Dance on the Wind

12

“The sooner we get her off our boat, the better things is gonna be for all of us,” Heman Ovatt growled in a loud whisper that rumbled off the nearby water.

“We can’t just set her off!” Titus protested, his eyes imploring the other two boatmen, who huddled with him near the bow, arguing out the fate of the woman they had plucked from the river.

At that moment the dark-haired woman sat alone beneath the awning, where she huddled out of the cold drizzle that leaked from a pewter sky, drier now, and warmer too, by the sandbox fire they tended for her. Nonetheless, she trembled, staring upriver into the distance as if she truly could not overhear their heated discussion.

When Bass glanced at the woman again, something tugged in his chest—the way she gazed upstream, transfixed, as if she were going to spot her husband’s boat, as if she hoped to materialize her husband right out of the cold air. There had been occasions he saw his mother wear that same look on her face: worried for his pap not yet home from clearing a far field. At such times he already had come to know that both she and his pap were children of families who farmed and hunted their ground at great risk to their lives. In those early years on that bloody ground of the canebrakes south of the Ohio River, a man might be late for any number of things. So his mother bravely watched from the front door, and always lit a candle at the window as dusk settled like a fine talc among the hills surrounding their cabin. She, continuing to watch into the distance for her man the same way this woman gazed upriver for some sign of her own.

“The young’un’s right,” Hames Kingsbury stated flatly.

“He ain’t got no say in this,” Reuben Root grumbled, his face grown hard, chertlike eyes barely visible between the slits he made of them. “Only us three got a vote on her staying, or us putting her off right now.”

Bass was about to open his mouth in hopes of cajoling, in some way to convince them into allowing him his voice in this, if not his outright vote, when the skinny Kingsbury wheeled on the explosive and powerful Reuben Root.

“Time you listen to me: I been first in charge of this boat for Ebenezer ever since’t him and me started down the Ohio years ago,” Hames said evenly, setting full measure by every one of the words he chose. “He picked him the best crew could be had on the river—so I damned well know any of us could be the one Ebenezer picked to watch over things if ever he wasn’t around or was just sleeping off part of a day’s float. Any one of us—”

“That’s right!” Root interrupted.

“But he picked me, Reuben.”

“Still, that don’t give you no extra vote over us,” Heman said, his own pocked and pitted face gone cold, suspicious, perhaps even downright superstitious in clinging to that riverboatman’s oldest and worst taboo with such fervent and steadfast belief.

“I ain’t taking a extra vote for me,” Kingsbury replied. “I’m just telling you as pilot on this here boat now—that I’m doing just what I figure Ebenezer’d do hisself if’n he was here. He’d give Titus a vote.”

“Like I said,” Root disagreed with a snarl, “the boy here never was hired on like the rest of us.”

“It ain’t right, Titus having as much say as us what been working Ebenezer’s boats for years now,” Ovatt added.

“You don’t wanna give the boy a vote, well—let’s just set that aside for a minute and talk over something else,” Kingsbury said with the sure ease of a man used to steering a boat out of troubled waters.

And something in the boatman’s face told Titus that Hames was going to try something smooth.

Hames continued, “S’pose you boys sit there and ponder what Ebenezer Zane would do ’bout that woman we pulled from the river back there. Reuben? How you think Ebenezer would vote?”

Ovatt’s eyes flared, knowing he’d been bested. “Ah, shit,” he said sourly. “We all three of us know Ebenezer’d vote to keep her on his goddamned boat—and he’d throw any of us off if’n we grumped about it too.”

“But Ebenezer ain’t here to throw us off,” Root declared, slowly crossing his beefy arms across his stout powder keg of a chest.

“Yes, he is,” Kingsbury said with great conviction, and pointed at the corpse lying in its canvas shroud. “I figure we’re carrying him on to Natchez … so we sure as hell can do the same for a living, breathing woman.”

“Ah, sweet Jupiter!” Root cried out, flinging his arms about in frustration. “No telling what kind of bad luck we’re going to have now!”

“Things in life ain’t that simple,” Kingsbury attempted to explain.

Ovatt laughed without humor, then said, “Listen to you, Hames! That woman sure as hell wasn’t no good luck on her husband’s boat. All the crew and him gone too—like she told it. The boat sunk in the river, scuttled by Injuns.”

“That man and woman been working the river together for more’n twenty years, Heman,” Kingsbury reminded. “Sure took that thing you call a woman’s curse a helluva long time to catch up to ’em, didn’t it?”

Bass watched the two of them grumble for a moment, then Ovatt turned to Kingsbury.

“She stays right there,” Heman demanded with noticeable reluctance. “She don’t come out to curse the rest of the boat.”

“What’s done is done,” Root groaned. “We’re already cursed, Heman. It don’t matter where she stays on this goddamned boat. The whole lot of us is already cursed.”

“But—she can stay, right?” Bass asked.

“Yes,” Kingsbury answered with finality. “The woman’s gonna ride with us till we get to Natchez—where we can let her off and put Ebenezer to his final rest.”

Later that afternoon Titus was surprised to hear the first notes from Reuben’s squeeze-box in a long time. Sliding mournfully up and down the scales with his wheezing concertina, the oarsman sat at the gunnel to begin playing snatches of melancholy ballads and slow airs in the cold drizzle that seeped from the brims of their hats, hammered the taut oil sheeting of their awning where the woman kept a fire going and coffee brewing throughout the day when she wasn’t fishing.

“Funny,” Bass said to Kingsbury quietly enough so that no one else would hear, then sniffed the aroma coming from the awning. “Never did I think of fish being something I’d get my hungers up for. That does smell good.”

“Ain’t ever had but one bite of catfish,” Hames replied. “Never had me another. But from what I seen that woman doing all afternoon, if she hauls in a catfish on her line, she just throws it back. Only keeping the fish what don’t taste like mud.”

“S’pose she’d mind me asking for some to eat?”

“I reckon you can go ask her,” he said with a smile.

Ducking out of the rain beneath the awning, Titus stood there, dripping, then thought to remove his hat. He found himself back in the company of women, where a man had to remember his good manners.

“Ma’am?”

She turned to regard him with her crow-footed face scored by wrinkles across her brow and reaching from her nose down to her chin in deep clefts. Pushing a long, unruly strand of hair from her eye, she did not speak to Bass, just stared as if expecting him to get on with his question.

As he watched her, he found himself liking the way working over the fire’s heat brought a flush to the woman’s leathery, tanned cheeks, after they had been so damned pasty and white the time they’d pulled her from the cold river.

“What’s that you’re cooking there?”

She glanced down at the big cast-iron skillet spitting and spewing the fish she’d halved and dipped into a cornmeal batter. And the woman smiled, her eyes softening.

“Fish.”

“Not catfish?”

She chuckled a little as she leaned over the skillet with a long fork and speared the fish around in the grease. “Don’t like catfish, me either. This here’s perch. Good eating.” Then she looked up at him, blowing the hair back from her nose and eyes. “You want you some?”

“I’d be awfully pleasured to have some, yes, ma’am.”

“Gonna need more of that grease,” she replied, turning back to her spewing skillet from which rose such enticing aromas. “Get me some more, and I’ll dish you up a trencher of this hot perch.”

In a long canvas-lined white-oak chest where the crew kept their mess utensils sat several clay pots into which the men always scraped the bacon grease left over after their endless, monotonous meals of pork. One of these he brought her, pulling off the metal latch that held the flat top on the pot. Stuffing her big iron fork into the congealed grease, the woman took a speckled, translucent gob over to the skillet and plopped it in with a spitting hiss. With the fork she pulled the largest piece of fish from the heat and laid it in one of the scooped-out oaken trenchers the crew used as plate and bowl in one. How Titus’s mouth watered just to look at the deep, rich, golden brown of that cornmeal breading, just to breathe in that fragrance of something other than salt pork, bacon, and boiled hocks. The anticipation of this meal was enough to bring tears to his eyes.

“How long since you et?” she asked.

“Yesterday night,” Bass replied, settling and pulling his knife from his belt.

“Acting starved to me.”

“He’s just a growing boy, ma’am,” Kingsbury defended from the stern rudder nearby. “The sort what needs a lot of victuals.”

Suddenly, with a second bite in his mouth, Titus was seized with another, even bigger, fear over his incomplete manners. “You ate, didn’t you, ma’am?”

“I fed myself first, son,” she answered. “Don’t you worry. If I didn’t eat first, I’d not had the strength to keep on fishing and frying. By the by—you might just as well be calling me by my name. I’m Beulah.”

“Beulah. Yes, ma’am. So how long’d you go without food?” Kingsbury asked from the stern rudder.

“Better’n three days: from the morning we was set upon by them Chickasaws, till yestiddy afternoon you come downriver and finded me floating on that piece of the boat.”

The pilot said, “Can’t imagine them Injuns letting you off alive like they done.”

“They didn’t,” she replied. “Figured us all being dead.”

“You slipped off ’thout them knowing?” asked Reuben Root.

With a wag of her head she plopped another slab of perch into a trencher dusted with cornmeal, then laid it in the greased skillet. “Me and Jameson—that’s my … that was my husband: Jameson Hartshorn,” she said, seeming to choke for a moment, her eyes blinking in the smoke rising from the fire and the pork grease. “We was both in the water after the Injuns got the four other fellas on the boat. Busting up the cargo, those red devils was, tossing it all over the side, making a awful mess of everything. Yelling and screaming and kicking fire out of the sandbox, catching our boat to burn.”

“They burned it right down to the water, I’ll bet,” Ovatt said acidly from the starboard oar.

“They might have,” she answered. “I wasn’t there to see it. Jameson and me—we was hanging on to some oakcask staves, trying to slip off ’thout any of them killers spying us. We was just lucky to slip over the side them not seeing us, way I figure it. We was paddling and kicking out from the boat—I looked around once and saw ’em dancing and screaming, couple of them Injuns throwing one of our men into the fire they had burning the boat. That’s when one of ’em spotted Jameson and me. They come to the gunnel shouting and pointing, shooting arrows, and finally one of ’em got his gun and shot Jameson in the back of the head.”

A few uneasy moments passed while she pushed at the portions of fish in the spitting skillet. Then Kingsbury asked quietly, “That when you lost him?”

“No. He started to slip off the stave, but I held him up for some time while his eyes was still open. Jameson … he said a couple things to me afore he went under. Last thing he told me was it was all right to let him go. Said he was done for and I ought’n save myself.”

“You waited to let him go till he died,” Root said, some new, begrudging respect showing on his broad face. “You’re a … a strong woman, ma’am.”

“I let the river take him,” she continued, pulling some of the fried fish out and heaping it into a big wooden trencher. “I’ll fetch up some of this for each of you and bring it over, you just wait a minute more.”

“It’s a wonder they didn’t shoot you too!” Titus exclaimed.

“They tried,” she said matter-of-factly. “After the third shot I quit paddling. Just hung myself over that chunk of wood I was floating on, barely kept my nose and mouth outta the water.”

“Playing possum, was you?” Ovatt asked.

“Playing dead is what I done,” the woman replied. “Drifted off into some brush by the far bank and they never come to look after me then on out. Next morning I pushed away of that brush to try to make it to the east shore, but the tow caught me, and I ended up getting pulled on out into the river. Hung there for more’n another day afore you come along—the first boat I seen come down after them Injuns jumped us all.”

“You was near froze by the time we come along,” Kingsbury said.

“I’m mighty grateful to you fellas,” she said, straightening, looking at each of them in turn when she continued. “I know how most folks look at a woman on a Kentucky-boat—but you still took me on for the trip down to Natchez. I promise you I won’t be in your way none, you just get me to where I can start my walk back up the Trace to home. I’ll help out all you want me to till then.”

“I think you’re doing us just fine, ma’am,” Kingsbury said.

“Hames is right,” Ovatt agreed reluctantly as he took the oak trencher from her. “This fish and all.”

“I can make us up a mess of beans—you got any beans for supper tonight? I best get to soaking ’em.”

“Titus, you’re in there. Fetch off the top of that barrel got our beans in it for her.”

After she had scooped out what she wanted into a brass kettle, the woman ladled some of their drinking water over it and set the beans aside to soak.

“Ma’am, you got any family, any friends, in Natchez?” Titus asked as she went back to breading more of the perch she’d dragged from the river that morning.

With a doleful wag of her head she answered, “We neither one had any family there.”

Kingsbury asked, “You fixing on setting off up the Natchez Trace all by yourself?”

She began to wag her head, saying, “No, I don’t.” Then she shrugged and stared at the fire. “I reckon there’ll be some wagons to ride in eventual. Maybe they’ll let me ride along like you done, what with me working for my keep by cooking and cleaning all the way north.”

“Ought to be a way for it to work out for you,” Ovatt commented.

“Hope it’s so: just ain’t right for a woman to have to face all them miles alone by herself,” Kingsbury said.

She looked up from her cooking, pushing some hair back from her sad eyes again, cheeks rosy with warmth, and said with courageous melancholy, “Looks like I’m bound to be lonely for a long, long time now. What with Jameson gone at the bottom of this here goddamned river.”

“We lost us a good friend to the Injuns too,” Root said.

“That him?” And she pointed to the shroud lashed near the bow.

“The pilot and owner of this boat,” Kingsbury answered. “We all been riding the rivers with him for some time now.”

She touched each one of them with her doleful eyes, baggy with fatigue and woe. Finally her gaze landed on the youngster. “How ’bout you?” she asked. “You don’t look to be a riverman.”

“I ain’t. Truth is—”

“He wasn’t till our pilot made a riverman out of him,” Kingsbury interrupted.

“He don’t got the look of a boatman,” she replied, hunching back over her work at the sandbox fire. “I know boatmen and you ain’t one, young’un.”

“This here’s his first trip down,” Ovatt explained. “An’ he’s taking to it real slick.”

Still she wagged her head. “That’un”—and she gestured up toward Bass with that long iron fork, not even raising her eyes to him—“he looks more like some lost mother’s child what ain’t got no business out here where he’s throwed in with a rascal bunch like you at best, mayhaps he’s gonna be killed at the worst of it.”

Titus instantly bristled with shame, roiling with boyish pride. “I’m old enough to take care of myself!”

“I had seven young’uns of my own,” she explained with a knowing smirk that made any man feel like a boy. “Lost two of ’em to the river. And now my husband—gone. Lemme tell you I know there’s a mother somewhere worrying herself sick about you. I never been able to own up to knowing all that much about a lot of things—but a mother knows something like that for certain.”

Prickling with anger, Bass felt the eyes of the others clawing at him as he stared down at the woman while she aimlessly poked at the burning limbs beneath her spitting skillet. What could he say in his own defense, he wondered, that wouldn’t let his words betray him when they come out?

“No matter that you might think different,” Kingsbury said offhandedly as he watched Bass turn without a complaint and silently shuffle away. “He’s a man now, and one of our crew … here on what’s to be Ebenezer Zane’s last trip to Natchez.”

* * *

“I heard how you put up for me back there when them others was wanting to set me off their boat,” Beulah said to him in the gray light more than a week later. “I wasn’t intending on being a burden—didn’t even ask any of you go looking for my husband.”

“He’s … likely gone, ma’am,” Titus replied.

She blinked, as if that worked something mechanical inside her to own up to the reality of it. “I might’ve asked—but I didn’t have the shirt he was wearing.”

“His shirt? How’d that help you?”

“Folks believe it—howsomever I ain’t never had occasion to prove it wrong,” Beulah explained. “You take a loaf of bread and wrap it in the missing person’s shirt. Put it on the water and it will sink over the spot where we can find his body.”

He thought on that, hard.

Finally she asked, “You don’t think that’s crazy, do you, young’un?”

With a shrug he replied, “Maybe not near as crazy as what some folks do. Hell—no matter that you didn’t have your husband’s shirt. We ain’t even got any bread to do it with anyways. But if we had, I’d talked ’em into giving it a try for you.”

She smiled warmly. “Want you to know I’m in your debt and didn’t mean you to take no offense when I was calling you a young’un, talking about your ma.”

“Wish you’d just left my mam out’n this,” Titus said as he watched the river ahead for obstacles, scratching at the incessant itch under his arms, at his waistband.

“There’s difference ’tween leaving home when it’s time … and running off,” she said as the cold wisps of river fog glided slowly past them.

“It was my time.”

“Just looking at you, I can tell that ain’t near enough the truth.”

Bristling like a short-haired hog at butcher time, Titus replied, “Ain’t none of your concern nohow.”

“How long you been itching the way you are?”

“I dunno,” he said, suddenly conscious of the fact that he had been scratching himself almost raw in places.

“Likely you got the Scotch-Irish itch.”

“The what?”

“You got lice, young’un,” she explained. “Never had ’em afore?”

He shook his head.

“Bet you got ’em now—just looking at this boat’s crew,” she chided, wagging her head.

“What can I do for ’em … stop this scratching?”

“Burn your clothes, pour coal tar on your hair,” she replied.

“You’re pulling my leg, ain’cha?”

“No—onliest way I know to get rid of them little seam-rats. Nits and graybacks—damn ’em all,” the woman answered.

He swallowed, regarding her carefully, deciding she was serious. “Maybeso I can get something for ’em up to Natchez.”

“Coal tar’s good.”

He flared with anger briefly as he gazed out at the river, watching. “I ain’t gonna put no coal tar on my hair.”

With a warm smile Beulah said, “G’won and get you some of that tar in Natchez. We kin daub some of it on them bites—keep ’em from itching you so bad.”

“Thank … thanks, Beulah,” he stammered, sensing something profound come from her at that moment.

For the longest time she had been staring off downriver as they’d slipped through the gauzy tendrils of gray fog, some of it clinging in her hair as if her head were smoldering. From time to time he caught sight of the river’s edge and the sycamore trees, roots exposed by the eroding bank, high-water mud plastered halfway up the tall trunks. Long gray moss, what some of the rivermen called “Spanish beard,” drooped in great, wavering clumps from the giant branches, dancing gently on the cold breeze.

“We’ll be making Natchez soon,” Beulah finally said. “Get close to Natchez, them others gonna bury the pilot in this river.”

“We been planning on it ever since’t he was killed.”

“He was a good man to you, wasn’t he?” Beulah asked. But without waiting for an answer, she continued. “So was my Jameson. How he stuck up for our three boys what run off from home—stuck up for ’em the same time he was doing all he could to ease my sorrow at their going.”

“They run off, like I done?”

“Ain’t ever see’d ’em since,” Beulah admitted with a sigh. “Once a young’un you’ve tried so hard to keep in the nest gets ready to try his wings—if you don’t step back and let ’em try flying on their own, they can damn sure beat you to death with those same goddamned wings.”

“You watched all of your’n fly off,” he said quietly.

The woman nodded. “And they ain’t come back after all this time, likely won’t ever show their faces again.” Then, turning to him directly, the woman added, “You best send your mama word that you’re all right—”

Shaking his head emphatically, Bass replied, “Don’t want no one to know where I’m gone.”

“You don’t write her word, then you better go see your mother.”

“Can’t do that neither.”

“Your pa?”

He went on staring at the brown water gliding past them beneath the cold gray of the wispy fog.

She said, “Men and their boys—every family has problems.”

“Weren’t just my family,” Titus owned up quietly. “It were everybody wanting me to be something I wasn’t.”

“This what you was meant to be? A riverman?”

“No,” he said. “Not that neither. Something akin to my gran’pap.” He went on to tell her how his family had come into the Kentucky country to settle long ago—how his grandfather never really did settle down like he was supposed to, restless and yearning to move farther west to his dying day.

“There’s men made what’re never meant to settle long in one place,” the woman said. “I saw that in my Jameson, right off. We both just made peace with it—and found us something to do what would keep him moving. Ain’t no wonder to me anymore that a young’un does all he can to escape the labors of the field for a life on the river.”

Heman Ovatt was clambering up over the cargo. “Titus, you best go back and get you some coffee. I’ll spell you at the gouger.”

“Hap that you fellas are ready for breakfast?” Beulah asked.

“We always ready to eat,” the riverman answered enthusiastically as he came up to take the gouger from Bass.

Titus stopped a moment, sensing an immense sadness clinging to the woman here, days after her tragic loss. “You got sons back to Ohio?”

Beulah wagged her head. “Two of ’em the river took,” she replied, staring off. “Them three I spoke of took off, and I don’t have idea one where they’ve gone. But two of my boys, yes—they always been up to Ohio when Jameson and me come home from every one of our journeys.”

“Then you got a place to stay when you get back there.”

“Yes,” she replied. “But you ain’t got a home no more, do you, son?”

He watched her back as the woman moved off toward the awning. Perhaps no more acutely since he’d fled Rabbit Hash had he felt without a home than since Ebenezer Zane was killed. Almost as if he were adrift on the river now himself, but without a rudder or gouger, without a single paddle to use when life tossed him this way and that, very much the way this mighty river shoved and pulled their broadhorn downstream.

Over their heads that melancholy morning hung a pearl button of a sun glimpsed through the thinning fog. The other three boatmen grew more somber as the hours passed and familiar landmarks presented themselves along the eastern shore.

“We’ll be tied up at Natchez before dark,” Kingsbury declared early that afternoon.

Titus said, “Means we’re gonna bury Ebenezer afore that.”

“There’s a place a few miles upriver he liked especial’,” Reuben said. “I figure that’s where he’d want us to let him over the side.”

Ovatt nodded, his face twisting somewhat in an attempt to hide the emotions threatening to overwhelm him.

At the rudder Kingsbury said only, “We get there, I’ll put us over to the east bank and we can all help put Ebenezer to his rest.”

Since passing the Chickasaw Bluffs where they’d first brought the woman aboard, they had made reasonable time coming on down that great river road. Several days after Beulah was rescued, they had pushed past the wide mouth of a river joining the Mississippi from the west.

“There’s some what says that water comes in from the far mountains,” Kirtgsbury stated.

“That river?”

“Call’t the Arkansas, Titus. Some thirty mile on up, there stands a old French village. Leastwise, there used to be when Ebenezer and me went there once of a time,” Kingsbury said as he leaned against the long rudder pole. “Nearby, the Spaniards got ’em a fort. Some folks call the place Ozark Village, other’ns call it Arkansas Post.”

“Spaniards still there?”

With a wag of his head Hames replied, “Naw. Nothing but backwoodsmen now—few hunnerd of ’em. Speak American—though most of ’em got French blood and French names, so it seems.”

Titus gazed off to the west, squinting, attempting to conjure up the lure of that settlement. “What them Frenchies do living off over there?”

“Near as we ever made out, they hunt when they want, trade when need be. And ain’t a one of ’em acts no better’n the Injuns in that country.”

For the longest time Bass watched the wide mouth of that river disappear behind them, trying his best to replace the endless cane and cattail swamp with images of mountains as he knew them from the Ohio River country, those distant high places supplying waters that rushed all the way down to feed the Mississippi.

Just south of the Arkansas they glided past the treacherous Stack Island, and the next day Kingsbury pointed out the “Crow’s Nest”—both at one time havens for Mississippi River pirates. That night they camped north a ways from the mouth of the Yazoo River at a well-known landing spot at Gum Springs in Choctaw country. The following morning they passed below the American Fort McHenry, standing high upon the Walnut Hills that rose along the eastern shore.^* Now surrounded by some well-cultivated fields and a sparse dotting of cabins and girdled trees, these heights in an earlier time had been held by the dominant Spanish with a post they called Fort Nogales. That bold, rising ground proved to be a welcome sight after the last seven hundred miles and many days of monotonous bayou and swampy cypress and sycamore forest.

Still, the river was far from finished cutting a wide swath for itself in that meandering journey to the Gulf of Mexico. South from the Yazoo the Mississippi once again spread its waters through a wide and inhospitable wilderness stretching all the way from Grand Gulf, down through Bayou Pierre and on to the endless swamp at Petit Gulf. Through it all Zane’s rivermen plied those brown waters, passing the sinister places named Devil’s Playground, down to the Devil’s Bake Oven, then on to the Devil’s Punch Bowl, where whirlpools snarled across the surface of the river, forcing even the finest of river pilots to put all their skills and muscle to a test.

But by that last day’s float above Natchez, the river once more moved along with a placid pace, if not became downright mournful, as they drew closer and closer to Ebenezer Zane’s resting place beneath the Mississippi.

“That spot way yonder ’neath the far bluff—ain’t that the one, Reuben?” Kingsbury hollered.

Root nodded, pointing. “That’s just the place I was thinking.”

“Yeah,” Kingsbury replied. “It’ll do just fine. Ebenezer allays thought this was a real purty place every time we come past.”

It could well have been one of the most beautiful spots along the river at the height of summer when the wisteria bloomed in all its purple glory and the dogwood set the hills afire. Even now, after so many freezes had shriveled every leaf and turned the trees from monuments of glory into winter’s contorted, skeletal refugees overlooking this wide bend in the Mississippi, Titus could nonetheless see for himself what beauty Ebenezer Zane might have always found in this place as Hames Kingsbury and Heman Ovatt eased their long Kentuckyboat toward that eastern shore.

Root jumped over the side and hauled the first of the thick hawsers into the shallows, where he stood shivering in waist-deep water to tie them off before clambering back over the gunnel. Beulah awaited him, holding out an old blanket as Reuben got to his feet.

As if struck dumb, Root stood there a moment, dripping and trembling, then took the offering, nodding shyly as he wrapped it around his middle and quietly said, “Thankee, ma’am.”

Clearly the woman saved him any more embarrassment when she turned aside, ducking beneath the awning as Kingsbury moved up among the casks and crates.

“Heman, why don’t you and Titus bring Ebenezer over here?” Hames said. “I figure we ought to put him into the water off the starboard.”

Root nodded in agreement as the two brought the canvas shroud to midship, hefting it atop four large kegs. Reuben said, “Ebenezer never was much of a man for port, was he, now? Allays liked to be on the river, never quite as happy when we was making for to tie up.”

“Thems is fine words to say over a friend, Reuben,” Kingsbury replied, drawing himself up as if about to confront something difficult. “Any of the rest of you have something to say to Ebenezer before we see this through?”

Laying his hand on the canvas shroud bound with rope, Heman Ovatt said, “I just want Ebenezer Zane to know—wherever he is right now—I never met a man I respected more. A man what took me in when no one else on the river would give me a job.”

“Amen to that,” Kingsbury said as Heman stepped back. “You was the sort what was trouble: Ohio born, whiskey soaked, and quick to anger. But Ebenezer didn’t never look at you that way. He said you’d make a good hand. And you allays have.”

“It’s ’cause of him I’m a different man today,” Ovatt replied, then looked over at Root shyly.

With a shrug Root just snatched the floppy-brimmed felt hat from his head and stared down at the shroud. “All I know is I’m a better man for knowing Ebenezer Zane. ’Cept—I do know one more thing for certain—I’m gonna miss him something terrible from here on out.”

There was a short period of silence until Kingsbury said, “We’re all gonna miss him, if’n we ain’t already. Come our walk back home to the Ohio. Come next summer’s float south again.”

“I dunno if I’m coming downriver again, Hames,” Ovatt said.

“You’ll come with us,” Kingsbury replied. “Ebenezer wouldn’t want you to go quitting on us, would he?”

“S’pose he wouldn’t.”

Then Titus felt Kingsbury’s eyes touch him.

The flatboat’s new pilot asked, “You got anything you wanna say afore we put Ebenezer over the side, Titus Bass?”

All of them looked at him, expectantly, even the woman. He stammered a moment, then finally said, “I still figure his dying was somehow my fault.”

“It ain’t,” Kingsbury replied immediately, “and Ebenezer told you that, right after they run us off the beach—told you none of it was your doin’. So you just go and make peace with that. If not for your sake, then you damn well do it for Ebenezer’s memory.”

“That’s right, Titus,” Root stated. “Ebenezer weren’t the kind to hold no grudges agin no man. So he wouldn’t want you holding no grudge agin yourself.”

Bass eventually nodded and said quietly, “I just wish things’d turned out different for us.”

“Life never tells us what it’s gonna do,” the woman said suddenly, surprising them all as she bent to come from the awning to stand among them near the shroud. “We ain’t got no call on life but to go on—no matter what’s dealt us.”

“Them’s true, true words, ma’am,” Kingsbury echoed with no small admiration as he gazed at her. “Thank you.”

“I never had me a chance to say nothing over my husband’s body,” she went on, staring at the shroud. “Not like most women, they get to stand over the grave where the man they loved is gonna lie for all eternity. Never had me the chance for them words.”

“You feel like saying something now—maybe over Ebenezer—what you’d like to gone and said over your own man’s grave?” Kingsbury asked.

With a nod she glanced quickly at Titus. “Jameson and me, we buried one stillbirth, another two that didn’t make their first year, then we finally raised up seven boys—only to see the rivers claim two of ’em. Maybe another three. I seen my share of troubles and woe, I have. My life been far from a pretty thing. But a man what sticks by his friends and cheats no other is a real treasure in this life. Seems to me that my Jameson and your Ebenezer Zane was two of that kind.”

“He was at that. Amen,” Kingsbury said, swiping a hand across a damp, jowly cheek.

Beneath her eyes Beulah dragged the rough wool of that blanket she clutched around her shoulders. “I suppose all we can really say about good men like this’un—what God don’t already know His own self—is that there’s gonna be a big hole to fill in our lives now that this man’s gone. But God, and good men like this’un, expect us just to go right on.”

As her voice dropped off and it got quiet, Titus looked up, finding her gazing at him with those intense, sad, red-rimmed eyes.

“Men like Ebenezer Zane expect you to go right on with what you were bound to do in this life,” Beulah continued.

As her voice died away, the wind gusted, cold and toothy, whipping their coats and flapping the edges of their blankets at them like flags. In the sudden leaving of that wind, the soft slap of water against hard, yellow poplar filled the silent void around them.

“If you fellas are ready to send this man to his rest,” she said, “I’ll say a few words what I remember is always said over folks getting buried.”

Without a sound Ovatt and Root hoisted the upper part of Ebenezer Zane’s body while Kingsbury took hold of the legs. When Titus began to move forward to help, Beulah put out her arm, held him in place beside her, then curled an arm in his as she began to repeat the litany as she remembered it.

“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” she said as the three boatmen hoisted the shroud toward the gunnel. “The Good Lord in heaven awaits thee, noble soul. Fly, fly now—and be quick to sit at God’s feet. Know that your toil is done, and your troubles are behind you now. We who are left behind will remember. We vow to remember.”

Bass watched them roll the shroud off the six-inch-wide plank that formed the top of the gunnel, heard the body splash into the river. By the time Titus got to the side of the flatboat, the gray shroud had darkened, taking on water as it slowly sank with the weights Root and Ovatt had tied to it.

We vow to remember, he echoed the words in his head, peering down with the rest of them as Ebenezer Zane sank slowly beneath the murky brown surface of the river, became a dark, oblong shape, then disappeared completely.

Once more the wind came up, and he had to swipe the hair from his eyes as he pushed back from the gunnel, stood, and moved away to the awning. In a moment more, the rest of them joined him there, all kneeling to warm their hands over the sandbox fire, eyes red-rimmed and the skin over their noses and cheeks flushed with the cold’s cruel bite.

“We’ll be putting up at Natchez in less’n a hour,” Kingsbury said to the woman. “But you’re welcome to stay over the night with us—seeing how you ain’t got no family there to put yourself up with.”

“Didn’t I hear talk of you fellas planning on making a hoot of it this evening Under-the-Hill?” she asked, without raising her eyes to any of them.

“We allays do,” Ovatt answered as he began to hold his right thumbnail over the flame of a candle in one of the lanterns.

“What the devil’re you doing?” she asked him.

“Hardenin’ my fingernails’s all.”

“Whatever for?”

This time Kingsbury explained with a grin, “Why, the better to feel for a feller’s eye strings, woman. Heman goes to gouging with them nails—he can make any bad son of a bitch tell the news! Natchez can be a damn hard town for a man what can’t take care of hisself in a scrap. But just ’cause we go off and have ourselves a hoot don’t mean you won’t have you a place to sleep tonight.”

With a visible shudder she turned away from watching Ovatt harden his thumbnails. “I’m ’bliged,” she replied. “My boys, an’ them others what hired on to work our boat—they never said much ’bout what they done when we reached Natchez, nary what they done at the Swamp when we got on down to Orlins too. Early on I come to figure it all just had to do with a man whoring and drinking, having himself a spree when his boat comes to port.”

Titus peered at those three roughened men, surprised to find them suddenly shy and sheepish in the presence of this woman looking every bit as worn enough to be their maiden aunt, a woman who had just spoken moving words as she watched them bury their pilot—then minutes afterward forced them to own up to just what it was rivermen tied up at Natchez to do.

Poking at the embers with a twig she stirred some more life into the fire, then shrugged a shoulder as she pulled the big coffee kettle from the heat. “I suppose it’s what men are about, and there’s never gonna be no changing it. So don’t pay me no mind. I’m much obliged for your giving me a place to lay my head on your boat tonight.” She picked up a tinned mug and asked, “Any of you care for more of my coffee?”

As for anything remotely resembling civilization in this river wilderness, there were but three sizable outposts of settlement that joined those tiny villages, far-flung trading posts, and the occasional military fort: at the far northern end of the lower Mississippi Valley sat the old French colony, St. Louis; all the way south at the other end of the river sprawled the even larger New Orleans; and between them squatted Natchez—a town more of dubious reputation than of any real note.

Not only could a boatman look forward to some ribald female companionship along with some head-thumping whiskey in the brothels and watering holes that sat at the river’s edge—but there was still even more cause to celebrate. Reaching Natchez meant the most treacherous sections of the Mississippi were now behind them. Sitting where it did on the eastern shore, the town had quickly proved itself an ideal way station where the flatboat crews put in to resupply, rest, and recreate before making the last short run on down to New Orleans.

Long before, the place had been nothing more than a semipermanent encampment of the Natchez Indians. With the coming of the white man the first settlement high upon the bluff overlooking the river was eventually wrangled over by three European countries. First to arrive were the Spanish, followed by the French, and eventually the British brought their influence to bear on this Mississippi port. Ultimately the infant United States came to reign supreme in recent years. Each of those conflicting cultures had added the same full-bodied, international flavor any traveler would find in St. Louis and New Orleans. All told, the entire Natchez district numbered some seventy-five hundred souls, due in large part to the cultivation of the unusually rich soil found on numerous farms and expansive plantations. Yet the town served as the center of more than mere trade—early-day Natchez boasted an extremely varied and exciting social life of theater, balls, and what traveling acts happened by.

The winter sun had set and twilight was slipping down around them as the four boatmen climbed over the gunnel to stand on the wharf, peering past the rickety clapboard and canvas-topped shanties to the lights of the town itself on the heights above.

Kingsbury turned and asked the woman, “You’re gonna be all right here?”

“Got me all I need,” she replied, then gestured them to be off. “Now, get—and have yourselves a hoot. I’ll be right here when you mosey on back.”

“Likely be back afore morning,” the boat’s skinny pilot replied as he turned away with the others.

They pressed into the last throb of that busy wharf, pushing past all manner of those who made the river and this wilderness their home. Here beneath the Natchez hill Bass not only rubbed elbows with many other homespun boatmen and leather-clad frontiersmen, but with Brits and Frenchmen, African slaves and freedmen, along with Indians, Spaniards, Acadians, and Creoles as well.

“What be that up there?” Titus asked, stopping to point up the bluff to the town built on the high ground at a distance of a mile from the river.

Kingsbury stopped with the rest of them right behind Bass, saying, “Natchez.”

“Ain’t we going up there?” Titus asked.

Heman Ovatt explained, “We ain’t allowed.”

“That’s right,” Kingsbury continued. “Rivermen like us get arrested if’n they go up there to the town where the proper folks live.”

Bass looked up the bluff again, then quickly at the collection of vulgar shacks and hovels raised along the wharf in one long, jagged strip. “If’n that’s Natchez up there, then what’s this place down here where they ’llow us to go?”

“This here’s called Natchez-Under-the-Hill,” Kingsbury answered.

That name was not only picturesque, but apt and clearly fitting. Tucked here under the fine houses and rich shops catering only to the most cultured of Natchez residents sat the squalid, low-roofed sheds where the rivermen flocked to celebrate a bawdy and profane life. Above them stood the big houses, all finished off with ornate balconies and ivy-covered piazzas, the town’s streets crowded by handsome carriages, while here beside the river huddled only those monuments to man’s timeless attraction to the varied sins of the flesh.

Kingsbury set the group off again, draping an arm over the youngster’s shoulder to say, “I’m wanting Titus here to have him a look at Annie Christmas’s gunboat down the way.”

“Gunboat?” Titus asked. “What the devil that be?”

“Just what they call a flatboat been left behind by a crew long ago and some working girls took it over,” Ovatt declared.

Bass asked him, “Working girls? Like them at the Kangaroo in Louisville?”

“That’s the idea!” Kingsbury replied. “It’s their floating whorehouse.”

“But why is it called a gunboat?”

“Don’t you go there to shoot off your gun?” Root inquired.

“I didn’t bring me my rifle—”

“Naw!” Kingsbury interrupted with a chuckle. “Didn’t Mincemeat go an’ teach you all about how to use your gun?”

“Yeah,” added Root. “You was locked up with her for all that time—I figured you’d learn’t you couldn’t have you near the fun with your rifle you can have with your gun!”

It came over him slowly as he looked from face to grinning, gaping face in that deepening twilight. “All right,” Bass said. “Let’s go see this here gunboat.”

Ovatt asked, “Maybe you’ll shoot your gun off tonight, eh?”

“Count on it,” Bass replied enthusiastically as they started off down the wharf once more, passing noisy whorehouses, grogshops, card rooms, and gambling dens where laughter and music, shouts and screams, as well as drunken men all came tumbling out onto the cold plank thoroughfare. Here and there a short street ran perpendicular to the single long avenue that corded itself beside the river—streets named: Choctaw, Silver, Cherokee, Arkansas, and Chickasaw, all of them littered with filth, trash, and human excrement. Hundreds of men poured from one dimly lit place to the other, hooting and hollering at the pinnacle of bawdy revelry, while half-feral dogs and other wild creatures slunk back in the dark places and fought wrinkle-necked vultures among the shadows over the rotting garbage heaved right out of each establishment’s front door.

“Here you go, Titus,” Kingsbury said when they finally reached the southern end of the wharf to stand near a long flatboat badly in need of repair.

“What’s this?” Bass inquired as the pilot held his palm open and there laid three coins.

“A picayune.”

“What’s it for?”

“Man needs money to buy hisself a place to shoot off his gun!” Root exclaimed as Kingsbury handed the other two boatmen their picayune—the equivalent of six cents.

“What’m I gonna do with only this?” Titus protested.

Kingsbury snorted a loud guffaw, then said, “Here at Annie Christmas’s gunboat, that there picayune gonna get you drunk, get you a woman near all night long, and a bed till morning.”

“But you don’t wanna let yourself fall asleep, Titus,” Ovatt warned.

“Listen to him,” Root echoed. “Don’t you dare fall asleep with one of Annie’s whores.”

“Why can’t I just sleep it off if’n I take a mind to—like I done with—”

“Ain’t like Mincemeat,” Kingsbury started to explain. “Most of these here gals got ’em steady men they flock with. The women work on their backs and those fellas go gamble off what the women make getting poked by boatmen.”

“So? What’s that mean to me?”

“It means a lot of them gals don’t give a good goddamn about you after they let you poke ’em,” Ovatt said. “You fall asleep, and you’re likely as not to never wake up—at the bottom of the river.”

He glanced down at the three coins in his palm, then clenched them tightly as he asked, “N-never wake up? How?”

Kingsbury slapped a hand on Bass’s shoulder in the way of a big brother explaining sharp realities, “You go to sleeping, that gal you’re with might let in her feller to do the blood work.”

“B-blood work?” He was suspicious they were yanking on his leg.

Root dragged an index finger from one ear, across his throat to the other ear, making a distasteful sound as he did so.

“Or that gal might just be the sort of whore cut your throat her own self!” Ovatt said.

“Like a hog hung up at the slaughter!” Kingsbury added.

Wide-eyed, Titus regarded them all in turn, then blinked and asked, “Why … why all you fellas—and Ebenezer too—let me go off by my own self with that one named Mincemeat?”

“Shit!” Kingsbury replied, rubbing a hand across the top of Bass’s head. “None of us, ’specially Ebenezer, gonna let you go off with some whore what’d open you up a new breathing hole in your neck! Ebenezer Zane was taking good care of you, sending you off with Mincemeat.”

“She’s a good whore!” Root exclaimed.

“Not like none of these here bitches in Natchez,” Ovatt said. “G’won and dip your stinger in their honey-pot, then get on outta there to do some more drinking. Or get your bones back to the boat.”

“That’s the only way, Titus,” Kingsbury warned. “Don’t trust none of them spread-legged bitches here in Natchez. They all likely murdered a man or two their own selves.”

Ovatt agreed, saying, “You just figure that’s why they’re working here, and not up to St. Louie, or on down to Norlins.”

“Likely got runned out of those towns,” Kingsbury said, “or escaped afore they was strung up for murderin’ customers.”

“Ain’t much law hereabouts,” Root said, gesturing this way and that. “Best thing for a man to do is to hang together with his crew when he ain’t humping ’tween the legs of one of them bang-tailed bitches.”

^* Future site of Vicksburg, Mississippi.