Dance on the Wind

14

As much as Root, Ovatt, and even Kingsbury grumbled about the fact that Beulah hung their laundry up on that rope stretched from the awning to the snubbing post at the bow, those freshly scrubbed clothes snapping smartly in the stiff breeze for everyone else on the lower Mississippi to see, the boatmen didn’t really mind at all the idea of having a clean shirt to pull on before they climbed ashore to celebrate their arrival in New Orleans in fine style.

Once she learned they had no extra clothing, the woman had ordered them all to pull off their dirty shirts, right then and there. When the pilot hesitated, then turned in retreat, the woman balled her fists on her hips and glared at him with motherly sternness.

“Hames! You—more’n the rest—need some soap put to that shirt of your’n.”

With a sheepish look he glanced at the others. “I think it’s fine just the way—”

“Give it here.”

He could see the grins and smirks on the rest of that bawdy crew and likely realized he was never going to win against the woman. Ever so slowly did he drag the shirt’s long tail out of his britches and waist belt, then yanked it over his head. As Kingsbury held it out at arm’s length to Beulah, Titus looked at how skinny the man was, all ribs and backbone and shoulder blades, the skin stretched over them like a piece of fine white linen draped over the sharp newels at the top of a ladder-back chair.

She snatched the shirt from him with a look of smug self-satisfaction. “Now that greasy cravat of your’n.”

With a look of fright crossing his face, Hames touched the red handkerchief. “Not my neck wrap!”

“Give it to me.”

“Ah, shit, woman,” he grumped, his bare skin beginning to show goose bumps.

“Won’t take me long,” Beulah explained. “Sooner you let me start on it, sooner I can get it done and dry.”

Reluctantly he untied the square knot and handed the cravat to her by one corner. Beulah took it in her hands, spread it out at arm’s length, and inspected it.

“Just as I thought,” she grumbled. “C’mere, Hames.”

Circling behind the pilot, Beulah raised up the hair that brushed Kingsbury’s shoulders. “You see, boys? I’ll bet you’re all the same as this’un here.”

Titus leaned in close enough to see how the skin at the pilot’s neck was nothing more than oozy scab and raw, angry flesh. “What’s all that from? He sick with something?”

Beulah clucked disapprovingly. “Only thing he’s sick of is taking care of hisseff. He’s been givin’ home and hearth to some verminous critters. These’uns here.”

Holding up the red bandanna Kingsbury had long used as a neck wrap, the woman pointed to the long row of big white lice neatly arranged within one of the folds, each one every bit as big as the hog lice he had seen on the family stock back at Rabbit Hash. Looking like a strand of long white beads, the vermin had arranged themselves in a row with their heads all turned toward the raw skin of the pilot’s neck, feasting away.

“When I get done with your clothes, fellas—won’t be a one of these I ain’t drowned. Then we gonna pick over all your blankets too.”

“What ’bout his neck?” Titus asked, pointing to the raw flesh. “Maybeso we ought’n put something on it.”

Beulah wagged her head, saying, “I don’t have nothin’ no more, none of my medeecins—”

“Most like, Ebenezer has him some liniment or oil you can put on it for me,” Kingsbury said, scooting to lean forward over a long chest, where he began to rummage among Zane’s belongings.

After smearing a thick daubing of some less-than-fragrant ointment Ebenezer kept in a cork-topped clay jar, Beulah proceeded to work up a lather from some river water and half a cake of lye-ash soap she found buried in the bottom of Ebenezer’s kitchen box. The day not really warm enough for any of them to stand around sans shirts, all four pulled on coats made of canvas or wool blanketing. Without a tin scrub board, she instead scrubbed their grimy shirts against the white-oak staves that formed the side of a large water bucket. Titus watched her work, reminded of his own mother, recalling for a moment how Amy washed the clothes of all those brothers and sisters.

By the time Beulah got to Titus’s homespun shirt of mixed cloth, the woman held the garment between two fingers at the end of her outstretched arm, her other hand pinching her nose in mock disgust. After she rubbed and scrubbed the best she could, she would pull his shirt from the soapy water and inspect it—both sides, neck, and cuffs—before plunging it back into the pail for more watery abuse. Again she pulled it out for inspection, then returned it to the gray, sudsy water. Over and over she dunked his sole shirt, then raised it from the pail for a look until it eventually passed her scrutiny. Only then did she drape it over a long line of half-inch rope they had tied for her to the awning support, stringing it all the way forward to the bow checking post.

Of varied tow cloth, calicoes, and linsey-woolseys, the four shirts dripped, drop by drop, before they began to dry, flapping in the cold air above Titus’s head. Nearby Heman Ovatt clacked out a rhythm on a pair of pewter spoons he whacked against his palm and elbow, knee and thigh. Back at the rudder, Reuben Root whistled one of his squeeze-box songs as he steered them through the last few miles of shoals, while the closer they drew to New Orleans, the flatboat traffic grew thick as the strop hair on the back of a hog. Even Hames Kingsbury clanged an iron ladle against the back of a cast-iron skillet while trying his best not to let that big grin of his split his face half-open.

“Damn, but it’s good to get back down here,” the pilot exclaimed with a gush of excitement. “Put all that river behind me.”

“Till May comes round again,” Ovatt reminded them all. “We go and load up a brand-new flatboat with another season’s cargo.”

“We still got us that damn walk back to Kentucky afore we do,” Root said, his dour expression quite a contrast to the healing Kingsbury’s.

“Just a thousand miles—every one of ’em making you hunger for seeing the Ohio again,” Ovatt said.

Hames called out, “Titus—you figure on walking north with us, don’t you?”

Nodding emphatically, Bass replied, “I ain’t staying down here in this country. Nosirree.”

“Good to hear: we can likely use your rifle on the Natchez Road,” Kingsbury declared. “Feed this bunch on our way home.”

Ovatt turned to the youth and asked, “You changed your mind and decided on heading back to your family’s place, Titus?”

He watched the passing of those lacy whitecaps stirred up by the wind like the bobbing of so many white-headed doves before he answered. “Nothing much left for me back there.”

“Maybeso you’d like to join on with us,” the pilot said. “With Ebenezer gone … well, we’re a man short—and besides: you’ve already made yourself one of the crew. Come downriver, twice’t a year with us! It’s a damned fine life for a young’un like yourself.”

As a matter of fact, Titus had already been working that over in his mind these last few days, ever since the night they escaped that mob on the Natchez wharf.

“There’s girls, Titus,” Ovatt said. “You seen ’em too. They come down to the bank to watch you pass. Wave to you. And you can call back to them, vow them of your love!”

“Figure I know what you got on your mind, Heman Ovatt,” the woman declared sourly.

“Just what any youngster like Titus here got on his mind too!” Heman replied.

“We’d like to have you join us,” Kingsbury repeated, getting serious once more. “Ain’t that right, Reuben?”

“It be a life just made for you, Titus Bass,” Root added.

With a slow, undecided wag of his head he finally raised his eyes to look at the crewmen seated here and there about the boat. Then he gazed at the woman one last time. “No. I been figuring on it some—and … this don’t rightly seem the life for me. Not that it ain’t a good life and all. But last few weeks … ever since Ebenezer, them Injuns and all—”

Kingsbury said, “I know just how you might feel, son. After Eb was kill’t … we got you tangled up in that business back at Annie Christmas’s gunboat. But cain’t you see? That was for Ebenezer too, settling a score for the man.”

“We done it for Mathilda too,” Ovatt said.

The pilot seemed to study Bass’s face for a few moments, then shrugged with resignation as he added, “Maybeso there’s too damned much of the wrong kind of excitement on the river for our young friend here.”

“Maybe too damn much …,” Titus began, then sighed and finished, “I ain’t never killed a man.”

“Them red bastards gonna kill you if’n you didn’t kill them!” Ovatt argued.

“Worse’n that,” Titus continued, “I never afore see’d a man die like Ebenezer Zane done.”

“You pay me heed: that’s one thing there’s plenty of in a boatman’s life,” Kingsbury explained. “Lot of dying.”

Ovatt nodded. “But I allays s’posed all that dying went right along with all the living.”

“So what you figure to do, Titus?” Root asked.

With a shrug Bass answered, “Figured to get back to the Ohio, make my way yonder to Louisville, where I was bound away for when I run onto you and Ebenezer.”

“Still got your sights set on finding work there?” Ovatt inquired.

“If I can’t find none, maybeso I’ll get on up to St. Louie eventually. Finally see what that place got to offer a man.”

“The hull damned world, that’s what,” the woman said, stunning them all. “That St. Lou there’s one of the four doors what opens onto the rest of the world, Titus. Don’t you see?”

“Four doors?” Root asked at the rudder.

“Up yonder’s Orlins,” Beulah explained. “That’s the southern door out to the world. A man can mosey on all the way up the Mississippi to find the northern door to them English lands, the lakes and rivers and all that country beyond where it grows mighty cold. Then, from Pittsburgh and Cincinnati country, you head east over the mountains where a body can go to the edge of the ocean, sailing off to just about anywhere.”

Bass listened to her words with not just his ears, but even more so with his heart, pounding as it was. Finally he asked, “St. Louie’s the w-western door?”

“That’s what I hear tell.”

Kingsbury leaned toward her to ask, “You ever heard of what’s out there?”

For a moment she cocked her head to the side, as if trying to pull something from her memory. “Only what I heard when Jefferson’s bunch—them explorers—come back years ago. You see, them other three doors—north, south, and east—they all open onto water. Water’s the way you get to the rest of the world.”

“But not from St. Louie?” Ovatt asked.

“Shit,” Root growled. “Everybody knows St. Louie’s on the river. Sure as hell a man can get west on the water.”

“I s’pose that’s true,” the woman agreed matter-of-factly. “But I heard there’s tall mountains atween St. Louie and the far ocean. Ain’t no river through them mountains what takes you to t’other side.”

Mumbling his unintelligible complaints while he scratched at the side of his hairy face, Root finally responded, “I don’t figure a man got any business going to no place where there ain’t a river to take him. I’m a waterman. Borned beside the river, raised up on it—figure I’ll live and die riding the rivers.”

“If there ain’t a river going there, Reuben don’t figure it’s worth the journey,” Kingsbury explained to Titus.

“Got to admit, Reuben’s got him something there,” Ovatt stated. “I allays found me everything I needed on the river, or right beside it.”

Turning from the boatmen, Titus peered intently at the woman. “You ever hear anything more about that country out there?”

“Only what I hear’d listening to menfolk talk up and down the river after Jefferson’s men come back from that far ocean.”

Bass leaned forward, excitement coursing through him. “They say anything about them mountains?”

“Only that they was so tall they touched the sky,” the woman replied, a look crossing her face that told him she understood. “Mountains higher’n anything we can’t even imagine out there.”

“And goddamned red-bellied Injuns too!” Kingsbury snarled.

“’Thout no big, fine rivers out there,” Root began, “sounds to me like that be country fit only for Injuns, and not at all fit for the likes of civil folk.”

“There gotta allays be a place for Injuns and wild critters,” Ovatt said. “Place where we can put ’em so just plain white folks like us can go on about our business of living.”

“Listen to you!” the woman cried. “Like you fellas was the cocks of the walk, wherever you choose to set down your boots!”

“Damn right—we are that!” Kingsbury shouted exuberantly. “Ever’ last one of us is half horse, half alligator—”

“Don’t even let me ever hear you go on and on about how you can whup up, outride, outdrink and all that better’n any other man alive.”

“We’re rivermen!” Root exclaimed. “By damn, we’re ring-tailed roarers—”

“By bloody damn, you just get us to Orlins,” Beulah interrupted the boatman’s verbal strut. “Then we’ll see if you can get us back north to Kentucky all to one piece.”

Kingsbury leaned forward from his perch to slap her on her ample rear. Whirling quickly on him, she squinted a flinty glare at first, but no sooner did it quickly soften into a grin.

“Why, Mr. Pilot,” she said, cocking her head coyly, “you do appear to be mending quite nicely.”

“I am at that,” Hames replied.

But now the woman doubled up a sizable fist and held it below the pilot’s nose. “But if I ever catch you taking a swat at my behind parts again, I’ll do even worse to you than you got visiting that whore’s gunboat.”

With a wide grin of his own Kingsbury ducked behind his arms as if about to be pummeled. “I hear you, ma’am. Won’t never have me grabbing for a feel of your behind parts no more.”

“Maybe since’t you ain’t making yourself useful steering this here broadhorn—you can grab one of them poles and do us some fishing for lunch.”

“I can do that,” Kingsbury said, starting to rise.

She laid a firm hand on his shoulder and shoved him back down on that rough bench beneath the awning. “And while you’re fishing, mister riverman—suppose you think about how you just might treat a lady proper, and not like one of your whores.”

Hames gazed up into her face, immediately contrite. “I’m sorry if’n I offended you, ma’am. Didn’t mean to treat you bad—”

“Not like them women you pay to hike up their skirts for you!” she said.

Titus listened and watched, amazed—never having heard a woman talk in such a bold-faced manner to a man. At least one who was not a foul-mouthed, hard-case whore.

“Just get to your fishing there, Pilot,” the woman ordered. “And prove to me you’re of some use besides rutting with poxed-up pay-women, making yourself tumble drunk at every river stop, and shoving your way into a fight at the drop of a boot.”

Hames glared, saying, “It’s fish you want, then fish you’ll get, woman.”

By midday Kingsbury had pulled all sorts of creatures from the waters of the lower Mississippi: besides perch and trout, he had hooked some buffalo fish, carp, and sturgeon, along with pike and even a soft-shelled turtle. Over the coals of her sandbox fire Beulah cooked the pilot’s catch, feeding them all until they were ready to burst.

“Maybe you’ll do,” she admitted to Kingsbury as he started from the warmth of the fire, intending to relieve Heman Ovatt at the stern rudder. “Maybe you are the sort of man what can provide for a woman proper.”

The pilot stopped, turned back to look closely at her face, then said, “If ever a man was intending to get himself tied up to one woman, I figure one like you ought to do a man nicely too.”

Bass watched her kneel back over the sandbox fire, her cheeks flushing with the compliment—Kingsbury grinning proudly as he took the long rudder pole from Ovatt.

As Heman resettled himself at the starboard oar, he winked to Titus. “Jesus God—look lively there, young’un. We’ll be tying up in Nawlins afore nightfall!”

New Orleans.

How he stretched and craned his neck to see something of it far down that broad stretch of endless bayou cluttered with cypress where Spanish moss hung eight, sometimes ten feet long, like great gray beards tossing in the wind.

To come here at last.

So he could finally get on with starting back for that Kentucky country … just as soon as they sold off the cargo, along with all the timber in Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat.

He was a thousand times farther away from home than he had ever been and right now was sensing a dull ache with that longing for familiar faces and well-known places and the reassuring smells that told him he was home … but that was purely impossible. There was no longer a home.

He was adrift and free, dancing on the wind.

But before he did return to that faraway Ohio River country, there still lay all those miles of wilderness they had yet to cross. On a road that would take them right through the red savage heart of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations.

Any way he looked at it, that spelled Injun country to Titus Bass.

If he had believed Louisville, and later Natchez, to be bustling, sprawling river ports—Titus was in no way prepared for what greeted him when they neared the levee at New Orleans.

Their Kentucky broadhorn was but one of more than three hundred tied up along the length of a serpentine wharf, boats lashed together three and four abreast. The great clusters of unloaded flats cluttered against the New Orleans wharf reminded Titus of sprawling and forlorn stacks of empty chicken coops. In addition, there were more than a hundred of the bigger keelboats with their low-roofed cabins squatting midship atop their decks.

But beyond them in the deep harbor lay anchored the astonishing wonder that made his young eyes widen and his mouth gape: those tall-masted schooners and other oceangoing vessels ribbed in their dull-white canvas now tucked away high above their decks and crews, massive sailing creatures that rose out of the water at least as tall as three of his pap’s cabins would be if stacked one on top of the other.

Kingsbury’s crew tied up at the far north end of the levee for a seven-dollar fee paid to that dog-faced wharfmaster who plied the waters of the New Orleans harbor in a rowboat propelled by six oarsmen, each one with skin blacker than any Negro Titus had ever seen and all wearing the same smart waist-length jacket with gold braid and brass buttons that glimmered brightly in the Mississippi sun. The six sat quietly, nonetheless watchful, as the man ordered them to tie him alongside the flatboat just come from upriver. Kingsbury and the rest listened from the gunnel as the wharfmaster accounted for the docking fee and held out the possibility of severe penalty for nonpayment.

“We’ll pay,” Kingsbury growled, stuffing his hand into Ebenezer Zane’s satchel of coins. “Ebenezer Zane allays paid what toll was due you.”

“I thought I recognized you,” the wharfmaster replied, his eyes searching the boat quickly, craning his neck this way and that as Kingsbury counted the coins into the man’s beefy palm. “Where’s Ebenezer Zane himself?”

The question was barely out of his mouth when the woman appeared from the awning, his jaw dropping agog in surprise.

“Dead,” Kingsbury declared. “Buried him upriver. T’other side of Natchez.”

Tugging down on the points at the front of his waistcoat, the man stated solemnly, “I’m sorry … sorry to hear that. He was a good man—the best. Well, hmmm. You understand you’ll have to have Zane’s bills of lading for all this cargo if you intend to sell it here to New Orleans.”

“We got ’em,” Kingsbury replied confidently, and stuffed his hand down into a flat rawhide pouch, pulling out a handful of papers.

Without another word the man clambered over the side into his boat and made a small, almost insignificant gesture with one hand. The six ebony oarsmen dipped their wood to water and stroked away along the levee as the wharfmaster settled midship, on about his business.

“Pleasure doing business with you too,” Beulah said as she came to the gunnel and peered after them.

“Seven dollars a day, just to tie up. That’s near robbery.” Kingsbury wagged his head.

“We just be sure to get this cargo sold and off the boat in a couple of days,” Ovatt reminded them optimistically.

“Stop all your fretting now,” the woman snapped at them. “That fee ain’t nothing, nothing at all—not compared to the small fortune you boys are bound to make when you go sell all this: hemp, flour, tobacco, ironworkings, and all.”

A smile slowly crossed Kingsbury’s face. “I suppose you’re right. A small fortune. Yes. Well, maybeso.”

“You’re all gonna be rich men,” the woman buoyed them. “Drink the finest wine. Smoke the finest cigars—not have to chew that poor stuff you boys been sucking on since you pulled me out’n the river. Times gonna change for you now.”

“R-rich men?” Root asked, looking at the faces of the other three crew.

“Even Titus Bass,” the pilot said. “You got your pay coming—”

“Pay?” Beulah demanded. “You three figure on giving Titus nothing more’n regular pay?” She whirled on Bass. “That’s only some fifty dollars for a crewman to come all the way downriver with a Kentuckyboat.”

“It don’t rightly seem fair he gets a full goddamned share,” Root snorted. “Not since’t he wasn’t with us when we put this here boat into the Ohio way up—”

“I don’t ’spect it to be a full share, now,” Titus interrupted with an apologetic wag of his head.

“Wait a minute,” Beulah demanded. “What’d Ebenezer Zane pay you fellas ever’ trip down? He pay only boatmen’s wages? Like every other patroon on the river?”

Kingsbury’s face went more sheepish than the others’ as they dropped their eyes. “Naw,” the pilot answered. “After he sold everything, Eb took his half off the top and split the other half atween all four of us, him included.”

She nodded in wide-eyed admiration, saying, “That’s a damn fine proposition for a boatman, I’ll say. No wonder you boys stayed on with him so many years. Likely you all was making five, maybe six times or more what you’d make working any other man’s boat down the river.”

“We all had us a little piece of the cargo that way, Ebenezer always said,” Hames explained.

“And all of this is yours to sell off now,” Beulah replied. “So to my way of thinking, I say you boys do like Ebenezer done for you: give Titus here what would be one man’s fair split of the boat’s profits, and with all that’s left you can split up atween yourselves. How’s that strike you?”

Root and Ovatt looked at one another quizzically, then both turned in unison to Kingsbury for help. After cogitating on it a few moments, working it over in his mind a handful at a time, he nodded and replied, “Sounds fair; fair to everyone. Fair to Titus ’cause he’ll get better’n a boatman’s wages for the trip … and better for all the rest of us ’cause we ain’t not a one ever had so much to split atween us before! It sound good to you, Titus?”

“I ain’t never … didn’t even count on no money coming—”

“Don’t matter. You earned your money,” Kingsbury interrupted, slapping Bass on the shoulder. “That settles it. What’s fair is fair—right, boys?”

When they went ashore that afternoon for the first time, Titus sensed his excitement swell with every step they took down the meandering levee, moving closer and closer to the city’s central business district. Never before in all those weeks and all the miles Bass had put behind him in coming downriver had he seen such a mix of colors and tongues, dialects and costumes, as there were here on the streets of New Orleans. Besides gaily dressed Indians from the region’s various tribes, Bass jostled against pale-skinned foreigners from faraway European principalities, coffee-colored visitors from a host of Caribbean islands, as well as stopping dead in his tracks to watch long lines of half-dressed Africans—some dull-eyed with privation, others wide-eyed with fear at certain death—each one as dark and shiny as charred hardwood glistening after a rain, all of them chained together with massive iron shackles, their feet bound two by two, led along with the accompanying beat of a drummer, perhaps even a fife or two adding a lively air above the sad procession of human cargo making for the middle of the marketplace, where the Africans would be offered up—man, woman, and child alike—to the well-heeled bidders who journeyed here to this slave market from throughout the gulf coast.

Even now near the end of a busy day, slave traders cried out in voices shrill and falsetto, bass or soprano, announcing what they were buying. Each barker screeched or sang louder and louder to outdo his competition as the hawkers moved along through the throbbing mass of upriver boatmen, local stevedores, and sailors come from ports across great oceans.

Here in the market below the trees where the grass moss hung like tatters of dirty linen, the autumn air did not move near so well within such a crushing mass of bodies. It was then that Titus began to smell people. As he thought on it, he could not remember the last time he had been confined in a crowd, forced to smell the sweat and stink of other folks—but, surely, it must have been only last summer. Back in Boone County. Perhaps at the Longhunters Fair, where so many gathered. Yet nothing at all like this.

Back upriver at the ports on the Ohio, the commerce of a few prosperous communities, perhaps a few states at best, was all that was conducted. Yet here lay the crossroads of many cultures, many countries, all bringing their wares to this southwesternmost port of an infant nation.

The smells of these people from different lands mingled now with the fragrances of exotic spices, the hearty tang of generous quarters of beef, veal, and pork, along with headless poultry and monstrous, glassy-eyed ocean-going fish, all hung in the public market that crowded most of the levee’s length, every morsel baking beneath the autumn sun, crusted with clusters of flying insects. In addition, from the backs of their carts some vendors hawked wild ducks and game from upriver in the Indian lands, while others sold what they held captive in their nearby cages: live turkeys, ducks, and geese, as well as varieties of barnyard fowl. As well, those men from upriver could purchase such exotic wares as packed vermilion from the Orient, French girdles of fine silk, embroidered shirts of Spanish linen, tiny round looking glasses, and dainty slippers for the tiniest of women’s feet. Here at New Orleans the world came knocking at America’s door.

On the docks lay a dizzying maze of goods just off-loaded from the downriver flats. Most Kentucky boatmen ran what they termed a “straight” load—consisting of one product easier to load, maintain, and unload en route. Things like pork, flour, coal, hay, and even cordwood. Fewer preferred a “mixed” load, hauling what they could buy cheap and sell for a considerable profit upon reaching New Orleans. Here on the wharf sat crates and kegs and casks of potatoes, dried apples, rolled cigars, lime, and tallow, very important to a lardless community. As well, the boatmen dodged around stacks of millstones and sprawling bundles of pig iron and corn brooms. Tobacco was a favorite of the Kentucky shippers: cured leaf purchased in Cincinnati or Louisville for $2.00 American for a hundredweight would increase in value to $9.50 by the time it reached the end of the line.

Everywhere was a splash of color and texture, with all the fruits and vegetables displayed at the top of open sacking or in huge wagon-borne boxes: all manner of melons, cucumbers, and Irish potatoes, both red and brown, along with the yams and sweet cherries, plums, and strawberries. Initially nervous at stealing—no matter how trifling—Titus nonetheless followed the example of the other boatmen as they threaded their way through the maze of vendors and displays, snatching up a treat here and there when they passed a veranda where no one was watching. Quickly stuffing their stolen treasure between their lips, sucking noisily, and commenting on the relative merits of the various purloined wares—finishing some while tossing the rest beyond the levee, where the refuse landed among that garbage floating on the chocolate-colored surface of the grand old Mississippi.

Originally founded by the French in 1718, New Orleans likely boasted a population of some ten thousand souls late in 1810. While the great fire of 1788 had destroyed nearly all of the original buildings, those tile-roofed wood and brick houses that arose from the ashes couldn’t help but impress even the most cosmopolitan or international of travelers. A constantly expanding dike protected this low-lying city, that dike ever in need of repair. Within the confines of the old colonial port, New Orleans had long ago divided itself into three sections: Spanish, American, and the dominant French community. In a city French by birth and French at its marrow, the French inhabitants rarely dealt with other residents save for matters of business. At the center of town stood the grand cathedral, the town hall nearby, as well as a convent, hospital, and public market house, in addition to a large complement of army barracks and a notorious prison, which was used by the local constables for the many, many troublemakers who haunted the city’s disreputable and world-infamous “Swamp.”

Here all manner of music screamed for attention from every open door as the four boatmen muscled their way along the crowded, rutted, garbage-strewn streets to reach that most dangerous yet ultimately alluring section of New Orleans where few streetlamps glimmered. As the sun sank from the sky, life in the Swamp grew more animated. Bustling billiard rooms and brothels, overflowing gaming houses and watering holes, the doorway of every public place teeming with those moving in and those coming out, along with those who shouted, barking to entice passersby with the prospect of whiskey, or women of all hues and colors, proposing that sailors come within for the sheer fun of unbridled debauchery now that they had reached this famous port.

“You never wanna go in there,” Heman Ovatt warned.

Titus stared, mule-eyed, at the oversize barker waving, dancing, shimmying all his rolls of fat while chattering to all at once in the doorway to a card room. On each side of the door was painted a brightly colored hand of cards.

Bass asked, “Why not?”

“Swindlers,” Ovatt said as if it hurt his tongue to have the word cross it. “Steal a man’s money and throw him in the street with their cheating games. And the girls in some of these places ain’t there to pleasure a man, neither.”

“Then what for?”

“They just help get a man drunk. Help him drink up his likker so others can see to it he loses his money at their swindling tables. And that poor turtle won’t even have a chance to get his pants down and climb a’tween their legs a’tall. Not in that sort of place. Stay close to us, young’un. And don’t dare let yourself get hauled into one of them dark dens.”

Dogs snarled at one another, fighting over the mounds of filth tossed from the many kitchens that lined these muddy, wheel-rutted, hoof-pocked streets. Men dead drunk lay propped here and there against the buildings, sleeping off their excesses, most with their pockets already turned inside out by casual thieves who leisurely worked over their unconscious victims. Not one of those drunks still boasted a pair of boots on his feet, most already stripped of hat and coat, perhaps a fancy shirt or sash—anything that might bring a thief a few pennies, ha’pence, shilling, or doubloon in exchange. The unwary and stupid proved themselves fair game.

In front of one busy saloon a large ring of people danced and cavorted in the lamplight, flowing this way and that in a great circle in time to the music of a fiddle and a concertina, along with a third man clanging out a steady rhythm on the bottom of a brass kettle.

Across that narrow lane from the revelers half-dressed women leaned on their elbows from open windows on both floors of a two-story brothel, many drinking and smoking expensive meerschaum pipes as they conversed with those below in the street. Flesh advertised because flesh was for sale. Necks and shoulders bared, breasts all but spilling forth from skimpy, wispy turns of cambric and calico, some of it trimmed with lace. Titus stood agog as one woman caught his eye, beckoned him over as she leaned out, her exposed and pendulous breasts hanging like fat udders craving a man’s fondling.

He looked over, staring, unbelieving at their size.

“Get along here, Titus,” Reuben snarled, snagging Bass’s arm and yanking him away from the whore’s outstretched arm. “We ain’t here tonight looking to find a knocking shop for you. Think back to the last time you had diddling on your mind—we nearly got us all kill’t.”

Then Bass remembered Annie Christmas’s gunboat. Natchez, and that mob intent on something unspoken, but murderous all the same. Recalled that bloodied scene: those dead men and the whore Kingsbury had gutted. Thinking on the look in those yellowed eyes, the dangerous, feral fear chiseled across the shiny black face of that big, smooth-headed slave who had worked the bar for Annie Christmas.

“Hey, you there: Kentucky boy!” the bare-breasted whore called out in singsong, lisping slightly what with missing some of her front teeth. She waved, tilting her head and lifting one of her breasts, beckoning him to her window. “C’mon over here and show me what it is all you Kentucky boys know about a woman!”

“That’s Madame Laforge’s place,” Reuben declared, tugging Bass away from the window. “You go in there—a feller like you won’t ever come back out!”

“W-why … they likely to kill me in that place too?”

The boatman snorted. “Hell, no! Not in there! Madame Laforge’s girls just hump a young’un like you till there’s nothing left but your moccasins!”

With a shudder he let Root turn him away, hurrying past the gay dancers to duck within the saloon behind Kingsbury and Ovatt. This mingling of dialects and tongues, a cacophony of odors and aromas that assaulted his nostrils as they pierced the lamplit gloom of that teeming grogshop, were enough to make Titus believe he had entered a whole new world. This could not be part of the United States.

“Lookee there,” Heman Ovatt cried out, indicating the bar where stood a long line of customers, most of whom were copper-skinned Indians and indigo-eyed freedmen, “drinking just like they was white men.”

“You of a sudden got something against a Negra having hisself a drink?” Kingsbury asked, slamming an open palm into Heman’s chest.

Ovatt shook his head. “Naw, I s’pose not—just as long as they don’t drink my share.”

“You ever see a Injun drinking?” Root asked Titus.

“Nary a slave neither,” Bass replied.

“Them ain’t slaves,” Kingsbury explained. “Them’s the Negras bought themselves their freedom, or had it bought for ’em by their owner.”

“Still ain’t never gonna be like a goddamned white man,” Ovatt grumbled.

“Negra works his job, same as you and me,” Reuben began. “How you figure that’s so bad?”

Shrugging, Ovatt declared, “Don’t know what to think about it. I guess I just figured there’d allays be slaves, and there’d allays be those what owned slaves. It were the way of things when I was growing up—simple as that.”

Sliding his arm over Titus’s shoulder, Kingsbury said, “Down here things aren’t near as simple as they likely was for you back home. Now, fellas—we ain’t having ourselves but a couple of drinks tonight before we get on back to the boat and the woman. We all need our heads clear tomorrow while’st we sell our cargo.”

“Just two drinks,” Reuben repeated, looking at Titus. “Then we’ll go.”

Then Ovatt turned to Bass. “So I s’pose that means Reuben and me gotta keep a eye on Titus here, just so he don’t go getting in any trouble with no fat whores this time!”

“Ah, leave the young’un be,” Kingsbury protested as they reached the long, crude counter and waited for one of the bar lackeys to amble over. “Ain’t his fault them two yellow-striped back-stabbers walked right onto Annie Christmas’s gunboat when they did. Young’un was just there to get hisself diddled.”

Ovatt turned to the pilot, asking, “Ain’t we gonna visit none of them knocking shops cross the way this time down, Hames?”

“Back to Natchez, taking care of your pizzers near got us all killed,” Kingsbury said as a barman approached. “So we get our work done, you just be sure this time you have your fun with some gals what won’t try to lift your purse or slit your throat.”

Came the bored question, “What’ll it be?”

Kingsbury replied, “A goodly portion of your finest phlegm-cutter for my crew, good man!”

“Lemme first see the color of your money,” advised the wary barman.

Onto the bar the pilot promptly hammered down his hard money.

“Don’t want none of your usual stuff,” Ovatt demanded. “Only your best antifogmatic will do for us’n!”

“Twenty shillings a bottle,” the barman said, sweeping up what he needed from the scattering of coins. All manner of specie was welcomed in trade anywhere along the river, but no more so than in New Orleans itself, where a brief roll with a woman would cost no more than a mere fivepence.

“Just have you a look at these, Hames,” Reuben complained a few minutes later as the mugs and bottle were slammed down before them and the raucous noise swelled around them. “These are all coarse frolickers and braggarts what ain’t got no bottom! Hell—give us a chance and we could drink the balls off any of ’em!”

Instead, the four did as they were ordered and drank slowly at their green bottle of smooth corn whiskey, something of a pleasant change from their fillee of Monongahela rye that had been their mainstay on the trip down—that daily ration usually no more than a gill, or quarter pint. Why, to pick up and leave these riverside grogshops and beer-sties before he had himself a head of alcohol-powered steam under his belt went completely against character for most any Kentucky boatman. More often than not for those who reached New Orleans after a long, ofttimes monotonous, sometimes invigoratingly dangerous journey, it seemed the greatest desire was to determine who among them could swallow the most liquor, whoop up with the most abandon and brawling, and carouse with one whore after another until the peep o’ day. After all, a riverman must always drink his full share, or he might well catch what their breed chose to call the “dry rot.”

Come now to this most southern port of call, the watermen did their best to live up to that compelling reputation they had acquired: the “alligator-horse”—a hard-drinking, lawless, straight-shooting, crude, and ferocious fighter—the ultimate drifter.

But with that evening still young, they devotedly followed Hames Kingsbury from the rambunctious Mad Dutchman, threading the noisy, bustling alleyways, past lamplit corners, making for their flatboat secured at the far end of the levee.

In the midst of the marketplace, where vendors were closing their shacks and shanties in the murky twilight, Reuben dropped back a bit to walk beside Titus, where he whispered, “I truly do believe Kingsbury’s gone soft for that woman we drugged outta the river.”

“She seems a nice enough woman,” Bass replied.

“Was a time it didn’t matter to Hames how long we all stayed out the night afore Ebenezer was to sell off his cargo,” Reuben explained. “Truth is, Hames was one alligator-horse what’d howl all night. A real damned snapping turtle! So tell me now: ain’t it strange how a woman can change a man?”

“I … s’pose it is,” Bass replied as Kingsbury hurried them all along.

Indeed, it was likely very strange for the three veteran rivermen from the Ohio country to be plying their way back to the boat so early on their first night come to New Orleans. After all those downriver miles, most new arrivals had a spree to get out of their systems, every bit like men who had wandered too long in a wilderness, making stops only at Louisville, Natchez, and eventually here to slake their thirst for strong drink and their appetite for soft-skinned women. Most of the commerce in the Swamp, that dangerous section of New Orleans catering to the rivermen, relied primarily on satisfying every last one of those intense hungers magnified by the long downriver journey for those half-feral American frontiersmen. Truly, the watering holes, whorehouses, and gambling dens here on the lower Mississippi helped the river live up to its reputation as “the spillway of sin.”

Without hesitation the fun-loving, hospitable Creoles and Acadians of New Orleans opened their arms to all their visitors, gladly providing for the rivermen what those visitors wanted most. So warm was that welcome for the lusty boatmen that many Americans decided to stay on after cargo and boat were sold. A good number took up residence, never to return to the states from which they originally hailed.

Despite the hospitality of the longtime residents, Creole mothers in these parts nonetheless commonly scolded their children with the oath, “Toi, tu n’es qu’un mauvais Kaintock!”

“You, you’re nothing but a filthy little Kentuckian!”

The wharf and levee this night were alive around them with crowds and music, laughter and torchlight. They found the woman sitting atop a cask near the awning, where she could watch the bustle of New Orleans after dark.

“Beulah?” Hames called out.

“That you, fellas?”

The four of them scrambled over the gunnel one at a time.

“Thought you’d make it a late night,” the woman explained as she eased herself over by Kingsbury. “Our crew always did.”

“We got us a shitload of hard work come early in the morning,” the pilot explained. “After that these fellas can have their fun.”

She watched the skinny boatman move past her, then asked of his back, “And what about you, Hames? What you gonna do for fun now you come to Orlins?”

He stopped, but without turning around, Kingsbury shrugged, saying, “I been to Nawlins many times. Ain’t nothing new I gotta see. Ain’t nothing new I gotta do. Maybeso a man comes to a point where he’s had him enough of the bad whiskey and humping on them bang-tails.”

She replied softly, “Maybe a man comes to where he figures he wants a little more outta life’n what he’s already had so far.”

“I say we split the money up afore we set off for the Ohio,” Heman Ovatt suggested.

Titus could see in the boatman’s eyes some hint of what he himself felt inside at that moment. The four of them and the woman stood in a cluster at the far end of the levee, watching three strangers release the hawsers, wheeling them in on that crude capstan as they set off on that very flatboat which had carried Ebenezer Zane’s crew down the Ohio, on down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

“Maybe that ain’t such a bad idea you got,” Kingsbury replied. “That way I don’t have to watch over it all by myself.”

Reuben nodded enthusiastically, licking his lower lip with a pink flick of his tongue. “I figure each of us watch out for his own share.”

“Too much for one man to carry, anyway, ain’t it?” Beulah asked.

The pilot held up the skin sack filled with heavy coins, then patted, with a muted rattle, the five other sacks he had weighing down the pockets of his greasy hide coat.

“I do believe it is. I ain’t no packmule,” Hames replied. “And sure as hell don’t wanna carry all this up the Natchez Road by myself.”

“Let’s divide it!” Ovatt cried.

“Not here,” Beulah said. “I gotta tell you that’s more money’n I ever seen—and I been on the river longer’n any of you fellas.”

“Ebenezer made sure he loaded his boat this time down with cargo what’d bring top dollar here in Nawlins for the season. Shame he ain’t here to see just how much it brung him.”

“He allays carried the money north hisself—in belts he wore under his shirt,” Ovatt stated. “Don’t know how he stood up under it all, though.”

Titus turned aside a moment, watching their flatboat slip away down the wharf, under the control of its new owners—men who bought flatboats reaching New Orleans, taking the vessels to their woodyard on the levee, where in the shallow water the boats were knocked and sawed apart, the hard-grained yellow poplar from those northern forests sold plank by plank, foot by expensive foot to those who could afford to build their homes and shops of the very best money would by. Selling off that long flatboat Ebenezer Zane had built for him at the mouth of the Ohio in Pittsburgh was the last thing holding them there. The long trek north could now begin.

Over the last week their cargo had gone for more than any of the veteran rivermen could have imagined. The massive coils of thick, oil-soaked hemp rope taken on in Louisville went first. Then the northern flour, first sifted and checked for weevil larvae and other pests before stevedores rolled off those casks for the buyers. After that the crates of Kentucky tobacco leaf were inspected and sold among four competing middlemen, each of whom had an overseas buyer in the markets in Europe. And finally came the middlemen interested in looking over the kegs and casks of Kentucky and Pennsylvania ironmongery: candleholders and chest hinges, door latches, hasps and all manner of window hardware, every last fire-hardened piece of it hammered out somewhere along the northern frontier of the Ohio River country.

Seven days it took them to arrange for the sale of everything. This strange, new, convoluted process began by their searching out Ebenezer’s longtime buyers for certain goods, scouring the levee for still others, bringing those savvy negotiators to the boat one by one to let them pore over the goods brought down from the Ohio country, and offer their best price for what they wanted most. There followed considerable discussion and ciphering among the three boatmen, arguing over how they might wrestle the best deal for every cask, keg, and crate of Ebenezer’s cargo.

After the second buyer made his offer on the entire lot of their flour that first day of dickering, the boatmen even turned to Titus for help sorting through the maze of numbers for them.

“Why me?” he asked anxiously.

Kingsbury’s brow furrowed. “We ain’t none of us been to school in many a year—I just figured you’d know more about such things and wouldn’t mind working out things on paper for us.”

“I …”—and he swallowed hard with no little fear, forcing out the admission—“I don’t remember much about how numbers work and such.”

It was the truth, plain and simple: he could recall practically nothing of the mystical world of ciphering.

In bewildered frustration Kingsbury turned to the woman.

“If you’re sure you’ll trust me,” Beulah replied without hesitation.

With a glance at Titus the pilot said, “You know how to work your numbers?”

“See there?” she snapped at him. “Just goes to show you don’t trust me.”

But Kingsbury was as quick to answer, “We’ll trust you—just figure it out for us. Cipher what the offers mean for all them ropes. An’ what that fella said he’d give us for that whole lot of flour.”

From then on Beulah stood foursquare in the thick of the bargaining, selling, and in counting the hard money the buyers brought in pouches, all manner of specie: Spanish doubloons, French guineas, and sometimes even American silver. Money that had a real heft to it, cool to the touch, substantial. More of it than Titus thought he’d ever see in his whole life.

And now he watched the woman count out his share into his palm. More into his other palm, until he was sure he could hold no more in his hands. Into a skin pouch he poured his treasure, then dropped it inside his shirt, patted it. Maybe this was what it took to feel like a man. Not just the liquor and women—but to feel as if he was a real man like his father, earning a living. This long trip downriver had earned him a small fortune.

“I’m gonna show you boys what you ought’n do with your money,” Beulah said that night as they settled into a small second-story room above a noisy gambling house at the edge of the Swamp. Against the walls lay pallets made with coarse hemp, old comforters for padding, and a wool blanket.

They joined her to sit squat-legged around a flickering grease lamp and some wax candles at the center of the room while the woman passed out four needles.

“You get all of these out of Ebenezer’s plunder?”

Nodding her head, Beulah answered, “They was in his box on the boat what I saved. Them and this thread here.”

She gave them each a long strand of linen thread to start them out, showed them how to lick it before slipping it through the eye of their needle despite their coarse, callused, clumsy fingers. Then she turned to their youngest member.

“Titus, I want you go over in the corner and take your britches off.”

All four of them looked at her as if she had just whacked them all up alongside their heads with a snag pole.

“G’won, now. Put that blanket round you, if you’re scairt to lemme see you in your woolens.”

No one said a word as Titus crawled over to his pallet, laid the wool blanket over his legs, and loosened the buttons on his britches. When he had kicked them off his feet, Bass slid his rump back to the circle and handed the pants to her.

“Now watch what I’m gonna show you on the young’un’s britches so you can get started doing the very same thing on yours.”

Having peeled both legs inside out, the woman carefully sliced open the waistband. She pushed in a few of the youngster’s coins before knotting her thread and beginning her repair.

“Here, son,” she said, handing him the britches in one hand, the needle in the other, “now you keep on with it and get all them coins of your’n sewed away outta sight.”

“Ouch!” Reuben cried moments later as he began. He sucked on a bloody finger. “Goddamn! I ain’t s’posed to be doin’ such woman’s work as this.” He flung down his britches in disgust. “Rest of you can play like you’re a tailor—”

“So you want everyone you meet ’long the road home to know you’re carrying all that money, is that right?” Beulah asked.

“That’s my concern. T’ain’t none of yours!” Root snapped.

“Damn well is my concern,” Kingsbury said. “You go letting folks know you’re carrying all that money—they’re gonna rightly figure we’re carrying all of ours too.”

“Most folks coming north from Orlins gonna be poor—but ’nough of ’em gonna be rich,” Beulah explained as she leaned over to hand Reuben the britches he had flung down. “Folks know if you’re on the Trace, you either gonna be rich from selling cargo downriver … or you’re poor as a church mouse, with nothing but the clothes on your back and a hankering to get back home fast as you can.”

“So that’s just how we gotta look to folks, ain’t it?” Ovatt asked.

“Like we’re poorest of the lot, and ain’t worth the time of no robbers to shake us down for the lice in the seams of our old, wored clothes,” Kingsbury added.

“You fellas all got your pistols, don’t you?” she asked, her eyes touching each one of the four.

“Only thing you let us spend our money on today,” Root grumbled.

“G’won and throw your money away like you fixed on doing at Natchez: whores and whiskey—just to get your throats cut.”

“Aw, shit,” Root said sourly. “This damned woman’s right again.”

“I wanna make the Ohio country with my fortune,” Kingsbury declared. “To do that, we gotta be smart and use our money only for food, some new blankets, and these pistol guns we bought us for our journey. We go off buying too much fancy things—folks can tell we got money just by looking at us on the way home.”

Ever since that morning when they had moved from gun shop to gun shop looking to buy enough weapons so that each of them would have a pair of pistols, including the woman, Titus had kept his tucked in the old sash tied at his waist. As he stuffed coins into the waistband he was sewing, he touched those pistols where they lay beside him. It reassured him now, to have such power—the longbarreled, big-caliber pistols, in addition to his grandpap’s rifle. He let his chest swell again as it had many times this day, just to think how he would turn away any would-be highwaymen by simply pulling out his weapons. And once more Titus practiced that determined look he was certain would turn any thief’s knees to water when they laid their eyes on him.

He was still dreaming on how he would convert robbers to cowards on the Natchez Trace when Heman Ovatt nudged him awake the next morning in that cold room they all shared.

“Them wagons ain’t gonna wait for us,” Root said as Titus came up onto an elbow slowly.

“Time to go,” Kingsbury said as he stood, slinging over his shoulder that pair of blankets he had rolled into a tube, tied at either end with a leather cord.

Titus’s stomach complained with a fading whine as he yanked on the second of his moccasins. “We got time for breakfast afore we catch up them wagons?”

Beulah shook her head, patting the big pouch that hung at her hip, suspended over her shoulder. “No, but I got us some biscuits and hard-meat from last night’s supper. It will do once we get rolling north.”

Leaving their tiny room, the five hurried into the cold mist and down the outside steps that were braced into the back wall of the gambling house. A few yards behind the brothel next door they stopped among the trees where three outbuildings were stationed. Titus was the last to have the chance to duck out of the cold dawn mist and settle himself on the plank with that hole sawed out for him to nest upon. While it was dry in there, he had to admit the air damned near choked a man. In enough of a hurry to breathe some better air, he shuffled outside, pulling his britches up. In the chilling mist he got them buttoned, shifting the new and unaccustomed weight of the waistband while he retied the belt sash.

Through the litter-clogged streets of New Orleans they hurried as the mist became a chilling rain. Among the heaps and mounds of garbage, children fought for any edible morsel, every one of them dressed in their tattered frocks, muddy and barefoot, noses running and eyes red and matted in disease. Ragged-eared dogs, soaked and shivering, slunk back in the shadows of the alleyways. Along those dark passages the boatmen and Beulah hurried, watching and listening for windows that would open above them, chamberpots emptied by the oblivious tenants on any unsuspecting pedestrians below.

Titus smelled the wagon yard a full two blocks before they reached the freight district—mules and oxen steaming in the downpour, the smell of fresh dung and old hay. Arriving at the proper yard just as a sheet of oiled canvas was being lashed over the walls of the last wagon, they found the head teamster, who looked them over, then held out his open palm.

“When you wasn’t here right away, I thort you’d had you a change of mind,” said the moon-faced, red-nosed man.

“We’re here, and we’re going,” Kingsbury replied, glancing down at that open hand suspiciously. “We done paid you already.”

“That was for my boss,” he said, an ingratiating smile seeming to cut that bare-shaven round face right in half. “This morning you pay me.”

“We had us a deal—”

“You had a deal with my boss.” The wagon master smiled, snapping his fingers, then opening his palm once more. “He just owns the wagons. I’m the man what sees they get to Natchez and back with the goods.”

“I wanna talk to your boss—where’s he?”

That smile fading quickly from the moon face, the wagon master turned and began to step off. “Get yourself another ride north.”

“Wait!” Beulah cried, lunging forward to grab the man by the elbow. “What do we owe you?”

For a long moment he looked down on the small woman; then the smile returned as he peered back at the four men who stood in the rain, small puddles growing at their feet. “Ten dollar each ought’n be about right.”

She let go of his elbow, looked back at Kingsbury quickly, then shook her head. “We ain’t got that kind of money.”

“Don’t tell me that crock of horsepuck,” he growled, and laughed. “You’re going north, back to home. Got you all kinds of money—”

“Five dollars each of us,” she wheeled and interrupted with a snap. “That’s twenty-five dollars for you. And I’ll wager you ain’t seen that much money for your own self at one time in many a month.”

For a second the heavyset man was startled by her words; then his smile broadened and he licked his bottom lip. “I ain’t in the business of arguing over money, ma’am. Ain’t nothing for us to settle here. All you gotta do is get out your ten dollars for the each of you—”

“Five dollars,” she snapped at him again, putting one finger against his chest. “We don’t go, you don’t make no extra this trip north. That’d be a real shame.”

Cocking his head, he licked his lips again and let the rain drip off the floppy brim of his cheap wool-felt hat a minute longer, then said, “Eight dollar.”

“Six.”

“Seven.”

“Six,” she repeated adamantly.

“Awright,” he grumbled, holding out his hand again, this time toward the woman. “Six and a half.”

“She ain’t got the money,” Kingsbury declared as he shuffled forward in the mud. “I do.”

Eyes dancing, the wagon master watched the coins clink into his hand one at a time, smiling with more largesse than ever. “Just figured she’d be the one to have the money, I did,” he clucked, “the way this female panther ’pears to have just about all the brains and balls in your outfit.”