“I’ll race you to goddamned Cincinnati, Hoosier!” Gatty’s voice cracked with fury. “You’ll sink that bastard tub, too, but this time you’ll be looking at my hairy backside!”
Crowe’s boat was longer and narrower than Maudie. It cut through the Little Kanawha’s brown water like a shark fin, surging past Maudie under a full head of steam. Archie could see the words Detroit Damsel painted in bold letters on her port bow.
“I’ll just float ‘til you catch up, Delbert,” Crowe called as he passed. “Hate to take advantage of old Maudie.” His crew tipped Gatty an ironic salute.
Gatty spat into Crowe’s wake. “Watch out for snags, you son of a bitch. No excuses this time!” He cranked the throttle open and jammed it there with the barrel of his gun, then ran up to the bow, shouting curses at Crowe, Punch and Judy, and the state of Indiana. Maudie picked up speed, rocking in the Detroit Damsel’s wake.
Rufus tapped Archie on the shoulder. “Might as well have us a sit-down,” he said over the roar and hiss of the boiler. “Delbert’ll either win or he won’t. Probably he will, but there ain’t nothing for us to do. Can’t pole us away from a snag at this speed, and he took me off the rudder when he found out that Alfonse don’t drink.”
Archie followed Rufus back to the lee of the cabin, where they sat down. Rufus hefted a jug he found next to the railing and grinned. “Must have left this here yesterday,” he said. “Bottoms up.”
The two boats pulled even as they rounded the bend below the MacGruder house. Even in their sheltered spot, wind whipped in furious eddies, and Archie jammed his hat down over his ears. He’d never moved this fast before, not even on a train, and their speed in the narrow waterway made him nervous. If they crashed, he wasn’t at all certain he would be able to fight the swollen spring currents.
“How long will they race?” he asked Rufus.
” ‘Til someone runs out of wood or blows the boiler.”
“Blows the boiler?” This was a possibility Archie hadn’t considered. He upended the jug, drinking until his eyes watered. Rufus watched him quizzically, waiting to speak until Archie set the jug on the deck and gasped for breath.
“You ain’t never been on a boat in your life, have you?” Archie shook his head, and Rufus cackled. “I figured. Why’d you git on this godforsaken tub, then?”
Archie looked out over the wakes left by the churning paddle-wheels. An odd silence seemed to have fallen, as if the wall of sound created by the race had attuned Archie’s hearing to what wasn’t there. Maudie’s boiler could explode at any moment, leaving him mangled or drowned in the freezing water—he’d read of similar accidents in the Herald. There were dozens every year.
And then Jane would be murdered.
What would happen then? Would the war between the chacmool and the Lenape go on, or would some kind of decisive blow have been struck? Archie didn’t know, but he also realized that he didn’t much care. Whether the world changed or not, Jane would still be dead. None of the rest of it mattered.
“If you don’t want to say, it don’t sweat me none,” Rufus said, but he looked injured despite his words. He looked down between his knees and popped his thumb in and out of the jug’s neck.
“No, it’s not that. Just woolgathering,” Archie said. “My daughter—I think she’s in Louisville. I’m trying to find her. Her mother’s dead, and I,” he swallowed hard. “I haven’t been much of a father to her.”
“Mm,” Rufus nodded. “I got a daughter. Two, I think. They’re in Vicksburg, though, and I ain’t been there in nearly ten years.” He glanced off to his right, where the Detroit Damsel was, beginning to open up a lead. Then he shook his head and sighed. “Reckon I won’t never get back there again.”
The Kanawha was broadening ahead of them and Archie could see the clustered buildings of Parkersburg, and beyond it the open water of the Ohio perhaps half a mile downstream. He wondered if Maudie was running flat out, or if Gatty could coax a bit more out of her once they swung out into the main current. A strange detachment settled over him, all of his anxieties receding into the background like the noise of the race had seemed to before. Almost as if the river itself was singing him a lullaby, relaxing him.
So this was fatalism. His fate was completely out of his hands. Either he would survive Delbert Gatty’s mania or he wouldn’t. Either he would reclaim Jane from her captors or he wouldn’t. Rufus had it exactly right: just take a seat on the deck and watch things unfold. What else was there for a foot soldier to do?
Milt Crowe had pulled a full length ahead, and as the two vessels charged through the mouth of the Little Kanawha, he edged to the left, driving Maudie dangerously close to the left bank. Gatty shouted something and flung Archie’s pole at the Detroit Damsel’s stern.
Maudie steamed nearer the bank, and Gatty suddenly came charging past Rufus and Archie to the stern. He grabbed hold of Alfonse and shoved him to the right.
“Cut the channel! Cut the channel!” he screamed. “You, Punch and Judy, keep stoking!”
Part of what Archie had thought was the Little Kanawha’s left bank was actually an island, with a narrow channel separating it from the Virginia mainland. Oh my God, Archie thought, how can we make that turn at this speed? And with a manual rudder?
“Damn daring move, Delbert,” Rufus said appreciatively. “Hope no boat’s tied up at old Blennerhassett’s dock.”
As Crowe’s boat steamed out into the Ohio, Gatty shoved Alfonse away from the rudder and hauled on it with all his strength. Maudie’s stern came around to the right, and she practically skidded across the river’s surface before straightening and plowing toward the channel.
The near bank loomed ominously close, but Archie’s mind had fastened on something Rufus had said. “Blennerhassett?” The name was familiar. Something he’d read somewhere?
“Yup, the old man owned this island.” Rufus’s eyes were fixed on the bank, but his mouth kept moving. “He’s gone now since the Burr trial. Don’t know who lives there now—oh my Christ!”
Gatty had cut the angle perfectly, keeping Maudie from running aground while losing a minimum of speed in the turn, but he hadn’t noticed the massive dead oak leaning out from the undercut bank just around the bend from the Little Kanawha’s mouth. He saw it now, though, and he strained against the rudder, his eyes wide and disbelieving.
Rufus was up and running before it happened. “Into the water!” he cried. “She’ll blow sure!” He dove headfirst off the stern and disappeared into Maudie’s wake.
As Maudie surged under the toppled tree, a hanging branch thick as a man’s torso caught the top of her stack, bending it back and crushing it down into the boiler. The branch hung swaying, then broke loose to crash down on Maudie’s stern, snapping off the rudder handle and pinning Gatty to the deck.
Maudie shuddered and an ear-piercing whistle drowned out the shouts of Punch and Judy as they stumbled toward the bow, tripping over the shackles binding their feet. The boat drifted into the center of the channel, her wheel slowing and her stern coming farther around until she floated broadside in the slow current. Archie found his feet and scrambled to follow Rufus off the stern; Alfonse had disappeared and Gatty was thrashing under the branch pinning his legs. Archie could see his mouth moving, but the
whistle from the boiler had risen to a hurricane scream and Gatty’s words were lost.
He had barely made it to the cargo stacked in the stern before the boiler exploded, the blast wave pinwheeling Archie out over the flat brown river.
When he hit the water, Archie sucked in an involuntary breath at the shocking cold. The river flooded his mouth and nose, and he panicked, flailing about in the murky water. Which way was up? Forcing his eyes open, he saw sunlight and kicked toward it, his lungs burning and pulse hammering in his ears.
He broke the surface and gulped a deep breath, immediately choking up a stream of dirty water. Wiping hair from his eyes, Archie saw Maudie, burning like tinder as she drifted sternfirst in the mainlan
d side of the channel, her deck barely level with the water. The boiler, stack, and cabin were gone, shattered into bits of flotsam that spotted the water around the wreck. Her cargo, too, was gone, either sunk or drifting away.
Gatty’s body hung in the water off Maudie’s stern, twisted in the railing and the waving remains of the rudder. His head was underwater. There was no sign of Rufus or the three slaves.
Archie’s boots began dragging him down, and awakening pain from his burns made every move excruciating. Water slopped over his chin as he imagined trying to swim with iron manacles about his ankles; any of the three blacks could be gasping out his life from the muddy bottom, eyes fixed on the same sunlight Archie had seen but unable to reach it. A terrible vision of hopeless dark hands grasping at his feet spurred Archie to action; he got his arms moving and began to swim.
A packing crate floated in front of him, burning along the corner farthest above the water. The flame spread and leapt out onto the water, licking along the ripples Archie made as he stopped to tread water. Something about it was soothing, and he forgot his fear of being dragged under.
Just for a moment, and then it was gone; but Archie saw it. He saw the flames resolve themselves into an image, low and shimmering like reflected sunlight on the brown water. Helen’s face. He spoke her name, reached toward the flickering image, and then it was gone, extinguished as the crate turned slowly over with a hiss and puff of steam.
“Helen,” he said. “Love, what is it?”
The feathet talisman floated to the surface, its brass medallion bobbing on the waves created by his awkward strokes. It turned around once, the feathers brushing against Archie’s chin, then pointed steadily toward the bank of Blennerhassett’s Island.
Archie waited for another sign, some indication of why Helen’s face had formed itself from fire and water and death. What kind of magic was this? Was it a warning, come too late, of Maudie’s wreck? Dazed and fearing he’d conjured the image out of shock and guilt, Archie followed the talisman and struck out for a sandy strip of beach a few dozen yards distant. The slumping remains of a dock stood out from the beach’s downriver edge, just a double row of sunken posts with a few crooked boards clinging to them. Archie’s back and shoulders hurt like they were still being steam-cooked; he thought he could feel fresh blisters rising and breaking as he worked across the current, finally catching hold of one of the weathered dock posts and settling his feet on the sandy bottom.
Looking behind him, he saw that Maudie was completely gone save for the very tip of her bow, which peeked above the surface in a tangle of brush and fresh debris on the mainland side of the channel. She would lie there caught on a snag until another short-cutting captain either tore out his bottom on her or brought in salvagers to float her down to Cincinnati. Either way, Archie’s short career as a riverman was over. There was no sign on the river of the image he’d seen moments before.
“I don’t understand,” Archie moaned, his teeth beginning to chatter. The soothing lethargy he’d felt just a few minutes before was gone, replaced by a surge of desperate frustrated anger. Jane was in the hands of madmen, and he was stranded on a strip of mud with only the sodden clothes on his back and fleeting visions of his dead wife. He had to find a way to Louisville, and if he were to heed Tamanend’s advice and travel by water he’d have to cross the island and hope that a passing vessel would pick him up. Barnum’s money was gone, a windfall for whoever dredged up Maudie’s charred bones.
And come to think of it, Tamanend’s advice hadn’t proved very useful, had it? Archie shivered as he slogged out of the shallows onto the beach, feeling the March wind draw his body heat through the tears in his dripping clothes. Have to get warm and dry, he thought. No inexplicable encounters with Indians this time, just find a roof and get warm. You can’t do Jane any good if you catch a fever and die here.
Helen, what did you want to tell me?
He supposed he was in shock—four men had just died and he’d barely given a thought to finding Rufus. Sorry, old man, he thought. Hope you got clear. Maybe Milt Crowe will come back around and pick you up.
Archie realized he’d spoken aloud, and then that he was deaf. Must have been the explosion, he thought. But his ears didn’t hurt, at least not any more than the rest of him. He hoped it was temporary.
A winding, overgrown path snaked back into the trees from the base of the dock. Before following it, Archie stripped and wrung his clothes dry as best he could. Despite the chilly temperatures, the sun was bright, and he actually warmed a bit as his skin dried. The chill settled over him again as he dressed, but it was nothing a brisk walk wouldn’t stave off until he could locate a roof and, he hoped, a dry bed and change of clothes.
So this is Blennerhassett’s Island, Archie thought as he made his way up a gentle rise and into the denser forest. Harman Blennerhassett had bankrolled much of Aaron Burr’s seditious activity and, after Burr’s arrest, had fled to Louisiana and died, leaving his island estate to fall into disrepair. The mansion had burned in 1811, and Blennerhassett himself had died in 1831. Archie had never understood Blennerhassett’s role, or his interest in the whole affair. Burr’s Wallam Olum commentary gave no indication that the old Irishman had known of the Tlaloc cult. Perhaps he had simply been hungry for power and had sought to guarantee himself influence by financing Burr’s bid to become a western emperor.
It wasn’t just Blennerhassett, either. Archie wasn’t absolutely certain of the motives of any of the various parties in this endless, invisible war. Tamanend had said that people create gods, but that gods attain a reality of their own as long as they are worshiped. That might explain the conflict between the Lenape and the chacmool’s people, but both societies had been practically eradicated by the white man. What was left to fight over? Was it really possible for a handful of fanatics to resurrect a forgotten god?
What did the Lenape really want? Were they really so solicitous of the civilization that had destroyed them, or was Tamanend not telling him something?
And none of those questions, even if they could be concretely answered, explained Riley Steen. He certainly believed that the old gods had power—Archie had no doubt of that after the night at the Museum and outside the Brewery—but he didn’t exactly worship, did he? He feared his enemies and used what rituals he could, but Archie couldn’t recall seeing him actually pray. Perhaps he too was only in it for the power, and thought he could ride the chacmool to some sort of prominence.
At least I know what I want, Archie thought. No one has offered me riches or power, and I don’t care. I just want to be a father again.
But was that really true? Would he turn down what Steen sought, if it was offered to him?
The sight of a dilapidated mansion ahead broke Archie’s train of thought. Funny, Archie thought. Barnum said it had burned.
He made his way across a muddy field, once a lawn or perhaps vegetable garden but now overgrown with oak and poplar saplings. Archie wished he was better acquainted with edible plants. If this had been a garden, some of the vegetables might have survived, and … but no, it was only March. And unless someone had taken up residence here when Blennerhassett fled south, it was very likely that Archie wouldn’t eat until he managed to secure passage farther down the river. How long before hunger began to seriously debilitate him?
The manor house itself was blocky and squarish, with most of its paint peeled away by thirty-five winters. The roof sagged noticeably in several places, and nearly all of the windows were broken. Off to one side stood a barn, its roof fallen completely in and its doors standing open.
No wagons or carriages were visible, or any other sign that the house was occupied. Archie approached the house and tried the front door. The knob was frozen, no doubt rusted shut. He debated a moment, then went to the nearest ground-floor window. Peering inside, he saw what must have been a parlor, dominated by the hulk of a fortepiano in the opposite corner from the window. A rotting divan flanked by Queen Anne chairs had been set
up facing a central table. Everything in the room was covered in leaves and dust.
Archie used his elbow to break out the shards of glass still clinging to the sash, then climbed through the window. In the front hall a stairway led to the second floor; a sitting room, dining room and kitchen occupied the remainder of the ground floor. Archie searched the kitchen and adjoining pantry, but whatever viable foodstuffs Blennerhassett left behind, in this mansion that had supposedly burned to its foundation thirty years before, had long since moldered or been ruined by hungry animals.
The talisman began to throb slowly as Archie climbed the front staircase. He stopped and peered up into the dim hall at the top of the stairs. Could the chacmool have somehow known he would be stranded here and set up an ambush? It seemed absurd, but Tamanend had admonished him to stay dry while traveling by water. Perhaps as long has he’d had a boat between him and the river, Archie had been masked, but when Maudie had blown herself to fragments, the chacmool had scented him.
Then what was waiting for him at the top of the stairs?
Archie drew the knife, thanking his lucky stars—if he had any—that it hadn’t been torn loose in the explosion, and crept up the stairs. His hearing was beginning to return and he listened as well as he could for any sound other than the creak of his foot on each step.
The upstairs hall was dark enough that the chacmool itself could have crouched invisibly within arm’s length, but the talisman’s vibration didn’t intensify. Holding the knife out in front of him, Archie stepped cautiously ahead. His eyes began to adjust to the dimness and he saw that just ahead and to his right, a door opened off the hall. Another doorway was barely visible directly opposite the first, on the other side of what looked like a drawing room.
A slow pulse like a heartbeat began to throb in it as Archie approached the door nearest him, over the dining hall on the ground floor. He tested the knob and the door clicked open.
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