Since passing the Chickasaw Bluffs where they’d first brought the woman aboard, they had made reasonable time coming on down that great river road. Several days after Beulah was rescued, they had pushed past the wide mouth of a river joining the Mississippi from the west.
“There’s some what says that water comes in from the far mountains,” Kirtgsbury stated.
“That river?”
“Call’t the Arkansas, Titus. Some thirty mile on up, there stands a old French village. Leastwise, there used to be when Ebenezer and me went there once of a time,” Kingsbury said as he leaned against the long rudder pole. “Nearby, the Spaniards got ’em a fort. Some folks call the place Ozark Village, other’ns call it Arkansas Post.”
“Spaniards still there?”
With a wag of his head Hames replied, “Naw. Nothing but backwoodsmen now—few hunnerd of ’em. Speak American—though most of ’em got French blood and French names, so it seems.”
Titus gazed off to the west, squinting, attempting to conjure up the lure of that settlement. “What them Frenchies do living off over there?”
“Near as we ever made out, they hunt when they want, trade when need be. And ain’t a one of ’em acts no better’n the Injuns in that country.”
For the longest time Bass watched the wide mouth of that river disappear behind them, trying his best to replace the endless cane and cattail swamp with images of mountains as he knew them from the Ohio River country, those distant high places supplying waters that rushed all the way down to feed the Mississippi.
Just south of the Arkansas they glided past the treacherous Stack Island, and the next day Kingsbury pointed out the “Crow’s Nest”—both at one time havens for Mississippi River pirates. That night they camped north a ways from the mouth of the Yazoo River at a well-known landing spot at Gum Springs in Choctaw country. The following morning they passed below the American Fort McHenry, standing high upon the Walnut Hills that rose along the eastern shore.* Now surrounded by some well-cultivated fields and a sparse dotting of cabins and girdled trees, these heights in an earlier time had been held by the dominant Spanish with a post they called Fort Nogales. That bold, rising ground proved to be a welcome sight after the last seven hundred miles and many days of monotonous bayou and swampy cypress and sycamore forest.
Still, the river was far from finished cutting a wide swath for itself in that meandering journey to the Gulf of Mexico. South from the Yazoo the Mississippi once again spread its waters through a wide and inhospitable wilderness stretching all the way from Grand Gulf, down through Bayou Pierre and on to the endless swamp at Petit Gulf. Through it all Zane’s rivermen plied those brown waters, passing the sinister places named Devil’s Playground, down to the Devil’s Bake Oven, then on to the Devil’s Punch Bowl, where whirlpools snarled across the surface of the river, forcing even the finest of river pilots to put all their skills and muscle to a test.
But by that last day’s float above Natchez, the river once more moved along with a placid pace, if not became downright mournful, as they drew closer and closer to Ebenezer Zane’s resting place beneath the Mississippi.
“That spot way yonder ’neath the far bluff—ain’t that the one, Reuben?” Kingsbury hollered.
Root nodded, pointing. “That’s just the place I was thinking.”
“Yeah,” Kingsbury replied. “It’ll do just fine. Ebenezer allays thought this was a real purty place every time we come past.”
It could well have been one of the most beautiful spots along the river at the height of summer when the wisteria bloomed in all its purple glory and the dogwood set the hills afire. Even now, after so many freezes had shriveled every leaf and turned the trees from monuments of glory into winter’s contorted, skeletal refugees overlooking this wide bend in the Mississippi, Titus could nonetheless see for himself what beauty Ebenezer Zane might have always found in this place as Hames Kingsbury and Heman Ovatt eased their long Kentuckyboat toward that eastern shore.
Root jumped over the side and hauled the first of the thick hawsers into the shallows, where he stood shivering in waist-deep water to tie them off before clambering back over the gunnel. Beulah awaited him, holding out an old blanket as Reuben got to his feet.
As if struck dumb, Root stood there a moment, dripping and trembling, then took the offering, nodding shyly as he wrapped it around his middle and quietly said, “Thankee, ma’am.”
Clearly the woman saved him any more embarrassment when she turned aside, ducking beneath the awning as Kingsbury moved up among the casks and crates.
“Heman, why don’t you and Titus bring Ebenezer over here?” Hames said. “I figure we ought to put him into the water off the starboard.”
Root nodded in agreement as the two brought the canvas shroud to midship, hefting it atop four large kegs. Reuben said, “Ebenezer never was much of a man for port, was he, now? Allays liked to be on the river, never quite as happy when we was making for to tie up.”
“Thems is fine words to say over a friend, Reuben,” Kingsbury replied, drawing himself up as if about to confront something difficult. “Any of the rest of you have something to say to Ebenezer before we see this through?”
Laying his hand on the canvas shroud bound with rope, Heman Ovatt said, “I just want Ebenezer Zane to know—wherever he is right now—I never met a man I respected more. A man what took me in when no one else on the river would give me a job.”
“Amen to that,” Kingsbury said as Heman stepped back. “You was the sort what was trouble: Ohio born, whiskey soaked, and quick to anger. But Ebenezer didn’t never look at you that way. He said you’d make a good hand. And you allays have.”
“It’s ’cause of him I’m a different man today,” Ovatt replied, then looked over at Root shyly.
With a shrug Root just snatched the floppy-brimmed felt hat from his head and stared down at the shroud. “All I know is I’m a better man for knowing Ebenezer Zane. ’Cept—I do know one more thing for certain—I’m gonna miss him something terrible from here on out.”
There was a short period of silence until Kingsbury said, “We’re all gonna miss him, if’n we ain’t already. Come our walk back home to the Ohio. Come next summer’s float south again.”
“I dunno if I’m coming downriver again, Hames,” Ovatt said.
“You’ll come with us,” Kingsbury replied. “Ebenezer wouldn’t want you to go quitting on us, would he?”
“S’pose he wouldn’t.”
Then Titus felt Kingsbury’s eyes touch him.
The flatboat’s new pilot asked, “You got anything you wanna say afore we put Ebenezer over the side, Titus Bass?”
All of them looked at him, expectantly, even the woman. He stammered a moment, then finally said, “I still figure his dying was somehow my fault.”
“It ain’t,” Kingsbury replied immediately, “and Ebenezer told you that, right after they run us off the beach— told you none of it was your doin’. So you just go and make peace with that. If not for your sake, then you damn well do it for Ebenezer’s memory.”
“That’s right, Titus,” Root stated. “Ebenezer weren’t the kind to hold no grudges agin no man. So he wouldn’t want you holding no grudge agin yourself.”
Bass eventually nodded and said quietly, “I just wish things’d turned out different for us.”
“Life never tells us what it’s gonna do,” the woman said suddenly, surprising them all as she bent to come from the awning to stand among them near the shroud. “We ain’t got no call on life but to go on—no matter what’s dealt us.”
“Them’s true, true words, ma’am,” Kingsbury echoed with no small admiration as he gazed at her. “Thank you.”
“I never had me a chance to say nothing over my husband’s body,” she went on, staring at the shroud. “Not like most women, they get to stand over the grave where the man they loved is gonna lie for all eternity. Never had me the chance for them words.”
“You feel like saying something now—maybe over Ebenezer—what you’d like to gone and said over your own man’s grave?” Kingsbury asked.
With a nod she glanced quickly at Titus. “Jameson and me, we buried one stillbirth, another two that didn’t make their first year, then we finally raised up seven boys—only to see the rivers claim two of ’em. Maybe another three. I seen my share of troubles and woe, I have. My life been far from a pretty thing. But a man what sticks by his friends and cheats no other is a real treasure in this life. Seems to me that my Jameson and your Ebenezer Zane
