Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  “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 t
he 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.”