Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  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.”