Dance on the Wind

11

It was damned cold there in the dark—moonless the way it was. Their only light shook loose and rained down from those brilliant stars hoisted way up high in that tarry sky. Not near enough for him to tell much about where the crates and casks ended and the gunnel began.

Black, and bloody well cold enough that a man wanted nothing more than to stay wrapped in that blanket Titus had draped about him as he sat atop some hundred-weight barrels of flour lashed near the front of the awning. The rest slept, soundly, from what he could hear of them.

Titus let his heavy eyelids fall. What little sleep he had grabbed during the first two watches wasn’t near enough to let him fight off the mighty pull of slumber. What with the night quiet as cotton on the wind. Nothing more than the constant murmur of the river lapping against the yellow poplar sides of the flatboat, along with an occasional call of a owl on the hunt, maybeso the howl of a distant wolf on the prowl somewhere on that western side of the Mississippi.

Those nightsounds, and that muffled scrape at the stern of the boat. Likely a snag, he considered, letting his eyes close securely.

That was but one kind of terror that might “stove in” the bottom of a boat if a watchful crewman stationed at the bow did not push off that sort of hazard. A snag was nothing more than a branch, a piece of a tree trunk, “trashwood” freely floating downriver.

More dangerous still were planters and sawyers—both of them trees freed from the river’s eroding banks. The planter had one of its ends firmly planted in the river bottom but otherwise plainly visible so that the flatboat crew could steer themselves away from the hazard. The sawyer was, like a planter, a fallen tree with its end firmly gripped by the river bottom, but the other end bobbing above and below the waterline—making it the greatest hazard of all.

Either one—planter or sawyer—could put a quick end to a flatboat’s journey to New Orleans. Already Zane’s crew had passed the wrecks of half a dozen flatboats since leaving behind the mouth of the Ohio. A tree branch of no mean size could nonetheless still gouge a hole in the hull of a broadhorn with no more force behind it than the river’s current.

And when either hazard did crunch into a flatboat, the rivermen immediately had to begin bailing and using their leather pump while attempting to reach shore before they sank—there to effect repairs, if possible, before their expensive cargo disappeared at the muddy bottom of the Mississippi.

Come spring, the boatmen told Titus, the river was dang near choked full of planters and sawyers, sometimes so many that it might appear they were floating through a submerged grove of trees. Winter travel wasn’t near so bad. Still, they had seen some on this trip down, sure enough—more here on the Mississippi than on the less rambunctious Ohio.

From the sounds of it, likely a small snag had just bumped against the upriver end of the boat, scraped, and floated on by.

He opened his eyes and looked back at the stern. Nothing. No more sound now. And try as he might in the pitiful starshine, Titus couldn’t much make out anything on the surface of the river as the black water flowed on past.

Gone on by, he convinced himself. Then looked longingly at what few red embers remained in that sandbox where they had heated water he’d used in cutting on Zane’s leg. About the time the brass kettle had begun to boil, Kingsbury and Ovatt had heaved the flatboat over to the far western bank and tied up in some brush. They hadn’t needed to go ashore to secure the hawsers—simply lashing them to the roots of some sycamore trees exposed in the side of the bank like bared rib bones in some half-consumed carrion.

He turned and leaned against a crate, dragging the thick wool blanket back over his shoulder, smelling its musty river stench, then shifting the rifle across his lap Titus let his eyelids sink once more.

By the time they had secured the boat to those roots, Titus had pulled the kettle from the fire and sat there quivering as he honed his knife across the strop’s greased surface. Having no idea where to begin cutting on a man’s leg, digging out the shaft of an arrow from that man’s flesh, Bass figured he’d just wait for someone to tell him what to do—even if it had to be Ebenezer Zane himself.

The pilot drank long and hard at the rye they sloshed out of one of the gallon kegs the crew kept for their own use.

“Messessap water tastes like weak mud,” Ebenezer had explained in a slur.

“He’s right,” Kingsbury agreed as the rest gathered round, holding the lanterns close. “Ain’t no use in washing with it—a fella ends up just as dirty, smeared up too. Maybeso in coffee it’ll do.”

That seemed reasonable enough an explanation why liquor was always the drink of choice for a Mississippi boatman. The river rendered such a disagreeable drink that most men took to letting a pail of it set overnight, hoping to settle most of the dirt. Even then, many of those working flats down the Mississippi drank it right out of the river for its “medicinal qualities,” others claiming the Mississippi was a cure-all and “powerful cathartic,” even “a purifier of a hardy man’s blood.”

“Do like he told you,” Kingsbury said. “Cut that hole in his britches bigger so you can see to work on him.”

Without a word of reply Titus brought his trembling hands back to the base of the arrow shaft that Kingsbury attempted to hold steady. A squat and powerful man, Reuben Root had positioned himself between Zane’s legs, where he locked an arm around each ankle. Heman Ovatt squatted near the pilot’s head, helping Zane drink his liquor and staying ready to bear down on Ebenezer’s arms when the need arose. Across the steersman’s body Kingsbury laid his weight, there to assist the best he could as young Bass finished tearing the thick nankeen cloth nearly the whole length of the wounded man’s thigh from buttock to knee.

“You don’t need the whole goddamned arrow no more,” Zane slurred, the rye clearly beginning to work. “Figure you might just as well break off a big chunk of it and lemme have it.”

Titus asked, “What you want it for?”

Ebenezer twisted his head slightly, still not able to touch Bass with his eyes. “Gonna bite down on it, you stupid young’un. When you finally get around to cutting that son of a bitch outta my leg. Now, do as I said and break it off!”

Bass’s hands were shaking so when he took hold of the shaft that Zane yelped in pain, his leg twisting up, his body contorting in pain. Titus let go as if he had touched a hot fire poker.

“Here, lemme,” Kingsbury suggested softly. “See if I can do it.”

Steadying one hand against the back of Zane’s thigh and around the shaft, the boatman wrapped the other hand just above it, looked up at Titus, and closed his eyes, gritting his teeth as he gave the shaft a snap. It broke smartly, making the sharpest sound in that quiet night tied against the west bank of the Mississippi.

Zane huffed, slowly quieting his breathing. “Gimme that, Hames, goddammit.”

Titus watched the pilot take the arrow shaft and jam it between his big teeth. Then he laid his cheek upon the blanket they had folded beneath him once more. He grumbled something Bass could not understand.

“W-what’d you say—”

“Get it done!” he ordered, having yanked the shaft from his mouth so his words weren’t so garbled.

Looking up at Kingsbury, Titus asked, “You figure we should see just how hard it’s buried in there?”

Kingsbury only nodded.

Taking hold of the last six inches of shaft, Bass pulled slightly. Zane groaned, but made no great cry of pain. Titus gave another, harder yank—and this time Zane nearly came off the deck of the boat with a stifled shriek. When Bass let go, Ebenezer lay there panting as the pain passed over him in waves.

“Gonna have to cut it out,” Root advised. “Just like he tol’t you at the start.”

“Y-you knowed I was gonna have to cut it out, didn’t you, Ebenezer?” Bass said.

Zane raised his head wearily and nodded once, his eyes glazing.

“Then I reckon you been stuck by an arrow afore,” Titus replied.

“Neber,” he said quietly around the shaft.

“Seems that makes two of us, Ebenezer.”

Zane asked, “How’s dat?”

“I ain’t never cut a arrow outta a man afore neither.”

Suddenly a little scared when he saw Zane turn slowly to peer back over his shoulder at him, Titus tried to look away but could not tear his eyes off the pilot’s clay-white face as Ebenezer took the shaft from his mouth.

“That’s good, Titus Bass,” Zane said, his glassy eyes smiling more than his lips. “A man what can make me laugh just when he’s fixing to go cutting on my leg—that’s all right, Titus Bass. Like I said afore: you’ll do to ride the river with.”

He watched Zane return the shaft between his teeth, then turned back to Kingsbury. “I figure this cutting is gonna hurt him something fierce.”

“We’ll hold him,” Ovatt said, locking Zane’s arms under his.

“Just get on with it,” Root said from the pilot’s legs.

“You cut slow enough, maybe he won’t feel it so bad,” Kingsbury suggested almost in a whisper. “Not near as soon anyways.”

It took all his strength to put the tip of his knife against that flesh, piercing the ragged hole cupped around the shaft, oozing blood shiny in the light spilled by the candles hung from the beam just above their heads. As he began to drag the blade through the soft, giving skin and down into the muscle, stroke by stroke by stroke below the shaft, Zane whimpered, groaned, growled around his piece of wood, but he lay amazingly still. Only the punctured leg quivered uncontrollably in something resembling a muscle spasm each time Bass’s blade sank deeper.

“Try it now,” Kingsbury said, then nodded to Ovatt and Root as if to tell them to lock down on Zane.

With his left hand Titus put some strain on the shaft. The pilot squealed in pain. While he heard Ebenezer gasping, Bass pressed on with his work and pried open the incision he had made with the bloody blade, pulling up with a steady pressure at the same time.

The shaft yanked free.

With a loud grunt Zane went limp.

“Ebenezer?” Ovatt called out. Then repeated it again more loudly. He touched the pilot’s face. “He’s gone, boys.”

“G-gone?” Titus groaned. “I kill’t him?”

“Jesus God, no!” Ovatt replied with a. chuckle. “Zane’s done passed out.”

“Good thing, too,” Kingsbury said. “He took that longer’n nary any man I know of would taken it. G’won now, Titus.”

“G-g’won?”

“You’ve more to dig outta his leg.”

“More?”

Snatching the shaft from Titus’s hand, Kingsbury held it inches before the youth’s eyes. “Can’t you see, goddammit! Here’s the arrow! But there ain’t no point on the son of a bitch.” He wheeled on Root. “Get over there to larboard and pull one of them arrows out’n the side of the boat, Reuben. I wanna have us a lookee at it.”

When Root returned, he handed two arrows over to Kingsbury. “Side of the boat looks like a porkypine, stuck the way it is.”

“I s’pose Ebenezer’s lucky he only catched the one,” Kingsbury replied. “Look there, Titus,” and the boatman held both arrows to the lamplight. “These got ’em some iron points. Damn it all. See how they’re tied round the shaft with that wrap.”

“I see.”

“It all come loose inside his leg. The wrap and the point too. Got wet in his blood.”

“An’ slipped off the shaft,” Ovatt finished for them.

Root inquired, “Gotta dig it out, Hames?”

“Gotta try.” Then he peered up at Bass. “Don’t we, Titus?”

“I’ll … try.”

He went back to work, pressing down on one side of the incision with his bloody fingers, slicing down a little at a time with the point of his blade until he saw something fibrous. He snagged it between his trembling fingers and pulled slowly. Out it came in a long, thick thread.

“Just like I tol’t you,” Kingsbury declared. “Now, go back in there and get the head of it afore Ebenezer wakes up.”

“I don’t think he’s coming to till morning, Hames,” Ovatt reported.

“Good thing too,” Kingsbury responded. “Finish it, Titus.”

Back down into the meat of the river pilot’s muscle he probed, until it felt as if the tip of the blade scraped against something harder than the soft, giving tissue. Hoping it wasn’t bone, he slowly pressed two fingers deep into the incision, both of them feeling down the knife’s blade until a fingertip struck it. Taking it between his fingers, he pulled. Slick with dark, warm blood—his fingers slipped off.

Again he grabbed hold of it, pulled, and slipped off.

“I c-can’t get a hold on it.”

“Stuck in the bone, most like,” Ovatt grumbled.

“Yeah,” Kingsbury agreed. “Don’t you got something in your shooting pouch you can grab it with, Titus?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“What’s a fella use when he’s got a ball stuck down his barrel and you’re wanting to pull it out?”

“I got a screw I put on the end of my wiping stick.”

“Yeah, I know—but when you got the screw into the ball, what you use to yank hard on the wiping stick get that stuck ball out?”

It came to him all at once. “That just might work. Get me my pouch.”

Heman Ovatt flung the shooting pouch his way. Scrounging at the bottom of the front section of the pouch, Bass pulled out the forged-iron tongs he had never used all that much.

“Them looks like they’ll work,” Kingsbury declared.

“Hames, help pull that meat outta my way,” Titus told the boatman. As Kingsbury tugged the muscle in one direction, Bass eased it down in the other. Working his fingers back into the incision, he touched the rounded end of the arrow point once more. Slipping the small, narrow tongs into the incision, he guided them into position, clamped them around the point, and began to pull; “Damn, but that’s stuck in there.”

“Work on it—it’ll come,” Ovatt said.

Rocking it back and forth slightly, Titus felt it begin to give way, eventually freeing itself from its lock in that biggest bone in the human body. Carefully he slid it from the deep incision, captured between the tongs. Holding the point up to the light for a moment, Titus turned it around slowly so all could see.

“We best save that for him,” Kingsbury said.

“That’s for sure,” Root agreed. “He’ll be one mad kingfish gone alligator-horse if’n we throw that away!”

“He might even wear it on a cord round his neck,” Hames predicted.

They washed the wound out with hot water, then pried open Zane’s lips so they could extract a little of the tobacco quid he had pulverized inside his cheek before passing out. Kingsbury pressed the dark, soupy leaf and spittle down into the laceration. They finished by cutting a strip of cloth from the bottom of Ebenezer’s spare shirt and knotting it around his leg. With a pair of blankets pulled over their leader, the three boatmen decided they would draw lots to take watch until dawn, when they would once more set off downriver.

Root happily sat up the first pull, and Kingsbury took the second watch. An hour or more back now, Hames had awakened Titus with an insistent nudge.

“Cold,” Bass had muttered as he sat up, slowly coming awake.

“Real cold,” Kingsbury said as he slid past the youngster. “And cold does a good job keeping you awake.”

But it hadn’t.

He awoke himself with a start, hearing himself snore. He sputtered, then fell silent, still half-asleep, listening to the other men snoring. He wondered if Ebenezer’s was that loudest rumble, as much of that rye as he had swallowed down. As he let his eyelids slip back down and his chin go back to resting against his chest, Bass heard the muffled scrape of another sawyer against the side of the boat. It bumped so quietly, he wasn’t sure. Then decided it was the tumble of the sawyer’s roots, hitting again, here, then a third place along the side.

He glanced up at the starry sky to the east across the river where the sun would emerge—if it ever chose to—watching his frosty breath as he pulled the blanket up against his ears.

And froze in place.

Staring into the blackness of that moonless night. Holding his breath, Titus watched the shadow take form at the gunnel, pouring over the top of the poplar plank like a big bubble in a kettle of stew ready to boil over the fire, emerging slowly from the surface of the stew, just as this shadow emerged from the top of the gunnel back there near the stern. As if it were punching an inky black hole out of that cold sky dusted with a sugary coating of stars.

He swallowed, feeling his throat constrict in fear.

The shadow congealed in the black of that night, becoming a head, then one arm, and another—eventually pulling itself atop the gunnel. Beyond it another shadow. Then three more appeared at the stern. Heads turning this way, then that. Finally slipping themselves soundlessly atop the side of the boat. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw bows at the ends of the arms. Saw them already strung with arrows. And then a shaft, perhaps a lance. No. Not that long. Those had to be the muskets.

Letting the blanket fall from his shoulders, he brought the hammer back to full cock in one motion as he lowered the muzzle onto the closest of the shadows and pulled in one motion. In his rush he forgot to close his eyes for the muzzle flash. That much sudden light hurt them as everything went black. The last he saw was the shadow pitching backward, spilling over the gunnel, where it disappeared among all that blackness beyond.

Around him erupted cries and yelps as the boatmen came awake and the Chickasaw screeched their war cries. At least a half dozen were on board before the other three boatmen fought their way out of the blankets and began a heroic defense of their boat.

Arrows thwacked into wood all around him, a gun roared, then another. He had no idea whose weapon it was: boatman or Indian. Men grunted as bodies slammed together in a match of strength pitted against surprise. Beneath the dull starshine he watched a tomahawk go into the air at the end of a warrior’s arm—a gunshot—the tomahawk stopped its arc, then fell backward … the arm and the warrior spilled over the side of the boat.

Titus found his knife in his hand as he watched an Indian hurtling onto Kingsbury’s back—something huge held out at the end of his arm.

On instinct Titus lunged forward, felt the blade that had sliced an arrowhead out of a man’s leg with so much struggle now dig between another man’s ribs almost effortlessly. He didn’t know if he pulled the Indian off Kingsbury or if the boatman flung the Indian back to free himself like a dog shaking off water, but Titus fell over backward, his arm locked around the Indian’s neck. Rolling to the side, he felt the warrior quiver, tense, then go limp.

Bass was on his feet, wheeling to leap beneath the awning, his eyes searching the red-tinged darkness for sign of Ebenezer Zane. In a tangle of arms and bodies the lump on the far side of the awning struggled beneath its blankets, crying out in pain, grunting under two attackers who pinned the pilot down, one of them raising his arm to strike a second time, then a third with something that cracked dully against Zane’s head. Bass swept forward, tripping on the planks and falling against one attacker while the second whirled and fled. Bass’s knife sank into the Indian’s back but seemed to take no immediate effect. Titus spun on that first, fleeing warrior.

Drawing the knife back, Titus reached out and snagged a handful of hair as the Indian cleared the awning. Yanking the head toward him, Bass slashed at the Indian’s neck once, then a second time. He was preparing for a third journey with that skinning blade when he sensed the warm gush spill across the back of his hand and wrist in the cold night. The body went limp beneath him.

Spinning to find another attacker, Titus cried, “Ebenezer!”

He had time only to yell out the man’s name once before he felt the searing pain against his shoulder, delivered with enough stunning force that he was flung against the pilot’s body. Spinning, Titus watched his attacker draw back a long, stone-studded war club for a second swing. Without thinking, Bass tried to raise his left arm to ward off the blow. But the arm would not respond to his command without a frantic, burning tongue of fire coursing through his shoulder. Suddenly crouching, Titus hurled himself at the Indian, slashing back and forth with the knife at the end of his one good arm while the attacker stumbled backward beneath the savage ferocity of the white man’s attack, swinging his long club side to side in a vain attempt at fending off the white man’s knife. At the end of one wide arc with that club, Titus dived, his arm extended.

The blade struck, slid to the side a little, then sank into the Indian’s chest. He drew it out. Ran it home a second time. Drew it out as the Indian stumbled backward. Again he plunged it into the chest. Pulled it back, then jammed it into the enemy with all his might. Bass watched the Indian finally sink to his knees, the front of his buckskins glistening in the pewter light of that cold starshine. The warrior keeled to the side, his eyes opened wide, and he lay completely still.

At that moment it seemed the boat grew quiet around him. So quiet he could hear the lap of water against the poplar planks. Some man’s raspy breathing nearby. The groan of another. Then a scrape against the side of the boat. The very noise he’d heard just before the Indians had come aboard. His mind swimming with a charge of hot adrenaline, his heart squeezed with terror in his chest, Titus knew the warriors were in canoes.

And now more of them were about to come over the gunnels!

Leaping from the awning, he reached the stern, ready to hack at the next warriors to climb out of their canoes. When the voice startled him.

“That you, T-titus?”

“Heman?”

He growled, “Pull me up, goddammit!”

Ovatt stood precariously, his legs shaky, in one of the canoes, holding one of his arms up the side of the flatboat. As Bass pulled, Heman clambered over the side and into the broadhorn with a grunt. Gasping, he asked, “Where the others?”

Only then did Titus turn, drenched with the chill of that darkness, fully realizing the significance of the great, cold, inky black silence around them.

“Kingsbury?” he called.

“Hames?” Ovatt cried in desperation.

“Here,” came the reply. A shadow appeared halfway down the far side of the boat, hand to its head. “I … I need some help, boys.”

Bass watched the shadow pitch to its knees, struggle up again, before he reached Kingsbury. “Only got one good arm right now,” Titus apologized for his struggle in getting the other man to his feet.

“Me too,” Kingsbury replied. Into the dim starshine he turned, showing his right arm, dark stains tracing its length from shoulder to wrist. “Cain’t move it too good.”

“Then don’t,” Ovatt ordered.

“Reuben?”

They heard a splash from the bow.

“I’m here,” came the growl. “Just throwing one of the dead bastards overboard.”

Root turned about, darkening a patch of the starry sky as he strode back toward the stern atop kegs and casks and crates.

“You hurt?” Kingsbury asked as he tore his own bloody sleeve asunder.

“I been better,” Root growled. “A few scratches. Nothing I ain’t ever had afore in a good brawl. You boys?”

“Looks to be Hames got the worse of it,” Ovatt explained as he finished tearing the sleeve from Kingsbury’s shirt, looping it quickly around the upper arm. “Gonna have to stop this bleeding for you. Me—I just head-butted a few of them red bastards and followed ’em over the side into the shallow water, where we tussled.”

“You finish a few of ’em off?” Kingsbury asked.

“They ain’t none of ’em left I can see of,” Ovatt replied gruffly.

Root turned to the youngster. “Your arm—you stuck, Titus?”

“Just hit my arm, maybe my shoulder. A club. It’ll be all right come morning.”

“Ain’t long till morning,” Kingsbury said, settling clumsily to the deck. His head weaved wearily. “Well, now, Titus—that were your first Injun fight—”

“How ’bout Ebenezer?” Ovatt interrupted suddenly as he rose from Kingsbury’s side, turning on his heel. “Eb—”

“I pulled one of ’em off him,” Titus began to explain. “One what was smashing Zane with a club.”

“Here that’un is,” Ovatt declared, dragging the body out of his way to step over it getting to the tick mattress where they had worked on the river pilot beneath candlelight.

“Ebenezer?” Root called out, rushing to Ovatt’s side.

“Maybeso he’s still drunk,” Kingsbury declared as he pushed up to join them.

“Likely so,” Ovatt said as he rolled the man over, pulling the blankets down gently. He held his ear over Zane’s face, listened. Then jerked back, his hands feeling around the pilot’s head in the dark. “Shit.”

“What?” Titus asked, inching forward a step.

Ovatt wiped his hands on the front of his coat. “Ebenezer’s done for.”

“Dead?” Root demanded.

“Just as dead as that son of a bitch there,” Ovatt growled as he whirled and kicked the dead Indian with all he could muster.

Whimpering like a wounded animal, Heman fell atop the Chickasaw’s body, pummeling it with his fists. Then seized the Indian’s ears and drove the head down onto the deck repeatedly as Root and Titus struggled to pull him off the body.

When Ovatt finally let the mighty Root yank him away, he sank into Reuben’s arms. Then he spat on the body, spat again. “Killed the best man on the river! That’s what you done!”

Completely numbed, Bass stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, not believing what the others were saying. It simply couldn’t be. Not Ebenezer Zane! Not the man who had taken him under his wing, promised to teach him the rivers, the flatboat trade, to introduce him to the right whores in Natchez and on down to New Orleans. The man who these last few weeks had become like a real father to him. Not Ebenezer!

“I’ll throw this bastard over with the rest,” Root said as Ovatt crumpled next to Zane’s body.

“We gotta get downriver,” Kingsbury commanded as he crawled back in under the awning. “Can’t stay here now.”

“Burn them canoes afore we go,” Root said.

“Just scuttle ’em,” Ovatt growled with a shake of his head, anger making the man tremble. “They’ll sink sure enough.”

“Ebenezer?” Titus asked in the midst of all their talk, taking another step forward.

“There might be more coming,” Kingsbury declared.

“Ebenezer … dead?” Bass repeated with another step, staring at the body in the dim, starry light.

“Nawww,” Root disagreed with Kingsbury. “Ain’t no more coming. This is the same goddamned bunch the boy here run onto out hunting. They come downriver follering us. Ain’t no more coming.”

“Still the same,” Kingsbury said, his voice edged with pain. “We gotta get on down past the Chickasaw Bluffs.^* Safer water.”

“Hames might be right,” Root said. “Them jumping us like this might just mean them red devils are out to put the steal on some of the river traffic.”

“Awright—we’ll go,” Ovatt finally said as Titus reached his side. He looked up as the youth knelt beside Zane’s body. “Decent thing to do … we gotta take Ebenezer on down. Figure out what we oughtta do then.”

“What we gotta do from here on out,” Kingsbury corrected with a wince of pain as he rubbed the shirt bandage around his arm. “With the boat. And this load.”

Barely hearing any of the others’ talk, Titus sank to his knees, reaching out his hand, pulling the blanket back from the pilot’s face. “Didn’t have a chance.”

“What would Ebenezer Zane want us to do?” Ovatt asked.

Bass peered into the crushed and battered face of Ebenezer Zane, feeling the tears of frustration, of loss, come over him, ease slowly from his eyes.

“He’d want us to finish the trip,” Root replied. “You always finish what you start—Ebenezer Zane always said.”

A hand came out to rest on Bass’s shoulder. Then a second. He looked up to find Ovatt standing over him now, Root as well. Kingsbury slid up nearby, clutching his upper arm tightly.

“He liked you, Titus,” Hames said. “I never knowed Ebenezer Zane to take to young’uns afore.”

“But he liked you, for certain on that,” Ovatt said, patting Titus on the shoulder.

“Said you’d do to ride this goddamned river with,” Reuben added quietly. He patted the youth on the back of the head as Titus hunched over, beginning to cry.

Heman added, “Ain’t nothing better Ebenezer could say ’bout a man.”

Hames Kingsbury dragged a bloody hand beneath his nose angrily, then snorted, “And by damn, fellas—that’s something Ebenezer Zane was right about from the start. You’ll do to ride this goddamned river with, Titus Bass.”

More than a day before Titus’s hunt had set a terrible wheel in motion, Ebenezer Zane had piloted them out of the mouth of the Ohio—for the last time.

They floated on downriver another day after the Chickasaw attack, deciding to take their chances that night by anchoring at the downstream end of a tree-lined sandbar where they figured no redskin on the river would find it easy to discover them tied up among the clutter of living brush and dead sawyers.

After scuttling the three canoes that cold night of the attack, they had wrapped the body within a section of oiled Russian sheeting Ebenezer kept stowed away for repairs to the awning, binding the dead pilot tightly within his shroud using a wrap of one-inch hemp before carrying Zane out to lay atop some casks containing cured Kentucky smoking leaf.

After that short autumn day of denying what needed doing, the four of them gathered beneath the oiled awning at their sandbox fire and boiled coffee, finally speaking of the unspeakable.

“Never thought he’d go this way,” Kingsbury admitted softly.

“Still can’t believe it,” Root added, as if it soured his stomach.

Ovatt looked into the other faces, asking, “What you figure we ought’n do with him?”

The three only shrugged, stared back into the fire, each man deeply possessed of his own thoughts.

Eventually Titus asked, “What you think Ebenezer would want you to do for him?”

One by one in turn the three looked up from their reverie and stared at the youth.

“I just figured—you all knowed him much better’n me,” Bass explained. “Thinking one of you should have an idea what Ebenezer’d want done. Maybe we ought’n talk about getting him back to his family for burying.”

“He ain’t got no family,” Root explained. “Heman told you ’bout his woman … what happed to his boys.”

“But he’s gotta have a mam or pap,” Titus declared. “Surely he’s got some kin back to home.” He watched the heads shake. “Aunt or uncles? Brother or a sister?” Still the boatmen wagged their heads.

“Got no kin he ever spoke of,” Kingsbury said.

Kingsbury nodded as he stared at the tiny flames, rubbing one of his jowls thoughtfully. “He started floating the Ohio and Mississap years ago when he was just a young feller. Always said he didn’t leave behind no family to speak of.”

Ovatt stated, “I reckon that’s why he took such a real liking to you, Titus.”

“How old you figure Ebenezer was?” Bass inquired.

With a wag of his head Root said, “I don’t have no likely idea. Man looked older’n he really was—or maybe he was older’n he looked. No telling with all that hair, and life being so hard on the river.”

“He had no family, but he had to have a home,” Titus protested. “Place where he come from.”

“Don’t think so,” Kingsbury answered. “He done two floats south to Nawlins each year. Finish off selling his goods, then sell off the boat timbers, and we’d walk north on the Trace. Get back up to the Ohio, Ebenezer’d go straight on to Pittsburgh for to get one of the boat outfits started on a new broadhorn for his next trip downriver.”

“No family?” Titus repeated as the sad and utter rootlessness of it sank in. “An’ no home neither.”

“River was his home,” Ovatt stated.

Rubbing his palms along the tops of his thighs thoughtfully, Bass said, “Then you men was his family.”

They looked at one another for a few moments.

Finally Kingsbury spoke. “Maybeso you’re right. We was as much his family as any man’s got family.”

“Then to my way of thinking,” Ovatt agreed, “it’s up to us to decide what’s best to do for Ebenezer.”

“Gotta bury him,” Titus said.

“Where?” Root asked.

Bass gestured with a thumb over his shoulder. “Where he lived. Out there. On the river.”

“Bury him in the river?” Kingsbury echoed.

“Certain of it,” Ovatt replied with a slap to his leg, then pushed back a shock of that red hair from his eyes. “Damn right—we oughtta bury him in the Messessap.”

“Why not the Ohio?” Root asked, hard-eyed. “He was more a Ohio boy than a Messessap boy.”

“Can’t haul his goddamned body all the way up the Natchez Trace with us,” Kingsbury grumbled.

“Why cain’t we?” Root demanded.

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! He’s gonna … he’ll be … ah, goddammit!” growled Kingsbury. “Ebenezer gonna start going bad, and the man deserves to be planted afore he starts stinking enough to turn the noses of heaven!”

“Hames is right, Reuben,” Ovatt stated firmly. “Nothing we can do about what’s landed in our laps. We can’t go a’hauling him all the way back up to the Ohio—so we oughtta just figure out what’s best to do by Ebenezer down here on the Mississap.”

“He allays liked Natchez,” Kingsbury mused out loud, then looked up to gaze at the others around that low fire that reflected a crimson glow from each of their faces in the cold darkness surrounding their boat.

“Thought we decided we was burying him in the river!” Root snapped.

“We can,” Kingsbury replied. “We’ll just do it when we get to Natchez.”

“He liked some of those places Under-the-Hill,” Ovatt agreed. “’Bout as much as he took to Mathilda’s Kangaroo.”

“Then we’ll wait to bury him till we get to Natchez,” Kingsbury said with great finality. “And put him to his eternal rest in the river opposite the harbor.”

The next morning before full light they had secured the body of Ebenezer Zane atop their cargo, released the hawsers, and slipped away with the cold brown current of the Mississippi. Only four of them now: three boatmen, and a youngster who kept staring at that shroud, unable to shake off the feeling that it had all been of his own making.

“You’re carrying more’n any one man ought’n carry,” Kingsbury said that night as he relieved Titus at watch after they had tied up in a small, brushy cove against the river’s west shore.

“Can’t help it, the way things turned out.”

“No man ever can say how things gonna turn out, Titus.”

Bass wagged his head. “He’s dead because of something I done, or didn’t do. Dammit!” he grumbled under his breath. “I don’t know rightly which it is.”

“Listen and let me tell you the way Ebenezer lived his life, son,” Kingsbury said as he settled beside the youth. “Life is only what happens to you after you get borned of your mama. You can’t help it, so you go on living if you’re lucky enough, if you ain’t one of them babes what dies in the birthin’. You do what you must to stay alive for a few years, and then dying is something that happens at the other end of your life, he always believed. Just make sure it’s a quick’un, Ebenezer said. Better’n going slow, painful.”

Stifling a sob, Titus said, “I damn sure hope he went quick.”

Hames continued, “I figure Ebenezer Zane got his wish, Titus. He went the way he wanted to go—and by damn, that’s a lot more’n most of us’ll ever get when our name’s called on the roll up yonder.”

“I don’t know much of what to think about heaven.”

“Ain’t much to think about, really. We’ll find out all about it when we get there.”

Bass looked up at the boatman, then asked in that icy stillness, “You figure Ebenezer Zane is gone on to heaven already?”

Ovatt chuckled softly, patted Titus on the back reassuringly. “Hell, he’s there already.”

Kingsbury nodded. “I’d wager he’s got a bunch of them angels already learning to tie hawsers and work a gouger, how to dip their oars an’ turn their heavenly flatboats right around in midriver.”

Even the sour-faced Root grinned when he said, “No doubt Ebenezer’s even got ’em singing some of his bad songs too.”

“Bad songs?”

Hames smiled, staring up at the dark canopy. “Songs what God wouldn’t want none of his angels learning—them’s the kind Ebenezer Zane will go and teach ’em. Probably got some chewing tobacco too.”

The hurt overwhelmed Titus when he sobbed, “I miss him.”

Kingsbury looked at the youngster’s sad, hangdown face. “We all miss him. But God’s got him now, so we’re bound away to get Ebenezer Zane’s last flatboat down to Nawlins—just the way he’d planned.”

“Then we’re heading back north?”

“Buy us another boat and hire us on another load—float on down again come spring,” Kingsbury replied.

And Ovatt added, “Like Ebenezer allays done.”

“Just like he’d want us to keep doing—even ’thout him here,” Hames said.

It had been another cold day of floating, watching the land flatten even more while the river itself began to meander before they sailed past the settlement of New Madrid squatting on the far west bank of the Mississippi. Founded in 1790 by Colonel George Morgan, a New Jersey land speculator, who was in turn sponsored by the crown of Spain as a means of establishing a foreign outpost reaching far up the river, by 1810 the village was inhabited mostly by Americans who had been struggling against the fickle river for twenty years. Less than two dozen ragged houses sheltered a rough, indolent population that included a handful of Spaniards, some French Creoles down from the Illinois, and a few hardy German immigrants. A pair of poorly stocked stores charged outrageous prices for what little they had to offer, especially if a traveler did not carry the right nation’s currency then in vogue and was thereby forced to pay a rate of exchange bordering on river piracy.

South from there the terrain flattened even more, the extensive floodplain preventing any real settlement through what appeared to be a boggy, impenetrable wilderness. In more than a week of travel the boatmen alternated periods of extreme boredom with snatches of terror while they negotiated treacherous stretches of the Mississippi popularly known as the Devil’s Raceground—where to Titus it felt as if some unnatural force picked up the crew’s flatboat and hurled it downriver a few miles at a dizzying pace … and later at the Devil’s Elbow—where they had to fight constantly to steer the boat around a maze of innumerable sandbars while twisting this way and that through corkscrew turns as the river bent back on itself. Here Kingsbury had to battle the stern rudder, with Heman Ovatt on the gouger, both of them struggling to keep their broadhorn close to the east bank lest the strong current pull their boat right into what the rivermen called “the woods,” that broad floodplain west of the Mississippi, a tangled, confusing maze of bogs where a crew would have little hope of ever returning to the river’s main channel.

“See that high point yonder?” asked Ovatt of an early morning two days later.

Titus looked into the distance where Heman pointed south. “What is it up there?”

“That’s the fourth Chickasaw Bluff.”

“Chica … like the Injuns killed Ebenezer?”

Ovatt nodded. “Chickasaw. Up top there sits the army’s post. Called Fort Pickering.”

“S’pose them soldiers can see a long way up there,” Bass replied as his eyes came back to watching the river for sawyers and planters. He sat at the bow, clutching one of the long, sturdy poles, ready to push off any dangerous object that posed a threat to their boat by bobbing too close in the muddy, sometimes swirling current.

“Keep your eyes open,” Ovatt reminded as he got up to clamber away over the casks and kegs. “I’m getting me a little drink now that the river settles down for a while.”

Bass returned his attention to the water, sweeping his gaze back and forth as he had been doing for days on end as they rolled on down the great, wide river. Most of the sawyers were easily spotted. Some were not, the others had warned him: hiding their danger just below the surface of the river. Some might poke only a solitary root or limb barely above waterline. A man had to be watchful and not become mesmerized by the monotonous roll of the murky water beneath a gray, overcast sky.

Spotting one, Titus rose to his knees, leaned back, and grabbed the long pole, ready to brace himself against some hundredweight kegs to push off the sawyer he saw coming up, still downriver more than a quarter of a mile. With a single limb raised, it bobbed in the current. For a moment the hazard appeared to roll, for the limb disappeared, then another arose to take its place out of the brown water. Funny thing, he thought, rubbing his eyes, then squinting into the distance again. For a moment there—that damned thing looked like it took a ghastly, human shape.

“Heman!” he shouted, heart leaping out of his chest.

Ovatt stuck his head out from beneath the awning as Root stirred fitfully from his nap atop some tobacco crates. “Just knock the goddamned thing off to the side, Titus.”

“It’s a person!”

Kingsbury craned his neck from the stern rudder, asking, “In the river?”

“Lookee there!” Titus said, pointing as Ovatt emerged from the shade of the awning and clambered over the cargo to the bow.

“I can see! By damn, it is a human person, Hames!”

Root had rolled up on his elbow, rubbing his eyes and grumbling to himself as Kingsbury began shouting his orders.

“Heman, get some of that rope tied around the boy’s waist. We’ll put him over the side and he can swim out: pluck that fella outta the river—”

“I! I can’t swim!” Titus squealed.

“You can too swim!” Ovatt cried.

Wagging his head emphatically, he admitted, “Not good ’nough to pull nobody else outta no river!”

“Dammit!” Kingsbury snarled. “Ovatt, you tie yourself off. And, Titus, you work that gouger with me so we can slow this here Kentuckyboat down. Heman can grab that fella, and we’ll let Reuben pull the two of ’em in.”

With Kingsbury barking orders to young Bass while Ovatt knotted a one-inch line around his middle and Reuben Root secured the other end around his own waist, Hames and Titus began to work the flatboat over into the middle of the current, cutting a course directly for the man waving all the more frantically as the rivercraft bore down on him.

“Looks like he’s hanging on to something—maybeso a snag or piece of timber,” Ovatt announced as he squatted at the gunnel near the bow, ready to leap into the cold water. “Right when I go in, Titus, you cut that gouger hard to the left so the bow goes right—away from me. Understand?”

Bass nodded, more than a little nervous at having so important a part in this rescue.

Then it was time for the red-haired boatman to take his bath. Into the river Ovatt dived just as they were about to approach the man in the river. Immediately leaning hard against the bow rudder, Titus helped Kingsbury wheel the flatboat about, almost crosscurrent, suddenly slowing the craft with a sharp lurch as Ovatt splashed up behind the man and snagged him.

“P-pull!”

Root was already heeding Ovatt’s command, dragging in the narrow rope hand over hand as the man from the river flopped and struggled to secure a grip on the one who had come to rescue him. The pair of them went under again, and then again, bobbing up, both men sputtering and spitting, Ovatt bellowing at his charge to settle down—but still the man fought against his rescuer, flinging arms this way and that, attempting to lock on to Ovatt. There at the side of the flatboat he finally did so as Kingsbury shoved the rudder hard to the starboard, kicking the bow back into the head of the current.

“Bring me up! Up, goddammit!” Ovatt gurgled, spitting water.

“Gonna help this fella first, you no-good half-drowned mudrat!” Root snarled in reply as he leaned over the gunnel and seized hold of the man they had just plucked from what appeared to be a wide plank of white oak. A hewn flatboat timber.

Gasping, the sodden, soaked creature collapsed from Root’s grip right atop some casks, his chest heaving, spewing up river water, heaving volcanically.

“You done up there—get me up now, Reuben!”

Root leaned over the gunnel, grinning. “You ain’t asked me purty, now, have you?”

With the flat of one hand, Ovatt smacked the side of the flatboat, growling, “Get me up there or I’ll pin your ears back so far you’ll be wiping them when you wipe your ass!”

Root and Kingsbury both roared as Reuben pulled Ovatt over the gunnel, where he landed in a heap, sputtering and gasping, gazing with the other three at the soppy-haired creature they had just pulled out of the muddy waters.

“How you come to be in the river, mister?” Root demanded as he pounded heartily on the survivor’s back. Then, “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, backing up a step clumsily, then a second and nearly falling as the creature raised its head and gazed up at them.

“He’s a … she’s a woman!”

True enough.

“What the hell have you just plucked from the river, Heman?” Kingsbury asked, his neck craning as he roared with a great laugh.

“D-don’t none of you go blaming me for bringing no goddamned woman on this boat!” Ovatt cried.

Shivering with cold, trembling with fear, she looked at each one in turn as the three men stared back at her, stunned into silence. None of them moved. Titus was gaping openmouthed at the stringy-haired soot-smudged woman with the rest of them until Kingsbury jogged them all awake.

“Get her a blanket, goddammit! Woman gonna freeze in this wind less’n you cover her up.”

As Root turned and bent to slip under the awning, Ovatt asked her, “You—ma’am … gonna be all right?”

Unable to utter a word, the woman only nodded, swiping muck off her face from brow to chin with the back of her torn sleeve as she continued to drip as much of the river on the deck as did Heman Ovatt. When Root laid an old wool blanket around her shoulders, she gazed up at the man with the sort of gratitude in her eyes that Titus always saw in the eyes of the family’s hounds whenever he threw them the bones butchered from what game he brought in from the hills. It damned near pulled at his heart now, the way she looked round at all of them redeyed and frightened.

Wiping her hand one more time across her face, where her hair continued to drip, the woman said quietly, “I know what you’re all thinking: it’s bad luck to have you a woman on your boat.” She yanked the blanket tightly around her shoulders, her eyes falling to the deck. “’Cause my husband … me an’ him had a boat like this’un.”

Root leaned forward to ask, “Where at’s your husband, ma’am?”

With a wag of her head she replied, “River claimed him.”

“You mean he’s dead?” Kingsbury inquired.

Titus watched her choke off a sob with a quiver of her chin, then brave herself up enough to answer. “River claimed him … after the Injuns jumped us two day ago.”

^* Future site of Memphis, Tennessee.