Rubbing his palms along the tops of his thighs thoughtfully, Bass said, “Then you men was his family.”
They looked at one another for a few moments.
Finally Kingsbury spoke. “Maybeso you’re right. We was as much his family as any man’s got family.”
“Then to my way of thinking,” Ovatt agreed, “it’s up to us to decide what’s best to do for Ebenezer.”
“Gotta bury him,” Titus said.
“Where?” Root asked.
Bass gestured with a thumb over his shoulder. “Where he lived. Out there. On the river.”
“Bury him in the river?” Kingsbury echoed.
“Certain of it,” Ovatt replied with a slap to his leg, then pushed back a shock of that red hair from his eyes. “Damn right—we oughtta bury him in the Messessap.”
“Why not the Ohio?” Root asked, hard-eyed. “He was more a Ohio boy than a Messessap boy.”
“Can’t haul his goddamned body all the way up the Natchez Trace with us,” Kingsbury grumbled.
“Why cain’t we?” Root demanded.
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! He’s gonna … he’ll be … ah, goddammit!” growled Kingsbury. “Ebenezer gonna start going bad, and the man deserves to be planted afore he starts stinking enough to turn the noses of heaven!”
“Hames is right, Reuben,” Ovatt stated firmly. “Nothing we can do about what’s landed in our laps. We can’t go a’hauling him all the way back up to the Ohio—so we oughtta just figure out what’s best to do by Ebenezer down here on the Mississap.”
“He allays liked Natchez,” Kingsbury mused out loud, then looked up to gaze at the others around that low fire that reflected a crimson glow from each of their faces in the cold darkness surrounding their boat.
“Thought we decided we was burying him in the river!” Root snapped.
“We can,” Kingsbury replied. “We’ll just do it when we get to Natchez.”
“He liked some of those places Under-the-Hill,” Ovatt agreed. “’Bout as much as he took to Mathilda’s Kangaroo.”
“Then we’ll wait to bury him till we get to Natchez,” Kingsbury said with great finality. “And put him to his eternal rest in the river opposite the harbor.”
The next morning before full light they had secured the body of Ebenezer Zane atop their cargo, released the hawsers, and slipped away with the cold brown current of the Mississippi. Only four of them now: three boatmen, and a youngster who kept staring at that shroud, unable to shake off the feeling that it had all been of his own making.
“You’re carrying more’n any one man ought’n carry,” Kingsbury said that night as he relieved Titus at watch after they had tied up in a small, brushy cove against the river’s west shore.
“Can’t help it, the way things turned out.”
“No man ever can say how things gonna turn out, Titus.”
Bass wagged his head. “He’s dead because of something I done, or didn’t do. Dammit!” he grumbled under his breath. “I don’t know rightly which it is.”
“Listen and let me tell you the way Ebenezer lived his life, son,” Kingsbury said as he settled beside the youth. “Life is only what happens to you after you get borned of your mama. You can’t help it, so you go on living if you’re lucky enough, if you ain’t one of them babes what dies in the birthin’. You do what you must to stay alive for a few years, and then dying is something that happens at the other end of your life, he always believed. Just make sure it’s a quick’un, Ebenezer said. Better’n going slow, painful.”
Stifling a sob, Titus said, “I damn sure hope he went quick.”
Hames continued, “I figure Ebenezer Zane got his wish, Titus. He went the way he wanted to go—and by damn, that’s a lot more’n most of us’ll ever get when our name’s called on the roll up yonder.”
“I don’t know much of what to think about heaven.”
“Ain’t much to think about, really. We’ll find out all about it when we get there.”
Bass looked up at the boatman, then asked in that icy stillness, “You figure Ebenezer Zane is gone on to heaven already?”
Ovatt chuckled softly, patted Titus on the back reassuringly. “Hell, he’s there already.”
Kingsbury nodded. “I’d wager he’s got a bunch of them angels already learning to tie hawsers and work a gouger, how to dip their oars an’ turn their heavenly flatboats right around in midriver.”
Even the sour-faced Root grinned when he said, “No doubt Ebenezer’s even got ’em singing some of his bad songs too.”
“Bad songs?”
Hames smiled, staring up at the dark canopy. “Songs what God wouldn’t want none of his angels learning— them’s the kind Ebenezer Zane will go and teach ’em. Probably got some chewing tobacco too.”
The hurt overwhelmed Titus when he sobbed, “I miss him.”
Kingsbury looked at the youngster’s sad, hangdown face. “We all miss him. But God’s got him now, so we’re bound away to get Ebenezer Zane’s last flatboat down to Nawlins—just the way he’d planned.”
“Then we’re heading back north?”
“Buy us another boat and hire us on another load—float on down again come spring,” Kingsbury replied.
And Ovatt added, “Like Ebenezer allays done.”
“Just like he’d want us to keep doing—even ’thout him here,” Hames said.
It had been another cold day of floating, watching the land flatten even more while the river itself began to meander before they sailed past the settlement of New Madrid squatting on the far west bank of the Mississippi. Founded in 1790 by Colonel George Morgan, a New Jersey land speculator, who was in turn sponsored by the crown of Spain as a means of establishing a foreign outpost reaching far up the river, by 1810 the village was inhabited mostly by Americans who had been struggling against the fickle river for twenty years. Less than two dozen ragged houses sheltered a rough, indolent population that included a handful of Spaniards, some French Creoles down from the Illinois, and a few hardy German immigrants. A pair of poorly stocked stores charged outrageous prices for what little they had to offer, especially if a traveler did not carry the right nation’s currency then in vogue and was thereby forced to pay a rate of exchange bordering on river piracy.
South from there the terrain flattened even more, the extensive floodplain preventing any real settlement through what appeared to be a boggy, impenetrable wilderness. In more than a week of travel the boatmen alternated periods of extreme boredom with snatches of terror while they negotiated treacherous stretches of the Mississippi popularly known as the Devil’s Raceground—where to Titus it felt as if some unnatural force picked up the crew’s flatboat and hurled it downriver a few miles at a dizzying pace … and later at the Devil’s Elbow—where they had to fight constantly to steer the boat around a maze of innumerable sandbars while twisting this way and that through corkscrew turns as the river bent back on itself. Here Kingsbury had to battle the stern rudder, with Heman Ovatt on the gouger, both of them struggling to keep their broadhorn close to the east bank lest the strong current pull their boat right into what the rivermen called “the woods,” that broad floodplain west of the Mississippi, a tangled, confusing maze of bogs where a crew would have little hope of ever returning to the river’s main channel.
“See that high point yonder?” asked Ovatt of an early morning two days later.
Titus looked into the distance where Heman pointed south. “What is it up there?”
“That’s the fourth Chickasaw Bluff.”
“Chica … like the Injuns killed Ebenezer?”
Ovatt nodded. “Chickasaw. Up top there sits the army’s post. Called Fort Pickering.”
“S’pose them soldiers can see a long way up there,” Bass replied as his eyes came back to watching the river for sawyers and planters. He sat at the bow, clutching one of the long, sturdy poles, ready to push off any dangerous object that posed a threat to their boat by bobbing too close in the muddy, sometimes swirling current.
“Keep your eyes open,” Ovatt reminded as he got up to clamber away over the casks and kegs. “I’m getting me a little drink now that the river settles down for a while.”
Bass returned his attention to the water, sweeping his gaze back and forth as he had been doing for days on end as they rolled on down the great, wide river. Most of the sawyers were easily spotted. Some were not, the others had warned him: hiding their danger just below the surface of the river. Some might poke only a solitary root or limb barely above waterline. A man had to be watchful and not become mesmerized by the monotonous roll of the murky water beneath a gray, overcast sky.
