Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  Ice coated everything: tree branches and trunks, thick sheets of it whirling out of the northwest over the past three days to plaster the sides of cabins and shops, to slick the wharf itself. If the sun had ever chosen to put in a grand and bright appearance, it would have made for a dazzling show. But, instead, the sun hid behind the thick layer of icy frost blanketing the earth.

  At dawn that morning Titus and some of the others had dragged in handcarts filled with mounds of sandy earth scraped from the bank east of town. This they scattered with their shovels over the crude, wide planks of the wharf, even spreading the sand up the length of those cleated planks that stretched from dock to flatboat like bands of thick and mortified connective tissue.

  So it was that one moment he was plodding toward the wharf, planting each thick-soled, fur-lined pac moccasin deliberately along the sanded plank, glancing inquisitively at the ice riming the river below him around every trunklike stanchion supporting the dock … when the next heartbeat found him freed of the ninety-pound keg of ironmongery bound south for the settlement at Bowling Green. Like a dog flinging water from its hide—the keg flew one way, Bass the other. Just before he hit the water, the oak cask crashed against the side of the wharf with a great metallic clatter, splintering and splashing … but by then he was beneath the surface of the Ohio, numbed immediately, shocked by the cold immersion, his mind slow to react—until he realized he damn well might drown.

  Not that he really hated water. It was something he might admit to drinking every now and then. And water enjoyed a fair enough reputation on those rare occasions when a man wanted himself a bath. But, by and large, if Titus was about to confront water, he wanted it on his own terms: shallow enough for him to stand in, no deeper. Those months floating down the Ohio and the Mississippi on a flatboat manned by a good and savvy crew had been one thing, but to confront water all on his lonesome—that took an entirely different sort of courage. The very courage he found himself still in want of at that moment.

  Sluggishly clawing his way through the black, icy water, Titus burst to the surface, gasping at the freezing air, teeth chattering uncontrollably, his heavy woolen clothing like great stones capturing his limbs, dragging him down. Struggling through the water for the side of the wharf, he found his arms heavy and unresponsive, his legs sodden, reluctant to help him. The frosty air above the choppy water was alive with screams and wails, the cries of bellowing animals lashed to wagons they jerked and reared against, frightened screeches of the people who careened off in all directions, crashing into one another as the wharf suddenly heaved itself up right before Bass’s eyes.

  As if the riverbed below him had sunk in that instant, the mighty Ohio surged back from the bank with the strength of some unseen, mighty hand—and in that momentary lull he struggled to reach a wharf piling. Clutching it with all his might with both arms and legs, he turned, trembling, to gaze at the main channel of the Ohio and beheld a terrifying sight. What water had been mysteriously sucked away toward the northern bank was at that very moment cresting against itself in a frothy gray tidal wave rearing some fifteen feet high, one long and billowy wall of dingy-brown water beginning to hurtle back his way—aiming right for the dock at Owensboro.

  “Gimme your hand!”

  Titus jerked around, looked up, stared at the bony hand extended down to him—recognizing those wide eyes in that half-pretty face of hers—then lunged to grab hold.

  Straining, Mincemeat rocked back with all she had in her frame—succeeding more from a long shudder the wharf itself underwent with the next severe, rolling tremble of the earth’s shell … and dragged him just far enough that Bass could fling an arm over the end of the rough planks, hoist a leg up. She freed his hand and grabbed that leg, yanking desperately on his soggy pants turning to ice in the frigid air, heaving back with all her might. And when she wasn’t grunting with her Herculean efforts, she bawled with the most hair-raising scream Titus had ever heard.

  Sprawled on his belly across the roiling, sand-coated dock, Bass gasped for air, sputtering as his belly spewed up river water. From the corner of his eye he watched that monstrous wave thundering down upon him; he scrambled to his feet, pulling her up with him. Beneath them the wharf creaked, groaned, then screamed as it tore itself apart, hurtling them both into the air, thrown a dozen feet toward the bank as the dock wrenched itself free of the southern shore. Down into the last of the sand scattered atop those planks slanting toward the water like jack-straws they both tumbled as that great wooden structure screeched in protest against what long iron spikes still held it together, moaning in protest of the last few moorings imprisoning the wharf against the riverbank that itself was peeling away in great crumbling gobs of what, until moments before, had been solid ground. Sheet after sheet of that dark loam was shredding itself away with each jolting shudder of the earth’s crust. The Ohio was all but back upon them.

  That rampart of foam crashed against the two dozen or so flats and keels, raising them like children’s toys on its icy, boiling surface, flinging some high into the top of the leafless trees sheltering the riverbank being shed piece by piece into the Ohio, other craft flung into what remained of the dock with a deafening thunder as wood splintered against wood. Great planks of oak cartwheeled through the air as if they were no more than mere whittling splinters. The force of the river’s collision with the wharf shattered more of the trunk-sized pilings into kindling.

  With a great, long groan of agony, the wharf beneath them keened to the side, collapsing at long last toward the fevered river as if the Ohio were a giant, gaping maw swallowing, devouring everything within reach of its monstrous appetite.

  “Titus!”

  At her shriek he whirled, the fingers of one hand all that held him from sliding toward the black, roiling waters. Just feet above him Mincemeat slipped, slid his way on her belly, her own hands clawing uselessly at the icy planks as she spilled ever downward. Lunging toward her with his free arm, he felt the ground shudder beneath him. Then as suddenly the wharf heaved once again, flinging them both into the air. Spinning, wheeling, he landed in a heap beside her, the air driven from his lungs. Now she had a grip on his leg, and he had a purchase on the end of a plank that teetered precariously sideways as the rest of the wharf’s superstructure slowly creaked to the side, giving way toward the river.

  “Keep hol’t on me!” he shouted to her above the screams and bawling of those terrified people on shore: the frightened ones who huddled on higher ground, watching the ground split like overripe pecans below them, those excruciating wails of the wounded and maimed, beaten and broken and crushed by the riverbed’s cruel tremble.

  Then he began to claw with his free hand, trying for a grip on another plank before he dared free the first hand, swinging a few feet closer toward the bank and solid ground. One wide plank at a time he slid his bloody hands pierced by splinters as the river heaved and frothed at their feet, like a yapping, monstrous, living thing devouring thick planks of once-great flatboats now nothing more than creaking, groaning timbers hurtled together and flung against the sinking wharf like so much flotsam.

  Titus clung to a piling with one arm while he twisted to reach down with the other, and snagged Mincemeat’s wrist, pulling her free of his leg. Whimpering like a small, frightened animal caught with nowhere to run, she clawed her way up his legs to cling at his waist and refused to let go as two men slogged up to their knees in the mud to yank and drag them onto the last fixed portion of the wharf. Together the four clambered to their feet.

  When the next shudder of the earth came, Bass lunged forward, one watery leg moving, then the next, the woman clinging to him like a deer tick sucking its fill until they were above the river street, standing in the midst of those who were to survive this great and mysterious quake of the earth.

  There on the icy, trampled ground he collapsed onto his hands and knees, his every breath feeling like a handful of painful shards of glass splintering inside his chest. Mincemeat rolled onto her
back, gasping as well, her eyes clenched as tight as her mouth was open, tongue lolling like a hound out of breath. Across her forehead and down into one eye ran a nasty, oozy gash. Her hands were dirty, bloodied. His a mass of bleeding wounds. Bass looked down at himself. His pants were torn, both legs cut and plastered with mud. Only then did he feel his whole face begin to throb. Touching his cheek below one eye made the rest of his head ache with a sudden fire. He had broken something in his face on one of those flights he’d taken across the wharf, he decided. But at least they were alive.

  Slowly Titus turned, squatting in a heap beside her, there among the many who had been fortunate enough to clamber to higher ground when the first roll had struck Owensboro.

  “How … how’d you know?” he asked her in a gasp.

  “Know what?” she replied without opening her eyes.

  “To come get me.”

  “I was already coming down there,” she explained softly, only then opening her eyes. “Bringing you something to have your noon dinner with me.”

  “You damn well may’ve saved my hash,” he admitted, staring down at the woman who had warmed his bed through what had been left of last spring, followed by a long and humid summer, then finally into these first cold, sleety weeks of another winter.

  It had been something on the order of a year now since Ebenezer Zane had first led him into Mathilda’s Kangaroo tavern. Just shy of a year since he had first experienced her back in that tiny crib. In all that time he could not remember sensing anything beyond an animal need for her. Yet here and now, as the thunder of the earth’s great crumbling shudder died in the distance, great flocks of shrieking birds blackening the sky overhead, Titus realized he truly did care for this bony whore. Not that he believed she might ever love him the way he imagined a woman could love a man and be loved in return.

  Yet here he sat, in the flush of that moment of terror—having been saved by Mincemeat—only now beginning to realize what he must mean to her. Perhaps even more important, sensing for the first time that she meant much more to him than a warm place to sleep, more than a moist receptacle for his peeder when it grew hungry for relief, more than a companion at his side to help drive away the long and lonely hours of these seasons while he sorted out what next to do with those years yet to come.

  “Hell, I’d done the same for anyone,” she said gruffly, rocking up to one elbow and swiping gently at the eye where the blood oozed.

  He seized her by the shoulders. “No, you wouldn’t.”

  She glared at him harshly a moment; then her face seemed to crack, softening, her eyes deepening in hue. “You bastard,” she whispered, those eyes pleading. “Don’t you ever, ever take advantage of me … now that you know what I … how I—”

  “I swear. Never will I.”

  “Can I trust you, Titus?”

  He gulped, blinking the tears back as folks flooded past them, heading for what was left of the south riverbank where once had stood a street bustling with frontier commerce, a wharf where riverboats had tied up, and the town’s population helped inch settlement farther and farther west.

  “You can trust me with your life, Abigail.”

  Her lips moved as if she were trying to say something, then she collapsed against him instead. Wrapping her skinny arms about him tightly, she buried her face in his chest, sobbing. “Don’t care what you say, I know I cain’t ever trust you now. Ain’t never been able to trust no man. Your kind is here today. Gonna be gone off tomorrow. You’ll just go away, tearing yourself off a little piece of my heart when you disappear.”

  “Didn’t ever have no intention of leaving you … least like that I won’t.”

  “You bastard,” she groaned with a shudder, as if in saying it to Titus Bass, she could lump all men together in him. “You’re no better’n a lying sack of pig’s entrails—all of you!”

  And the harder she sobbed, the tighter she clung to his icy coat. All around them stunned people trudged this way and that in shock, as if struck half-dead at what had just befallen them. But there on that’tiny piece of icy, sodden ground, their sodden clothes freezing in the frightfully cold air, the two of them sat. Bass rocked her in his arms.

  “I won’t never leave you like that,” he whispered into the wet sprigs of her wild hair that still smelled of too much tobacco smoke and the musty stench of their bedding gone too long without airing, those blankets and hides they retreated under every night she trundled back to him, for a few hours all done with lying on her back in those stinking cribs behind the saloon that once stood at the river’s edge.

  “You damn right you won’t leave me, Titus Bass,” she promised harshly. “I’ll leave you first. Afore you leave me hurting. I’ll say my fare-thee-well to you, you bastard. Just like I been wanting to say it to every man I ever come to care for just a little … when he up and leaves me.”

  Suddenly she jerked back, snagging the lapels of his dripping coat. “Some of those sons of bitches even had the balls to steal what little money I had at the time. Can you beat that? They’d hit me, made me bleed, then stole’t what little I had hid away for myself—”

  “You’re hurt. Bleeding,” he interrupted, suddenly drawn from the tremble of her blue lips to the darkening gash at her brow. “Let’s go see to it.”

  As Titus dragged her to her feet, he said, “How’s a fella s’posed to thank you for saving ’im?”

  She stood quivering beside him. “Onliest way I know is just don’t ever run off from me like them others done. That’s how. You’ll thank me by waiting until I take off on you.”

  Looking down into her frightened eyes, he knew he had no way of ever understanding her terror that she might fall in love with him. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. Ain’t gonna ever hurt no one like that—”

  “You just let me go, Titus. Let me leave you behin’t when the time comes.”

  Without saying anything more Bass turned Abigail toward the path of girdled trees that would take them west toward the edge of town, where the settlement of Owensboro had stretched itself more and more every week this past summer. There he had raised them a new place, a dugout a little bigger than her shanty had been, with a bit better roof of all one pitch, just like a lean-to. A single door and window in that front facing the river. They hadn’t needed anything more, because he worked by day and she worked by night, and they gave themselves to one another in the moments of passing. For the time being it was enough to share what little they had with one another.

  For the time.

  The center of that great earthquake struck in Missouri, some seventy miles below the mouth of the Ohio, at a settlement called New Madrid, once a Spanish military post on the west bank of the Mississippi. For more than a hundred miles in every direction the earth convulsed.

  Although Owensboro lay 130 miles away as the crow would fly, even that part of the lower Ohio River valley wasn’t spared much of the devastation that eleventh day of December, 1811. Not only the Ohio, but even more so the Mississippi, both rolled back in their beds, flowing north for a short time while the earth heaved beneath them. Hundreds upon countless hundreds of keelboats, Kentucky broadhorns, log rafts of all description were torn apart, dashed against sandbars and riverbanks, the surface of the great rivers strewn for weeks and weeks with the debris of craft and cargo alike.

  Five nights later near ten o’clock the crust of the earth trembled once more. Waterfowl clacked and squawked overhead, afraid to put down and roost as they were scattered to the four winds in their fear.

  Then again the next day, December 17. Once more the banks caved in, carved away by forces stronger than the rivers that reversed direction in their beds. Great chasms splintered open across forest and field—raw, gaping lacerations in the earth that drew the curious and the frightened and the truly awed in the weeks and months to come—brought there to stare and consider. And when folks returned to the river, they always found it foaming, littered with a tangle of drift timber and uprooted trees. The thick forests were now a m
aze of sundered stands of maple, elm, oak, and beech. Those caught in more open country had witnessed the earth undulate in regular waves advancing at close to the pace of a trotting horse. In those first few days following the initial quake, there were times when the day became all but dark as the night, times when the sun failed to show its face, hidden behind a yellow pall, a haze wrought of dust and fires and hell on earth.

  By Christmas many folks had begun migrating away from that tormented land. Where they were bound for sure, they did not know. But word already had it that the worst of things had devastated the region south and west from the mouth of the Ohio. Best to head back east and north, they figured. If a wagon could be had, settlers loaded it with all they could carry out of that dangerous country some said was condemned by the hand of God Almighty. If nothing else was available, they strapped what they could to the backs of their horses, mules, oxen, and milch cows, setting off to get as far as possible from that land of the devil, often forced in their travels to bridge the great chasms of earth rent in those mighty upheavals.

  Even the wildlife migrated for a time, panthers and turkeys, deer and bear, wolves and waterfowl, all huddling in among the frightened fleeing from the maw of hell, taking what comfort they could from humankind in the wake of so great a catastrophe. Just to get out of that damned country.

  And damned that country was, they believed. Nothing but the wrath of God could have caused so great a calamity as to make the earth shake as it continued to do from time to time, right on into February of 1812 with no fewer than twenty-seven full-scale quakes. All too many of those pushing east believed this terrible retribution was being visited upon the unclean, the impure, the unholy and unrepentant who had flocked to the lower Mississippi Valley to feast themselves on flesh and whiskey, wine, women, and debauchery, in the devil’s playgrounds of Natchez and New Orleans.