flatboat tied up at the bank, gently bobbing in the cold, silvery light tracing lacy patterns on the black water.
Laughter drew his gaze back to the fire.
What that sound could do for his young soul.
Laughter!
His heart rising in his throat, Titus moved out of the timber, watching two of the men rise from their stumps.
“Who goes?”
He stopped, called back, “Just me.” And stayed rooted to that spot a moment more. “I was the one hollered out to you while back. Upriver, it was.”
One of the forms moved in front of the fire now, coming his way. He stopped, backlit by the cheery, yellow, beckoning flames.
“You’re alone?”
“Just me.”
That one signaled Titus on. “You’ve got our welcome.”
Bass inched into the light, licking his lips at the fragrance of something frying, smelling biscuits baking in a skillet to the side of the fire. He couldn’t take his eyes off that steaming kettle, the simmering coffeepot as his mouth worked at a gallop, salivating like a hound’s.
“Hell, he’s just a boy,” one of the others grumbled, placing his fists on his hips.
“Yeah,” the closest one cheered as Titus came closer. He had on a worn flannel shirt and buff-colored nankeen britches. “C’mon over here, boy. You look a mite hongry.”
“I … I am. Real hungry.”
The one in greasy flannel stepped close. As hairy as any man Titus had ever seen. “We got us plenty. You’re welcome to share.”
“He don’t get none of my share,” a third, short and stocky man grumbled, then spat into the fire with a loud hiss. He wore a jacket and waistcoat of quilted Spanish silk.
“How long it been since you et last?” asked the first man with his Kentucky accent.
“Been a day … or two,” Titus said, his eyes wandering nowhere from the frying pan and kettle at the fire’s edge.
“God-glory-damned, Ebenezer,” the last of the men exclaimed. “I do b’lieve this here boy’s done runned away from home!”
7
He couldn’t ever remember eating so much. It seemed his mouth and gullet and belly kept crying out for more, for every last bite he could lay his hands on.
“How long you say it been since you last et?” asked Hames Kingsbury, the head oarsman, who wore beneath his blanket coat a shirt of poor man’s tow cloth, topped with a bright-red handkerchief for a cravat. Crowning it all was a dark-green hat in which a long red feather was prominently displayed—a strutting cock of a boatman’s symbol of martial prowess.
Titus looked over the rim of his coffee tin at the blond, short-cropped man with a matted beard. “Two … two days.”
Kingsbury glanced up at the one called Ebenezer Zane, the long-haired, heavily bearded pilot and patroon of that flatboat bobbing gently nearby in the black water of the Ohio. “This boy’s got him a natural appetite, Ebenezer. If he gets hisself this hongry in two days—think what a pitiful sight he’ll make if he happed to go a week ’thout a bite.”
Zane squatted next to the youngster, grinning within that black beard and unkempt hair of his that surrounded his ruddy face like the mane of a lion. “Don’t you give none of these river riffraff no mind, Titus Bass. G’won and eat your fill.”
“I had a way,” Titus garbled around a chunk of the boiled salt pork, “I’d do something pay you back for the victuals.”
“Now, don’t go and tell our patroon that!” grumbled Reuben Root, just about the sourest-faced man Titus thought he’d ever had the displeasure to run across. Besides his jacket and waistcoat of Spanish silk that had seen finer days, Root sported a shapeless, low-crowned hat, the like of which protected a man from rain. “Man always pays up for what he eats.”
Stopping the corn dodger at his lips, Titus looked over at Root across the fire. “I … I ain’t got no money to pay for this food.”
In his fox-fur cap, with its legs dangling from either side of the pilot’s head and the tail bobbing down his back, Ebenezer Zane clapped a hand on the back of Bass’s shoulder and said, “Told you not to pay these’r hired fellers no mind. Eat your fill. An’ if’n that ain’t enough, we’ll boil up some more.”
“We go giving our food away, how we sure to last till Louisville and the Falls?” demanded Root grumpily.
“Shit, we’ll make it awright,” the fourth man cheered as he knelt close to the fire and picked up the bail to a large kettle where the boatmen had boiled their coffee. Like the other three, he too wore the thick moccasins preferred by rivermen, all well greased with tallow, as well as fustian britches, made of a coarse cloth woven from cotton and linen. The one called Heman Ovatt continued, “Cain’t be more’n another night on the river afore we reach port at Louisville.”
“Ovatt’s got the sense his folks give him,” Zane replied to the others.
“You’re the pilot—you tell me,” Root spat. “Pilot’s the one what’s supposed to know this river like every wrinkle in your own honey-dauber. Leastways, that’s what you claimed to me when you hired me back up to Pennsylvania.”
Zane leaned close to Bass as if intending to whisper a confidence, but his voice remained clear and loud as he said, “This sack of whorehouse catshit named Reuben Root really ain’t so bad a heart as it may seem, son. Just that, well—he’s a Pennsylvania boy. And not a Kentucky man.”
“Ovatt ain’t a Kentucky man neither!” Root protested. “An’ ’sides—I ain’t a sack of whorehouse catshit. That’s ’bout the worse thing you could call a man what hates cats much as I does.”
“Hell, Ebenezer knows that!” Kingsbury said. “Why you think he gone and called you that?”
The pilot nodded, smiling hugely. “Hames there”—and he pointed at the oarsman across the fire—“he a Ohio man. Same as Heman there. But I’ll ’llow they’re good Ohio men … seeing as they came from about as close to Kentucky as you can come.”
“We’re from Cincinnati,” Ovatt explained. “This here’s my third trip downriver.”
As were many who took up the nomadic, rootless life of a riverman, the flatboat’s patroon was himself a discharged soldier, a veteran of the Continental Army. Kingsbury, Root, and Ovatt had been the sort of vagabonds who naturally clustered in the river ports like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis when Ebenezer Zane had come upon them—otherwise homeless men who had become a class by themselves in the late eighteenth century.
Zane turned to Bass. “I figure since’t we saw you on the south side of the river—that’s gotta make you a Kentucky boy.”
“Yep, I am,” Bass answered.
How his ears already hung on every word these four spoke. While they might all be from the same general part of the frontier Titus had once called home, these boatmen nonetheless spoke with an accent that was all their own. From time to time their unique speech was spiced with the jargon peculiar to their trade, with a few Spanish, French, Creole, and Indian words thrown in for good measure.
Zane asked, “You got a place you call home?”
He glanced at the pilot a moment, then at two of the others around the fire, all of them gazing at him in expectant silence.
“It’s all right, Titus Bass,” the patroon finally said. “You don’t wanna say, makes us no difference. None of us gonna haul you back to home nohow.”
“R-rabbit Hash,” he said around a mouthful of meat.
