“Is it a race?” asked Whit, staring in delight.
“Yep,” said Berry, and bent to draw a polished hickory-wood fiddle from the case. She tested the tuning by plucking at the strings and turning the pegs, stood up on the highest rock facing downstream, and drew a long note, starting low and winding high until it seemed to leap off the fiddle altogether. She added, “I’ve fiddled my keeler boys up over every shoal and riffle on the Gray and the Grace. It makes the work go easier if you have a rhythm. When the boat boss wanted them to go faster, he’d bribe me to play quicker. The boys would bribe me to play slower. It could get pretty lucrative.”
Fawn spotted a lot of fellows out on the Pearl Bend wharf boat in the distance, shouting the contestants onward. “I don’t suppose you have a bet down on this race, do you, Berry?”
The riverwoman grinned. “Yep.” And set her bow to her strings, sending an astonishingly loud ripple of notes echoing down the river valley. The grunting keelers on the near shore looked up and cheered, and bent again to their rope in time to the boatman-music. Fawn guessed it was a familiar tune, likely with familiar words, and likely with a rude version, but the men had no breath to spare to sing along. The oxen on the other side seemed indifferent to the noise.
When the repeats on the first song began to get dull, Berry switched to a second tune, then a third. Some of the other boat bosses from Possum Landing had come out to watch the show, including Wain from the Snapping Turtle. Berry moved back from the rocks to the other side of the path as the keelboat drew near and began yet another tune, even livelier, her elbow pumping. Her audience shuffled after her. Strands of her lank blond hair, loose from the horse-tail at her nape, stuck to her face, and she alternated between either blowing them out of her mouth or chewing on them in her concentration. Her fingers stretched, arched, flew so fast they blurred. Everyone else was watching the race; Whit was watching Berry, his eyes alight and his mouth agape.
The sweating keelers, passing, hooted at her, then bent and stamped and strained. She made her fiddle echo their cries almost like a human voice. They were pulling well ahead of the oxen. Berry kept her music chasing them up the shore until they reached the wharf boat, reeled in their keelboat, threw down their rope, and sent up a victory whoop. She made her fiddle whoop back, and finally dropped it from under her chin, panting.
The flatties and locals who had collected along the bank to watch tromped back up the riverside to settle their bets and hoist a drink at the wharf boat, but neither Berry nor the other boat bosses on the lookout point joined them. Instead, they peered upriver, where one of the flatboats had loosed from its mooring and was being slowly sculled out to mid-river. “There goes the Oleana Lily,” someone muttered. They were all watching, Fawn realized, to see if this scout could clear the shoals without hanging up or tearing out its hull.
“If he makes it, will we go?” Fawn asked Berry.
“Not just yet,” said Berry, shading her eyes and squinting at the drifting flatboat, which was picking up speed. “The Lily drew a shallower draft than me even before I undertook to load on extra people, a ton o’ window glass, and a surly horse. You see that long pole sticking up out of the water below the Landing wharf boat?”
Fawn gazed where she pointed at what looked like a slim, bare tree, stripped of side branches, with a limp red flag nailed to its top some thirty feet in the air. Every half foot along its length, it had a groove circling it daubed with red paint, until a few feet up from the water where it changed to black paint. “That tells you how high the water is, right? Is it safe to take the shoals when it changes from red to black?” There seemed to be several feet left for the water to rise.
“Depends on how low in the water your hull and cargo ride. When it changes to black, any fool can get his boat over.”
“The marks go all the way to the top,” said Fawn uneasily. “The water doesn’t ever go that high, does it?”
“No,” said Berry, and Fawn relaxed, until she added, “By the time it’s about halfway, the pole usually rips out and washes away.”
Fawn finally saw why the river people relied on wharf boats, instead of a fixed dock like those she’d seen around Hickory Lake. The wharf boats would rise and fall with the shifting water, could be pulled ashore for winter, and wouldn’t be torn away by floods, drifting trees, or grinding ice. Were less likely to be, she amended that thought.
A few of the boat bosses lined up on the rocks yelled comments or advice to the steersman of the Oleana Lily, which were proudly ignored, but most watched in silence. When the steersman leaped to one side and pulled hard, not a few leaned with him, fists clenching, as if to add their strength to his. When the boat sideswiped a rock, scraping along the whole length of its oak hull, the boat bosses groaned in synchrony. They bent like trees in the wind, then all straightened together and sighed at what sign Fawn could not see; but the Lily was past the last rock and clump of wrack and still moving serenely.
The group broke up and began to trudge back up the path; a couple of men trotted ahead. Berry detoured only briefly at the crowded wharf boat, collecting a couple of bone-cracking hugs from some keelers and money from several more sheepish boatmen. She refused pressing offers of cider, beer, or the drink of her choice. “I got me a boat to launch, boys. We’ve been here too long—you’ve drunk this place dry!”
She paused on the bank to squint again at the ringed pole. “Well, not quite yet. But I think we might load on that horse.”
Back at the Fetch, they did so, laying extra timber for the gangplank. Dag soothed his dubious mount across the bending boards. Copperhead snorted in dismay, but followed; the boat dipped as he clomped down onto the deck and was penned with Daisy-goat. Whatever groundwork Dag was doing to assure the gelding’s cooperation was as invisible to Fawn as ever, but she noticed Remo raising his brows as if secretly impressed.
Berry climbed onto the roof to watch two neighboring boats launch at the same time and tangle their long side oars, with a lot of swearing. Berry scrubbed at the grin on her lips. “I think we’ll go next,” she said to Fawn at her shoulder. “It’s a dice roll, at this point. With a crowd like this, you want to go late enough to get the highest water, but not so late that some hasty fool before you wrecks his boat and blocks the channel again.”
Still, the launch seemed leisurely. Hawthorn dodged back and forth untying ropes from the trees and casting off, and Hod limped around to roll them up in neat coils, two at the front corners and two at the back corners. The oarsmen did not sit to their long sweeps, but stood, walking or leaning back, pushing or pulling as needed. Berry took the rear steering oar, with Bo and Whit on one side sweep and Dag and Remo on the other. It made Berry’s shouted directions simple: “Farmer side, pull!” “Patroller side, pull!” “Now the other way, patrollers! Turn her!”
A thump shook the boat as the hull glanced off a hidden stump. A crash from the kitchen sent Fawn racing inside to make sure everything was locked down and to check, for the third time, that her cook fire was well-banked and penned behind its iron barrier. When she came out again the boat was in the middle of the river, which still looked bigger than from shore. They swung into alignment with the channel. In contrast to its earlier placid clarity, the water was an opaque bright brown and visibly rolling, carrying along storm wrack from far upstream in an impressive current. She couldn’t imagine the bruised Remo swimming it now.
Fawn debated whether to cling to the bench by the front door or climb to the more precarious roof, then decided she was tired of being too short to see things. She climbed up and found herself a spot in the exact middle just beyond the radius of any of the three oars. She sat down firmly, wishing there were side railings, or a handle to grip. Maybe she could talk Bo into adding one. But for now the view was very fine.
They entered the Riffle proper, and the Fetch picked up speed. Dag suddenly yelled, “Bear right, boss! There’s a big snag about two feet under down there!”
Berry stared where his finger pointed
. “You sure? I don’t see a boil!”
“Try me!”
“All right,” said Berry dubiously, and leaned on her oar to twist the boat past, alarmingly close to some highly visible rocks on the far side. Bo had to lift his sweep to clear them, and shot his boss a questioning look, which she answered with a shrug before leaning on her oar to bring the boat around again. Whit, lending his strength to Bo, looked utterly exhilarated.
“Your boat steers like a drunk pig,” Remo said, hauling briefly backward against the current at her next order.
“Yeah, it ain’t no narrow boat, is it,” Berry returned cheerfully, un-offended. “Live and learn, patroller.”
A flatboat crowding close behind them chose to veer wider around the rocks. With a loud clunk, it shuddered almost to a stop, then began to swing around its bow. Cries of dismay and a lot more swearing followed as its crew fought to keep it from turning broadside to the current. Berry looked at Dag and raised her brows high. He touched his temple back at her.
“Well, live and learn,” Berry repeated, in quite another tone.
Fawn stared back at the receding Lakewalker ferry landing, wondering if they were being watched by irate council eyes. They passed rocks, clogs of dead trees and debris including a bloated sheep, and less visible hazards, then the river widened and the odd swirls like soup boiling disappeared. The surface smoothed.
“Ease up, boys, we’re over the Riffle and away at last,” said Berry. “It’s a straight reach for the next three miles.”
Dag and Bo stood down from their sweeps. On the easy stretches, Fawn understood, the oarsmen would take turnabout, and the boat would float along all day without stopping. Dag came over, sat down beside her, stretched out one leg, and gave her a hug around the shoulders. “All right, Spark?”
“It’s wonderful!” She stared at Pearl Bend, already falling behind on the far shore, and back to the boat boss, now leaning happily on her oar. “We’re going so fast!”
Berry’s agreeing grin stretched as wide as the river. “Fast as a horse can trot!”
11
The Fetch made thirty river miles before the dank autumn dusk, when they tied to the bank for the night in the middle of, as nearly as Fawn could tell, nowhere. Berry explained regretfully that she didn’t want to try running downriver in the dark—Whit’s appalling suggestion. In addition to the hazards of rocks, stumps, sand bars, ledges, and wrack, the river divided frequently around shifting islands. A boat choosing the wrong side might find itself stuck in a channel that petered out into impassible thatch, and its crew plagued with the arduous task of towing it up around the head of the island again, difficult enough for a keelboat, designed for such work, worse for a balky flatboat. Boats had been abandoned in such situations, Berry said. Fawn poked Whit to silence when he began to volunteer Dag for a night pilot. Even were Dag’s groundsense recovered to its full one-mile range, some of these islands were as much as five miles long. And the river was quite scary enough in daylight.
After that, Fawn was too busy fixing dinner to worry further. With the excitement of the day wearing off, everyone seemed glad to turn in early. In addition, Fawn suspected Dag was still bone-weary from healing the Pearl Bend woman, at some level underneath the mere physical. He seemed to wrap himself around Fawn in their bedroll more for comfort than anything else; from the intensity of his clutch he was feeling low on comfort tonight. She wondered if having Remo aboard bothered him. A curtain gave no privacy from groundsense. Although since farmers couldn’t veil their grounds at all, she supposed Remo must have shut himself off, as Dag often did, to spare himself the abrasion. Weary herself, her musings trickled into sleep.
They made a dawn start, and by midday, the clouds had thinned and the sun came through, if still a bit pale and watery, which Fawn thought lifted everyone’s moods. At Berry’s suggestion she experimented with the clever iron oven that fitted in the Fetch’s hearth, and was able to produce pies for lunch without stopping the boat. Or setting it on fire, a fact of which she was more proud than of the pies, which, truly, everyone ate with flattering appetites. In the afternoon, she found Dag taking a break from his oar, lounging on the bench on the front deck keeping pleasantly idle company with Copperhead, Daisy-goat, and the chickens. She leaned over the rail and eyed the smooth, brown water. The Fetch seemed to be outracing a sodden log, but that floating leaf was definitely pulling ahead.
“Dag,” she said, “do you think you could catch us enough fish for dinner?”
He opened his eyes and sat up. “What kind?”
“I don’t even know what kinds there are in this river. Bo was going on about how much he liked a good channel catfish fried up in a cornmeal crust. Do you think you could get enough of them to feed eight?”
His slow smile tucked up the edges of his mouth. “I could try, Spark.”
He rose and stretched, only to drape himself over the side of the boat just behind the pen, his left arm trailing down. His hook barely grazed the water. Fawn watched in sudden doubt. When he’d persuaded that big bass to leap so startlingly into their laps at Hickory Lake, they’d been in a much smaller boat, with lower sides. The Fetch’s rail seemed awfully high to expect any fish to jump over. Were catfish even the jumping sort? Fawn had a dim idea that they lurked about on the river bottom.
When nothing happened in about ten minutes, Fawn considered wandering back to her domain by the hearth to think about what she could do with bacon for dinner, again, except she was afraid Dag was falling asleep. Granted he would doubtless wake up when he hit the water, and he could swim better than she could, and if she grabbed for his legs he might simply pull her over with him, but still. But then he stiffened, muttering, “Ha.” She craned her neck.
And then he was jerked half over the thwart, with a startled scream of “Blight!”
Fawn lunged, managing to get her hands around his belt. She snatched one look over the side before she leaned frantically backward, feet skidding on the deck. A huge gray splashing shape seemed to have half-swallowed Dag’s hook, and was trying to yank him into the river. In order to eat him, near as Fawn could tell. She supposed turnabout was fair play, but she wasn’t willing to give up her best husband to some awful river monster. “Dag, let go of it! It doesn’t matter! I don’t want a fish dinner that much!”
“I can’t! Crap! The blighted thing’s stuck on my hook!” Dag clawed futilely at the buckles on his arm harness, then managed to get his knees down far enough to clap them to the inboard side of the hull and give a mighty heave. Fawn added what weight she had.
Several feet of flailing gray wetness rose from the brown water and arced through the air to land on the mid-deck with a thud that shook the whole boat. Dag, still attached to its mouth-end, perforce fell with it, and Fawn with them both. She scrambled back on her hands and knees. The startled Copperhead tromped his hooves in the straw of his pen, jerked his head, and whinnied, and Daisy-goat bleated in fright, whether of the plunging horse or of the river monster Fawn was unsure.
“Whit!” Dag yelled. “Bring a mallet! Quick!”
The uproar brought the entire crew of the Fetch rushing to the bow. Whit, Hod, and Hawthorn jammed up in the front hatch. Berry, Remo, and Bo peered down over the edge of the cabin roof. Whit vanished, Hawthorn fell through, and Hod, eyeing Copperhead’s antics, hung back. Fawn bounced to her feet for her first clear view of the most enormous fish—if it was a fish—she had ever seen or imagined. It was nearly as long as she was tall. Its head was huge, eyes glaring yellow, mouth wide and ugly, and Dag’s left arm was still stuck partway into its gaping gullet. Red gills flexed, and its long barbels snapped like whips as it heaved and flopped. Dag was jerked around with it.
Whit reappeared with a shiny new shovel grabbed from Berry’s stock of Tripoint goods, and proceeded to try to beat the fish to death, or at least into submission, urged on by Dag: “Hit it again, Whit! Harder! Ow! Aim for its head, blight you!”
The catfish finally stopped moving, mostly, and Dag d
rew a long breath, sat up, and carefully worked his hook free from inside the thing’s mouth. If the monster had succeeded in pulling him overboard, would it have taken him to the bottom and drowned him before he could get loose? Fawn felt faint. Dag shook out his arm, looked around at his riveted audience, and cleared his throat. “There, Spark. Fish dinner for eight.”
“Thank you, Dag,” Fawn choked. Which won a flash of a smile back, the strain in his face easing. He almost succeeded in looking as if he’d meant to do all this, but she thought he might be picturing that trip to the river bottom, too.
“Fish dinner for forty-eight, more like,” said Whit, measuring out the gleaming corpse. “How much does this thing weigh?”
“Looks like about a hundred, hundred-twenty pounds, to me,” drawled Bo. An expert opinion, Fawn presumed. Whit whistled.
“Well,” said Berry, looking down at Fawn and shaking her head. “You did tell me your husband could catch fish, I’ll give you that. Never seen anyone use live Lakewalker for bait, before.”
“How do you fit it in a pan?” Fawn nearly wailed. She pictured it draped across her skillet with an arm’s length hanging over each side. She wouldn’t be able to lift it. Could it be cooked on a turnspit, like a roasting pig?
“Whit and Hod will clean it and cut it up for you,” said Dag genially. He stretched his back and climbed somewhat gingerly to his feet, wiping his hook on his trousers. “I’m sure Bo will be happy to tell them how.”
Whit’s look of big-eyed enthusiasm faded a trifle, but he didn’t protest. He and Hod hauled the catch to the back deck to butcher under Bo’s amused supervision.
Passage Page 17