He started to rise slowly, cautiously, frightened.
“We need you up there right now, Titus,” Kingsbury urged.
“That boy ain’t gonna do us no good!” Root snarled.
“He will too,” the pilot snapped, fighting his rudder. “Get up there now, Titus—and help us get this god- damned Kentuckyboat landed.”
Clawing his way around barrels and over crates, Titus eventually slid down onto the slippery deck in what foot room there was standing opposite Heman Ovatt.
“Lay on it!” the gouger ordered.
Bass hurled himself onto the short shaft of the rudder, face-to-face with Ovatt.
“You don’t weigh much, do you?” Ovatt grunted.
“My mam … she always trying to fatten me up. Said … I had me no tallow. Only b-bone and gristle.”
“Push! Or pull, Titus Bass!”
Zane hollered above the cry of the wind and the hammer of the rain, “We’re doing it, boys!”
Titus didn’t allow himself a look right then, able only to feel the lurch and bob of the flatboat’s bottom as it passed out of the river’s main channel, heaving over toward the calmer water near the Ohio’s south shore. By now the mist had become a steady rain, cold as springwater running down the back of his shirt and jerkin.
“Bring ’er over hard, Heman. Bring it over, Titus Bass!” Zane cried out. “Reuben, bring your oar out and get this’r stern line ready.”
In less time than it takes to tell, Root had pulled his oar from the hammered surface of the brown water and slid back to the rear of the craft, where he laid a loop of thick oiled hemp over one shoulder.
“There’s some likely stumps up ahead, Ebenezer,” Reuben suggested. “They been clearing more and more land.”
“I’ll bring you over and you snag a likely one,” the pilot advised with a grunt.
As Zane brought the slowing flatboat side-sliding to the shore, Root bent and lunged toward the bank in a smooth, practiced motion. He landed on the shiny grass, his moccasins slipping on the mud. He went to his knees but was up in a fluid motion, ripping the coil of rope from his shoulder to fling a great loop of it around the stump of a long-ago girdled tree.
“Tie ’er off stout, Reuben!” Zane advised as the flatboat began to ease on past the stump where Root stood knotting the length of hemp as thick as a man’s four fingers.
At the first straining creak of the stretching rope, it proved certain the huge, oiled knot was going to hold, bringing the stern of the craft closer to the shore as it bobbed on down the bank.
“Bring it about, Heman! Show the boy what to do!”
“Push, goddammit!” Ovatt commanded. “Now’s the time to push!”
Together they plunged the gouger deeper into the water speckled with icy, hammering rain. Beneath him Titus could feel the bow of the boat beginning to sweep around, held firm astern by the one line to their rear, the front of the craft being nudged over by the strong muscle of the river’s current against the gouger and the two men who clung to her.
“Hames! Take the bowline ashore!”
Against the steady drumming of the rain atop flat oaken kegs and barrels, against the hardwood crates, he heard Kingsbury grunting up behind him with his burden, listened as the boatman dragged the rope across the top of their cargo, heard him land in the sodden mud onshore. Kingsbury flung a loop once around a second tree stump, and working in concert with the two men straining at the gouger, he steadily took up the slack in the rope, easing the bow into the shore.
“Tie ’er off,” Zane commanded, stepping away from his rudder pole for the first time in those long, anxious minutes. He twisted from side to side, working a kink out of his back, then tugged down the brim of his shapeless hat before disappearing beneath the awning.
“You can let go now,” Ovatt said.
Only then did Titus realize he still had a deathlike grip on the gouger pole. It took him a moment before he could get his cramped fingers to obey his wishes. When they finally came off, he flexed them.
“C’mon, fellas,” Zane called out, reappearing from the awning. He scooted to the left side of the craft and heaved himself down into the mud.
Ovatt was next, while Bass was the last to land. His legs felt unsteady beneath him at first, what with struggling to keep his balance on the bobbing, weaving flatboat.
Ebenezer Zane was beside him, grabbing his shoulder, helping him straighten there on the shore. “C’mon, boy. I owe you a drink. This Titus Bass did fine, did he not, Heman?”
“He did better’n fine, Ebenezer. He did a man’s work this afternoon.”
Zane pounded him on the back. “Then a man’s drink it is for Titus Bass.”
“At the Kangaroo?” Kingsbury asked.
“Hell, yes,” Zane replied. “There is no better place where we could celebrate this boy’s passage to manhood in Louisville.”
Twenty families accompanying George Rogers Clark on one of his many forays in the Old Northwest during the Revolutionary War had first settled in the area in 1778. Until Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte, Louisville officially served as the young country’s western port of entry, with headquarters for a single U.S. customs agent. Now some thirty-two years later the town boasted a population of at least five hundred, and growing. Besides the grogshops, alehouses, and inns frequented by the rivermen, there were a score of more respectable hotels and restaurants, as well as two long blocks of shops and stores of all description. The town even boasted its own theater, recently built in 1808, establishing what the Louisville
But try as Louisville’s respectable citizens might, it was still the river that had created the town, and it was the river from which Louisville drew its sustenance. Here, close to two out of three men in one way or another owed their livelihood to the Ohio flatboat trade. All along the wharf surrounding the harbor pulsed the bustling commerce of boat building and repair, the riverbank crowded with wagon masters loading goods for their trek inland to the heart of Kentucky, from dawn till dark throbbing with the jostle and shove of draymen and hired lackeys.
Louisville was just about the most exciting place Titus had been in his life. All he had ever dreamed of already, and he hadn’t yet moved a step from Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat.
“The ever-loving Kangaroo!” Hames Kingsbury sang out prayerfully as they pushed on up the soggy bank. “God, but I hope to lay eyes on sweet Mathilda.”
To which Zane exclaimed, “That ain’t all you want to lay on her, I’ll wager!”
All five of them belly-laughed as they strode through the mud into the splotches of hissing torchlight fronting the infamous low-roofed Kangaroo Tavern. Titus stumbled into something, leaping over it as he peered down at the ground.
“You’ll have to watch where you’re walking,” Ovatt advised, “there’s more of ’em.” He pointed out the half- dozen or more bodies sprawled here and there among the mud puddles shimmering in the torchlight dancing on the breeze outside the tippling house.
A crude door blew open and out poured three men, two of whom had a secure hold on the third. A burst of noise, squeals of womankind, and sharp gusts of cruel laughter rolled out in their wake. Intent on their business, the two shoved their way right through the boatmen, stopped, and heaved the one between them into the night. Bass watched the man hurtle a good ten feet through the air until he landed facedown in the rutted muddy lane, where he struggled to rise on all fours at first, then gave up and sank back into the mire.
“Such’ll teach you: don’t never get yourself thrown out, Titus Bass,” Zane warned with a wag of his finger.
The other three rivermen laughed as Titus’s eyes followed that pair of monstrous, stoop-shouldered bouncers back into the Kangaroo.
“Maybe there’s ’nother place—”
Heman Ovatt snatched him by the arm, Kingsbury securing the other as they set him in motion between them, all four laughing.
“There ain’t ’nother place holds a candle to the likes of the Kangaroo!” Hames cried as they passed beneath two wavering, spitting torches and plunged into the tavern’s raucous, smoky depths.
