Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

“One of ’em, you said he stabbed Ebenezer?” and he put the stem to his lips.

  Abigail waited to answer, watching his face as he drew long and slow on the pipe stem, pulling it into his lungs with all that was in him. The potent heat hit him hard: he found this smoking stuff like trying to force down a coarse old horseshoe file. As soon as it began to hurt more than he could stand, Titus coughed it right back up, gagging and retching, his face hot with embarrassment.

  “That’s awright, Titus. Best to take it gentle and slow—not so much all at the first. Go ’head on and give ’nother try.”

  He closed his eyes as he brought the pipe to his mouth a third time. Had to admit he’d always liked the smell of it, what with menfolk smoking around him all those years back in Boone County—something mighty flavorful. But getting it past his mouth into his chest appeared to be another matter. Still game for it, this time he did as she had suggested, drawing the smoke in slow and easy, a tiny bit at a time. He held it for a moment without coughing, opening his eyes wide in self-astonished celebration at his own triumph, then exhaled every bit as slowly as he had just pulled the smoke into his lungs. It was nothing less than a wonder to watch it all come back out in a steady stream.

  Abigail smiled at him. “That’s it, Titus. Now you try some more.”

  “G’won and tell me about Ebenezer getting stabbed.” Only then did he bring the pipe stem back to his lips.

  “The pilot done it. With a big ol’ guttin’ knife—but lucky for Ebenezer Zane that the tip of the blade hit a rib and only sliced up some skin. Hurt him enough I s’pose that he went to his knees. That’s when Mathilda watched that bastard yank the knife back, ready to plant it in Ebenezer’s back again—’bout the time Zane grabbed hol’t of that pistol one of them others dropped out’n his chopped-up hand. Ebenezer turned and fired.”

  “Who’d he hit?”

  She wagged her head, insistent on telling the story her own way. “First thing Zane done was pick Mathilda up and wrap a blanket round her—what with the way them four had tored every stitch off her. She asked him if the pilot was dead, and when Ebenezer said he didn’t know, Mathilda said they should make sure he was. She told Ebenezer go pour some powder and coal oil all over the cargo.”

  He blew out a gush of smoke, so damned proud of himself that he hadn’t coughed anymore nor made himself sick like his pap had warned him he would. Titus asked, “But he still didn’t know for sure if that river pilot was dead?”

  “Didn’t matter,” she said matter-of-factly. “Mathilda wanted the bastard dead her own self. She was the one used that pistol’s flintlock to drop a spark down on the powder, setting it off and putting the coal oil to flame just as Ebenezer was loosing the mooring ropes. He pulled her onto the wharf afore he jumped back onto that flatboat and steered her long enough to get it out of the harbor into the main channel of the river.”

  “Then what’d he do?”

  She took the pipe from him, sucked on it twice without results, and said, “’Pears you’re out’n tobacco. I’ll get us some more.”

  He sat up at the side of the bed and pulled a blanket around himself, anxious to hear the rest of the story as she went back to the skin pouch in the walnut chest, then squatted by the fire. “Tell me what Ebenezer done out on that burning boat headed into the river.”

  Holding the stump of the straw in the flames, Abigail explained, “Why, he gone and jumped in the river—an’ don’t you know he was cut up and bleeding pretty bad—but he swum right back to where Mathilda was waiting for him at the wharf. By the time he got hisself swum there, a goodly crowd was watching, and they dragged him out of the water. I was there by that time too. We all stood, with the rest—watching that boat drifting off across the Ohio, burning to beat the band. Ever’ now and then there’d be a poof, and come a big shower of sparks like a cannon firing. And soon enough—there weren’t no more fire, and no more Pennsylvania flatboat.”

  This time he readily took the pipe from her and put it to his lips.

  “I gotta pee,” Abigail declared, as if she made such a confession to men all the time.

  His eyes widening, he snatched for the blanket with one hand, pushing himself off the bed. “I’ll go stand … go outside—”

  “You silly,” she chided, her smile one that involved her whole face. Abigail inched over to the chamber pot. “Just turn away and look at the fire.”

  From the corner of his eye he watched her for a moment as she turned her back to him, then flipped out the bottom of the blanket to squat over the chamber pot. As she rose, he quickly looked back at the fire and sucked on the pipe. Once more he glanced from beneath the shock of brown hair that spilled across his brow, finding her scoop a handful of red cedar shavings from the copper kettle, which she tossed into the pot. He heard her slide open the crude door and carry the pot out.

  While she was gone, the door hung open—the small fire’s warmth scurried from the room in one long draft. Then she was back, closing the door behind her, seeming to bring with her an aura of cold and dampness that clung about her threadbare blanket.

  “I feel like I ain’t et in a week,” he said as she took the pipe from him. “How about us going out for some breakfast?”

  “Ain’t time for breakfast yet,” she said, setting the pipe on the table and turning back to the bed.

  Glancing at the door, he asked, “Ain’t morning yet?”

  “Still dark out there. Hardly a soul moving.”

  He watched her lie back on the bed, slowly sliding the blanket back from her body in that firelight and frail, wispy lamplight. Not able to help himself, he swallowed hard, staring at her bony hips, that dark delta between her legs, then up across her flat belly to those fleshy breasts. He licked his lips, mouth gone dry as he found her staring at him, her eyes intent.

  Patting the narrow bed beside her, Abigail said, “C’mon in here with me, Titus. I’m certain we can find us something to do till it’s time for victuals.”

  9

  Ebenezer Zane chose to set off downriver in the worst possible weather yet to batter the valley that autumn.

  The sky overhead hung just out of reach, every bit as cold and the color of a great slab of the rain-soaked granite that protruded from the barren, skeletal forest that formed both sides of the channel the Ohio carved out of this western land. Yellows, oranges, and reds had been long ago stripped from the trees, nipped by frosts, turned by the crawl of time toward winter, hurried on their way before every gust of the season’s winds. Everything smelled of dank decay and humus, coated with ice and frost.

  And then the sky unleashed itself, beginning to fling down a sharp, needling sleet borne on the back of a twisting, thrashing gale.

  Titus gulped the last of the coffee in the bottom of his tin cup and turned on the rough bench to pull on a second pair of moccasins, dragging them over the first he had tied over his thickest pair of woolen stockings. Not without their holes and worn fabric, they nonetheless still climbed to his knees. And they would simply have to do. Like the rest of what little he had plopped beside the table where he hunkered with the rest of the crew finishing their hearty breakfast of hominy and great slabs of bacon, as well as baskets filled with biscuits and plenty of steaming coffee. Here in the Kangaroo other rivermen tied up at the wharf were beginning to show up for a hearty meal. But they would have to do without this choicest of tables near the fireplace, where Ebenezer Zane stuffed the other four who would that morning dare the Great Falls of the Ohio with him.

  “Looks to be you’re still dead set on killing yourself, Ebenezer,” one of the other pilots growled as he came up to the table, wagging his head.

  “Plan on getting my boat all the way down to New Orleans before the devil even knows I’ve cleared out of Louisville,” Zane replied. “Have some coffee, John.”

  The boatman took the offered cup, cradling it in both hands just under his nose, soaking in the steamy warmth and aroma. After that first sip he said, “Looks like snow out there.”
r />   “I’d just as soon it did,” Hames Kingsbury commented.

  Zane nodded. “Better that than the ice I fear most.”

  “It’s froze to everything,” Heman Ovatt said. “Hard for a man to lock on to the gouger. Even an oar. Everything coated thick with ice, Ebenezer.”

  “Nothing what can’t be chipped away.” Zane glanced at a wide-eyed Titus for a flicker of a moment, then said, “Snow’s fine by me.”

  The boatman looked up from his coffee and replied, “You nary was one to be afeared of that river, Ebenezer. Afeared of what it could do to your boat.”

  “No sense in being afeared now.”

  “Times we wondered if you was born with any sense at all,” the older pilot commented with a snort. When he looked around over the rim of his cup and found no smiles among the others, he quickly sank back into his tin.

  Other rivermen continued to crowd in as the minutes passed, some hobbling over from the tavern side, where they might well have slept off their liquor sprawled on a table or crumpled under a bench, perhaps lumbering in from one of the barmaids’ beds, most hurrying up from the wharf, where they had sought shelter aboard their flatboats bobbing in the crowded harbor while the white, icy arrow points had begun to lance out of the gray sky. At least half of those who entered the Kangaroo came over to make some greeting to Ebenezer Zane, more still to give their farewell—having heard the news that the pilot was pushing off downriver this nasty, forbidding day.

  Three nights had Zane’s crew tarried there in Louisville while their steersman bartered himself more cargo, itself a bit of a problem to begin with, seeing how little of the deck a man could walk upon, crammed to the gunnels as it was with crates, kegs, and oaken barrels bound for the mouth of the Mississippi. It ultimately turned out they had taken on a load of oiled hemp destined for use on great oceangoing vessels—huge coils of coarse twenty-four-strand rope, each one a hundred feet long and looped into a bundle it took three stevedores to burden on board. There the coils were lashed down atop the rest of the cargo.

  “That rope’s just about the only thing Ebenezer could’ve figured out for us to haul pitched up there on top of everything else,” Ovatt had declared yesterday as they’d secured the last coil.

  Reuben Root spat into the water alongside as twilight sank around them. “Could’ve done ’thout it at all, to my way of thinking. Jest lookee the way we’re a’setting in the water now.”

  “We’ll ride just fine,” Kingsbury said. “Got plenty of room left to draw water up the sides.”

  “Which is just what we’re gonna do we hit them Falls,” Root replied with a sneer.

  Kingsbury waved his arm for them all to follow him off the boat, saying, “Just pack that squeeze-box of your’n in some waxed paper and lock it up high—you won’t have a lick of trouble, Reuben.”

  “Don’t none of you realize that extra cargo I just bought me after three days of haggling will make this trip all the sweeter for every one of us?” Zane asked them as they joined him on the wharf nearer the Kangaroo where they had moved the boat earlier in the day to begin their on-loading. There the broadhorn would remain moored until dawn.

  All four carried belt weapons that night as they put solid land under their feet. Zane had assigned each of them a four-hour watch, keeping a fire burning in the sandbox there close by the stern rudder, something to warm their hands and coffee over too.

  Bass glanced over the others as they put away their pistols, then said, “You didn’t gimme a watch, Mr. Zane.”

  With something of a smile Ebenezer turned to Titus in the swelling darkness of that autumn evening. “These here men’re my crew, Titus Bass. They hired on for work such as this.”

  “Back at the start you said you needed me through the Falls.”

  “I did say that, and your help is much appreciated.”

  “Then you count me like one of the rest—if I’m to work through to the other side of the Falls.”

  Kingsbury nodded. “Boy’s got him a point, Ebenezer.”

  “You’re up to taking a watch, are you?” Zane asked.

  But before Bass could answer, Ovatt declared, “It’s lonely work. Out here by yourself. Just you and the river and any others what wanna raise some devilment with our load.”

  “That’s right,” Root added. “The whole town knows we’re setting off come morning. Lonely and cold out here—’specially since’t Mincemeat gonna be inside ’thout you tonight.”

  Bass turned back to Zane, steadfast. “I’ll take the watch you gimme. First, last, or middle. I figure to pull my share of the work for ’llowing me come downriver with you. All you done for me since we got here.”

  Zane said, “I’ll see ’bout sending Mincemeat out to visit you.”

  Wagging his head, Bass replied, “Treat me just like the rest of ’em here. I got work to do—don’t want a woman around.”

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Kingsbury exclaimed. “Did you hear that? Titus sure got serious about work, going and turning down a woman coming out to keep him warm—”

  “Maybeso the rest of you learn something from Titus Bass here,” the pilot declared. “When you’re working, you keep your mind on work.”

  Bass said, “Yessir. That’s what I was saying.”

  “All right, son. With you added on, that shorts the watches to three hours apiece. Titus takes this first watch.” Ebenezer drew his two big-bored belt weapons out of his greasy red waist sash and handed them over, butt first, to the youth. “Here. Keep these handy. Rest of us be right up the slope at the inn. Any trouble, just call out or shoot. We’ll huff down here straightaway.”

  His eyes got big as coffee saucers when the pistols came into his skinny hands, in awe at their sheer weight. All Titus did was bob his head as the four turned to go.

  “You want supper brung out?” Ovatt asked.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “When he finishes, he can have his ale and stew,” Zane declared as the four slogged up the slope toward the Kangaroo in the cold. “And Mincemeat too.”

  Bass thought he had struggled with loneliness before—those first nights in the forest. Believed he had battled cold too. But nothing like this: the dampness penetrated him to the bone despite the coffee and the fire he hunkered over, flames flutting in that tin sandbox he fed with more and more kindling. But, then, cold and lonely always seemed to go hand in hand, he brooded. Never had he been lonely on a summer night.

  How easily he thought back to Amy then. Her memory still a bright thing he could feel inside his breast despite the miles and all the days. How sweet her mouth had tasted last summer, so unlike Abigail’s—her mouth strong with the whiskey and the tobacco. But it was not to be, he decided again, surprised that he still was making peace with that.

  Had his father come searching for him? Had they finally given up? Would his folks ask of him all the way upriver to Cincinnati? Perhaps even this far downriver to Louisville, he convinced himself. Maybe not. Maybe his pap already figured it was for the best, ridding himself of a son not wanting to become a farmer. So much the better—and now they would go on with their lives.

  But what of his mother? Strong as she was, he nonetheless worried most for her. She had always been the one to quietly set herself against her husband when it mattered: she who hid supper for Titus; she who had seen to it the new shirt and biscuits were set out where Titus could get his hands on them that dark morning of farewell. Such was the real remorse he felt, about his only regret, leaving the way he had without explaining to her. Sure even now that she would have understood.

  There wasn’t a star he could make out in the sky overhead. Clouds thickened like coal-blackened cotton bolls, reminding him how his hands hurt, rubbed raw and cut, whenever they had to pick what little cotton they had taken to growing on a small patch of ground by the smokehouse. Better was the flax the family planted, woven with wool to make a strong cloth that would turn the weather without being as heavy as pure wool. Between that mixed cloth his mother had wo
ven and the animal skins she’d tanned for coats, britches, and moccasins—a body could count on staying reasonably warm, no matter what the weather.

  In such deep thought his watch passed, and it was with reluctance that Titus turned over the two horse pistols to Ebenezer, who came to relieve him three hours later.

  “Likely there’s some stew left, but if not, they’ll get you a pullet or two and a loaf of that black bread. There’s plenty of beans to fill you up. But stay away from the spruce beer this night, Titus,” Zane had warned as he settled onto a crate to start his watch. “I need your head clear come morning.”

  So until that dawn he had filled himself with nothing more than Abigail Thresher, as hungry as he was for her, having done his best to pay no heed to the taunts of the other three boatmen when they warned him the whore would have nothing more to do with him once Ebenezer Zane had gone, taking his fat river pilot’s purse with him.

  “She said she likes me,” Titus had protested.

  “Playing with your diddle ain’t the only thing Mincemeat gets paid for,” Root explained, always the one out to pop another man’s bubble. “She gets paid for saying what she’s told to say.”

  “Ebenezer told her to tell me that?”

  Kingsbury only shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “She’s just a whore,” Ovatt said. “There’ll be others on the ride down. Why, if’n you was floating along with us, you could count on tasting some fine girls we reach Natchez-Under-the-Hill.”

  “And all them sweet Creole girls down to Nawlins,” Kingsbury added with a smack of his lips.

  “I ain’t got me any need to go south,” Titus argued with a doleful wag of his head. “West is where away I’m bound.”

  “St. Lou?” Heman Ovatt asked.

  “One of these days soon,” Bass answered.

  Kingsbury said, “A man goes west—you’ll need money to give yourself a stake. That’s fur country out’n St. Louie. Ain’t white man country west of there. You’ll need fixin’s.”

  “I’ll get me some work.”