“He damn well better appreciate it,” she said with a ghost of a smile, reaching out to slap Titus on the knee. “First time I made it to Norleans without him!”
14
As much as Root, Ovatt, and even Kingsbury grumbled about the fact that Beulah hung their laundry up on that rope stretched from the awning to the snubbing post at the bow, those freshly scrubbed clothes snapping smartly in the stiff breeze for everyone else on the lower Mississippi to see, the boatmen didn’t really mind at all the idea of having a clean shirt to pull on before they climbed ashore to celebrate their arrival in New Orleans in fine style.
Once she learned they had no extra clothing, the woman had ordered them all to pull off their dirty shirts, right then and there. When the pilot hesitated, then turned in retreat, the woman balled her fists on her hips and glared at him with motherly sternness.
“Hames! You—more’n the rest—need some soap put to that shirt of your’n.”
With a sheepish look he glanced at the others. “I think it’s fine just the way—”
“Give it here.”
He could see the grins and smirks on the rest of that bawdy crew and likely realized he was never going to win against the woman. Ever so slowly did he drag the shirt’s long tail out of his britches and waist belt, then yanked it over his head. As Kingsbury held it out at arm’s length to Beulah, Titus looked at how skinny the man was, all ribs and backbone and shoulder blades, the skin stretched over them like a piece of fine white linen draped over the sharp newels at the top of a ladder-back chair.
She snatched the shirt from him with a look of smug self-satisfaction. “Now that greasy cravat of your’n.”
With a look of fright crossing his face, Hames touched the red handkerchief. “Not my neck wrap!”
“Give it to me.”
“Ah, shit, woman,” he grumped, his bare skin beginning to show goose bumps.
“Won’t take me long,” Beulah explained. “Sooner you let me start on it, sooner I can get it done and dry.”
Reluctantly he untied the square knot and handed the cravat to her by one corner. Beulah took it in her hands, spread it out at arm’s length, and inspected it.
“Just as I thought,” she grumbled. “C’mere, Hames.”
Circling behind the pilot, Beulah raised up the hair that brushed Kingsbury’s shoulders. “You see, boys? I’ll bet you’re all the same as this’un here.”
Titus leaned in close enough to see how the skin at the pilot’s neck was nothing more than oozy scab and raw, angry flesh. “What’s all that from? He sick with something?”
Beulah clucked disapprovingly. “Only thing he’s sick of is taking care of hisseff. He’s been givin’ home and hearth to some verminous critters. These’uns here.”
Holding up the red bandanna Kingsbury had long used as a neck wrap, the woman pointed to the long row of big white lice neatly arranged within one of the folds, each one every bit as big as the hog lice he had seen on the family stock back at Rabbit Hash. Looking like a strand of long white beads, the vermin had arranged themselves in a row with their heads all turned toward the raw skin of the pilot’s neck, feasting away.
“When I get done with your clothes, fellas—won’t be a one of these I ain’t drowned. Then we gonna pick over all your blankets too.”
“What ’bout his neck?” Titus asked, pointing to the raw flesh. “Maybeso we ought’n put something on it.”
Beulah wagged her head, saying, “I don’t have nothin’ no more, none of my medeecins—”
“Most like, Ebenezer has him some liniment or oil you can put on it for me,” Kingsbury said, scooting to lean forward over a long chest, where he began to rummage among Zane’s belongings.
After smearing a thick daubing of some less-than-fragrant ointment Ebenezer kept in a cork-topped clay jar, Beulah proceeded to work up a lather from some river water and half a cake of lye-ash soap she found buried in the bottom of Ebenezer’s kitchen box. The day not really warm enough for any of them to stand around sans shirts, all four pulled on coats made of canvas or wool blanketing. Without a tin scrub board, she instead scrubbed their grimy shirts against the white-oak staves that formed the side of a large water bucket. Titus watched her work, reminded of his own mother, recalling for a moment how Amy washed the clothes of all those brothers and sisters.
By the time Beulah got to Titus’s homespun shirt of mixed cloth, the woman held the garment between two fingers at the end of her outstretched arm, her other hand pinching her nose in mock disgust. After she rubbed and scrubbed the best she could, she would pull his shirt from the soapy water and inspect it—both sides, neck, and cuffs—before plunging it back into the pail for more watery abuse. Again she pulled it out for inspection, then returned it to the gray, sudsy water. Over and over she dunked his sole shirt, then raised it from the pail for a look until it eventually passed her scrutiny. Only then did she drape it over a long line of half-inch rope they had tied for her to the awning support, stringing it all the way forward to the bow checking post.
Of varied tow cloth, calicoes, and linsey-woolseys, the four shirts dripped, drop by drop, before they began to dry, flapping in the cold air above Titus’s head. Nearby Heman Ovatt clacked out a rhythm on a pair of pewter spoons he whacked against his palm and elbow, knee and thigh. Back at the rudder, Reuben Root whistled one of his squeeze-box songs as he steered them through the last few miles of shoals, while the closer they drew to New Orleans, the flatboat traffic grew thick as the strop hair on the back of a hog. Even Hames Kingsbury clanged an iron ladle against the back of a cast-iron skillet while trying his best not to let that big grin of his split his face half- open.
“Damn, but it’s good to get back down here,” the pilot exclaimed with a gush of excitement. “Put all that river behind me.”
“Till May comes round again,” Ovatt reminded them all. “We go and load up a brand-new flatboat with another season’s cargo.”
“We still got us that damn walk back to Kentucky afore we do,” Root said, his dour expression quite a contrast to the healing Kingsbury’s.
“Just a thousand miles—every one of ’em making you hunger for seeing the Ohio again,” Ovatt said.
Hames called out, “Titus—you figure on walking north with us, don’t you?”
Nodding emphatically, Bass replied, “I ain’t staying down here in this country. Nosirree.”
“Good to hear: we can likely use your rifle on the Natchez Road,” Kingsbury declared. “Feed this bunch on our way home.”
Ovatt turned to the youth and asked, “You changed your mind and decided on heading back to your family’s place, Titus?”
He watched the passing of those lacy whitecaps stirred up by the wind like the bobbing of so many white- headed doves before he answered. “Nothing much left for me back there.”
“Maybeso you’d like to join on with us,” the pilot said. “With Ebenezer gone … well, we’re a man short—and besides: you’ve already made yourself one of the crew. Come downriver, twice’t a year with us! It’s a damned fine life for a young’un like yourself.”
As a matter of fact, Titus had already been working that over in his mind these last few days, ever since the night they escaped that mob on the Natchez wharf.
“There’s girls, Titus,” Ovatt said. “You seen ’em too. They come down to the bank to watch you pass. Wave to you. And you can call back to them, vow them of your love!”
“Figure I know what you got on your mind, Heman Ovatt,” the woman declared sourly.
“Just what any youngster like Titus here got on his mind too!” Heman replied.
“We’d like to have you join us,” Kingsbury repeated, getting serious once more. “Ain’t that right, Reuben?”
“It be a life just made for you, Titus Bass,” Root added.
With a slow, undecided wag of his head he finally raised his eyes to look at the crewmen seated here and
