Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  And when the boatman gets on shore,

  He spends his cash and works for more.

  “Then dance, the boatmen dance.

  Oh, dance—the boatmen dance.

  Oh, dance all night till broad daylight,

  And go home with the gals in

  the morning!”

  Float time between sunup and sundown shrank a little each day, and there were mornings when they awakened to find a rime of ice slicking their cedar water buckets. As much as they could through the long, cold evenings of enforced idleness they stayed close by the sandbox fire before they would crab off to their blankets beneath the oiled awning cloth.

  With their singing and their storytelling filling the long days and into the nights, how Titus often sat in pure wonder of these men who had welcomed him into their life, sweeping him along in their adventure, showing him how to make it his own. Rivermen, some called them. Others called them boatmen. Every last one of these restless souls folks on down the Mississippi had lumped together and called Kentuckians—these were the rough, rowdy, ne’er-do-wells Titus had come to regard as uncles, men who had taken him under their wings, to watch over, to teach, to open up the widening world to a young runaway from Rabbit Hash, in Boone County.

  And if Root, Ovatt, and Kingsbury were his uncles … then Ebenezer Zane must surely be like the father he wished he had been born to. An unfettered spirit, instead of a man like Thaddeus Bass, who lived out his days tied down to one place—his dreams, his very vision, content to take in no more than what he could see of the forested hills around him. Less than a mile, no more than two miles at most—that was all a man could see in that cramped country his father had chosen to live out his days.

  How was it that a man could satisfy himself so easily? Titus asked. How could a man content himself with so small a world, when the rest of it lay right out there for the taking? Had his father never had a dream like his own? Or was it simply that the older a man became, the more tarnished and smaller, the less important and more unrealized his dream became?

  It was during the days as they floated toward the Mississippi that he thought on such things, with every new sunset and all the miles they put behind them, sensing all the more just what he had chosen to leave back there—pulled by all that which lured him onward.

  Few people lived southwest of Louisville that early in the new century. No longer so hilly and broken, the countryside slowly flattened into a rich and fertile region.

  “Good for the farmers what’s coming,” Hames Kingsbury stated. “Only a matter of time before they fill it up too.”

  Surveyed only nine years before, Henderson, Kentucky, was beginning to flourish as a crossroads for the state’s Green River region. Floating on past Diamond Island, the boatmen then swept past the mouth of the Wabash, the western boundary of Indiana and one of the largest navigable rivers in the Northwest Territory.

  Early one afternoon Kingsbury took to singing a jaunty tune.

  “Some row up,

  Some row down.

  All the way—

  To Shawnee town.

  Pull away—pull away now!”

  “Ain’t far to Shawnee town now,” Ovatt declared, pointing downriver.

  A few miles down from the Wabash they put to at Shawnee town, a wild and raucous river port then beginning to flourish on the north side of the Ohio, its new citizens finding easy profit in satisfying all a boatman’s hungers. A little farther on Ebenezer Zane brought them to Cave-In Rock on the “Indian side” of the Ohio.

  “Times was, there was talk river pirates hid out in this place,” Hames Kingsbury explained to Titus as the crew put over to the north shore and climbed up to take in the legendary landmark.

  “Pirates?” Bass inquired.

  “Ain’t no pirates working the river like they done of a time not so long ago,” Ebenezer added. “Things pretty quiet nowdays.”

  Inside the cave the boatmen showed Titus where they had first inscribed their names on the walls, beneath them the dates of their first trips down the Ohio. The walls were covered from floor to a full arm’s length above them with the names of hundreds of other river travelers.

  “Here,” Reuben Root said, holding out his belt knife to Titus by the blade. “Scratch your name in there.”

  As the youth finished the second S on his last name, Ovatt said, “You’ll have to ask Ebenezer what day it is. He’s the only one among us what pays heed to such things.”

  “It’s your good fortune I do pay heed to such as that,” Zane replied. “It’s November the twenty-eighth, Titus.”

  “So that means the year still is eighteen and ten.”

  “Oh, you’ll know when we get to the new year, all right,” Kingsbury exclaimed. “That’s good cause for celebration with this bunch.”

  “It’s my birthday,” Titus told them as he finished gouging out the last number.

  “New Year’s Day?” Ovatt asked.

  Nodding, he turned and handed the knife back to Root.

  “Way I hope things to go, Titus,” Zane said, “we’ll be on the Trace come 1811.”

  Titus asked, “The Trace? What’s that?”

  “It’s the road we’re walking home from the Mississap, through Tennessee and on to Kentucky,” Kingsbury answered.

  “A wilderness road that points us north,” Zane added, turning toward the wide mouth of the cave. “Time we was setting off again.”

  Farther down the Ohio they passed the Cumberland River, commonly called the Shawanoe by the locals in the new nearby settlement of Smithtown, slowly spreading into the bottomland forest. In less than an hour they passed the Tennessee, both rivers flowing in from the south within a few miles of one another.

  “That Smithtown is one place a man’s life goes damned cheap,” Root grumped as they passed by the wharf where a couple of dozen men came out of log cabins to hail the flatboat passing on by.

  “Lots of knockabouts: fellas like you there, Titus,” Kingsbury declared.

  “Like me?” he asked, watching the men on the wharf wave, holler, attempting to attract attention and flag the boat over.

  “Homeless runaways, I’ll say. Young men with nothing but time on their hands. Even some boatmen what don’t have jobs. They all waiting there to hire on as hands to any of the boats what hap to put in at Smithtown.”

  “A scurvy lot those wharf rats are,” Ebenezer spat with a doleful wag of his head.

  By this point the Ohio was becoming more and more crowded with river traffic originating all the way from the Allegheny and Monongahela, the Muskingum, Scioto, and Kentucky. Within some two hundred miles, four major rivers—the Green (what some locals still referred to as the Buffalo), the Wabash, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, also known by the earliest settlers as the Cheraqui—all flowed into the Ohio. No more was she la belle rivière of the French traders. Yet she had become something quite grand, widening with mounting strength as each new river fed her its waters.

  Past the Tennessee they floated by Fort Massac, first erected in the Illinois country back in 1757 … then Wilkinsonville, a crude frontier station named after the young country’s treasonous brigadier general James Wilkinson who continued to dabble in boating, soldiering, and conspiring to carve out his own empire in the West. Little more than clusters of cabins and riverside wharves, these were among a handful of tiny outposts cropping up here and there to signal the inevitable spread of a thriving frontier civilization. Over each village, smoke smudged the air as open fires, rock chimneys, and hundreds of smoldering tree stumps all raised their oily black columns into the late-autumn sky. Each of these riverside ports was simply a pocket of land stripped of its timber and brush to make room for a cluster of cabins, a common stockade, and a few cleared fields just beyond.

  Why they hadn’t left the forest the way it was … why men like his pap, and his grandpap before that, figured they could improve on what was there to begin with—Titus figured he never would know. Whoever, whatever, put the trees and critte
rs there at the start likely had the best idea of all, he decided.

  “It’s up to man to bring peace to the hills and valleys,” his father often repeated his litany of subduing the earth. “Up to man to pacify the land and make it fruitful—just as God commands us do.”

  If his pap’s God wasn’t the same what made all the hills and valleys and critters, then Titus would simply find himself another God to believe in. A God who could make such a luxurious garden of forest and timber and critters could never be a God that set silently with seeing his creation destroyed by man.

  The farther west they floated, the more startling the contrasts became to him. With fewer and fewer settlements and outposts, with more and more long stretches of untouched wilderness—the differences between Titus and his father became all the more clear. While most came to a new land to conquer it, desiring to subdue all within sight, to make of it something in their own image … with every day Titus all the more sought the wilderness on its own terms.

  As they approached the mouth of the Ohio, Titus realized he had flatboated from the gentle mountains and forests of the upper river, southwesterly to a region of flooded lowlands and great stretches of treeless, brushy wilderness as far as the eye could see. The Ohio was the feeder, bringing the races and cultures tumbling together: Scotch-Irish, Kentuckians, English and French, pioneers all, rubbing shoulders with Creoles, Negro slaves, mulattoes, and freedmen, as well as an array of tribesmen—Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Peoria, Sauk, and Piankashaw.

  “These Injuns ain’t a problem to rivermen no more,” Zane explained as they closed on the mouth of the river, where the often-roiling blue Ohio mingled with and lost itself to the coffee-colored, more sedate Mississippi. “Most of them redskins moving on into the Illinois country. Maybeso across the Mississippi to the west. White man’s land over here. Let them red bastards have all that’s left ’em over yonder.”

  His eyes widened as he stood, mesmerized and amazed in watching the great sweep of water come in off the starboard. Pointing, Titus asked, “What’s that river coming in?”

  “It ain’t coming in, Titus,” the pilot explained with a smile. “This’r Ohio coming into it.”

  In wonder at the sheer size of it he exclaimed, “That’s the Mississip?”

  Working his rudder beneath one arm to position them into the colliding currents, Ebenezer Zane replied, “Ain’t none the other. You come to the mighty Mississip, Titus Bass.” Nodding to the south, he said, “Over here is all the land any man could want to farm and raise up his towns.”

  Yet Titus stared off across the widening expanse of water at the far, far shore. He pointed to the west. “And over there?”

  “Over there,” Zane answered with a sigh, “is the beginning of a wilderness fit only for Injuns, critters, and wild men.”

  10

  As Titus stood atop some of the hogsheads of flour to get himself the best view of that spectacular, unpeopled country, Ebenezer Zane heaved against his rudder to slip the flatboat out from the mouth of the Ohio and into the great, wide Mississippi already beginning to spread itself a mile and more wide in its slow roll to the south.

  “Yonder’s Cairo,” the pilot called out, pointing off toward the collection of shacks and log cabins built around a tiny wharf at the end of that peninsula formed by the joining of the two waters.

  Kingsbury brought his oar out of the water and leaned back with a sigh. “Farther on up there, Titus—a man comes to St. Louie.”

  “Like I said: time enough to get there, young as I am,” Titus said, his eyes widening as he took in the vast sweep of all that stretched before him on that far western horizon.

  “Young as you is,” Root scoffed at his oar below Bass, “you can have you two or three big adventures afore you gotta figure out what it is you’re gonna do for the rest of your life.”

  “Don’t pay him no heed, Titus,” Zane advised. “Reuben still ain’t sorted out what he’s gonna do when he gets growed up!”

  While rolling hills and timbered bluffs dominated the Mississippi’s shoreline above the mouth of the Ohio, from there south one could watch the landscape begin to flatten. Eagles dotted the cold, clear sky overhead, sweeping across the great expanse of the river in search of a meal they could pluck from the muddied waters in huge claws. Wild turkeys squatted in autumn’s leafless trees along the riverbanks like stumpy, black-robed, wattle-necked old men, curiously watching the boatmen float past.

  “Lookee there!” Heman Ovatt cried out, pointing to the eastern shore where loped a small pack of wolves, no more than a half dozen, slinking easily along the skirt of timber that frilled the riverbank.

  “Hunting must be good in these parts,” Titus exclaimed, already sensing an undeniable itch to have the ground beneath his moccasins and the woods at his elbow once more.

  Zane scratched at his hairy cheek and inquired, “You figure you could find us some game yonder?”

  With an eager grin Bass turned to the steersman, saying, “If you spot wolves along the bank, I figure there’s a good chance I’d run onto something for us to eat over there too.”

  “Damn right,” Kingsbury added. “Them wolves didn’t look like they’d missed a meal a’tall!”

  “I’ll bet these fellas would appreciate you giving them a change in supper fare tonight, Titus,” Zane continued, then looked off to the west to measure the fall of the sun in that cold sky. “Not far down here, I know a place where we can put over and let you off with your rifle. We’ll ease on down a few miles and tie up for the night. Get us a fire going and wait for you to bring us in some victuals for supper. How’s that strike you?”

  “It sounds fine to me!” Bass replied, starting to scramble down from atop the great oak kegs, eager to have a chance to hunt for the crew once again, just as he already had done on several occasions while they’d descended the lower Ohio.

  “Here’s one man gets damned tired of eating pig all the time,” Kingsbury grumbled.

  “Speak for yourself,” Root snapped. “A thick slab of salt pork allays better’n some gamy ol’ slice of buckskin.”

  “Y’all got my hungers up already,” Ovatt cheered from the bow, where he had been working at expanding one of his most elaborate tattoos, scratching at his forearm with a needle, then marking the artistic wound with India ink. More than any of the others, Heman was nearly covered in the gaudy blue drawings of sea serpents and devil’s heads, water maidens and feathered Indians. He looked up from his work, saying, “Don’t you give Reuben no never mind, Titus. This belly of mine could do wrapping around something new tonight, Titus!”

  “G’won now and get yourself ready,” Zane instructed. “It ain’t far till we come to that stretch of shore where we’ll drop you off to do some hunting. That is, if the river ain’t et the bank away too bad since’t last summer.”

  Even as slow as it moved, the relentless Mississippi had a way of doing that: gobbling up great bites of the riverbank from season to season. Come late spring, early summer, the river would lift twenty-five feet or more above its banks, cutting itself a new channel in the process, going here and there to alter last year’s course. As it did so, the Mississippi would destroy old islands and create new ones, uproot trees from both the banks and the far end of those new islands, depositing that timber on the upstream end of the next island met downriver. At high-water times of the year, tying up for the night could be a ticklish proposition: a good river captain understood that to secure his boat beneath a high bank or large timber just might mean the Mississippi would cause that bank to cave in on his broadhorn, or chew away enough of the shore, toppling one of the huge trees to come crashing down upon his sleeping crew.

  Flowing anywhere from three to five miles per hour, the Mississippi ran thirty feet deep in most places, fifty feet in some spots as it seesawed back and forth, making itself remarkably crooked. Despite the river’s width, it still proved itself a real test not only of a river pilot’s abilities at the rudder, but of the watchfulness of the rest
of his crew as they kept eyes sweeping the roiling waters for all manner of dangers: sawyers and planters and submerged sandbars.

  “You warm enough now?” Zane asked as he eased the flatboat out of the running current and headed for the eastern shore.

  “I’ll be fine,” Bass replied, kneeling at the gunnel as Root lowered the skiff into the muddy water.

  After Titus climbed into the tiny boat and he began paddling with Reuben, Ovatt played out a length of hawser lashed to the back of the skiff.

  “Get on off afore we gotta push back into the running current,” Root advised.

  The youngster heaved himself onto the bank just as Root waved across those yards of icy water, signaling Heman Ovatt to pull the skiff back to the flatboat.

  “Cold as it is, Titus,” Reuben hollered over his shoulder as Heman began to drag him away from the shoreline, “lot better to be hunting now. Come the summer in these here parts, skeeters come pick you up and carry you off, you go hunting way you are in them woods!”

  Such winged torment wasn’t the only disadvantage to hunting the riverbanks come the summer season. The heat and humidity both conspired against a man laboring through the thick, semitropical brush, weakening many with heat-fevers.

  Root waved his final farewell, saying, “Skeeters down in this here country twice’t as big as the ones we grow up to Kentucky! Big as a goddamned sparrow!”

  Waving in kind, Titus watched the skiff and flatboat move away, slipping back into the current, sensing a rush of emotions tumbling through him. Excitement and sheer anticipation had to be most prominent, as well as a good deal of pride, what with the trust the others placed in him to bring supper eventually to their evening fire.

  Titus clawed his way up the bank, into the brush and trees, then stopped with that shadow-drenched cover and looked again at the flatboat one last time from hiding. Perhaps he should be a bit scared, he told himself. Left here on his own in country that was as foreign to him as a desert. Maybe he ought to be frightened, Titus thought as his eyes slowly moved in a long sweep from left to right, listening with all his might to those sounds the woods brought to him.