Nearly out of breath, Kingsbury finally explained, “On many a boat the old hands will play some mean trick on a new hand—something like Reuben wanted you to do.”
“Cooning the steering oar,” Zane continued, “means we’d have you climb out to the end of this here rudder of mine.”
Bass’s eyes grew big as coffee tins as he stared at the water flowing around the back of the boat where the pole sank beneath the river’s surface. He gulped. “You’d had me climb out there, hanging on to just the rudder pole?”
Root was still hooting, slapping his knee in merriment. “Make sure you touch the rudder out there now, Titus … or we don’t let you climb back onter the boat!”
“It’s easy enough,” Ovatt confided. “Just hang on with your arms and legs. I done it years afore.”
“Yeah!” Root roared. “Best you hang on real tight!”
“Or you get a cold bath in the river,” Kingsbury concluded with a shudder. “Like I done.”
“B-but, none of you gonna make me do that, are you?” Bass inquired.
“You’re part of the crew anyways,” the bushy-headed pilot replied. “I see no need for them silly games just to make these fellers laugh on your account.”
“I thankee for that, Mr. Zane,” Titus replied, wanting to sense some real gratitude, but not really sure how he should feel at that moment. Perhaps such a ritual of initiation was really necessary for him to become part of the crew. Maybe they never would accept him as one of their own if he didn’t suffer some of their lighthearted pranks.
“No need to thank me, Titus,” Ebenezer said, his eyes softening in that kind, hairy face.
Titus started to turn away, ready to head to the bow, where he intended to lend his muscle to Heman’s efforts at the gouger, when Zane caught him by the shoulder, saying, “Why’n’t you stay back here with me for now, Titus Bass? That’s easy rope work for Ovatt now—and I could use the company, I could at that.”
As Hames and Reuben reached the stern of the flatboat to tie the skiff off to a snubbing post before clambering up the side and over the gunnel, Titus settled in near Zane, his heart still hammering, desperately wanting this to be the right thing for him to do.
“I don’t figure I done enough yet to thank you, Ebenezer,” he began. “I was fixing on helping the rest of you get through the Falls. But I didn’t do nothing. ’Stead of troubling yourself with me—why didn’t you just leave me back at Louisville when I told you I was all for staying on there?”
Grinning into the slanting hammer of the wind-driven sleet, Zane replied, “I figured there was no other way to find out if you was a riverman or not—but to take you with us through the Falls.”
“So what’d you find out?”
The pilot tousled Titus’s hair, then peered on down the gray Ohio once more. “You’ll do to ride the river with, Titus Bass. By damned, you’ll do.”
Autumn was all but done for by the time Ebenezer Zane’s broadhorn reached the mouth of the Ohio. What ducks and geese and other species of winged creatures hadn’t already flapped their way overhead were destined to struggle out the winter here in the north: all manner of doves, redheaded woodpeckers, and nighthawks too. The sort that stayed behind.
One day on the trip they spotted some gray and black squirrels, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all sweeping down from the north bank, plunging into the river to bob and swim with all their might against the current, like a mighty exodus that crossed to the south. Hundreds of heads dotted the murky brown water all about the boat, hundreds more pressing behind. And every day the men watched the shorelines for bigger species. Titus was amazed at the growing numbers of bear and deer, turkey and fox, he spotted as they rode the river farther west, heading for the Mississippi.
And always they sang—ballads of death and love and hard-hearted maidens.
For the longest time he pondered that the old song said just what his grandpap had told him: there had been buffalo in the canebrakes. Which set Titus to brooding on how those who had gone before him had shot the buffalo until there were no more.
Then Hames Kingsbury would always lift Bass’s spirits by singing what had long been Ebenezer Zane’s favorite, sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”
Then Heman Ovatt started in on one of his own.
