Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  When Bass turned to the side to use Root’s shirttail to wipe at the crimson coated inside of the cup, Ovatt asked, “You gonna put more of that Monongahela on your sewing job?”

  “Hell, no,” she said. “I aim to drink my share, now that he’s done and Kingsbury over there seems like’n he’s turned the last bad bend in the river.”

  As she took the cup from him, a frightened Titus asked, “You mean he ain’t … not likely to make it much longer?”

  Swallowing long and slow with her eyes closed, the woman finally took the cup away and licked her lips, then swiped a sleeve across her mouth. “Didn’t mean nothing of the kind. Damn, but it’s been a long time since I felt that particular burn down in my gut.”

  “Just what the hell you mean, then?” Ovatt demanded.

  She looked offended, then peered down at her cup a moment more before answering. “Near as I can tell, fellas—looks like your pilot there is gonna be up and around soon.”

  “He’s … he’s gonna pull through?” Bass demanded, feeling the tingle of hope coursing through all the bleakness of what had been his despair these last few days.

  “His color’s lot better, the last little while, and he ain’t breathing near like he was. No more choking and gurgling a’tall. I do believe Hames Kingsbury’s gonna make it.”

  “Whooeee!” Ovatt cried out, reaching out both arms to embrace the older woman, who sat there stunned by the boatman’s sudden affection.

  When Heman took his arms from her, Titus leaned forward and clumsily hugged her, whispering in her ear, “Thankee, ma’am. For all you done … for the both of ’em.” And just before he released her, Bass kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  As he pulled away from her, an astonished Beulah brushed her fingertips across her cheek, gazing at the youth wistfully. “T’weren’t nothing I wouldn’t done for nary boatman.”

  “We had you with us, likely Ebenezer Zane be alive today,” Titus said.

  Taking his hand in hers, she patted it maternally and wagged her head. “Ain’t nothing in this world gonna save a man what got his head caved in with a Chickasaw rock war club.”

  “She’s right, Titus,” Ovatt agreed as he pulled his collar up and rose from the bench to move past Root toward the bow. “I see it’s time we got on down to Nawlins. Get on up there and get them hawsers heaved to on that capstan. We got us a boatload of cargo and these two ailing boatmen to get on downriver.”

  The thick hemp ropes nearly filled his hands in their own right as he struggled with his knots against the nudge of the current, but they were soon moving south once more, through the last of that myriad of false channels and swamps just below Pointe Coupee, where Lower Louisiana began. Here long ago the French had begun construction of a great levee, that work later taken up by the Spanish in their own attempt to prevent seasonal flooding of the rich agricultural lands of the lower Mississippi Valley.

  “You see that,” Ovatt called out, pointing at the levees on the eastern shore, “a riverman knows it ain’t far now till he’s with more and more folks. All this here stretch is called the German Coast.”

  In his own crude way Heman had just expressed the riverboatman’s term for the civilization that began to dot the banks once he’d passed the northern end of the levee: behind its protection sat plantations, many small and quaint villages inhabited by the friendliest of French-speaking Louisianans. Here in the flooded fields they grew sugarcane and rice, along with cotton and one huge orange grove after another, many trees still heavy with fruit. A wondrous sight for young Titus to behold. Many of the inhabitants along the German Coast came to the riverbank to wave at the passing flatboat. Ovatt, Root, and Bass waved back in salute to the friendly riverfolk working their fields and orchards. And at the sight of every likely young maiden, the three all stood tall, boasting of their manhood while lustily crying out their claims of true love to her.

  In three more days Kingsbury was able to sit up and take more sustenance than grease soup. They floated past Baton Rouge, the site of an abandoned Spanish fort and a small village still peopled by Acadians. From there south they were never out of sight of one small settlement, cluster of fishing boats, trading post, or fine, palatial plantation after another.

  “I’m gonna get myself a drink of some real liquor,” Beulah said one afternoon as she came up and settled on a cask near Titus at the gouger. Root and Ovatt both sat near the stern rudder, singing one of their riverman songs to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”

  “Get up good sirs, get up I say,

  And rouse ye, all ye sleepers.

  See! Down upon us comes a thing,

  To make us use our peepers!

  “Yet what it is, I cannot tell,

  But ’tis as big as thunder.

  Ah! If it hits our loving ark

  We’ll soon be split asunder!”

  Titus asked, “What’s real liquor taste like?”

  She regarded him a moment in that afternoon light as a warming breeze crossed the bow. Then, peering off again to the south, the woman answered, “I allays get me a bottle of long-cork claret. Have every trip down. Figure it’s only fitting I should drink a final toast to Jameson. Only right.”

  “Drink a toast? Of course—to your dead husband,” Bass replied.

  “He damn well better appreciate it,” she said with a ghost of a smile, reaching out to slap Titus on the knee. “First time I made it to Norleans without him!”

  14

  As much as Root, Ovatt, and even Kingsbury grumbled about the fact that Beulah hung their laundry up on that rope stretched from the awning to the snubbing post at the bow, those freshly scrubbed clothes snapping smartly in the stiff breeze for everyone else on the lower Mississippi to see, the boatmen didn’t really mind at all the idea of having a clean shirt to pull on before they climbed ashore to celebrate their arrival in New Orleans in fine style.

  Once she learned they had no extra clothing, the woman had ordered them all to pull off their dirty shirts, right then and there. When the pilot hesitated, then turned in retreat, the woman balled her fists on her hips and glared at him with motherly sternness.

  “Hames! You—more’n the rest—need some soap put to that shirt of your’n.”

  With a sheepish look he glanced at the others. “I think it’s fine just the way—”

  “Give it here.”

  He could see the grins and smirks on the rest of that bawdy crew and likely realized he was never going to win against the woman. Ever so slowly did he drag the shirt’s long tail out of his britches and waist belt, then yanked it over his head. As Kingsbury held it out at arm’s length to Beulah, Titus looked at how skinny the man was, all ribs and backbone and shoulder blades, the skin stretched over them like a piece of fine white linen draped over the sharp newels at the top of a ladder-back chair.

  She snatched the shirt from him with a look of smug self-satisfaction. “Now that greasy cravat of your’n.”

  With a look of fright crossing his face, Hames touched the red handkerchief. “Not my neck wrap!”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Ah, shit, woman,” he grumped, his bare skin beginning to show goose bumps.

  “Won’t take me long,” Beulah explained. “Sooner you let me start on it, sooner I can get it done and dry.”

  Reluctantly he untied the square knot and handed the cravat to her by one corner. Beulah took it in her hands, spread it out at arm’s length, and inspected it.

  “Just as I thought,” she grumbled. “C’mere, Hames.”

  Circling behind the pilot, Beulah raised up the hair that brushed Kingsbury’s shoulders. “You see, boys? I’ll bet you’re all the same as this’un here.”

  Titus leaned in close enough to see how the skin at the pilot’s neck was nothing more than oozy scab and raw, angry flesh. “What’s all that from? He sick with something?”

  Beulah clucked disapprovingly. “Only thing he’s sick of is taking care of hisseff. He’s been givin’ home and hearth to some ve
rminous critters. These’uns here.”

  Holding up the red bandanna Kingsbury had long used as a neck wrap, the woman pointed to the long row of big white lice neatly arranged within one of the folds, each one every bit as big as the hog lice he had seen on the family stock back at Rabbit Hash. Looking like a strand of long white beads, the vermin had arranged themselves in a row with their heads all turned toward the raw skin of the pilot’s neck, feasting away.

  “When I get done with your clothes, fellas—won’t be a one of these I ain’t drowned. Then we gonna pick over all your blankets too.”

  “What ’bout his neck?” Titus asked, pointing to the raw flesh. “Maybeso we ought’n put something on it.”

  Beulah wagged her head, saying, “I don’t have nothin’ no more, none of my medeecins—”

  “Most like, Ebenezer has him some liniment or oil you can put on it for me,” Kingsbury said, scooting to lean forward over a long chest, where he began to rummage among Zane’s belongings.

  After smearing a thick daubing of some less-than-fragrant ointment Ebenezer kept in a cork-topped clay jar, Beulah proceeded to work up a lather from some river water and half a cake of lye-ash soap she found buried in the bottom of Ebenezer’s kitchen box. The day not really warm enough for any of them to stand around sans shirts, all four pulled on coats made of canvas or wool blanketing. Without a tin scrub board, she instead scrubbed their grimy shirts against the white-oak staves that formed the side of a large water bucket. Titus watched her work, reminded of his own mother, recalling for a moment how Amy washed the clothes of all those brothers and sisters.

  By the time Beulah got to Titus’s homespun shirt of mixed cloth, the woman held the garment between two fingers at the end of her outstretched arm, her other hand pinching her nose in mock disgust. After she rubbed and scrubbed the best she could, she would pull his shirt from the soapy water and inspect it—both sides, neck, and cuffs—before plunging it back into the pail for more watery abuse. Again she pulled it out for inspection, then returned it to the gray, sudsy water. Over and over she dunked his sole shirt, then raised it from the pail for a look until it eventually passed her scrutiny. Only then did she drape it over a long line of half-inch rope they had tied for her to the awning support, stringing it all the way forward to the bow checking post.

  Of varied tow cloth, calicoes, and linsey-woolseys, the four shirts dripped, drop by drop, before they began to dry, flapping in the cold air above Titus’s head. Nearby Heman Ovatt clacked out a rhythm on a pair of pewter spoons he whacked against his palm and elbow, knee and thigh. Back at the rudder, Reuben Root whistled one of his squeeze-box songs as he steered them through the last few miles of shoals, while the closer they drew to New Orleans, the flatboat traffic grew thick as the strop hair on the back of a hog. Even Hames Kingsbury clanged an iron ladle against the back of a cast-iron skillet while trying his best not to let that big grin of his split his face half-open.

  “Damn, but it’s good to get back down here,” the pilot exclaimed with a gush of excitement. “Put all that river behind me.”

  “Till May comes round again,” Ovatt reminded them all. “We go and load up a brand-new flatboat with another season’s cargo.”

  “We still got us that damn walk back to Kentucky afore we do,” Root said, his dour expression quite a contrast to the healing Kingsbury’s.

  “Just a thousand miles—every one of ’em making you hunger for seeing the Ohio again,” Ovatt said.

  Hames called out, “Titus—you figure on walking north with us, don’t you?”

  Nodding emphatically, Bass replied, “I ain’t staying down here in this country. Nosirree.”

  “Good to hear: we can likely use your rifle on the Natchez Road,” Kingsbury declared. “Feed this bunch on our way home.”

  Ovatt turned to the youth and asked, “You changed your mind and decided on heading back to your family’s place, Titus?”

  He watched the passing of those lacy whitecaps stirred up by the wind like the bobbing of so many white-headed doves before he answered. “Nothing much left for me back there.”

  “Maybeso you’d like to join on with us,” the pilot said. “With Ebenezer gone … well, we’re a man short—and besides: you’ve already made yourself one of the crew. Come downriver, twice’t a year with us! It’s a damned fine life for a young’un like yourself.”

  As a matter of fact, Titus had already been working that over in his mind these last few days, ever since the night they escaped that mob on the Natchez wharf.

  “There’s girls, Titus,” Ovatt said. “You seen ’em too. They come down to the bank to watch you pass. Wave to you. And you can call back to them, vow them of your love!”

  “Figure I know what you got on your mind, Heman Ovatt,” the woman declared sourly.

  “Just what any youngster like Titus here got on his mind too!” Heman replied.

  “We’d like to have you join us,” Kingsbury repeated, getting serious once more. “Ain’t that right, Reuben?”

  “It be a life just made for you, Titus Bass,” Root added.

  With a slow, undecided wag of his head he finally raised his eyes to look at the crewmen seated here and there about the boat. Then he gazed at the woman one last time. “No. I been figuring on it some—and … this don’t rightly seem the life for me. Not that it ain’t a good life and all. But last few weeks … ever since Ebenezer, them Injuns and all—”

  Kingsbury said, “I know just how you might feel, son. After Eb was kill’t … we got you tangled up in that business back at Annie Christmas’s gunboat. But cain’t you see? That was for Ebenezer too, settling a score for the man.”

  “We done it for Mathilda too,” Ovatt said.

  The pilot seemed to study Bass’s face for a few moments, then shrugged with resignation as he added, “Maybeso there’s too damned much of the wrong kind of excitement on the river for our young friend here.”

  “Maybe too damn much …,” Titus began, then sighed and finished, “I ain’t never killed a man.”

  “Them red bastards gonna kill you if’n you didn’t kill them!” Ovatt argued.

  “Worse’n that,” Titus continued, “I never afore see’d a man die like Ebenezer Zane done.”

  “You pay me heed: that’s one thing there’s plenty of in a boatman’s life,” Kingsbury explained. “Lot of dying.”

  Ovatt nodded. “But I allays s’posed all that dying went right along with all the living.”

  “So what you figure to do, Titus?” Root asked.

  With a shrug Bass answered, “Figured to get back to the Ohio, make my way yonder to Louisville, where I was bound away for when I run onto you and Ebenezer.”

  “Still got your sights set on finding work there?” Ovatt inquired.

  “If I can’t find none, maybeso I’ll get on up to St. Louie eventually. Finally see what that place got to offer a man.”

  “The hull damned world, that’s what,” the woman said, stunning them all. “That St. Lou there’s one of the four doors what opens onto the rest of the world, Titus. Don’t you see?”

  “Four doors?” Root asked at the rudder.

  “Up yonder’s Orlins,” Beulah explained. “That’s the southern door out to the world. A man can mosey on all the way up the Mississippi to find the northern door to them English lands, the lakes and rivers and all that country beyond where it grows mighty cold. Then, from Pittsburgh and Cincinnati country, you head east over the mountains where a body can go to the edge of the ocean, sailing off to just about anywhere.”

  Bass listened to her words with not just his ears, but even more so with his heart, pounding as it was. Finally he asked, “St. Louie’s the w-western door?”

  “That’s what I hear tell.”

  Kingsbury leaned toward her to ask, “You ever heard of what’s out there?”

  For a moment she cocked her head to the side, as if trying to pull something from her memory. “Only what I heard when Jefferson’s bunch—them explorers—
come back years ago. You see, them other three doors—north, south, and east—they all open onto water. Water’s the way you get to the rest of the world.”

  “But not from St. Louie?” Ovatt asked.

  “Shit,” Root growled. “Everybody knows St. Louie’s on the river. Sure as hell a man can get west on the water.”

  “I s’pose that’s true,” the woman agreed matter-of-factly. “But I heard there’s tall mountains atween St. Louie and the far ocean. Ain’t no river through them mountains what takes you to t’other side.”

  Mumbling his unintelligible complaints while he scratched at the side of his hairy face, Root finally responded, “I don’t figure a man got any business going to no place where there ain’t a river to take him. I’m a waterman. Borned beside the river, raised up on it—figure I’ll live and die riding the rivers.”

  “If there ain’t a river going there, Reuben don’t figure it’s worth the journey,” Kingsbury explained to Titus.

  “Got to admit, Reuben’s got him something there,” Ovatt stated. “I allays found me everything I needed on the river, or right beside it.”

  Turning from the boatmen, Titus peered intently at the woman. “You ever hear anything more about that country out there?”

  “Only what I hear’d listening to menfolk talk up and down the river after Jefferson’s men come back from that far ocean.”

  Bass leaned forward, excitement coursing through him. “They say anything about them mountains?”

  “Only that they was so tall they touched the sky,” the woman replied, a look crossing her face that told him she understood. “Mountains higher’n anything we can’t even imagine out there.”

  “And goddamned red-bellied Injuns too!” Kingsbury snarled.

  “’Thout no big, fine rivers out there,” Root began, “sounds to me like that be country fit only for Injuns, and not at all fit for the likes of civil folk.”

  “There gotta allays be a place for Injuns and wild critters,” Ovatt said. “Place where we can put ’em so just plain white folks like us can go on about our business of living.”