by.

“Lots of knockabouts: fellas like you there, Titus,” Kingsbury declared.

“Like me?” he asked, watching the men on the wharf wave, holler, attempting to attract attention and flag the boat over.

“Homeless runaways, I’ll say. Young men with nothing but time on their hands. Even some boatmen what don’t have jobs. They all waiting there to hire on as hands to any of the boats what hap to put in at Smithtown.”

“A scurvy lot those wharf rats are,” Ebenezer spat with a doleful wag of his head.

By this point the Ohio was becoming more and more crowded with river traffic originating all the way from the Allegheny and Monongahela, the Muskingum, Scioto, and Kentucky. Within some two hundred miles, four major rivers—the Green (what some locals still referred to as the Buffalo), the Wabash, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, also known by the earliest settlers as the Cheraqui—all flowed into the Ohio. No more was she la belle rivière of the French traders. Yet she had become something quite grand, widening with mounting strength as each new river fed her its waters.

Past the Tennessee they floated by Fort Massac, first erected in the Illinois country back in 1757 … then Wilkinsonville, a crude frontier station named after the young country’s treasonous brigadier general James Wilkinson who continued to dabble in boating, soldiering, and conspiring to carve out his own empire in the West. Little more than clusters of cabins and riverside wharves, these were among a handful of tiny outposts cropping up here and there to signal the inevitable spread of a thriving frontier civilization. Over each village, smoke smudged the air as open fires, rock chimneys, and hundreds of smoldering tree stumps all raised their oily black columns into the late-autumn sky. Each of these riverside ports was simply a pocket of land stripped of its timber and brush to make room for a cluster of cabins, a common stockade, and a few cleared fields just beyond.

Why they hadn’t left the forest the way it was … why men like his pap, and his grandpap before that, figured they could improve on what was there to begin with—Titus figured he never would know. Whoever, whatever, put the trees and critters there at the start likely had the best idea of all, he decided.

“It’s up to man to bring peace to the hills and valleys,” his father often repeated his litany of subduing the earth. “Up to man to pacify the land and make it fruitful—just as God commands us do.”

If his pap’s God wasn’t the same what made all the hills and valleys and critters, then Titus would simply find himself another God to believe in. A God who could make such a luxurious garden of forest and timber and critters could never be a God that set silently with seeing his creation destroyed by man.

The farther west they floated, the more startling the contrasts became to him. With fewer and fewer settlements and outposts, with more and more long stretches of untouched wilderness—the differences between Titus and his father became all the more clear. While most came to a new land to conquer it, desiring to subdue all within sight, to make of it something in their own image … with every day Titus all the more sought the wilderness on its own terms.

As they approached the mouth of the Ohio, Titus realized he had flatboated from the gentle mountains and forests of the upper river, southwesterly to a region of flooded lowlands and great stretches of treeless, brushy wilderness as far as the eye could see. The Ohio was the feeder, bringing the races and cultures tumbling together: Scotch-Irish, Kentuckians, English and French, pioneers all, rubbing shoulders with Creoles, Negro slaves, mulattoes, and freedmen, as well as an array of tribesmen—Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Peoria, Sauk, and Piankashaw.

“These Injuns ain’t a problem to rivermen no more,” Zane explained as they closed on the mouth of the river, where the often-roiling blue Ohio mingled with and lost itself to the coffee-colored, more sedate Mississippi. “Most of them redskins moving on into the Illinois country. Maybeso across the Mississippi to the west. White man’s land over here. Let them red bastards have all that’s left ’em over yonder.”

His eyes widened as he stood, mesmerized and amazed in watching the great sweep of water come in off the starboard. Pointing, Titus asked, “What’s that river coming in?”

“It ain’t coming in, Titus,” the pilot explained with a smile. “This’r Ohio coming into it.”

In wonder at the sheer size of it he exclaimed, “That’s the Mississip?”

Working his rudder beneath one arm to position them into the colliding currents, Ebenezer Zane replied, “Ain’t none the other. You come to the mighty Mississip, Titus Bass.” Nodding to the south, he said, “Over here is all the land any man could want to farm and raise up his towns.”

Yet Titus stared off across the widening expanse of water at the far, far shore. He pointed to the west. “And over there?”

“Over there,” Zane answered with a sigh, “is the beginning of a wilderness fit only for Injuns, critters, and wild men.”