Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  “Like them what’s coming now?” Ovatt announced in a shrill voice.

  They turned, gazing north along the crude wharf where the low rows of clapboard card houses and grogshops lay clustered. Two hundred yards off danced the flare of at least a dozen torches held high above a considerable knot of boisterous men. From the crowd came loud voices, noise without the words. Little matter: only a deaf and blind man would fail to understand the intent of that murderous crowd moving their way.

  “Take us to the timber, Titus Bass!” Kingsbury hissed in agony, shoving the youngster ahead of him into that narrow patch of shadow between a pair of weathered buildings, each of those shanties about to lean its shoulder against the other as they slowly sank into disrepair with each new year.

  Bass drew up at the back of the shacks, peered into the dark. Immediately behind the short streets that branched off the main thoroughfare stretched along the wharf, thick timber rose against the pale bluff. Without signaling the men behind him, Titus darted from the shadows of that alley, making for the shadows of the trees. Once he was beneath their cover, he waited for them all to catch up. Kingsbury was the last, hobbling up, gasping, clutching his side, his pasty face beaded in sweat.

  “You gonna make it, Hames?” Root asked, wrapping an arm around the pilot’s shoulder.

  Kingsbury looked up, his eyes narrowing. “We allays have us some scrap or another coming downriver, don’t we, Reuben?”

  “I s’pose we do.”

  “Good you remember that,” Hames replied. “I don’t want neither of you go blaming Titus Bass for the trouble been dogging us this trip.”

  Ovatt and Root glanced at the youth a moment. Then both of them shook their heads.

  “Only thing I wanna do is get you back to the boat,” Heman declared.

  “And get us the hell out of Natchez,” Root added.

  “Maybe things cool down by the time we get back here again come next summer,” Kingsbury told them. Then with a thin-lipped nod he instructed Titus to lead on.

  Bass swore his heart was going to leap out of his chest or pop right out of his mouth, the way it made his head pound, when they hadn’t gone all that far and he had to shush them. They all knelt back in the timbered shadows when the frantic jig of torchlight drew close—splashes of light dancing just on the far side of the low-roofed shanties. More frightening still was the sound of that mob: snarling, snapping, its quest for blood like a living thing that snaked along the wharf, headed for Annie Christmas’s gunboat. It reminded Titus of how he’d once watched a cottonmouth eat a field gopher, the dying prey slowly drawn along the length of the snake’s scaly body.

  As the mob thundered into the distance, they moved on into the welcome darkness. For now the four of them had a little time. Not much. But it might just be enough.

  As he reached the side of the flatboat, Bass watched the woman sit up like a shadow suddenly taking shape out of the night. Her dark form stood, pulling that ratty old blanket about her shoulders. She stepped to the side when he stopped at the gunnel, able to make out the red glow of embers and low flames she had shielded behind her.

  “You fellas home earlier’n I figured you—”

  “Help us get Hames aboard, ma’am,” Reuben demanded.

  Immediately crawling over the crates, she held down both her hands, the blanket falling from her shoulders. Rearing back, she pulled with all her might as Ovatt and Root hoisted the wounded pilot from the wharf, his body dragged against the side of the flatboat and onto the gunnel, where Kingsbury lay gasping, groaning.

  “You shot?” she asked.

  He clamped down on his lower lip and shook his head, eyes moistening.

  “They cut you?”

  “No,” he huffed, perhaps the pain easing.

  “Your side?”

  When he nodded, she carefully lifted his left arm braced against his belly. “I do believe they broke your ribs,” the woman declared. “How many, we’ll just have to find out.”

  “Ain’t got time for none of that now,” Ovatt snarled at her as he pushed past. “I’ll take the rudder, fellas. Reuben, get them hawsers freed so we can push off.”

  She watched the two move off in different directions, then turned to look at Kingsbury once more before she snagged hold of Titus’s jerkin.

  “What happened out there tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered sheepishly, hungover already. As if his very own mother had caught him at something wicked and now he was about to pay the high price for having his fun. “I was drunk. I dunno—”

  “We’re leaving for Nawlins,” Kingsbury announced, sprawled beneath them. “You ain’t got folks to stay with here, ma’am—”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then you got one choice or another,” and the pilot visibly sagged with the effort the talk took out of him.

  So she spoke up while he gathered his breath. “I can jump off this here boat and take my chances till I can get a way north on the Trace,” Beulah declared. “Or—I can throw in with you fellas all the way to Orlins.”

  The pilot swiped the back of a hand across his bloodied mouth and replied, “That’s only choices you got.”

  “We’re free!” Root cried, flinging the last hawser across the gunnel, then slinging himself aboard.

  “Push us off, you two!” Ovatt bellowed. “Give him a goddamned hand, Titus!”

  “I ain’t rightly got but one choice,” the woman said quietly as Titus started to move off, snatching up one of the long snag poles.

  Bass stopped, turned to hear what she said so very quietly as Beulah knelt beside their wounded pilot.

  “You fellas picked me out of the river. You give me a ride on your boat when every last one of you ’cept that young’un believed in all your hearts what bad luck it was to have a woman on your boat—”

  “I ain’t … none of us blaming you for this,” Kingsbury interrupted, then coughed soddenly.

  “Damn,” she said with a sad wag of her head. “Sounds of it: bet you gone and poked one of them ribs right through your lights.”

  Kingsbury turned his head to glance at the wharf Root was pushing his pole against with a loud growl. As he heaved against his long hardwood pole, Bass noticed the flare of the torches bobbing in the distance, this time headed back upriver. In their direction.

  The pilot rolled toward Beulah slightly, warning, “This be your last chance to jump off, woman.”

  With a shake of her head she nearly whispered, “And if I do jump off—just who the hell gonna take care of you men?”

  “He ain’t getting any better, is he?” Titus asked.

  The woman looked up from the feverish, unconscious Kingsbury, then wagged her head. “Nothing more I can do. It ain’t in my hands no more.”

  If it wasn’t in her skilled, sure hands, Titus wondered—then in whose hands did the life of Hames Kingsbury lie? It troubled him that the woman expected him to understand her … when he had no earthly idea who might hold the power to save the man.

  First off, he lost Ebenezer Zane. Now another man clung tenuously to life. No matter that he had people around him at this moment, Titus had rarely felt so alone.

  He raised his eyes from the pilot’s pale, clammy face, looking at Root manning the gouger, turning to gaze again at Ovatt stationed at the stern rudder.

  “It’s good water from here on down,” Heman had told him earlier that morning as the sun came up milk-pale in a cold sky. “I could get this broadhorn down to Nawlins, steering it on my lonesome, if’n I had to. Easy enough, though there’s cypress swamp what can fool a man if he don’t keep his nose locked in the main channel. But don’t you fret none, Titus. I’ll holler when I need you on one oar or t’other.”

  Many, many night fires this crew of four had told him how they’d worked the rivers together for more than a decade, without much bloodletting at all: a few fights, a few knife cuts sewn up with the same thread they used to repair their clothing, mostly a lot of good-natured head thu
mping in the midst of one hell of a lot of work. As much as there had been Indian scares in years past, they had never caused much more than an anxious moment or two for Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen—nothing more than threats from a far bank now and again.

  But what with that old pilot resting among the mud and catfish and sawyers at the bottom of the Mississippi, Heman Ovatt was beginning to think things had changed for the worse. And what was usually nothing more than some bruises and perhaps a broken bone now and then whenever they tied up for a frolic at Louisville’s red-candle district, Natchez-Under-the-Hill, or even the Swamp in New Orleans—now their raucous brawling had turned deadly. For no reason they could figure out.

  Except that it just might have to do with settling an old score with Ebenezer Zane.

  Kingsbury coughed in his sleep. Bass sensed the pilot slipping away from him too.

  Hames had passed out about the time they were pushing free of the wharf, with that mob drawing ever closer below those bouncing torches, their discordant voices looming louder out of the dark. One of that drunken lot had spotted them making for the main channel of the river, shrieked his warning to the others, and a great cry of frustration and disappointment had gone up. More than a handful of that rabble had yanked pistols from their belts and fired at the southbound flatboat. Only one bullet had smacked against their craft, crashing noisily into a cask holding ironmongery. The clatter had made Bass jump there at the gunnel while the woman bent over Kingsbury protectively and the other two men hurried them away from Natchez.

  For some time Ovatt and Root were convinced others would put up a chase, board some canoes or a pirogue and come slipping up after them. Overhead the stars in the Big Bear slowly slipped away from the middle of the sky and fell into the west as Titus fought a great weariness. He drank cup after cup of the woman’s coffee sweetened with thumb-sized clumps of homemade cake sugar there beside the sandbox fire and watched Root stoically wince with pain each time he had to lean against the long rudder handle to keep them in the running channel.

  By now Heman had a dirty bandage wrapped round his head. One eye was nearly puffed shut, yet he gladly took his place at the gouger when he and Reuben spelled one another, rotating pilot’s chores at the stern rudder through that long night. Once more Natchez-Under-the-Hill had lived up to its rough-and-tumble, life-is-by-damn-cheap reputation.

  Long after sundown the night following the fight at Annie Christmas’s gunboat brothel, Reuben Root admitted they had to put over and tie up just past Fort Adams, which stood on Loftus’s Heights at the thirty-first parallel, the southernmost military post erected on American soil in those days prior to Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana Territory.

  “The river shrinks down here some,” Reuben explained after he and Ovatt secured to the exposed roots of some cypress trees. “Don’t run no wider’n two hunnert fifty … maybe three hunnert yards at the most. On downriver tomorrow we’ll pass Wilkinsonville—named after the army general what wanted to be king his own self over all that out there.” Heman swept an arm across the darkening western horizon.

  Not so bad a dream, Bass figured as he slipped off the jerkin and removed what tatters were left of his old shirt. Bending over the tiny bundle of his belongings, he unwrapped the shirt his mam had finished for Thaddeus the night before Titus had slipped away. Ever since he had refused to wear it—feeling it to be ill-gotten, as if he had stolen that yoked shirt with its square arm holes, but now as he slipped it over his head—Bass sensed his mam just might have left it lying out on the table as she had because she knew her eldest son was taking his leave. Them biscuits and this new warm shirt: it was the best way she knew how to tell him good-bye without embarrassing him with a mother’s tears. Slowly he brushed his hand down the front of it after he got the shirt tucked into his britches.

  And felt the sudden stirring of homesickness that did not leave him for the better part of a day.

  By the time they approached Pointe Coupee the following morning, Root could hardly move his left shoulder. Close inspection by Beulah discovered the boatman’s shirt crusted to his back, right over the shoulder blade. Once she coaxed and coddled Reuben into sitting near the fire and sent Titus up to man the gouger, the woman clucked her disapproval as she slowly dripped warm water on the coagulate to free the shirt from a nasty knife wound.

  “You’re a brave man, Reuben Root,” she told him loud enough for all to hear. “Plenty brave … and mighty stupid.”

  When he started to rise in anger, she snagged hold of the back of his shirt and held tight—making him wince in pain as he settled back atop a low crate in a huff.

  “Ain’t nothin’,” he grumbled. “Had worse.”

  “Have you, now?” she replied in that tone guaranteed to make any man feel like a scolded child. “Ever you need someone to sew on you?”

  Wheeling on her, his face blanched. “No. Allays kept my cuts bound up with—”

  “You’re gonna need me sew on this’un. That much’s for sure, Reuben.”

  “W-we don’t got us needle an’ thread,” Root said, smiling lamely. “S’pose you can’t do no sewin’—”

  “Ebenezer allays keeps him some stout linen thread and some glover’s needles down in a chest there,” Ovatt reported from the rudder with a much wider, and more genuine, smile. “Never know when you’ll get your canvas tore.”

  Wagging his head in utter disgust while glaring at Heman, Reuben spat, “You mean-assed, mule-headed son of a bitch! Why, one day I’ll make sure—”

  “Beulah says you need some sewin’,” Ovatt interrupted calmly, “so we’ll see you get sewed up. Time for you be having your fillee.”

  “Fillee, hell!” he roared impudently. “This woman gonna sew on me, I’ll damn well drink my fill!”

  Reuben promptly set about drinking much more than his boatman’s ration of Monongahela rye—a fillee—and then some. Putting the backwoods liquor down on a stomach gone more than a day without food, and sedating a constitution having gone close to forty-eight hours without sleep—it wasn’t long before Root slid in and out of consciousness enough for Beulah to announce that she might as well get to sewing.

  Just south of Pointe Coupee, Heman put over, and Titus struggled before he got them tied off to the roots of a single great cypress. As the boat rubbed and chafed, timber against timber, Bass and Ovatt ducked beneath the awning where the sandbox fire always kept the air at least ten degrees warmer, there to join the woman, who took the knife from Root’s belt and cut herself a length of fine linen cord. One end of this she placed between her teeth, soaking it with the moisture in her mouth before she began to peel back the tiny strands that formed the twisted cord. When she had one strand the thickness she desired for the job at hand, she peeled it from the rest of the cord and threaded her sharp three-sided glover’s needle.

  Raising her eyes momentarily to Bass, she ordered, “Pour some more of that Monongahela into his cup.”

  Sitting at Root’s head, Ovatt said, “Don’t figure you need to, Beulah—looks to be Reuben ain’t gonna be awake to want no more. He’s snoring through the rough water already.”

  “I didn’t mean I wanted any for him to drink,” she replied curtly. “I want you to pour some on that there nasty cut afore I start.”

  Holding the threaded needle in her mouth, she once more took the boatman’s knife in hand, raised her long skirt, and this time sliced through the long hem of a dirty petticoat. “Tug his shirt out’n his britches for me, fellas. Pull it way up on his shoulders.”

  Heman and Titus did as they were instructed, both of them silent as sandbars and wide-eyed as deaf mules in a high wind, watching her every move as she dribbled a little of the rye along the crusty open wound. Taking an end to the strip of petticoat, she kneaded away a little of the coagulate. Time and again she dipped the cloth into the liquor and scrubbed at the neglected wound until the entire length of the angry gash lay raw and shiny with fresh ooze.

  “Wish to God I had my medeecins,” she
grumbled to herself as she knotted the linen thread, then looked at Titus. “A body can’t rightly do without some medeecins when folks need tending.”

  Wincing involuntarily, Bass watched her poke the needle through the right side of the laceration, continuing over to the left side before she pulled the thread through the flaps of flesh. Reuben grunted and his eyes fluttered a few times, but he never stirred.

  “Take hol’t of his arms there,” she said to Ovatt. Then turned her head to tell Titus, “An’ you, son—sit on his legs. There, like that. Just in case he decides to wake up and get in a fittle over this sewing I’ve got to do on him.”

  Tugging against the knot as if to assure herself that it would hold, the woman clucked once and drove the needle through the skin a second time. Wrap by wrap she worked herself down the eight long inches of severely torn muscle. Each time Beulah pulled her thread tight, she would dab more of the fiery alcohol on the laceration as it continued to ooze and seep bright-red blood.

  “That’s good,” she told them as she neared the last of her labors. “Better that it bleed. Gets all the evil out, seeing how we ain’t got no roots to put in it. My medeecins”—and Beulah bit her lip to stifle a sob—“all that I had in this world went down with that goddamned flatboat.”

  Her curse struck Titus as something foreign, never having heard a woman of her age hint at profanity, much less take God’s name in vain. After all that she had said about Kingsbury’s life resting in the Almighty’s hand—he thought it strange indeed that she would pray to God one day and soundly curse Him the very next.

  “Don’t look at me so odd, boy,” she commanded. “Close your mouth, or you’re likely to have something crawl right in it with more legs’n a Chickasaw war party.”

  Knotting the linen thread, she cut off the excess and returned the bloody-handled knife to Root’s belt scabbard. Then she slowly poured the last of the rye from the cup up and down the wound, washing away some of the dark ooze one last time.

  Handing the empty cup to Titus, she said, “Now, wipe that cup out and get me some more likker.”