Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  “G’won, now. Put that blanket round you, if you’re scairt to lemme see you in your woolens.”

  No one said a word as Titus crawled over to his pallet, laid the wool blanket over his legs, and loosened the buttons on his britches. When he had kicked them off his feet, Bass slid his rump back to the circle and handed the pants to her.

  “Now watch what I’m gonna show you on the young’un’s britches so you can get started doing the very same thing on yours.”

  Having peeled both legs inside out, the woman carefully sliced open the waistband. She pushed in a few of the youngster’s coins before knotting her thread and beginning her repair.

  “Here, son,” she said, handing him the britches in one hand, the needle in the other, “now you keep on with it and get all them coins of your’n sewed away outta sight.”

  “Ouch!” Reuben cried moments later as he began. He sucked on a bloody finger. “Goddamn! I ain’t s’posed to be doin’ such woman’s work as this.” He flung down his britches in disgust. “Rest of you can play like you’re a tailor—”

  “So you want everyone you meet ’long the road home to know you’re carrying all that money, is that right?” Beulah asked.

  “That’s my concern. T’ain’t none of yours!” Root snapped.

  “Damn well is my concern,” Kingsbury said. “You go letting folks know you’re carrying all that money—they’re gonna rightly figure we’re carrying all of ours too.”

  “Most folks coming north from Orlins gonna be poor—but ’nough of ’em gonna be rich,” Beulah explained as she leaned over to hand Reuben the britches he had flung down. “Folks know if you’re on the Trace, you either gonna be rich from selling cargo downriver … or you’re poor as a church mouse, with nothing but the clothes on your back and a hankering to get back home fast as you can.”

  “So that’s just how we gotta look to folks, ain’t it?” Ovatt asked.

  “Like we’re poorest of the lot, and ain’t worth the time of no robbers to shake us down for the lice in the seams of our old, wored clothes,” Kingsbury added.

  “You fellas all got your pistols, don’t you?” she asked, her eyes touching each one of the four.

  “Only thing you let us spend our money on today,” Root grumbled.

  “G’won and throw your money away like you fixed on doing at Natchez: whores and whiskey—just to get your throats cut.”

  “Aw, shit,” Root said sourly. “This damned woman’s right again.”

  “I wanna make the Ohio country with my fortune,” Kingsbury declared. “To do that, we gotta be smart and use our money only for food, some new blankets, and these pistol guns we bought us for our journey. We go off buying too much fancy things—folks can tell we got money just by looking at us on the way home.”

  Ever since that morning when they had moved from gun shop to gun shop looking to buy enough weapons so that each of them would have a pair of pistols, including the woman, Titus had kept his tucked in the old sash tied at his waist. As he stuffed coins into the waistband he was sewing, he touched those pistols where they lay beside him. It reassured him now, to have such power—the longbarreled, big-caliber pistols, in addition to his grandpap’s rifle. He let his chest swell again as it had many times this day, just to think how he would turn away any would-be highwaymen by simply pulling out his weapons. And once more Titus practiced that determined look he was certain would turn any thief’s knees to water when they laid their eyes on him.

  He was still dreaming on how he would convert robbers to cowards on the Natchez Trace when Heman Ovatt nudged him awake the next morning in that cold room they all shared.

  “Them wagons ain’t gonna wait for us,” Root said as Titus came up onto an elbow slowly.

  “Time to go,” Kingsbury said as he stood, slinging over his shoulder that pair of blankets he had rolled into a tube, tied at either end with a leather cord.

  Titus’s stomach complained with a fading whine as he yanked on the second of his moccasins. “We got time for breakfast afore we catch up them wagons?”

  Beulah shook her head, patting the big pouch that hung at her hip, suspended over her shoulder. “No, but I got us some biscuits and hard-meat from last night’s supper. It will do once we get rolling north.”

  Leaving their tiny room, the five hurried into the cold mist and down the outside steps that were braced into the back wall of the gambling house. A few yards behind the brothel next door they stopped among the trees where three outbuildings were stationed. Titus was the last to have the chance to duck out of the cold dawn mist and settle himself on the plank with that hole sawed out for him to nest upon. While it was dry in there, he had to admit the air damned near choked a man. In enough of a hurry to breathe some better air, he shuffled outside, pulling his britches up. In the chilling mist he got them buttoned, shifting the new and unaccustomed weight of the waistband while he retied the belt sash.

  Through the litter-clogged streets of New Orleans they hurried as the mist became a chilling rain. Among the heaps and mounds of garbage, children fought for any edible morsel, every one of them dressed in their tattered frocks, muddy and barefoot, noses running and eyes red and matted in disease. Ragged-eared dogs, soaked and shivering, slunk back in the shadows of the alleyways. Along those dark passages the boatmen and Beulah hurried, watching and listening for windows that would open above them, chamberpots emptied by the oblivious tenants on any unsuspecting pedestrians below.

  Titus smelled the wagon yard a full two blocks before they reached the freight district—mules and oxen steaming in the downpour, the smell of fresh dung and old hay. Arriving at the proper yard just as a sheet of oiled canvas was being lashed over the walls of the last wagon, they found the head teamster, who looked them over, then held out his open palm.

  “When you wasn’t here right away, I thort you’d had you a change of mind,” said the moon-faced, red-nosed man.

  “We’re here, and we’re going,” Kingsbury replied, glancing down at that open hand suspiciously. “We done paid you already.”

  “That was for my boss,” he said, an ingratiating smile seeming to cut that bare-shaven round face right in half. “This morning you pay me.”

  “We had us a deal—”

  “You had a deal with my boss.” The wagon master smiled, snapping his fingers, then opening his palm once more. “He just owns the wagons. I’m the man what sees they get to Natchez and back with the goods.”

  “I wanna talk to your boss—where’s he?”

  That smile fading quickly from the moon face, the wagon master turned and began to step off. “Get yourself another ride north.”

  “Wait!” Beulah cried, lunging forward to grab the man by the elbow. “What do we owe you?”

  For a long moment he looked down on the small woman; then the smile returned as he peered back at the four men who stood in the rain, small puddles growing at their feet. “Ten dollar each ought’n be about right.”

  She let go of his elbow, looked back at Kingsbury quickly, then shook her head. “We ain’t got that kind of money.”

  “Don’t tell me that crock of horsepuck,” he growled, and laughed. “You’re going north, back to home. Got you all kinds of money—”

  “Five dollars each of us,” she wheeled and interrupted with a snap. “That’s twenty-five dollars for you. And I’ll wager you ain’t seen that much money for your own self at one time in many a month.”

  For a second the heavyset man was startled by her words; then his smile broadened and he licked his bottom lip. “I ain’t in the business of arguing over money, ma’am. Ain’t nothing for us to settle here. All you gotta do is get out your ten dollars for the each of you—”

  “Five dollars,” she snapped at him again, putting one finger against his chest. “We don’t go, you don’t make no extra this trip north. That’d be a real shame.”

  Cocking his head, he licked his lips again and let the rain drip off the floppy brim of his cheap wool-felt hat a minute
longer, then said, “Eight dollar.”

  “Six.”

  “Seven.”

  “Six,” she repeated adamantly.

  “Awright,” he grumbled, holding out his hand again, this time toward the woman. “Six and a half.”

  “She ain’t got the money,” Kingsbury declared as he shuffled forward in the mud. “I do.”

  Eyes dancing, the wagon master watched the coins clink into his hand one at a time, smiling with more largesse than ever. “Just figured she’d be the one to have the money, I did,” he clucked, “the way this female panther ’pears to have just about all the brains and balls in your outfit.”

  15

  “We stick to the Catholic streets of Natchez,” Kingsbury whispered in the wavering shadows cast by the Spanish moss clinging to the tall cypress at the southern edge of town, “an’ I don’t mean the Irish Catholic streets, neither—we’ll be awright. Wait till dark to start through, and get on out of town afore light.”

  The other two boatmen nodded, then looked at Bass. Grim-lipped, Titus nodded, sensing his Adam’s apple bob high in his throat as he did.

  “We need us food, Hames,” the woman reminded.

  Glancing now at her haggard features, Titus thought Beulah looked older than she probably was.

  “Don’t you worry—we’ll get us food,” Kingsbury replied. “Do that, first whack.”

  It was their nineteenth day since leaving New Orleans, well into December now, with the weather growing colder the farther north they bounced and jostled atop the tarped wagons hauling staples up a well-beaten road to Natchez, Mississippi.

  Recognizing that they were nearing the outskirts of that settlement, Kingsbury bellowed out to the wagon master.

  “You go ’head an’ get off on your own now—anywhere you want,” the teamster boss cried over his shoulder as he brought the leather straps down onto the backs of his plodding oxen. “From here on out only place I stop is in town.”

  When they realized the wheels would keep on rolling, the wayfarers crawled to the sidewalls and leaped to the hoof-pounded trail where mud puddles lay crusted in ugly ice lace.

  Fearing that someone might well recognize them from the killings aboard Annie Christmas’s gunboat, the five hid among the thick undergrowth at the edge of town. Not far away stood the first of the immense canebrakes, each shaft standing nearly thirty feet tall, measuring a good two inches in diameter. Nearby squatted a jumble of run-down shacks where a woman might well take in wash during the day and work at keeping her legs spread at night, all to provide for a growing brood of children. Even in this chill as a metallic sun sank in the west, children scampered and played near enough that Titus could not just hear them, but watched them through the timber and underbrush.

  How these dirty, poorly dressed urchins reminded him of his own brothers and sister in earlier days, reminded him of Amy Whistler’s own siblings.

  “I could use a drink,” Ovatt grumped. “Ain’t had much of any since’t we was at Annie’s place.”

  “What’d that drinking get us?” Root demanded dourly.

  Turning to Kingsbury in disgust, Ovatt asked, “Can’t we just move around these here shanties and get on through town?”

  The pilot shook his head. “You two just hush. We’ll wait.”

  “Maybeso I can find something for you fellas to warm up on,” Beulah declared as she started to rise.

  “What you got in mind?” Kingsbury demanded, seizing her wrist.

  “A little liquor for the bunch of you,” she replied, glancing down at the hand he held around her arm. “A little ain’t gonna hurt, will it, now?”

  He let her go. “No, no hurt it be. A damn fine idea, you have.”

  As Beulah stood and straightened out her skirts beneath that secondhand coat purchased in New Orleans, then moved off toward the town as nonchalant as could be, Titus leaned back against the trunk of a chinaberry. Above him in its branches hung gray moss suspended like winter’s own tatters, tormented by the chill wind. Only yards away the streets of Natchez this sunset were beginning to bustle with barkers and pimps and highly rouged women emerging into the coming night, along with an assortment of tame pigs and wild dogs, as well as more of those dirty, unclaimed children.

  Beyond the last of the poor shanties, Bass watched Beulah reach the first of the low, broken, half-sunken plank sidewalks. She stopped, as if she wanted to wave back at them, then turned without a gesture and kept on until she disappeared into the gloom of those dark streets. Into the bowels of the wildest hellhole on the Mississippi River.

  Whereas the French were the first to build there around 1716, establishing their colony some three hundred miles—or ninety leagues—north of New Orleans, it was the Spanish who first sent their military expedition to that part of the new world. Late in the summer of 1540, de Soto, governor of the Island of Cuba, traversed the plains out of the southwest before he crossed the Mississippi near the future Natchez, packing along his own Negro slaves. There the knight commander of the Order of St. James of Compostela made contact with the peaceful Choctaw Indians, who for generations had performed their own bloody sacrifices at their White Apple Village. De Soto marched on with his army to reach the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, then the Cherokee in turn. By and large a peaceful people, these natives did not at first resist the intruders, even when de Soto’s priests began attempting to convert them from their heathen ways. For such Christians come to save unclean souls, their mission became a simple matter of converting the savages or killing them.

  Yet it wasn’t until de Soto asked too much of his hosts by demanding Choctaw women to warm the beds of his soldiers that the tribe finally revolted. They drove the Spanish back to the banks of the great river. As the terrified soldiers and priests fled from the forests that seemed alive with an enemy behind every tree, the Spanish left behind their holy vestments, their eucharistie ornaments, even their sacramental wine. Suspicious, the Choctaw broke the clay jars used in the white man’s ceremonies, letting the fragrant crimson fluid soak into the ground. Every bit like that wine the priests had blessed, de Soto’s blood was soon to seep into the mud, and there beside the Mississippi the governor of Cuba lay down to die, his anonymous bones to rot for all of eternity.

  It took nearly two hundred years more until a European culture would again dare to settle in the Mississippi Valley. By 1716 the French had come up from the West Indies to establish an outpost close by the White Apple Village of the Choctaw. Like the Spanish, the French were Catholic, bringing with them their own black-robed priests in charge of the vestments, sacraments, and wine. With only a brief interval when the British assumed temporary rule over the great river valley, the Spanish next took over under Governor Galvez just prior to the coming of the Americans in 1795. That same year the first steam-powered cotton gin arrived on the lower Mississippi. Already the Natchez District had proved itself as good a region as any other in the south for the growing of tobacco, sugarcane, and corn. Now it prepared to stand head and shoulders above the others in cotton.

  To the north, east, and south of Natchez sprang up the great plantations scoured from the canebrake and cypress swamps. Great houses were raised, fields were cleared from the bayous, and roads blazed. All of it accomplished on the backs of the African slaves brought to New Orleans on tall-masted ships, auctioned on that great, bloody block of misery in the market square, then hauled north into the wilderness, not quite able to understand they were now the property of one of those wealthy landowners.

  More than an hour later Beulah returned, the four corners of a scrap of blanket suspended over her shoulder to form a pouch. Coming awake in the dark and the cold, Titus moved with the other three boatmen into a tight circle as the woman set her bundle at her feet, then sank beside it.

  Beulah pulled apart the corners, exposing two clay jugs, and said, “I got you fellas some tafia.”

  Titus watched Ovatt pull the cork from one of the jugs and sniff it before turning the jug up to drink. He asked, “What
’s tafia?”

  “Rum.”

  “But it’s better’n that Monongahela we drunk all the way downriver,” Root said, smacking his lips as he handed the second jug to Kingsbury.

  “Try some,” Ovatt suggested, giving the first jug to Bass.

  It truly tasted sweeter than the American backwoods rum, and well it should—as it was made of the finest sugarcane in the French West Indies.

  “What else you get us?” Kingsbury inquired, fingering a slab of something dark. He brought it to his nose for a sniff.

  Beulah said, “You’ll like that.”

  “I bet I will,” the pilot replied, and took a bite.

  “Salt meat fried in bear’s oil,” she told them. “Enough for you all to have a goodly portion for supper.”

  For the most part they drank their tafia in silence, using it to wash down the seasoned meat and what biscuits she could find to purchase. At the same time, Kingsbury made it clear none of them were to drink enough to hobble them when it came time to push on through town. Overhead more clouds rolled in, shutting out the stars completely as some of them dozed on their full bellies.

  It was near the middle of the night when Kingsbury tapped on the sole of Bass’s moccasin. The others were awake, dusting and shifting their clothing, shivering in the cold. Beulah stood at the edge of the brush, waiting expectantly.

  “Like I told you, Hames—I figure you can keep to the edge of the woods until you get to the north side of town, where we’ll pick up the Trace.”

  “There by Kings Tavern?”

  With a nod she continued, “Place ain’t as dangerous as it might be. ’Pears there’s a train of slavers pushing through. They gone and chose to make a night of it at Kings Tavern.”

  “Slavers?” Ovatt asked. “Jesus God!”

  “Wagons and cages and such?” Kingsbury asked intently, ignoring Heman’s grumbling.

  “Yeah,” Beulah replied. “The place is packed with wagons. Men was all over the yard, in and out. Though most of ’em gone inside to the fires when it got cold.”