“Before, during, or after! Don’t make me no difference—Titus Bass here’s the young’un gonna get his pecker stretched as long as a riverman’s gouger! I figure I’ll just pour some likker in him, and the boy here will tell me when he’s damn good and ready to climb aboard a gal.”
“Mathilda’s house?” Zane asked.
Wide-eyed, Bass quickly turned back to look at Kingsbury.
Hames nodded and replied, “Mathilda’s house, it is. Not a finer lick in all of Louisville.”
“Lick?” Titus asked.
“A whiskey house men flock to,” Kingsbury explained. “Just like the critters you hunt flock to a salt lick.”
Then Bass inquired, “Who’s Mathilda?”
Again it was Hames Kingsbury who explained, “It’s her inn what has the sort to make any man happy, by damn!”
“That’s right,” Root said, a rare smile creasing his face. “Louisville’s the last place on the river till a boatman gets down to Natchez or up to St. Lou.”
“St. Lou?” Bass asked, remembering. “You ever go up there?”
As he looked from man to man, they all shrugged their shoulders. Then Ebenezer finally said, “None of us ever been upriver to St. Lou afore, boy. Place might be coming of age soon, what I hear. But for right now it ain’t much of anything but Frenchies.”
“Just like down to Norlins,” Root added.
“Ain’t nothing for us up to St. Lou,” Kingsbury said. “We make fine money floating goods from Pittsburgh and Cincinnati downriver to Nawlins. St. Lou just filled with Injuns and them fellas trade with the Injuns for the furs. More of them all the time.”
“Got all the Frenchies I ever wanna rub shoulders with down to Norleans,” Zane declared. “I don’t need to go looking for more up to St. Lou.”
“Less’n it’s the sort of gals come out of Madame Lafarge’s,” Kingsbury said.
The pilot grinned widely in that bushy, unkempt beard and nodded. “Them kind of Frenchies I can stand to rub on all the time!”
Turning back to Titus, Hames Kingsbury winked. “We’ll get your pecker dipped in the honey-pot tomorrow at Louisville. An’ downriver at Natchez—that’s Ovatt’s favorite place. Then we’ll see about getting you up on top of a fine French gal down at Madame Lafarge’s come we reach Nawlins.”
“Titus Bass,” Zane hurled his voice, “a stroke of real luck you running onto
“With us—by damn—you’re gonna swaller your first likker,” Kingsbury agreed with a smile. “An’ go dip into your first real woman too!”
By the time Ebenezer Zane began shouting his orders for them to put in at the little harbor at the mouth of Bear Grass Creek the next afternoon, the eastern sky behind their backs had turned as gray as the slate lining the canyon of the upper Ohio, and the west ahead of them roiled with dark thunderheads, whipped to a froth by a wind that shoved the taste of a cold rain straight into their faces.
“Steady on that gouger!” the pilot ordered, watching the river, his two oarsmen, and Heman Ovatt struggling at that bow rudder.
“Get ready to bring her over!”
“Ready when you are, Ebenezer!” Ovatt bellowed.
From where he crouched out of the cold wind and coming mist, Titus watched less and less of the four rivermen as he turned his attention to the increasing signs of civilization they had been passing in the last few miles. Infrequent squatter farms had eventually given way to larger spreads until there were more and more lamps lit in the windows of cabins and shops as Ebenezer Zane eased them over to the Kentucky side of the Ohio.
While there were three other towns in the immediate area—Shippingsport in Kentucky, along with Jeffersonville and Clarksville across the river in Indiana Territory—Louisville had not only been the first river port, but from the start had remained the most successful, primarily due to the small harbor that lay at the mouth of the Bear Grass, which made for an ideal patch of calm water where boatmen would tie up and lay to before braving the Great Falls of the Ohio—just downriver from the town.
“Aport! Ho! Bring her hard to port!”
With the pilot’s command Ovatt lunged against the small gouger, clutching it beneath his armpits, pushing the rudder toward the starboard side of the craft. At the same time Zane was performing the opposite maneuver with his larger, longer, deeper-plunging stern rudder. While the bow of the flatboat began to swing out toward the main channel of the river, the stern was already inching in toward the south shore as they cleared the northern boundary of the bay, a grassy, timbered fingertip of rocky land.
“Goddammit! She’s cluttered up, Ebenezer!” Root bellowed his warning as they all got their first view of the crowded port.
“I can damn well see that!” Zane spat. “Loosen up on that gouger, Heman!”
As soon as Ovatt brought the rudder out of the water, the flatboat’s bow eased back into line with the stern as Zane worked his rudder back and forth in long, sure, deep strokes. More than half a hundred flatboats already bobbed in the bay, tied up bow to stern all along the shore, every last one of them awash in the saffron light of at least one oil lantern as the rainy twilight flooded out of the western sky. On shore the wharf bustled as men shouted and barked their orders, hefting loads on and off the boats, clomping up and down the sagging gangplanks, laughing and cursing.
Beyond, on up the southern bank, lay the flickering yellowed diamond dots of Louisville. Titus hadn’t seen this many people in one place at one time since last summer’s Longhunters Fair—likely not since his family’s last trip to Cincinnati.
“Hames, you and Reuben give me some drag!”
At the steersman’s order both Kingsbury and Root dipped their oars into the murky Ohio and braced their legs in the bottom of the boat as they sought to slow the flatboat’s speed. The river tugged, shoved, popped its might at the oarsmen, both of them grunting, huffing, hunching over their work as their voices blended with the loud creak of wood and iron strained to the limit at both gunnels.
“Likely we can put to on the far side of the harbor,” Kingsbury advised, his words no more than a growl as he fought to hold his oar deep in the moving water.
“Figure you’re right,” Zane replied. “Heman! Swing her about and take her across to yonder side!”
Once more Ovatt plunged his gouger into the water, bringing the bow out more in line with the main current of the Ohio as the pilot sweated in concert with him, together keeping the flatboat all but on a dead reckoning for the far side of the Bear Grass harbor.
“Dig in, boys!” Zane reminded his oarsmen. “More drag! More drag! Mind you, I’ve never landed over here, so we don’t know what we got in store for us.”
In the fading light Titus found himself growing more scared as the broadhorn rushed on across the mouth of the harbor toward the south side. There the number of flatboats thinned out and dwindled down to nothing as the lights of Louisville lumbered past on their left, then winked out of sight behind them.
Bass inched around to ask of Kingsbury, barely above a whisper, “What happens we don’t land here?”
“Ain’t no
A shudder ran down his spine. “In the dark?”
“And a man might just as well put a pistol to his own head as head down them chutes at night, with this wet weather blowing into our teeth way it is. You know how to pray—you might wanna give Ebenezer a hand.”
“He p-praying?” Bass asked, feeling himself go weak inside. He’d never been on rough water, much less any falls.
“Hell no, he ain’t prayin’!” Kingsbury replied with a grimace as the oar just about dislodged him where he had his legs braced between some kegs of nails. “Ebenezer’s too damn busy saving this boat—”
“Hard to port, Heman! Put everything you got into it!”
“She’s fighting me, Ebenezer!”
“Stand on it!” Zane commanded. “Don’t let ’er throw you off!” Then he flung his voice down at the youngster. “Titus Bass! Crawl up outta there and lay on that gouger with Heman!”
