Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Stand on it!” Zane commanded. “Don’t let ’er throw you off!” Then he flung his voice down at the youngster. “Titus Bass! Crawl up outta there and lay on that gouger with Heman!”

  He started to rise slowly, cautiously, frightened.

  “We need you up there right now, Titus,” Kingsbury urged.

  “That boy ain’t gonna do us no good!” Root snarled.

  “He will too,” the pilot snapped, fighting his rudder. “Get up there now, Titus—and help us get this god-damned Kentuckyboat landed.”

  Clawing his way around barrels and over crates, Titus eventually slid down onto the slippery deck in what foot room there was standing opposite Heman Ovatt.

  “Lay on it!” the gouger ordered.

  Bass hurled himself onto the short shaft of the rudder, face-to-face with Ovatt.

  “You don’t weigh much, do you?” Ovatt grunted.

  “My mam … she always trying to fatten me up. Said … I had me no tallow. Only b-bone and gristle.”

  “Push! Or pull, Titus Bass!”

  Zane hollered above the cry of the wind and the hammer of the rain, “We’re doing it, boys!”

  Titus didn’t allow himself a look right then, able only to feel the lurch and bob of the flatboat’s bottom as it passed out of the river’s main channel, heaving over toward the calmer water near the Ohio’s south shore. By now the mist had become a steady rain, cold as springwater running down the back of his shirt and jerkin.

  “Bring ’er over hard, Heman. Bring it over, Titus Bass!” Zane cried out. “Reuben, bring your oar out and get this’r stern line ready.”

  In less time than it takes to tell, Root had pulled his oar from the hammered surface of the brown water and slid back to the rear of the craft, where he laid a loop of thick oiled hemp over one shoulder.

  “There’s some likely stumps up ahead, Ebenezer,” Reuben suggested. “They been clearing more and more land.”

  “I’ll bring you over and you snag a likely one,” the pilot advised with a grunt.

  As Zane brought the slowing flatboat side-sliding to the shore, Root bent and lunged toward the bank in a smooth, practiced motion. He landed on the shiny grass, his moccasins slipping on the mud. He went to his knees but was up in a fluid motion, ripping the coil of rope from his shoulder to fling a great loop of it around the stump of a long-ago girdled tree.

  “Tie ’er off stout, Reuben!” Zane advised as the flatboat began to ease on past the stump where Root stood knotting the length of hemp as thick as a man’s four fingers.

  At the first straining creak of the stretching rope, it proved certain the huge, oiled knot was going to hold, bringing the stern of the craft closer to the shore as it bobbed on down the bank.

  “Bring it about, Heman! Show the boy what to do!”

  “Push, goddammit!” Ovatt commanded. “Now’s the time to push!”

  Together they plunged the gouger deeper into the water speckled with icy, hammering rain. Beneath him Titus could feel the bow of the boat beginning to sweep around, held firm astern by the one line to their rear, the front of the craft being nudged over by the strong muscle of the river’s current against the gouger and the two men who clung to her.

  “Hames! Take the bowline ashore!”

  Against the steady drumming of the rain atop flat oaken kegs and barrels, against the hardwood crates, he heard Kingsbury grunting up behind him with his burden, listened as the boatman dragged the rope across the top of their cargo, heard him land in the sodden mud onshore. Kingsbury flung a loop once around a second tree stump, and working in concert with the two men straining at the gouger, he steadily took up the slack in the rope, easing the bow into the shore.

  “Tie ’er off,” Zane commanded, stepping away from his rudder pole for the first time in those long, anxious minutes. He twisted from side to side, working a kink out of his back, then tugged down the brim of his shapeless hat before disappearing beneath the awning.

  “You can let go now,” Ovatt said.

  Only then did Titus realize he still had a deathlike grip on the gouger pole. It took him a moment before he could get his cramped fingers to obey his wishes. When they finally came off, he flexed them.

  “C’mon, fellas,” Zane called out, reappearing from the awning. He scooted to the left side of the craft and heaved himself down into the mud.

  Ovatt was next, while Bass was the last to land. His legs felt unsteady beneath him at first, what with struggling to keep his balance on the bobbing, weaving flatboat.

  Ebenezer Zane was beside him, grabbing his shoulder, helping him straighten there on the shore. “C’mon, boy. I owe you a drink. This Titus Bass did fine, did he not, Heman?”

  “He did better’n fine, Ebenezer. He did a man’s work this afternoon.”

  Zane pounded him on the back. “Then a man’s drink it is for Titus Bass.”

  “At the Kangaroo?” Kingsbury asked.

  “Hell, yes,” Zane replied. “There is no better place where we could celebrate this boy’s passage to manhood in Louisville.”

  Twenty families accompanying George Rogers Clark on one of his many forays in the Old Northwest during the Revolutionary War had first settled in the area in 1778. Until Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte, Louisville officially served as the young country’s western port of entry, with headquarters for a single U.S. customs agent. Now some thirty-two years later the town boasted a population of at least five hundred, and growing. Besides the grogshops, alehouses, and inns frequented by the rivermen, there were a score of more respectable hotels and restaurants, as well as two long blocks of shops and stores of all description. The town even boasted its own theater, recently built in 1808, establishing what the Louisville Gazette called a true home for “the golden era of Drama in the West,” where theater patrons had “created a high standard of taste and judgment.”

  But try as Louisville’s respectable citizens might, it was still the river that had created the town, and it was the river from which Louisville drew its sustenance. Here, close to two out of three men in one way or another owed their livelihood to the Ohio flatboat trade. All along the wharf surrounding the harbor pulsed the bustling commerce of boat building and repair, the riverbank crowded with wagon masters loading goods for their trek inland to the heart of Kentucky, from dawn till dark throbbing with the jostle and shove of draymen and hired lackeys.

  Louisville was just about the most exciting place Titus had been in his life. All he had ever dreamed of already, and he hadn’t yet moved a step from Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat.

  “The ever-loving Kangaroo!” Hames Kingsbury sang out prayerfully as they pushed on up the soggy bank. “God, but I hope to lay eyes on sweet Mathilda.”

  To which Zane exclaimed, “That ain’t all you want to lay on her, I’ll wager!”

  All five of them belly-laughed as they strode through the mud into the splotches of hissing torchlight fronting the infamous low-roofed Kangaroo Tavern. Titus stumbled into something, leaping over it as he peered down at the ground.

  “You’ll have to watch where you’re walking,” Ovatt advised, “there’s more of ’em.” He pointed out the half-dozen or more bodies sprawled here and there among the mud puddles shimmering in the torchlight dancing on the breeze outside the tippling house.

  A crude door blew open and out poured three men, two of whom had a secure hold on the third. A burst of noise, squeals of womankind, and sharp gusts of cruel laughter rolled out in their wake. Intent on their business, the two shoved their way right through the boatmen, stopped, and heaved the one between them into the night. Bass watched the man hurtle a good ten feet through the air until he landed facedown in the rutted muddy lane, where he struggled to rise on all fours at first, then gave up and sank back into the mire.

  “Such’ll teach you: don’t never get yourself thrown out, Titus Bass,” Zane warned with a wag of his finger.

  The other three rivermen laughed as Titus’s
eyes followed that pair of monstrous, stoop-shouldered bouncers back into the Kangaroo.

  “Maybe there’s ’nother place—”

  Heman Ovatt snatched him by the arm, Kingsbury securing the other as they set him in motion between them, all four laughing.

  “There ain’t ’nother place holds a candle to the likes of the Kangaroo!” Hames cried as they passed beneath two wavering, spitting torches and plunged into the tavern’s raucous, smoky depths.

  “Man overboard!”

  Titus whirled at the frantic cry of alarm, finding a disheveled riverman perched high atop the huge stone mantel fronting the fireplace, weaving for a moment before he flung himself out into the crowd with abandon. A half-dozen others caught him, some grumbling their curses, many laughing, a few splashing ale on his head as they lowered him to the soppy floor below. There on his belly he thrashed with his legs and stroked with his arms disjointedly as if swimming, worming his way across the floor’s mud and muck in good fashion as more and more of the drinkers continued to splatter ale on the swimmer.

  Titus found the noise almost ear shattering, unable to make out a single voice in the mad, raucous cacophony—

  “Man overboard!”

  Another cried out, causing Bass to whirl and look as he was swept along with his crew. This caller as well flung himself out from the wall into the crowd, which broke his fall, then dropped him without ceremony onto the muddy puncheon floor. But like a great beached carp, this one flopped over on his back and began to mimic something of a crude backstroke. Keeping his mouth open for the most part, the swimmer gaped like a fish as he inched himself along in that worming backstroke, swallowing most every drop of that ale bystanders sloshed upon him from above. Titus watched until the swimmer, his front completely soaked, disappeared among the tangle of legs in the milling throng.

  “Three Monongahela rye for these fine boatmen,” Zane was ordering as Titus clattered to a halt within their fold, the pilot immediately drawing Bass to his side as he held up two fingers on the other hand, “and a spruce beer for me and my young friend here.”

  Three men worked the bar, tapping kegs of ale with great bung starters and mallets, pouring out mugs of the Ohio River’s most famous rye. With a clatter and a slosh their five pewter mugs appeared before them. As the other four all grabbed for theirs, Ebenezer Zane took his in hand and picked up the last, unclaimed mug.

  “Here, Titus Bass. I figure you ought’n go slow—this being your first night’s carouse as a man. That pissant rye these boys love to swill takes some getting used to. Me? I prefer my ale, with a foamy head or no. Potato squeezings or spruce drippings—it’s all the same to me. Drink up, lad!”

  Titus watched the pilot throw back his chin and take a long and mighty draft, his hen-egg-sized Adam’s apple bobbing up and down between those muscular cords in his neck that throbbed beneath his thick beard.

  Taking the mug from his lips, Zane dragged a forearm across his hairy face and whirled on the barman. “Another of that fine ale, my good man!”

  When he had his second and had turned back to his crew, the pilot leaned in to Titus, saying, “Now it’s your turn. Drink the first one fast like I, boy. And the second you can savor the taste.”

  “Swaller? Swaller it all … like you done—”

  “Just like I done.”

  “G’won, Titus Bass,” Kingsbury prodded as the other three boatmen crowded close, faces gaping apishly.

  He figured it would be nothing much to fit his belly around that mug of ale—just a matter of swallowing until he had drained it all. With the first sip he found it not unpleasant, a woodsy taste to it, some effervescent tickling his tongue. Then he was swallowing in good order, barely aware of the boatmen around him chanting their encouragement as he tipped the bottom of his mug up higher and higher. From the corner of his eye he watched them cheer him on, hoisting their own mugs in waving salute until there was no more for him to drink.

  “What’d you think of that?” Heman Ovatt asked with a slap to the back of his shoulders.

  “Yes, you li’l river rat—what’d you think of that?”

  At the sudden, strange, and very female voice, he whipped around to find a skinny woman sliding herself into their group, picking up Kingsbury’s arm to drape it over her shoulder.

  “Ah, Mincemeat,” Kingsbury cried out, his eyes come alive with an inner fire as he seized one of her ample and half-exposed breasts in a huge hand, then clamped her jaw in the other, holding her prisoner while pressing his mouth on hers.

  “I’m next, I’m next!” Ovatt cried, standing right there to press himself against the woman when Kingsbury drew back to take a breath and another swallow of his rye.

  “An’ how ’bout you, Ebenezer Zane? You want your welcome kiss too?” she asked when Ovatt had finished kissing her.

  Still aghast at the woman’s sudden appearance, how she allowed the men to hungrily fondle and kiss her, Titus stood there dumbfounded, his eyes muling as he watched Ovatt reach up to fondle the flesh across the tops of her rounded breasts, exposed as they were all the way down to just above her nipples, pushed up to their full extent by the bodice she had laced beneath them. Skinny as she was, they were about as big a pair as any breasts Bass had seen.

  At that moment it grew warm in the Kangaroo. He became discomforted inside, gazing as he was at her pale, mottled flesh there in the murky, smoky lamplight.

  “Thankee anyway, my sweetness. Mathilda working tonight?” Kingsbury asked as he brought his head up from kissing the woman’s cleavage.

  “Ain’t she working ever’ night?” the woman asked in reply, her full eyes coming to rest on Titus. “After all, she owns this place where you pigs come to rut, don’t she?”

  “Any new girls?” Reuben finally spoke up before he drank at his rye.

  “Nary a one,” she replied. “Mathilda had a signed writ on three more new ones to come downriver from Pitts—but a feller down Natchez way made ’em a better offer.”

  “Bet that made Mathilda a wild one!” Zane declared.

  “Wild? You bet. None of us could live with her for a week after that,” she explained. “Then she up and sent a writ back to Cincinnati for what new girls she could get to come down on the next boat.”

  “When’ll that be?” Root asked.

  She turned to him slowly, her distaste for the man plain as paint on her face. “Be a long time.”

  “What?” Root complained. “There’s boats like ours coming down all the time—”

  She snorted as she took hold of Ovatt’s mug, saying, “Not boats hauling people cargo.”

  As she tossed back some of his rye, Ovatt said, “Settlers going downriver—we see ’em all the time.”

  “Not the same as a bunch of women, now, is it, you mud rat?” she snarled at Heman, her eyes flicking back to the youngster. “Not many wanna take up valuable cargo space with whores, now, do they?”

  “Think Mathilda be happy to see me?” Kingsbury asked as he snugged her tighter against his hip.

  One side of her chemise slipped off a bony shoulder, exposing just a bit more of one breast. Yet she did not take her eyes off Titus. “She’ll be happy to see you. Seeing that you’re one of the few don’t punch her so she’s gotta throw you out. One of you pig rutters gonna tell me who’s this skinny river rat you dragged in with you?”

  “This’un?” Zane replied, slinging his weighty arm over Bass’s skinny shoulder. “Why, this be our new hand. Joined up couple days back on the river. Kentucky side of the river, that is. Like me, the lad’s a Kentucky man: southwest of Cincinnati—where you say them new girls be coming from.”

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  He licked his lips and looked away from her face. “B-bass.”

  “What’s your christened name?”

  For a moment that stumped him.

  “His name is Titus,” Ebenezer answered for him.

  With a bob of his warm head he echoed, “Titus Bass.” Immediately he turned to Zane
to ask, “Can I get another?”

  “Like that, eh?”

  Bass agreed, glad to tear his eyes from the roundness and cleavage of the woman’s flesh. “Tasted real good. Makes a fella thirsty for another.” His head felt warm, the skin on his face burning too.

  And he felt warm low in his belly when his eyes yanked back to look at her.

  “S’pose you go find Mathilda for me?” Kingsbury asked. “You do that, Mincemeat?”

  A loud voice suddenly called out, “You staying with them, Mincemeat?”

  The five of them and the woman all turned to look at the table where a trio of men hard at their cups motioned her back over their way.

  “I’m staying here, Briggs.”

  A second man grumbled sourly, “You was here with us first.”

  Zane slid in front of the woman protectively. “The lady said she was staying with us. There’s plenty others here for the likes of you.”

  “The likes of me?” the third one of the trio cried out like a branded mule. “You’re a fine one—”

  Then the woman shoved back in front of Zane, holding her arms out between the two of them. “Briggs, you and the rest ain’t never met this’un before, have you? If you had, I figger you’d know better. He’s a real snapping turtle—”

  “Don’t look all that mean to me,” Briggs snorted. “Kinda old, ain’cha?”

  “Shuddup, Briggs,” she snarled, slapping a hand against his chest, causing his two companions to guffaw. “Makes no matter, ’cause I’m sure you heard of him somewheres on the river anyway. Eb—this here’s Nathaniel Briggs. Briggs, this here’s Ebenezer Zane.”

  The stranger’s eyes went wide as his mouth stammered, “Eb … Ebenezer Zane, is it?” The color drained from Briggs’s face as he repeated the name.

  “Then I wasn’t wrong: you heard of this here half snapping turtle, half earth trembles, I take it?” Mincemeat asked. “Learn’t what happened last time he tied up here in Louisville.”

  “Some talk of it,” Briggs said, his voice quieter as a few others around them at the crude bar squeezed in closer. “Last summer, wasn’t it?”