“Ain’t long till morning,” Kingsbury said, settling clumsily to the deck. His head weaved wearily. “Well, now, Titus—that were your first Injun fight—”
“How ’bout Ebenezer?” Ovatt interrupted suddenly as he rose from Kingsbury’s side, turning on his heel. “Eb—”
“I pulled one of ’em off him,” Titus began to explain. “One what was smashing Zane with a club.”
“Here that’un is,” Ovatt declared, dragging the body out of his way to step over it getting to the tick mattress where they had worked on the river pilot beneath candlelight.
“Ebenezer?” Root called out, rushing to Ovatt’s side.
“Maybeso he’s still drunk,” Kingsbury declared as he pushed up to join them.
“Likely so,” Ovatt said as he rolled the man over, pulling the blankets down gently. He held his ear over Zane’s face, listened. Then jerked back, his hands feeling around the pilot’s head in the dark. “Shit.”
“What?” Titus asked, inching forward a step.
Ovatt wiped his hands on the front of his coat. “Ebenezer’s done for.”
“Dead?” Root demanded.
“Just as dead as that son of a bitch there,” Ovatt growled as he whirled and kicked the dead Indian with all he could muster.
Whimpering like a wounded animal, Heman fell atop the Chickasaw’s body, pummeling it with his fists. Then seized the Indian’s ears and drove the head down onto the deck repeatedly as Root and Titus struggled to pull him off the body.
When Ovatt finally let the mighty Root yank him away, he sank into Reuben’s arms. Then he spat on the body, spat again. “Killed the best man on the river! That’s what you done!”
Completely numbed, Bass stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, not believing what the others were saying. It simply couldn’t be. Not Ebenezer Zane! Not the man who had taken him under his wing, promised to teach him the rivers, the flatboat trade, to introduce him to the right whores in Natchez and on down to New Orleans. The man who these last few weeks had become like a real father to him. Not Ebenezer!
“I’ll throw this bastard over with the rest,” Root said as Ovatt crumpled next to Zane’s body.
“We gotta get downriver,” Kingsbury commanded as he crawled back in under the awning. “Can’t stay here now.”
“Burn them canoes afore we go,” Root said.
“Just scuttle ’em,” Ovatt growled with a shake of his head, anger making the man tremble. “They’ll sink sure enough.”
“Ebenezer?” Titus asked in the midst of all their talk, taking another step forward.
“There might be more coming,” Kingsbury declared.
“Ebenezer … dead?” Bass repeated with another step, staring at the body in the dim, starry light.
“Nawww,” Root disagreed with Kingsbury. “Ain’t no more coming. This is the same goddamned bunch the boy here run onto out hunting. They come downriver follering us. Ain’t no more coming.”
“Still the same,” Kingsbury said, his voice edged with pain. “We gotta get on down past the Chickasaw Bluffs.* Safer water.”
“Hames might be right,” Root said. “Them jumping us like this might just mean them red devils are out to put the steal on some of the river traffic.”
“Awright—we’ll go,” Ovatt finally said as Titus reached his side. He looked up as the youth knelt beside Zane’s body. “Decent thing to do … we gotta take Ebenezer on down. Figure out what we oughtta do then.”
“What we gotta do from here on out,” Kingsbury corrected with a wince of pain as he rubbed the shirt bandage around his arm. “With the boat. And this load.”
Barely hearing any of the others’ talk, Titus sank to his knees, reaching out his hand, pulling the blanket back from the pilot’s face. “Didn’t have a chance.”
“What would Ebenezer Zane want us to do?” Ovatt asked.
Bass peered into the crushed and battered face of Ebenezer Zane, feeling the tears of frustration, of loss, come over him, ease slowly from his eyes.
“He’d want us to finish the trip,” Root replied. “You always finish what you start—Ebenezer Zane always said.”
A hand came out to rest on Bass’s shoulder. Then a second. He looked up to find Ovatt standing over him now, Root as well. Kingsbury slid up nearby, clutching his upper arm tightly.
“He liked you, Titus,” Hames said. “I never knowed Ebenezer Zane to take to young’uns afore.”
“But he liked you, for certain on that,” Ovatt said, patting Titus on the shoulder.
“Said you’d do to ride this goddamned river with,” Reuben added quietly. He patted the youth on the back of the head as Titus hunched over, beginning to cry.
Heman added, “Ain’t nothing better Ebenezer could say ’bout a man.”
Hames Kingsbury dragged a bloody hand beneath his nose angrily, then snorted, “And by damn, fellas—that’s something Ebenezer Zane was right about from the start. You’ll do to ride this goddamned river with, Titus Bass.”
More than a day before Titus’s hunt had set a terrible wheel in motion, Ebenezer Zane had piloted them out of the mouth of the Ohio—for the last time.
They floated on downriver another day after the Chickasaw attack, deciding to take their chances that night by anchoring at the downstream end of a tree-lined sandbar where they figured no redskin on the river would find it easy to discover them tied up among the clutter of living brush and dead sawyers.
After scuttling the three canoes that cold night of the attack, they had wrapped the body within a section of oiled Russian sheeting Ebenezer kept stowed away for repairs to the awning, binding the dead pilot tightly within his shroud using a wrap of one-inch hemp before carrying Zane out to lay atop some casks containing cured Kentucky smoking leaf.
After that short autumn day of denying what needed doing, the four of them gathered beneath the oiled awning at their sandbox fire and boiled coffee, finally speaking of the unspeakable.
“Never thought he’d go this way,” Kingsbury admitted softly.
“Still can’t believe it,” Root added, as if it soured his stomach.
Ovatt looked into the other faces, asking, “What you figure we ought’n do with him?”
The three only shrugged, stared back into the fire, each man deeply possessed of his own thoughts.
Eventually Titus asked, “What you think Ebenezer would want you to do for him?”
One by one in turn the three looked up from their reverie and stared at the youth.
“I just figured—you all knowed him much better’n me,” Bass explained. “Thinking one of you should have an idea what Ebenezer’d want done. Maybe we ought’n talk about getting him back to his family for burying.”
“He ain’t got no family,” Root explained. “Heman told you ’bout his woman … what happed to his boys.”
“But he’s gotta have a mam or pap,” Titus declared. “Surely he’s got some kin back to home.” He watched the heads shake. “Aunt or uncles? Brother or a sister?” Still the boatmen wagged their heads.
“Got no kin he ever spoke of,” Kingsbury said.
Kingsbury nodded as he stared at the tiny flames, rubbing one of his jowls thoughtfully. “He started floating the Ohio and Mississap years ago when he was just a young feller. Always said he didn’t leave behind no family to speak of.”
Ovatt stated, “I reckon that’s why he took such a real liking to you, Titus.”
“How old you figure Ebenezer was?” Bass inquired.
With a wag of his head Root said, “I don’t have no likely idea. Man looked older’n he really was—or maybe he was older’n he looked. No telling with all that hair, and life being so hard on the river.”
“He had no family, but he had to have a home,” Titus protested. “Place where he come from.”
“Don’t think so,” Kingsbury answered. “He done two floats south to Nawlins each year. Finish off selling his goods, then sell off the boat timbers, and we’d walk north on the Trace. Get back up to the Ohio, Ebenezer’d go straight on to Pittsburgh for to get one of the boat outfits started on a new broadhorn for his next trip downriver.”
“No family?” Titus repeated as the sad and utter rootlessness of it sank in. “An’ no home neither.”
“River was his home,” Ovatt stated.
