Dance on the Wind

was two of that kind.”

“He was at that. Amen,” Kingsbury said, swiping a hand across a damp, jowly cheek.

Beneath her eyes Beulah dragged the rough wool of that blanket she clutched around her shoulders. “I suppose all we can really say about good men like this’un—what God don’t already know His own self—is that there’s gonna be a big hole to fill in our lives now that this man’s gone. But God, and good men like this’un, expect us just to go right on.”

As her voice dropped off and it got quiet, Titus looked up, finding her gazing at him with those intense, sad, red-rimmed eyes.

“Men like Ebenezer Zane expect you to go right on with what you were bound to do in this life,” Beulah continued.

As her voice died away, the wind gusted, cold and toothy, whipping their coats and flapping the edges of their blankets at them like flags. In the sudden leaving of that wind, the soft slap of water against hard, yellow poplar filled the silent void around them.

“If you fellas are ready to send this man to his rest,” she said, “I’ll say a few words what I remember is always said over folks getting buried.”

Without a sound Ovatt and Root hoisted the upper part of Ebenezer Zane’s body while Kingsbury took hold of the legs. When Titus began to move forward to help, Beulah put out her arm, held him in place beside her, then curled an arm in his as she began to repeat the litany as she remembered it.

“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” she said as the three boatmen hoisted the shroud toward the gunnel. “The Good Lord in heaven awaits thee, noble soul. Fly, fly now—and be quick to sit at God’s feet. Know that your toil is done, and your troubles are behind you now. We who are left behind will remember. We vow to remember.”

Bass watched them roll the shroud off the six-inch-wide plank that formed the top of the gunnel, heard the body splash into the river. By the time Titus got to the side of the flatboat, the gray shroud had darkened, taking on water as it slowly sank with the weights Root and Ovatt had tied to it.

We vow to remember, he echoed the words in his head, peering down with the rest of them as Ebenezer Zane sank slowly beneath the murky brown surface of the river, became a dark, oblong shape, then disappeared completely.

Once more the wind came up, and he had to swipe the hair from his eyes as he pushed back from the gunnel, stood, and moved away to the awning. In a moment more, the rest of them joined him there, all kneeling to warm their hands over the sandbox fire, eyes red-rimmed and the skin over their noses and cheeks flushed with the cold’s cruel bite.

“We’ll be putting up at Natchez in less’n a hour,” Kingsbury said to the woman. “But you’re welcome to stay over the night with us—seeing how you ain’t got no family there to put yourself up with.”

“Didn’t I hear talk of you fellas planning on making a hoot of it this evening Under-the-Hill?” she asked, without raising her eyes to any of them.

“We allays do,” Ovatt answered as he began to hold his right thumbnail over the flame of a candle in one of the lanterns.

“What the devil’re you doing?” she asked him.

“Hardenin’ my fingernails’s all.”

“Whatever for?”

This time Kingsbury explained with a grin, “Why, the better to feel for a feller’s eye strings, woman. Heman goes to gouging with them nails—he can make any bad son of a bitch tell the news! Natchez can be a damn hard town for a man what can’t take care of hisself in a scrap. But just ’cause we go off and have ourselves a hoot don’t mean you won’t have you a place to sleep tonight.”

With a visible shudder she turned away from watching Ovatt harden his thumbnails. “I’m ’bliged,” she replied. “My boys, an’ them others what hired on to work our boat—they never said much ’bout what they done when we reached Natchez, nary what they done at the Swamp when we got on down to Orlins too. Early on I come to figure it all just had to do with a man whoring and drinking, having himself a spree when his boat comes to port.”

Titus peered at those three roughened men, surprised to find them suddenly shy and sheepish in the presence of this woman looking every bit as worn enough to be their maiden aunt, a woman who had just spoken moving words as she watched them bury their pilot—then minutes afterward forced them to own up to just what it was rivermen tied up at Natchez to do.

Poking at the embers with a twig she stirred some more life into the fire, then shrugged a shoulder as she pulled the big coffee kettle from the heat. “I suppose it’s what men are about, and there’s never gonna be no changing it. So don’t pay me no mind. I’m much obliged for your giving me a place to lay my head on your boat tonight.” She picked up a tinned mug and asked, “Any of you care for more of my coffee?”

As for anything remotely resembling civilization in this river wilderness, there were but three sizable outposts of settlement that joined those tiny villages, far-flung trading posts, and the occasional military fort: at the far northern end of the lower Mississippi Valley sat the old French colony, St. Louis; all the way south at the other end of the river sprawled the even larger New Orleans; and between them squatted Natchez—a town more of dubious reputation than of any real note.

Not only could a boatman look forward to some ribald female companionship along with some head-thumping whiskey in the brothels and watering holes that sat at the river’s edge—but there was still even more cause to celebrate. Reaching Natchez meant the most treacherous sections of the Mississippi were now behind them. Sitting where it did on the eastern shore, the town had quickly proved itself an ideal way station where the flatboat crews put in to resupply, rest, and recreate before making the last short run on down to New Orleans.

Long before, the place had been nothing more than a semipermanent encampment of the Natchez Indians. With the coming of the white man the first settlement high upon the bluff overlooking the river was eventually wrangled over by three European countries. First to arrive were the Spanish, followed by the French, and eventually the British brought their influence to bear on this Mississippi port. Ultimately the infant United States came to reign supreme in recent years. Each of those conflicting cultures had added the same full-bodied, international flavor any traveler would find in St. Louis and New Orleans. All told, the entire Natchez district numbered some seventy-five hundred souls, due in large part to the cultivation of the unusually rich soil found on numerous farms and expansive plantations. Yet the town served as the center of more than mere trade—early-day Natchez boasted an extremely varied and exciting social life of theater, balls, and what traveling acts happened by.

The winter sun had set and twilight was slipping down around them as the four boatmen climbed over the gunnel to stand on the wharf, peering past the rickety clapboard and canvas-topped shanties to the lights of the town itself on the heights above.

Kingsbury turned and asked the woman, “You’re gonna be all right here?”

“Got me all I need,” she replied, then gestured them to be off. “Now, get—and have yourselves a hoot. I’ll be right here when you mosey on back.”

“Likely be back afore morning,” the boat’s skinny pilot replied as he turned away with the others.

They pressed into the last throb of that busy wharf, pushing past all manner of those who made the river and this wilderness their home. Here beneath the Natchez hill Bass not only rubbed elbows with many other homespun boatmen and leather-clad frontiersmen, but with Brits and Frenchmen, African slaves and freedmen, along with Indians, Spaniards, Acadians, and Creoles as well.

“What be that up there?” Titus asked, stopping to point up the bluff to the town built on the high ground at a distance of a mile from the river.

Kingsbury stopped with the rest of them right behind Bass, saying, “Natchez.”

“Ain’t we going up there?” Titus asked.

Heman Ovatt explained, “We ain’t allowed.”

“That’s right,” Kingsbury continued. “Rivermen like us get arrested if’n they go up there to the town where the proper folks live.”

Bass looked up the bluff again, then quickly at the collection of vulgar shacks and hovels raised along the wharf in one long, jagged strip. “If’n that’s Natchez up there, then what’s this place down here where they ’llow us to go?”

“This here’s called Natchez-Under-the-Hill,” Kingsbury answered.