Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! He’s gonna … he’ll be … ah, goddammit!” growled Kingsbury. “Ebenezer gonna start going bad, and the man deserves to be planted afore he starts stinking enough to turn the noses of heaven!”

  “Hames is right, Reuben,” Ovatt stated firmly. “Nothing we can do about what’s landed in our laps. We can’t go a’hauling him all the way back up to the Ohio—so we oughtta just figure out what’s best to do by Ebenezer down here on the Mississap.”

  “He allays liked Natchez,” Kingsbury mused out loud, then looked up to gaze at the others around that low fire that reflected a crimson glow from each of their faces in the cold darkness surrounding their boat.

  “Thought we decided we was burying him in the river!” Root snapped.

  “We can,” Kingsbury replied. “We’ll just do it when we get to Natchez.”

  “He liked some of those places Under-the-Hill,” Ovatt agreed. “’Bout as much as he took to Mathilda’s Kangaroo.”

  “Then we’ll wait to bury him till we get to Natchez,” Kingsbury said with great finality. “And put him to his eternal rest in the river opposite the harbor.”

  The next morning before full light they had secured the body of Ebenezer Zane atop their cargo, released the hawsers, and slipped away with the cold brown current of the Mississippi. Only four of them now: three boatmen, and a youngster who kept staring at that shroud, unable to shake off the feeling that it had all been of his own making.

  “You’re carrying more’n any one man ought’n carry,” Kingsbury said that night as he relieved Titus at watch after they had tied up in a small, brushy cove against the river’s west shore.

  “Can’t help it, the way things turned out.”

  “No man ever can say how things gonna turn out, Titus.”

  Bass wagged his head. “He’s dead because of something I done, or didn’t do. Dammit!” he grumbled under his breath. “I don’t know rightly which it is.”

  “Listen and let me tell you the way Ebenezer lived his life, son,” Kingsbury said as he settled beside the youth. “Life is only what happens to you after you get borned of your mama. You can’t help it, so you go on living if you’re lucky enough, if you ain’t one of them babes what dies in the birthin’. You do what you must to stay alive for a few years, and then dying is something that happens at the other end of your life, he always believed. Just make sure it’s a quick’un, Ebenezer said. Better’n going slow, painful.”

  Stifling a sob, Titus said, “I damn sure hope he went quick.”

  Hames continued, “I figure Ebenezer Zane got his wish, Titus. He went the way he wanted to go—and by damn, that’s a lot more’n most of us’ll ever get when our name’s called on the roll up yonder.”

  “I don’t know much of what to think about heaven.”

  “Ain’t much to think about, really. We’ll find out all about it when we get there.”

  Bass looked up at the boatman, then asked in that icy stillness, “You figure Ebenezer Zane is gone on to heaven already?”

  Ovatt chuckled softly, patted Titus on the back reassuringly. “Hell, he’s there already.”

  Kingsbury nodded. “I’d wager he’s got a bunch of them angels already learning to tie hawsers and work a gouger, how to dip their oars an’ turn their heavenly flatboats right around in midriver.”

  Even the sour-faced Root grinned when he said, “No doubt Ebenezer’s even got ’em singing some of his bad songs too.”

  “Bad songs?”

  Hames smiled, staring up at the dark canopy. “Songs what God wouldn’t want none of his angels learning—them’s the kind Ebenezer Zane will go and teach ’em. Probably got some chewing tobacco too.”

  The hurt overwhelmed Titus when he sobbed, “I miss him.”

  Kingsbury looked at the youngster’s sad, hangdown face. “We all miss him. But God’s got him now, so we’re bound away to get Ebenezer Zane’s last flatboat down to Nawlins—just the way he’d planned.”

  “Then we’re heading back north?”

  “Buy us another boat and hire us on another load—float on down again come spring,” Kingsbury replied.

  And Ovatt added, “Like Ebenezer allays done.”

  “Just like he’d want us to keep doing—even ’thout him here,” Hames said.

  It had been another cold day of floating, watching the land flatten even more while the river itself began to meander before they sailed past the settlement of New Madrid squatting on the far west bank of the Mississippi. Founded in 1790 by Colonel George Morgan, a New Jersey land speculator, who was in turn sponsored by the crown of Spain as a means of establishing a foreign outpost reaching far up the river, by 1810 the village was inhabited mostly by Americans who had been struggling against the fickle river for twenty years. Less than two dozen ragged houses sheltered a rough, indolent population that included a handful of Spaniards, some French Creoles down from the Illinois, and a few hardy German immigrants. A pair of poorly stocked stores charged outrageous prices for what little they had to offer, especially if a traveler did not carry the right nation’s currency then in vogue and was thereby forced to pay a rate of exchange bordering on river piracy.

  South from there the terrain flattened even more, the extensive floodplain preventing any real settlement through what appeared to be a boggy, impenetrable wilderness. In more than a week of travel the boatmen alternated periods of extreme boredom with snatches of terror while they negotiated treacherous stretches of the Mississippi popularly known as the Devil’s Raceground—where to Titus it felt as if some unnatural force picked up the crew’s flatboat and hurled it downriver a few miles at a dizzying pace … and later at the Devil’s Elbow—where they had to fight constantly to steer the boat around a maze of innumerable sandbars while twisting this way and that through corkscrew turns as the river bent back on itself. Here Kingsbury had to battle the stern rudder, with Heman Ovatt on the gouger, both of them struggling to keep their broadhorn close to the east bank lest the strong current pull their boat right into what the rivermen called “the woods,” that broad floodplain west of the Mississippi, a tangled, confusing maze of bogs where a crew would have little hope of ever returning to the river’s main channel.

  “See that high point yonder?” asked Ovatt of an early morning two days later.

  Titus looked into the distance where Heman pointed south. “What is it up there?”

  “That’s the fourth Chickasaw Bluff.”

  “Chica … like the Injuns killed Ebenezer?”

  Ovatt nodded. “Chickasaw. Up top there sits the army’s post. Called Fort Pickering.”

  “S’pose them soldiers can see a long way up there,” Bass replied as his eyes came back to watching the river for sawyers and planters. He sat at the bow, clutching one of the long, sturdy poles, ready to push off any dangerous object that posed a threat to their boat by bobbing too close in the muddy, sometimes swirling current.

  “Keep your eyes open,” Ovatt reminded as he got up to clamber away over the casks and kegs. “I’m getting me a little drink now that the river settles down for a while.”

  Bass returned his attention to the water, sweeping his gaze back and forth as he had been doing for days on end as they rolled on down the great, wide river. Most of the sawyers were easily spotted. Some were not, the others had warned him: hiding their danger just below the surface of the river. Some might poke only a solitary root or limb barely above waterline. A man had to be watchful and not become mesmerized by the monotonous roll of the murky water beneath a gray, overcast sky.

  Spotting one, Titus rose to his knees, leaned back, and grabbed the long pole, ready to brace himself against some hundredweight kegs to push off the sawyer he saw coming up, still downriver more than a quarter of a mile. With a single limb raised, it bobbed in the current. For a moment the hazard appeared to roll, for the limb disappeared, then another arose to take its place out of the brown water. Funny thing, he thought, rubbing his eyes, then squinting into the distance a
gain. For a moment there—that damned thing looked like it took a ghastly, human shape.

  “Heman!” he shouted, heart leaping out of his chest.

  Ovatt stuck his head out from beneath the awning as Root stirred fitfully from his nap atop some tobacco crates. “Just knock the goddamned thing off to the side, Titus.”

  “It’s a person!”

  Kingsbury craned his neck from the stern rudder, asking, “In the river?”

  “Lookee there!” Titus said, pointing as Ovatt emerged from the shade of the awning and clambered over the cargo to the bow.

  “I can see! By damn, it is a human person, Hames!”

  Root had rolled up on his elbow, rubbing his eyes and grumbling to himself as Kingsbury began shouting his orders.

  “Heman, get some of that rope tied around the boy’s waist. We’ll put him over the side and he can swim out: pluck that fella outta the river—”

  “I! I can’t swim!” Titus squealed.

  “You can too swim!” Ovatt cried.

  Wagging his head emphatically, he admitted, “Not good ’nough to pull nobody else outta no river!”

  “Dammit!” Kingsbury snarled. “Ovatt, you tie yourself off. And, Titus, you work that gouger with me so we can slow this here Kentuckyboat down. Heman can grab that fella, and we’ll let Reuben pull the two of ’em in.”

  With Kingsbury barking orders to young Bass while Ovatt knotted a one-inch line around his middle and Reuben Root secured the other end around his own waist, Hames and Titus began to work the flatboat over into the middle of the current, cutting a course directly for the man waving all the more frantically as the rivercraft bore down on him.

  “Looks like he’s hanging on to something—maybeso a snag or piece of timber,” Ovatt announced as he squatted at the gunnel near the bow, ready to leap into the cold water. “Right when I go in, Titus, you cut that gouger hard to the left so the bow goes right—away from me. Understand?”

  Bass nodded, more than a little nervous at having so important a part in this rescue.

  Then it was time for the red-haired boatman to take his bath. Into the river Ovatt dived just as they were about to approach the man in the river. Immediately leaning hard against the bow rudder, Titus helped Kingsbury wheel the flatboat about, almost crosscurrent, suddenly slowing the craft with a sharp lurch as Ovatt splashed up behind the man and snagged him.

  “P-pull!”

  Root was already heeding Ovatt’s command, dragging in the narrow rope hand over hand as the man from the river flopped and struggled to secure a grip on the one who had come to rescue him. The pair of them went under again, and then again, bobbing up, both men sputtering and spitting, Ovatt bellowing at his charge to settle down—but still the man fought against his rescuer, flinging arms this way and that, attempting to lock on to Ovatt. There at the side of the flatboat he finally did so as Kingsbury shoved the rudder hard to the starboard, kicking the bow back into the head of the current.

  “Bring me up! Up, goddammit!” Ovatt gurgled, spitting water.

  “Gonna help this fella first, you no-good half-drowned mudrat!” Root snarled in reply as he leaned over the gunnel and seized hold of the man they had just plucked from what appeared to be a wide plank of white oak. A hewn flatboat timber.

  Gasping, the sodden, soaked creature collapsed from Root’s grip right atop some casks, his chest heaving, spewing up river water, heaving volcanically.

  “You done up there—get me up now, Reuben!”

  Root leaned over the gunnel, grinning. “You ain’t asked me purty, now, have you?”

  With the flat of one hand, Ovatt smacked the side of the flatboat, growling, “Get me up there or I’ll pin your ears back so far you’ll be wiping them when you wipe your ass!”

  Root and Kingsbury both roared as Reuben pulled Ovatt over the gunnel, where he landed in a heap, sputtering and gasping, gazing with the other three at the soppy-haired creature they had just pulled out of the muddy waters.

  “How you come to be in the river, mister?” Root demanded as he pounded heartily on the survivor’s back. Then, “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, backing up a step clumsily, then a second and nearly falling as the creature raised its head and gazed up at them.

  “He’s a … she’s a woman!”

  True enough.

  “What the hell have you just plucked from the river, Heman?” Kingsbury asked, his neck craning as he roared with a great laugh.

  “D-don’t none of you go blaming me for bringing no goddamned woman on this boat!” Ovatt cried.

  Shivering with cold, trembling with fear, she looked at each one in turn as the three men stared back at her, stunned into silence. None of them moved. Titus was gaping openmouthed at the stringy-haired soot-smudged woman with the rest of them until Kingsbury jogged them all awake.

  “Get her a blanket, goddammit! Woman gonna freeze in this wind less’n you cover her up.”

  As Root turned and bent to slip under the awning, Ovatt asked her, “You—ma’am … gonna be all right?”

  Unable to utter a word, the woman only nodded, swiping muck off her face from brow to chin with the back of her torn sleeve as she continued to drip as much of the river on the deck as did Heman Ovatt. When Root laid an old wool blanket around her shoulders, she gazed up at the man with the sort of gratitude in her eyes that Titus always saw in the eyes of the family’s hounds whenever he threw them the bones butchered from what game he brought in from the hills. It damned near pulled at his heart now, the way she looked round at all of them redeyed and frightened.

  Wiping her hand one more time across her face, where her hair continued to drip, the woman said quietly, “I know what you’re all thinking: it’s bad luck to have you a woman on your boat.” She yanked the blanket tightly around her shoulders, her eyes falling to the deck. “’Cause my husband … me an’ him had a boat like this’un.”

  Root leaned forward to ask, “Where at’s your husband, ma’am?”

  With a wag of her head she replied, “River claimed him.”

  “You mean he’s dead?” Kingsbury inquired.

  Titus watched her choke off a sob with a quiver of her chin, then brave herself up enough to answer. “River claimed him … after the Injuns jumped us two day ago.”

  * Future site of Memphis, Tennessee.

  12

  “The sooner we get her off our boat, the better things is gonna be for all of us,” Heman Ovatt growled in a loud whisper that rumbled off the nearby water.

  “We can’t just set her off!” Titus protested, his eyes imploring the other two boatmen, who huddled with him near the bow, arguing out the fate of the woman they had plucked from the river.

  At that moment the dark-haired woman sat alone beneath the awning, where she huddled out of the cold drizzle that leaked from a pewter sky, drier now, and warmer too, by the sandbox fire they tended for her. Nonetheless, she trembled, staring upriver into the distance as if she truly could not overhear their heated discussion.

  When Bass glanced at the woman again, something tugged in his chest—the way she gazed upstream, transfixed, as if she were going to spot her husband’s boat, as if she hoped to materialize her husband right out of the cold air. There had been occasions he saw his mother wear that same look on her face: worried for his pap not yet home from clearing a far field. At such times he already had come to know that both she and his pap were children of families who farmed and hunted their ground at great risk to their lives. In those early years on that bloody ground of the canebrakes south of the Ohio River, a man might be late for any number of things. So his mother bravely watched from the front door, and always lit a candle at the window as dusk settled like a fine talc among the hills surrounding their cabin. She, continuing to watch into the distance for her man the same way this woman gazed upriver for some sign of her own.

  “The young’un’s right,” Hames Kingsbury stated flatly.

  “He ain’t got no say in this,” Reuben Root grumbled, his face grown
hard, chertlike eyes barely visible between the slits he made of them. “Only us three got a vote on her staying, or us putting her off right now.”

  Bass was about to open his mouth in hopes of cajoling, in some way to convince them into allowing him his voice in this, if not his outright vote, when the skinny Kingsbury wheeled on the explosive and powerful Reuben Root.

  “Time you listen to me: I been first in charge of this boat for Ebenezer ever since’t him and me started down the Ohio years ago,” Hames said evenly, setting full measure by every one of the words he chose. “He picked him the best crew could be had on the river—so I damned well know any of us could be the one Ebenezer picked to watch over things if ever he wasn’t around or was just sleeping off part of a day’s float. Any one of us—”

  “That’s right!” Root interrupted.

  “But he picked me, Reuben.”

  “Still, that don’t give you no extra vote over us,” Heman said, his own pocked and pitted face gone cold, suspicious, perhaps even downright superstitious in clinging to that riverboatman’s oldest and worst taboo with such fervent and steadfast belief.

  “I ain’t taking a extra vote for me,” Kingsbury replied. “I’m just telling you as pilot on this here boat now—that I’m doing just what I figure Ebenezer’d do hisself if’n he was here. He’d give Titus a vote.”

  “Like I said,” Root disagreed with a snarl, “the boy here never was hired on like the rest of us.”

  “It ain’t right, Titus having as much say as us what been working Ebenezer’s boats for years now,” Ovatt added.

  “You don’t wanna give the boy a vote, well—let’s just set that aside for a minute and talk over something else,” Kingsbury said with the sure ease of a man used to steering a boat out of troubled waters.

  And something in the boatman’s face told Titus that Hames was going to try something smooth.

  Hames continued, “S’pose you boys sit there and ponder what Ebenezer Zane would do ’bout that woman we pulled from the river back there. Reuben? How you think Ebenezer would vote?”