Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  Five nights later near ten o’clock the crust of the earth trembled once more. Waterfowl clacked and squawked overhead, afraid to put down and roost as they were scattered to the four winds in their fear.

  Then again the next day, December 17. Once more the banks caved in, carved away by forces stronger than the rivers that reversed direction in their beds. Great chasms splintered open across forest and field—raw, gaping lacerations in the earth that drew the curious and the frightened and the truly awed in the weeks and months to come—brought there to stare and consider. And when folks returned to the river, they always found it foaming, littered with a tangle of drift timber and uprooted trees. The thick forests were now a maze of sundered stands of maple, elm, oak, and beech. Those caught in more open country had witnessed the earth undulate in regular waves advancing at close to the pace of a trotting horse. In those first few days following the initial quake, there were times when the day became all but dark as the night, times when the sun failed to show its face, hidden behind a yellow pall, a haze wrought of dust and fires and hell on earth.

  By Christmas many folks had begun migrating away from that tormented land. Where they were bound for sure, they did not know. But word already had it that the worst of things had devastated the region south and west from the mouth of the Ohio. Best to head back east and north, they figured. If a wagon could be had, settlers loaded it with all they could carry out of that dangerous country some said was condemned by the hand of God Almighty. If nothing else was available, they strapped what they could to the backs of their horses, mules, oxen, and milch cows, setting off to get as far as possible from that land of the devil, often forced in their travels to bridge the great chasms of earth rent in those mighty upheavals.

  Even the wildlife migrated for a time, panthers and turkeys, deer and bear, wolves and waterfowl, all huddling in among the frightened fleeing from the maw of hell, taking what comfort they could from humankind in the wake of so great a catastrophe. Just to get out of that damned country.

  And damned that country was, they believed. Nothing but the wrath of God could have caused so great a calamity as to make the earth shake as it continued to do from time to time, right on into February of 1812 with no fewer than twenty-seven full-scale quakes. All too many of those pushing east believed this terrible retribution was being visited upon the unclean, the impure, the unholy and unrepentant who had flocked to the lower Mississippi Valley to feast themselves on flesh and whiskey, wine, women, and debauchery, in the devil’s playgrounds of Natchez and New Orleans.

  Those who fled often looked back over their shoulders as they left the downriver settlements like Owensboro. Some merely clucked and shook their heads. Others ranted out the last of their sanctimonious warnings. Look to the heavens! Why, a burning star had foretold of catastrophe! That very same comet that had streaked across the heavens back in August and on into September and even October, with each fiery trip warning of God’s hand soon to be unleashed on the land of the sinners. Even the righteous who would not listen, so the warnings went, would be swallowed up with the unclean.

  “Go! Go now!” shouted one of the prophets of doom standing there at the edge of what was left of the Owensboro wharf Titus and the others labored to rebuild that cold, icy January.

  With a singing of hymns the doomsayer led a curious flock in song and fervent prayer before he unleashed that brimstone tirade castigating those who sinned against the Judgment Day. It took him no time to gather a sizable crowd of those still clinging to Owensboro, women who now huddled beneath shawls or shreds of Russian canvas, a few men who shuddered beneath wool blankets to listen to that dire warning from one who, by the conviction of his powerful words, appeared to have a much greater knowledge about such things both physical and metaphysical than the mere common man.

  “The end is coming!” he bellowed, holding up his scuffed and worn text at the end of his arm, a long staff in the other, exhorting his gathering. “In this—His own word—God Himself has ordained the end to arrive in just such a way. Take heed of my pronouncement, for the mouth of that comet unleashed by His great hand has brought nigh the end of man.”

  “The comet!” some in the crowd shouted in eager response.

  “Yes—the comet!” the anointed one shrieked. “The earth has quaked because of the comet that made its appearance across God’s firmament months ago. A comet with two great horns, like the devil has horns himself!”

  “Work of the devil!” one in the crowd roared.

  “Two great horns!” the prophet shouted. “And this frail, temporal scrap of earth where man has made his home now quakes because we have rolled over one of those horns on that comet, and now lie lodged betwixt that pair of horns that adorn the devil’s own brow!”

  So it was they flooded east in small groups and by droves, all those who feared lying in the lap of the devil when the hand of God returned to smite them again … leaving behind those who did not believe in such superstition, those who relished the depravity of living there in the lap of the devil himself, and even one lone man who had vowed he would not be the first to leave.

  After all, enough folks remained behind, or migrated downriver, that Titus still had his job, could go on working through each day, spending each night waiting for her and wondering if the following morning would be the dawn when she failed to return.

  Here in Owensboro there were many who celebrated their deliverance from destruction by merrymaking. When the aftershocks rocked their houses and saloons in the following weeks, they clung to one another or the walls until the trembling subsided, and they dared dance once more. It was this indomitable spirit that had brought such hardy souls to this land. Only those who truly belonged at the edge of that new frontier elected to stay on.

  They always had.

  The French and their Indians hadn’t run them off their holdings sixty years before. A generation later the English and their Indians had failed to scare off their kind. Those of pioneer stock were not about to be deterred by something so insignificant as the trembling of huge plates of rock beneath the surface of the earth. They had the matter of living to be about. And whether it was enemy armies, or skulking Chickamauga and Shawnee, or whether it was capricious skies and stillborn babes, those steadfast pioneers hung on. Some had no choice: they had come to make a stand and dared not return to what lay behind, what they had fled, back over the mountains. If anything, they would move from this ground torn and rent asunder—move on to new land they could clear and make fruitful.

  Time and again in those days and weeks and eventually months of tumult within the unsettled earth, Titus thought again of his grandpap. Once more he realized there was no threat big enough to frighten away those who were truly westering, truly moving toward the setting sun, seeking that most fertile of valleys. After all, that breed of folk believed, a man could be buried anywhere. A man had himself a choice: back there where they had come from, where most folks claimed it was one hell of a lot safer to keep his woman and raise his family. Or he could always lay his bones down here in the western extent of the Illinois country, here along the lower Ohio, or those new settlements of Missouri. Just as well a man be buried after making his life count for something, no matter how short.

  Better to live their lives full, than long, some of the hardy ones declared. Better to be buried in sod where few men would ever walk than lie a’moldering beneath ground trampled by the boots of thousands.

  In late winter word drifted downriver to Owensboro of something folks were calling a steamboat. Talk was that Nicholas Roosevelt’s New Orleans had made it down to Louisville about the time of the first earthquake in early December—all one hundred tons of her, pushed along by a paddle wheel churning at her stern, primitive woodburning fires heating steam that powered an engine mighty enough to push itself against the strongest of river currents.

  The bearer of the news shared his report with his wide-eyed, yet skeptical audience there in Owensboro late that March of 1812: “It reach
ed Louisville in the middle of the night, rousting folks from their beds to come scurrying down to the dock to watch it tie up. Didn’t dare take on the Falls—water too low. So the captain turned it about at the harbor and marched that boat right back upriver to Cincinnati.”

  “Against the Ohio?” asked an astonished citizen.

  “Yep.”

  “They had to have ’em a big crew paddling,” Titus scoffed.

  Others in the crowd agreed, doubting this outlandish monk’s tale.

  “Not a one,” the reporter went on undeterred. “Not an oar in sight. Only that wheel paddling agin the current.”

  Less than a week later the New Orleans showed up at Owensboro, having finally braved the Falls of the Ohio, the water rising enough to resume that voyage to its namesake city.

  Nothing short of a pure wonderment, that was, Titus thought, standing at the new wharf in awe. Why, to push upriver and down at will, that crude, hissing engine throbbing noisily, black smoke chugging against the winter sky. By some mysterious force able to sail upriver against the Ohio that long ago had borne the downriver fleets of the great prehistoric mound builders, then the birch-bark canoes of French and English explorers, next the dugout pirogues of Indian traders and Kentucky longhunters, followed by the bateaux of George Rogers Clark in his daring conquest of the Old Northwest, not to mention the first flatboats of those westering pioneers come to that new land little seen by white eyes.

  What would become of these great, untamed rivers now—Bass wondered with a twinge of painful regret—if man could construct a craft such as this? Why, all the wildness would go out of the rivers, and eventually the land itself. The Ohio would soon be tamed, and the mighty Mississippi no longer feared by rivermen.

  Only the Missouri remained.

  The same faraway river that had beckoned Levi Gamble to join Manuel Lisa’s fur brigades yearning toward the distant, as yet unseen, spaces. Farther on, those mountains few could speak of having seen, fewer still could claim to have crossed.

  The world was changing around him, too damned fast for his comfort. Something on the order of a year and a half had passed since he’d fled those fields tilled by Thaddeus Bass. This second winter on his own, having watched the frightened and weak of heart turn about and take their families back, despite the relentless press of others surging ever westward.

  Nothing would stop the killing. The wildness of the land was dying still.

  Who was he to expect that it would be any different out here? Generations gone had crossed the mountains and flooded into the canebrakes, streaming down the Cumberland, killing the last of the buffalo not already run off. Now their kind was killing off the great rivers that for so long had been the final barriers holding back those of lesser fiber.

  Now with a wet squeal of a whistle, the steamboat announced its coming. True enough, he had seen only one. But Titus knew there would be others, one day soon. Such noisy, belching monsters would put an end not only to the great mysteries of the western rivers, but to the rivermen as well. No more would the Kentucky boatman float and pole, cordelle and warp his way up and down the waterways that had moved America west. No more would there be any room for that breed that had spawned the likes of Ebenezer Zane and Hames Kingsbury.

  And when the wild rivers no longer served as a final, immutable barrier, and every last person in the east could come west, then it would be time for him to move on again. If there was no more wildness in that move west—there was no heart in the journey. No spark in the spirit. No dance on the wind.

  But move on he must.

  For he had come to sense instinctively there in the first months of his eighteenth year that his feet itched perhaps every bit as much as his grandpap’s had. So he prayed there would always be country to see, rivers to ride, those mountains to climb.

  And winds to dance upon.

  19

  The air was pregnant with the fragrance of early summer while his nostrils drank in the heady aroma of fresh-cut grass even before he opened his eyes to the sun creeping over the horizon. Without looking he knew it was morning’s call: clearly making out the gentle lowing of a half-dozen cows below him all chewing their breakfast in their stalls.

  Titus stretched, yawned, rolled over, and pulled the blankets over his head, grinding out a new place for both his shoulder and hip down in the soft crunch of the fragrant stalks that cradled him in the barn’s loft. Moments of blissful reverie swallowed Bass until that voice jarred him.

  “You coming down to help out today?”

  Damn.

  Titus shoved his blankets back from his face and replied, “I’ll be down straightaway, Mr. Guthrie.”

  Instead he lay there for a few moments more—listening, hearing the settler murmur to his cows, settle atop a stool and begin milking. The first stream of milk struck the red cedar piggin loud enough for Titus to hear it. He had slept in again, later than he’d intended. Right now he didn’t know whether he should be angry with himself, or the girl.

  But then he smiled. How could he possibly be angry with her for keeping him up late into the evening after a long day, talking as they did on the porch to her parents’ cabin? A few days ago he had decided there were no two ways about it. He simply would have to work hard not to fall in love.

  For certain, this wasn’t anything like what it had been with Amy Whistler. That was nothing more than some mutual exploration and discovery, wherein she was seeking a dutiful husband and Titus was craving some relief from all those greatest mysteries of youth.

  Nor was this at all like what he had experienced with Mincemeat back in Owensboro for close to three years. That had only been a matter of his hungers and his loneliness. Nothing more to it, he had kept himself convinced. All Abigail Thresher had done was guide him into manhood; then in return she was free to take all that she wanted from him through their season upon season together as that Kentucky frontier settlement grew like a gangly child.

  When he awoke one cold morning this past spring to find that she hadn’t come home to the tiny shake-and-pole cabin he had built for them, Titus went off asking to round her up—fearful at first she had been hurt by one of the violent men who were a river-port prostitute’s only clientele. That’s when he was told Mincemeat had run off for New Orleans. As much as she had talked about it over the years, he had never once truly believed she really aimed to go there.

  That morning he was unable to understand why anyone would want to go to New Orleans. Bewildered and shaking his head, Titus trudged back to their shanty—to find that Abigail had not only run off with what little weekly pay he had just earned from his work at the wharf, but over the past few days, with him gone to work, she had evidently been rooting around until she found his secret cache of what coins were left him from his trip downriver on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky broadhorn bound for New Orleans.

  As spitting mad as he was at first, it didn’t take long at all before he found himself laughing until he cried, there and then in that shanty leaking with a cold early-spring drizzle, thinking how his New Orleans pay was on its way back down the Ohio and Mississippi right about then, traveling full circle without him.

  That very day Titus determined to up and set out downriver himself.

  Just shy of the mouth of the Ohio he decided he’d make camp and wait to fetch himself a ride to the far shore of the chocolate-hued Mississippi. After three days of signaling to every passing keelboat and broadhorn and even the ungainly log rafts, a flatboat finally pulled over to tie up at the bank nearby late one afternoon. In return for bringing in a couple of deer for the hungry crew’s supper, Titus was awarded a trip to the west shore of the old muddy river at dawn the next day.

  Waving in farewell, he watched that boat’s crew urge their broadhorn into the main channel. On south lay the mouth of the Arkansas and the White and all the rest of those rivers he had floated past when he was younger. Now he stood there on the far side of the Mississippi at twenty, turning expectantly to face the north that spring of
1814. Upriver. New country he had never laid eyes on. Nothing else really concerned him now but moving north. His eager feet set themselves in motion.

  St. Louis lay somewhere beyond the horizon. How far, he had no idea. At the time it really had mattered little when he would reach that mythical place. For the time being, he exalted in the journey itself. He was young, feeling the fiery surge of every heartbeat as the wide breadth of his life seemed to stretch out before him. For now, time as measured in days, months, or years was of little concern for him.

  He was on his way to see for himself the city that had lured Levi Gamble out of the eastern forests … when one evening Titus heard nearby the lowing of cows, about the time he was ready to roll himself up in his blankets that twilight. How his mind whirled with memories of home and barns, turned earth and the heady aromas of a cabin kitchen. No, sir—those surely weren’t wild critters he heard. Why, one of them even wore a bell by the gentle clang of it.

  Titus had followed the lowing to its source, and near dark he’d found the shed attached to a corral and paddock. Beyond stood a cabin where a telltale thread of smoke rose from the stone chimney. In the lengthening shadows Bass decided he didn’t feel all that much like company. Quite the contrary, the possibility of warmth in that cattle shed beckoned him even stronger. After a solid night’s rest, he figured to be up and on his way early enough, scaring up something for breakfast somewhere down the trail.

  Besides, this settler might even have him a chicken or two roosting in that shed. And chickens just might mean eggs. Even pullets, those young chickens less than a year old, would mean eggs for a settler. Titus sorely missed his eggs. In these years since fleeing Rabbit Hash, he hadn’t eaten anywhere near as many as he used to eat back in Boone County. Yes, indeed. It had all sounded like a fine, fine idea to lay out his blankets in that shed for the night, then purloin himself some eggs come dawn and cook them in his cup over a breakfast fire once he had put a few miles between himself and the settler’s place later that morning.