transfixed, as if she were going to spot her husband’s boat, as if she hoped to materialize her husband right out of the cold air. There had been occasions he saw his mother wear that same look on her face: worried for his pap not yet home from clearing a far field. At such times he already had come to know that both she and his pap were children of families who farmed and hunted their ground at great risk to their lives. In those early years on that bloody ground of the canebrakes south of the Ohio River, a man might be late for any number of things. So his mother bravely watched from the front door, and always lit a candle at the window as dusk settled like a fine talc among the hills surrounding their cabin. She, continuing to watch into the distance for her man the same way this woman gazed upriver for some sign of her own.
“The young’un’s right,” Hames Kingsbury stated flatly.
“He ain’t got no say in this,” Reuben Root grumbled, his face grown hard, chertlike eyes barely visible between the slits he made of them. “Only us three got a vote on her staying, or us putting her off right now.”
Bass was about to open his mouth in hopes of cajoling, in some way to convince them into allowing him his voice in this, if not his outright vote, when the skinny Kingsbury wheeled on the explosive and powerful Reuben Root.
“Time you listen to me: I been first in charge of this boat for Ebenezer ever since’t him and me started down the Ohio years ago,” Hames said evenly, setting full measure by every one of the words he chose. “He picked him the best crew could be had on the river—so I damned well know any of us could be the one Ebenezer picked to watch over things if ever he wasn’t around or was just sleeping off part of a day’s float. Any one of us—”
“That’s right!” Root interrupted.
“But he picked me, Reuben.”
“Still, that don’t give you no extra vote over us,” Heman said, his own pocked and pitted face gone cold, suspicious, perhaps even downright superstitious in clinging to that riverboatman’s oldest and worst taboo with such fervent and steadfast belief.
“I ain’t taking a extra vote for me,” Kingsbury replied. “I’m just telling you as pilot on this here boat now— that I’m doing just what I figure Ebenezer’d do hisself if’n he was here. He’d give Titus a vote.”
“Like I said,” Root disagreed with a snarl, “the boy here never was hired on like the rest of us.”
“It ain’t right, Titus having as much say as us what been working Ebenezer’s boats for years now,” Ovatt added.
“You don’t wanna give the boy a vote, well—let’s just set that aside for a minute and talk over something else,” Kingsbury said with the sure ease of a man used to steering a boat out of troubled waters.
And something in the boatman’s face told Titus that Hames was going to try something smooth.
Hames continued, “S’pose you boys sit there and ponder what Ebenezer Zane would do ’bout that woman we pulled from the river back there. Reuben? How you think Ebenezer would vote?”
Ovatt’s eyes flared, knowing he’d been bested. “Ah, shit,” he said sourly. “We all three of us know Ebenezer’d vote to keep her on his goddamned boat—and he’d throw any of us off if’n we grumped about it too.”
“But Ebenezer ain’t here to throw us off,” Root declared, slowly crossing his beefy arms across his stout powder keg of a chest.
“Yes, he is,” Kingsbury said with great conviction, and pointed at the corpse lying in its canvas shroud. “I figure we’re carrying him on to Natchez … so we sure as hell can do the same for a living, breathing woman.”
“Ah, sweet Jupiter!” Root cried out, flinging his arms about in frustration. “No telling what kind of bad luck we’re going to have now!”
“Things in life ain’t that simple,” Kingsbury attempted to explain.
Ovatt laughed without humor, then said, “Listen to you, Hames! That woman sure as hell wasn’t no good luck on her husband’s boat. All the crew and him gone too—like she told it. The boat sunk in the river, scuttled by Injuns.”
“That man and woman been working the river together for more’n twenty years, Heman,” Kingsbury reminded. “Sure took that thing you call a woman’s curse a helluva long time to catch up to ’em, didn’t it?”
Bass watched the two of them grumble for a moment, then Ovatt turned to Kingsbury.
“She stays right there,” Heman demanded with noticeable reluctance. “She don’t come out to curse the rest of the boat.”
“What’s done is done,” Root groaned. “We’re already cursed, Heman. It don’t matter where she stays on this goddamned boat. The whole lot of us is already cursed.”
“But—she can stay, right?” Bass asked.
“Yes,” Kingsbury answered with finality. “The woman’s gonna ride with us till we get to Natchez—where we can let her off and put Ebenezer to his final rest.”
Later that afternoon Titus was surprised to hear the first notes from Reuben’s squeeze-box in a long time. Sliding mournfully up and down the scales with his wheezing concertina, the oarsman sat at the gunnel to begin playing snatches of melancholy ballads and slow airs in the cold drizzle that seeped from the brims of their hats, hammered the taut oil sheeting of their awning where the woman kept a fire going and coffee brewing throughout the day when she wasn’t fishing.
“Funny,” Bass said to Kingsbury quietly enough so that no one else would hear, then sniffed the aroma coming from the awning. “Never did I think of fish being something I’d get my hungers up for. That does smell good.”
“Ain’t ever had but one bite of catfish,” Hames replied. “Never had me another. But from what I seen that woman doing all afternoon, if she hauls in a catfish on her line, she just throws it back. Only keeping the fish what don’t taste like mud.”
“S’pose she’d mind me asking for some to eat?”
“I reckon you can go ask her,” he said with a smile.
Ducking out of the rain beneath the awning, Titus stood there, dripping, then thought to remove his hat. He found himself back in the company of women, where a man had to remember his good manners.
“Ma’am?”
She turned to regard him with her crow-footed face scored by wrinkles across her brow and reaching from her nose down to her chin in deep clefts. Pushing a long, unruly strand of hair from her eye, she did not speak to Bass, just stared as if expecting him to get on with his question.
As he watched her, he found himself liking the way working over the fire’s heat brought a flush to the woman’s leathery, tanned cheeks, after they had been so damned pasty and white the time they’d pulled her from the cold river.
“What’s that you’re cooking there?”
She glanced down at the big cast-iron skillet spitting and spewing the fish she’d halved and dipped into a cornmeal batter. And the woman smiled, her eyes softening.
“Fish.”
“Not catfish?”
She chuckled a little as she leaned over the skillet with a long fork and speared the fish around in the grease. “Don’t like catfish, me either. This here’s perch. Good eating.” Then she looked up at him, blowing the hair back from her nose and eyes. “You want you some?”
“I’d be awfully pleasured to have some, yes, ma’am.”
“Gonna need more of that grease,” she replied, turning back to her spewing skillet from which rose such enticing aromas. “Get me some more, and I’ll dish you up a trencher of this hot perch.”
In a long canvas-lined white-oak chest where the crew kept their mess utensils sat several clay pots into which the men always scraped the bacon grease left over after their endless, monotonous meals of pork. One of these he brought her, pulling off the metal latch that held the flat top on the pot. Stuffing her big iron fork into the congealed grease, the woman took a speckled, translucent gob over to the skillet and plopped it in with a spitting hiss. With the fork she pulled the largest piece of fish from the heat and laid it in one of the scooped-out oaken trenchers the crew used as plate and bowl in one. How Titus’s mouth watered just to look at the deep, rich, golden brown of that cornmeal breading, just to breathe in that fragrance of something other than salt pork, bacon, and boiled hocks. The anticipation of this meal was enough to bring tears to his eyes.
“How long since you et?” she asked.
“Yesterday night,” Bass replied, settling and pulling his knife from his belt.
“Acting starved to me.”
