With a mixture of excitement mingled with awe at the sudden announcement, Titus watched and listened as Beulah and the pilot finally declared what the two of them had been discussing for much of the long journey up from New Orleans.
Ovatt whirled on Root and asked, “An’ you’re telling me you didn’t know?”
“I … I knowed they was thick,” Reuben sputtered sheepishly.
“Yeah, real thick. ’bout as thick as your skull,” Ovatt said, then held his hand out to Kingsbury.
“Maybe you three ought’n go on over to Mathilda’s by yourselves,” the pilot said as they shook in turn, nodding at Beulah. “Me and the woman find us another place to bed in for the night.”
“Mean you’ll meet us down by the wharf come morning?” Root asked.
“Count on finding me there, waiting for all you late sleepers,” Kingsbury replied, glancing down with no small satisfaction as Beulah finally stepped to his side and threaded her arm through his. “This crew still got us a few miles left afore we get all the way back up the Ohio to Cincinnati, where I can buy us ’nother flatboat. Ain’t nothing changed my mind ’bout you an’ Heman still working the river with me.”
Root flicked a glance at Ovatt, then asked, “So you still figuring you need us?”
“Need you? Why, the hull lot of us been making a home on the river for years,” Kingsbury snorted.
Then Beulah leaned forward to say, “You think just because me and Hames gonna be a pair now that we don’t need you fellas? That it? Damned nonsense! If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re both crazy as a mad coon. Me being your pilot’s wife don’t change a thing.”
“But, well … there’s some fellers what’d be afeared of having a woman on their boat—not saying it’d be me, you unnerstant,” Root explained.
“Are you such a man?” Beulah asked.
Root smiled gamely and tried to shrug it off. “Maybeso you ain’t no more bad luck than anything else, Beulah.”
She leaned over to him and planted a kiss on Reuben’s cheek. “That mean you figure it’s awright for me to be part of your crew?”
While Root blushed, wide-eyed, Ovatt was the first to nod his head. Reluctantly, Reuben finally spoke up. “You’re part of the crew—just as long as you keep us fed and the coffee on.”
“I can do that,” Beulah replied as she slipped back beside Kingsbury. “And since Titus here ain’t gonna be part of the crew no longer, you’ll likely need me to spell you fellas on an oar or the gouger from time to time.”
A look of surprise crossed Ovatt’s face. “You do that man’s work too?”
“I been a boat pilot’s woman since I can remember,” she answered with a confident tilt to her chin. “So don’t you think I can put my hands to every chore on a flatboat, including taking my turn at the rudder?”
“See, boys?” Kingsbury said confidently. “Just like I found out for myself—this here’s one woman what can take care of her own self when it comes to a Kentucky broadhorn on the river.”
With a happy wag of his head Root cheered, “Looks like we’re back to being a foursome, it does at that!”
Ovatt nodded in agreement, saying, “When Ebenezer was kill’t, I figured Titus here was the one bound to fill out our crew. S’why I got real worried when he said he wasn’t gonna make a life on the river with us.”
“No matter that he’s going off on his own to do what he wants—now there’s four of us,” Kingsbury summed it up, then suddenly turned to the skinny youth. “Still, I wish I could find the words to make you wanna stay with us, Titus Bass.”
Titus struggled to explain how he wanted to press on, reaching for his dream. “Far back as I can remember, I been thinking on making for Louisville.”
Ovatt asked, “Come here to stretch your wings a bit?”
“Likely I will do that—if’n there’s any stretching left to do after that float down to Nor leans with the lot of you.”
“Out yonder lays a great big world, Titus—just waiting for you. And there’s allays the women and the whiskey while a young feller’s tasting it all,” Kingsbury said, stepping right up to Bass. “I’m gonna miss you.”
“Only till you get back down the Ohio come spring,” Bass reassured them, sensing a sour ball of sentiment begin to clog his throat.
“That’s right, Hames,” Root added. “Titus says he’s gonna be right here in Louisville where we can look him up every trip down.”
“Less’n Mincemeat kills him first!” Kingsbury joked, then clumsily threw his arms about the youngster. Into Titus’s ear he whispered, “You’ll take care of yourself now, hear?”
With the salty smart of his own tears and the sudden self-conscious silence surrounding them all, Bass could only nod, locked within the pilot’s crude embrace. He was unaccustomed to such a sharing of emotion between men. Finding this thing of hugging a strange custom, yet discovering that embrace made him feel truly accepted. There and then he thought back with some regret, wishing his father had been the sort to show just this sort of affection. Still after all, none of his family had ever stood on that physical side of things. Not even his mother, not with all that she said and did. None of his kin had ever been much taken with outwardly showing warmth and affection.
So much did that river pilot’s embrace mean to him that as soon as Kingsbury released him and took a step back, a sudden and chilling sense of loss swept over him. So much so that Bass was about to say he just might reconsider staying on with them—when Kingsbury reached up, tousled his hair, and gazed into Titus’s face.
With glistening eyes the pilot said, “Just look at you, son. Come a long way from being that poorly critter what walked outta the woods on our night fire way back last fall. Cain’t no man dare say you ain’t come a long way, Titus Bass.”
Try as he might to fight it, he could feel a tear escape from one eye, his lips quivering slightly as he fought to find the words—damning himself for such a childish display, angry at showing that sort of weakness here in the company of these strong men. But when he looked up, Bass saw Kingsbury’s tears spill into his short-cropped, matted blond beard.
The pilot swiped at them carelessly as Beulah gripped his arm tight, her own eyes red-rimmed and brimming. With a voice suddenly sounding like a door dragged over its sill, Kingsbury said, “We’ll see you here by the Ohio come late spring.”
In the next heartbeat he had Beulah turned and moving away into the fading light of that winter afternoon.
“C’mon, Titus,” Ovatt said, stoically refusing to let sentiment get the best of him as he grabbed hold of Bass’s arm. “We gotta get over to Mathilda’s and see if Mincemeat still remembers you.”
Locked there between the two boatmen sweeping off to have themselves a spree, Titus was pulled away a few steps before he realized he had forgotten someone.
He jerked to a stop, turning around there in the last reddish splash of winter’s afternoon sunlight, gazing back at the Negro. “You comin’, Hezekiah?”
With only a shrug of his big, broad shoulders, the slave answered, his head hung, chin to chest. Confused, Titus hurried back to him, saw the tracks of moisture tracing shiny indigo furrows down the tattooed ebony cheeks.
Softly, Titus asked, “You’re comin’, ain’t you?”
The big man answered, “You be going away from me soon, yes?”
“Hezekiah—I’m gonna see that you’re set free. Ain’t that what you want?”
“Free, yes. Free and go with Titus Bass.”
“Maybeso you ought’n not be free with me no longer,” Titus replied, trying to explain. “Maybeso you ought’n move on, go and try out your own wings now, Hezekiah.”
The big chert-black eyes sought his out with their moistness. “Then we say good-bye soon.”
“Not soon. Not tonight, anyways. Don’t have to be tonight. C’mon, you go with us over to Mathilda’s place. A fine place, with good food and lots of noisy folks.”
“T-titus,” Root began tentatively in a harsh whisper. “They don’t ’llow Negras in Mathilda’s place.”
“The hell they don’t!” Bass snapped indignantly. “I seen some back to the kitchen.”
“They the help. So that’s right where he can stay when we go in the place,” Ovatt suggested. “Back with Mathilda’s help.”
Titus turned on the slave. “That be awright with you? Get your meal and maybe a place to curl up for the
