“Didn’t matter,” she said matter-of-factly. “Mathilda wanted the bastard dead her own self. She was the one used that pistol’s flintlock to drop a spark down on the powder, setting it off and putting the coal oil to flame just as Ebenezer was loosing the mooring ropes. He pulled her onto the wharf afore he jumped back onto that flatboat and steered her long enough to get it out of the harbor into the main channel of the river.”
“Then what’d he do?”
She took the pipe from him, sucked on it twice without results, and said, “’Pears you’re out’n tobacco. I’ll get us some more.”
He sat up at the side of the bed and pulled a blanket around himself, anxious to hear the rest of the story as she went back to the skin pouch in the walnut chest, then squatted by the fire. “Tell me what Ebenezer done out on that burning boat headed into the river.”
Holding the stump of the straw in the flames, Abigail explained, “Why, he gone and jumped in the river—an’ don’t you know he was cut up and bleeding pretty bad—but he swum right back to where Mathilda was waiting for him at the wharf. By the time he got hisself swum there, a goodly crowd was watching, and they dragged him out of the water. I was there by that time too. We all stood, with the rest—watching that boat drifting off across the Ohio, burning to beat the band. Ever’ now and then there’d be a poof, and come a big shower of sparks like a cannon firing. And soon enough—there weren’t no more fire, and no more Pennsylvania flatboat.”
This time he readily took the pipe from her and put it to his lips.
“I gotta pee,” Abigail declared, as if she made such a confession to men all the time.
His eyes widening, he snatched for the blanket with one hand, pushing himself off the bed. “I’ll go stand … go outside—”
“You silly,” she chided, her smile one that involved her whole face. Abigail inched over to the chamber pot. “Just turn away and look at the fire.”
From the corner of his eye he watched her for a moment as she turned her back to him, then flipped out the bottom of the blanket to squat over the chamber pot. As she rose, he quickly looked back at the fire and sucked on the pipe. Once more he glanced from beneath the shock of brown hair that spilled across his brow, finding her scoop a handful of red cedar shavings from the copper kettle, which she tossed into the pot. He heard her slide open the crude door and carry the pot out.
While she was gone, the door hung open—the small fire’s warmth scurried from the room in one long draft. Then she was back, closing the door behind her, seeming to bring with her an aura of cold and dampness that clung about her threadbare blanket.
“I feel like I ain’t et in a week,” he said as she took the pipe from him. “How about us going out for some breakfast?”
“Ain’t time for breakfast yet,” she said, setting the pipe on the table and turning back to the bed.
Glancing at the door, he asked, “Ain’t morning yet?”
“Still dark out there. Hardly a soul moving.”
He watched her lie back on the bed, slowly sliding the blanket back from her body in that firelight and frail, wispy lamplight. Not able to help himself, he swallowed hard, staring at her bony hips, that dark delta between her legs, then up across her flat belly to those fleshy breasts. He licked his lips, mouth gone dry as he found her staring at him, her eyes intent.
Patting the narrow bed beside her, Abigail said, “C’mon in here with me, Titus. I’m certain we can find us something to do till it’s time for victuals.”
9
Ebenezer Zane chose to set off downriver in the worst possible weather yet to batter the valley that autumn.
The sky overhead hung just out of reach, every bit as cold and the color of a great slab of the rain-soaked granite that protruded from the barren, skeletal forest that formed both sides of the channel the Ohio carved out of this western land. Yellows, oranges, and reds had been long ago stripped from the trees, nipped by frosts, turned by the crawl of time toward winter, hurried on their way before every gust of the season’s winds. Everything smelled of dank decay and humus, coated with ice and frost.
And then the sky unleashed itself, beginning to fling down a sharp, needling sleet borne on the back of a twisting, thrashing gale.
Titus gulped the last of the coffee in the bottom of his tin cup and turned on the rough bench to pull on a second pair of moccasins, dragging them over the first he had tied over his thickest pair of woolen stockings. Not without their holes and worn fabric, they nonetheless still climbed to his knees. And they would simply have to do. Like the rest of what little he had plopped beside the table where he hunkered with the rest of the crew finishing their hearty breakfast of hominy and great slabs of bacon, as well as baskets filled with biscuits and plenty of steaming coffee. Here in the Kangaroo other rivermen tied up at the wharf were beginning to show up for a hearty meal. But they would have to do without this choicest of tables near the fireplace, where Ebenezer Zane stuffed the other four who would that morning dare the Great Falls of the Ohio with him.
“Looks to be you’re still dead set on killing yourself, Ebenezer,” one of the other pilots growled as he came up to the table, wagging his head.
“Plan on getting my boat all the way down to New Orleans before the devil even knows I’ve cleared out of Louisville,” Zane replied. “Have some coffee, John.”
The boatman took the offered cup, cradling it in both hands just under his nose, soaking in the steamy warmth and aroma. After that first sip he said, “Looks like snow out there.”
“I’d just as soon it did,” Hames Kingsbury commented.
Zane nodded. “Better that than the ice I fear most.”
“It’s froze to everything,” Heman Ovatt said. “Hard for a man to lock on to the gouger. Even an oar. Everything coated thick with ice, Ebenezer.”
“Nothing what can’t be chipped away.” Zane glanced at a wide-eyed Titus for a flicker of a moment, then said, “Snow’s fine by me.”
The boatman looked up from his coffee and replied, “You nary was one to be afeared of that river, Ebenezer. Afeared of what it could do to your boat.”
“No sense in being afeared now.”
“Times we wondered if you was born with any sense at all,” the older pilot commented with a snort. When he looked around over the rim of his cup and found no smiles among the others, he quickly sank back into his tin.
Other rivermen continued to crowd in as the minutes passed, some hobbling over from the tavern side, where they might well have slept off their liquor sprawled on a table or crumpled under a bench, perhaps lumbering in from one of the barmaids’ beds, most hurrying up from the wharf, where they had sought shelter aboard their flatboats bobbing in the crowded harbor while the white, icy arrow points had begun to lance out of the gray sky. At least half of those who entered the Kangaroo came over to make some greeting to Ebenezer Zane, more still to give their farewell—having heard the news that the pilot was pushing off downriver this nasty, forbidding day.
Three nights had Zane’s crew tarried there in Louisville while their steersman bartered himself more cargo, itself a bit of a problem to begin with, seeing how little of the deck a man could walk upon, crammed to the gunnels as it was with crates, kegs, and oaken barrels bound for the mouth of the Mississippi. It ultimately turned out they had taken on a load of oiled hemp destined for use on great oceangoing vessels—huge coils of coarse twenty-four- strand rope, each one a hundred feet long and looped into a bundle it took three stevedores to burden on board. There the coils were lashed down atop the rest of the cargo.
“That rope’s just about the only thing Ebenezer could’ve figured out for us to haul pitched up there on top of everything else,” Ovatt had declared yesterday as they’d secured the last coil.
Reuben Root spat into the water alongside as twilight sank around them. “Could’ve done ’thout it at all, to my way of thinking. Jest lookee the way we’re a’setting in the water now.”
“We’ll ride just fine,” Kingsbury said. “Got plenty of room left to draw water up the sides.”
“Which is just what we’re gonna do we hit them Falls,” Root replied with a sneer.
