If it wasn’t in her skilled, sure hands, Titus wondered—then in whose hands did the life of Hames Kingsbury lie? It troubled him that the woman expected him to understand her … when he had no earthly idea who might hold the power to save the man.
First off, he lost Ebenezer Zane. Now another man clung tenuously to life. No matter that he had people around him at this moment, Titus had rarely felt so alone.
He raised his eyes from the pilot’s pale, clammy face, looking at Root manning the gouger, turning to gaze again at Ovatt stationed at the stern rudder.
“It’s good water from here on down,” Heman had told him earlier that morning as the sun came up milk-pale in a cold sky. “I could get this broadhorn down to Nawlins, steering it on my lonesome, if’n I had to. Easy enough, though there’s cypress swamp what can fool a man if he don’t keep his nose locked in the main channel. But don’t you fret none, Titus. I’ll holler when I need you on one oar or t’other.”
Many, many night fires this crew of four had told him how they’d worked the rivers together for more than a decade, without much bloodletting at all: a few fights, a few knife cuts sewn up with the same thread they used to repair their clothing, mostly a lot of good-natured head thumping in the midst of one hell of a lot of work. As much as there had been Indian scares in years past, they had never caused much more than an anxious moment or two for Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen—nothing more than threats from a far bank now and again.
But what with that old pilot resting among the mud and catfish and sawyers at the bottom of the Mississippi, Heman Ovatt was beginning to think things had changed for the worse. And what was usually nothing more than some bruises and perhaps a broken bone now and then whenever they tied up for a frolic at Louisville’s red-candle district, Natchez-Under-the-Hill, or even the Swamp in New Orleans—now their raucous brawling had turned deadly. For no reason they could figure out.
Except that it just might have to do with settling an old score with Ebenezer Zane.
Kingsbury coughed in his sleep. Bass sensed the pilot slipping away from him too.
Hames had passed out about the time they were pushing free of the wharf, with that mob drawing ever closer below those bouncing torches, their discordant voices looming louder out of the dark. One of that drunken lot had spotted them making for the main channel of the river, shrieked his warning to the others, and a great cry of frustration and disappointment had gone up. More than a handful of that rabble had yanked pistols from their belts and fired at the southbound flatboat. Only one bullet had smacked against their craft, crashing noisily into a cask holding ironmongery. The clatter had made Bass jump there at the gunnel while the woman bent over Kingsbury protectively and the other two men hurried them away from Natchez.
For some time Ovatt and Root were convinced others would put up a chase, board some canoes or a pirogue and come slipping up after them. Overhead the stars in the Big Bear slowly slipped away from the middle of the sky and fell into the west as Titus fought a great weariness. He drank cup after cup of the woman’s coffee sweetened with thumb-sized clumps of homemade cake sugar there beside the sandbox fire and watched Root stoically wince with pain each time he had to lean against the long rudder handle to keep them in the running channel.
By now Heman had a dirty bandage wrapped round his head. One eye was nearly puffed shut, yet he gladly took his place at the gouger when he and Reuben spelled one another, rotating pilot’s chores at the stern rudder through that long night. Once more Natchez-Under-the-Hill had lived up to its rough-and-tumble, life-is-by-damn- cheap reputation.
Long after sundown the night following the fight at Annie Christmas’s gunboat brothel, Reuben Root admitted they had to put over and tie up just past Fort Adams, which stood on Loftus’s Heights at the thirty-first parallel, the southernmost military post erected on American soil in those days prior to Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana Territory.
“The river shrinks down here some,” Reuben explained after he and Ovatt secured to the exposed roots of some cypress trees. “Don’t run no wider’n two hunnert fifty … maybe three hunnert yards at the most. On downriver tomorrow we’ll pass Wilkinsonville—named after the army general what wanted to be king his own self over all that out there.” Heman swept an arm across the darkening western horizon.
Not so bad a dream, Bass figured as he slipped off the jerkin and removed what tatters were left of his old shirt. Bending over the tiny bundle of his belongings, he unwrapped the shirt his mam had finished for Thaddeus the night before Titus had slipped away. Ever since he had refused to wear it—feeling it to be ill-gotten, as if he had stolen that yoked shirt with its square arm holes, but now as he slipped it over his head—Bass sensed his mam just might have left it lying out on the table as she had because she knew her eldest son was taking his leave. Them biscuits and this new warm shirt: it was the best way she knew how to tell him good-bye without embarrassing him with a mother’s tears. Slowly he brushed his hand down the front of it after he got the shirt tucked into his britches.
And felt the sudden stirring of homesickness that did not leave him for the better part of a day.
By the time they approached Pointe Coupee the following morning, Root could hardly move his left shoulder. Close inspection by Beulah discovered the boatman’s shirt crusted to his back, right over the shoulder blade. Once she coaxed and coddled Reuben into sitting near the fire and sent Titus up to man the gouger, the woman clucked her disapproval as she slowly dripped warm water on the coagulate to free the shirt from a nasty knife wound.
“You’re a brave man, Reuben Root,” she told him loud enough for all to hear. “Plenty brave … and mighty stupid.”
When he started to rise in anger, she snagged hold of the back of his shirt and held tight—making him wince in pain as he settled back atop a low crate in a huff.
“Ain’t nothin’,” he grumbled. “Had worse.”
“Have you, now?” she replied in that tone guaranteed to make any man feel like a scolded child. “Ever you need someone to sew on you?”
Wheeling on her, his face blanched. “No. Allays kept my cuts bound up with—”
“You’re gonna need me sew on this’un. That much’s for sure, Reuben.”
“W-we don’t got us needle an’ thread,” Root said, smiling lamely. “S’pose you can’t do no sewin’—”
“Ebenezer allays keeps him some stout linen thread and some glover’s needles down in a chest there,” Ovatt reported from the rudder with a much wider, and more genuine, smile. “Never know when you’ll get your canvas tore.”
Wagging his head in utter disgust while glaring at Heman, Reuben spat, “You mean-assed, mule-headed son of a bitch! Why, one day I’ll make sure—”
“Beulah says you need some sewin’,” Ovatt interrupted calmly, “so we’ll see you get sewed up. Time for you be having your
“Fillee, hell!” he roared impudently. “This woman gonna sew on me, I’ll damn well drink my fill!”
Reuben promptly set about drinking much more than his boatman’s ration of Monongahela rye—a
Just south of Pointe Coupee, Heman put over, and Titus struggled before he got them tied off to the roots of a single great cypress. As the boat rubbed and chafed, timber against timber, Bass and Ovatt ducked beneath the awning where the sandbox fire always kept the air at least ten degrees warmer, there to join the woman, who took the knife from Root’s belt and cut herself a length of fine linen cord. One end of this she placed between her teeth, soaking it with the moisture in her mouth before she began to peel back the tiny strands that formed the twisted cord. When she had one strand the thickness she desired for the job at hand, she peeled it from the rest of the cord and threaded her sharp three-sided glover’s needle.
Raising her eyes momentarily to Bass, she ordered, “Pour some more of that Monongahela into his cup.”
Sitting at Root’s head, Ovatt said, “Don’t figure you need to, Beulah—looks to be Reuben ain’t gonna be awake to want no more. He’s snoring through the rough water already.”
“I didn’t mean I wanted any for him to drink,” she replied curtly. “I want you to pour some on that there nasty cut afore I start.”
Holding the threaded needle in her mouth, she once more took the boatman’s knife in hand, raised her long skirt, and this time sliced through the long hem of a dirty petticoat. “Tug his shirt out’n his britches for me, fellas. Pull it way up on his shoulders.”
Heman and Titus did as they were instructed, both of them silent as sandbars and wide-eyed as deaf mules
