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
