grinning proudly as he took the long rudder pole from Ovatt.
As Heman resettled himself at the starboard oar, he winked to Titus. “Jesus God—look lively there, young’un. We’ll be tying up in Nawlins afore nightfall!”
New Orleans.
How he stretched and craned his neck to see something of it far down that broad stretch of endless bayou cluttered with cypress where Spanish moss hung eight, sometimes ten feet long, like great gray beards tossing in the wind.
To come here at last.
So he could finally get on with starting back for that Kentucky country … just as soon as they sold off the cargo, along with all the timber in Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat.
He was a thousand times farther away from home than he had ever been and right now was sensing a dull ache with that longing for familiar faces and well-known places and the reassuring smells that told him he was home … but that was purely impossible. There was no longer a home.
He was adrift and free, dancing on the wind.
But before he did return to that faraway Ohio River country, there still lay all those miles of wilderness they had yet to cross. On a road that would take them right through the red savage heart of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations.
Any way he looked at it, that spelled Injun country to Titus Bass.
If he had believed Louisville, and later Natchez, to be bustling, sprawling river ports—Titus was in no way prepared for what greeted him when they neared the levee at New Orleans.
Their Kentucky broadhorn was but one of more than three hundred tied up along the length of a serpentine wharf, boats lashed together three and four abreast. The great clusters of unloaded flats cluttered against the New Orleans wharf reminded Titus of sprawling and forlorn stacks of empty chicken coops. In addition, there were more than a hundred of the bigger keelboats with their low-roofed cabins squatting midship atop their decks.
But beyond them in the deep harbor lay anchored the astonishing wonder that made his young eyes widen and his mouth gape: those tall-masted schooners and other oceangoing vessels ribbed in their dull-white canvas now tucked away high above their decks and crews, massive sailing creatures that rose out of the water at least as tall as three of his pap’s cabins would be if stacked one on top of the other.
Kingsbury’s crew tied up at the far north end of the levee for a seven-dollar fee paid to that dog-faced wharfmaster who plied the waters of the New Orleans harbor in a rowboat propelled by six oarsmen, each one with skin blacker than any Negro Titus had ever seen and all wearing the same smart waist-length jacket with gold braid and brass buttons that glimmered brightly in the Mississippi sun. The six sat quietly, nonetheless watchful, as the man ordered them to tie him alongside the flatboat just come from upriver. Kingsbury and the rest listened from the gunnel as the wharfmaster accounted for the docking fee and held out the possibility of severe penalty for nonpayment.
“We’ll pay,” Kingsbury growled, stuffing his hand into Ebenezer Zane’s satchel of coins. “Ebenezer Zane allays paid what toll was due you.”
“I thought I recognized you,” the wharfmaster replied, his eyes searching the boat quickly, craning his neck this way and that as Kingsbury counted the coins into the man’s beefy palm. “Where’s Ebenezer Zane himself?”
The question was barely out of his mouth when the woman appeared from the awning, his jaw dropping agog in surprise.
“Dead,” Kingsbury declared. “Buried him upriver. T’other side of Natchez.”
Tugging down on the points at the front of his waistcoat, the man stated solemnly, “I’m sorry … sorry to hear that. He was a good man—the best. Well, hmmm. You understand you’ll have to have Zane’s bills of lading for all this cargo if you intend to sell it here to New Orleans.”
“We got ’em,” Kingsbury replied confidently, and stuffed his hand down into a flat rawhide pouch, pulling out a handful of papers.
Without another word the man clambered over the side into his boat and made a small, almost insignificant gesture with one hand. The six ebony oarsmen dipped their wood to water and stroked away along the levee as the wharfmaster settled midship, on about his business.
“Pleasure doing business with you too,” Beulah said as she came to the gunnel and peered after them.
“Seven dollars a day, just to tie up. That’s near robbery.” Kingsbury wagged his head.
“We just be sure to get this cargo sold and off the boat in a couple of days,” Ovatt reminded them optimistically.
“Stop all your fretting now,” the woman snapped at them. “That fee ain’t nothing, nothing at all—not compared to the small fortune you boys are bound to make when you go sell all this: hemp, flour, tobacco, ironworkings, and all.”
A smile slowly crossed Kingsbury’s face. “I suppose you’re right. A small fortune. Yes. Well, maybeso.”
“You’re all gonna be rich men,” the woman buoyed them. “Drink the finest wine. Smoke the finest cigars—not have to chew that poor stuff you boys been sucking on since you pulled me out’n the river. Times gonna change for you now.”
“R-rich men?” Root asked, looking at the faces of the other three crew.
“Even Titus Bass,” the pilot said. “You got your pay coming—”
“Pay?” Beulah demanded. “You three figure on giving Titus nothing more’n regular pay?” She whirled on Bass. “That’s only some fifty dollars for a crewman to come all the way downriver with a Kentuckyboat.”
“It don’t rightly seem fair he gets a full goddamned share,” Root snorted. “Not since’t he wasn’t with us when we put this here boat into the Ohio way up—”
“I don’t ’spect it to be a full share, now,” Titus interrupted with an apologetic wag of his head.
“Wait a minute,” Beulah demanded. “What’d Ebenezer Zane pay you fellas ever’ trip down? He pay only boatmen’s wages? Like every other patroon on the river?”
Kingsbury’s face went more sheepish than the others’ as they dropped their eyes. “Naw,” the pilot answered. “After he sold everything, Eb took his half off the top and split the other half atween all four of us, him included.”
She nodded in wide-eyed admiration, saying, “That’s a damn fine proposition for a boatman, I’ll say. No wonder you boys stayed on with him so many years. Likely you all was making five, maybe six times or more what you’d make working any other man’s boat down the river.”
“We all had us a little piece of the cargo that way, Ebenezer always said,” Hames explained.
“And all of this is yours to sell off now,” Beulah replied. “So to my way of thinking, I say you boys do like Ebenezer done for you: give Titus here what would be one man’s fair split of the boat’s profits, and with all that’s left you can split up atween yourselves. How’s that strike you?”
Root and Ovatt looked at one another quizzically, then both turned in unison to Kingsbury for help. After cogitating on it a few moments, working it over in his mind a handful at a time, he nodded and replied, “Sounds fair; fair to everyone. Fair to Titus ’cause he’ll get better’n a boatman’s wages for the trip … and better for all the rest of us ’cause we ain’t not a one ever had so much to split atween us before! It sound good to you, Titus?”
“I ain’t never … didn’t even count on no money coming—”
“Don’t matter. You earned your money,” Kingsbury interrupted, slapping Bass on the shoulder. “That settles it. What’s fair is fair—right, boys?”
When they went ashore that afternoon for the first time, Titus sensed his excitement swell with every step they took down the meandering levee, moving closer and closer to the city’s central business district. Never before in all those weeks and all the miles Bass had put behind him in coming downriver had he seen such a mix of colors and tongues, dialects and costumes, as there were here on the streets of New Orleans. Besides gaily dressed Indians from the region’s various tribes, Bass jostled against pale-skinned foreigners from faraway European principalities, coffee-colored visitors from a host of Caribbean islands, as well as stopping dead in his tracks to watch long lines of half-dressed Africans—some dull-eyed with privation, others wide-eyed with fear at certain death—each one as dark and shiny as charred hardwood glistening after a rain, all of them chained together with massive iron shackles, their feet bound two by two, led along with the accompanying beat of a drummer, perhaps even a fife or two adding a lively air above the sad procession of human cargo making for the middle of the
