Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  “The young’un’s right,” Hames Kingsbury stated flatly.

  “He ain’t got no say in this,” Reuben Root grumbled, his face grown hard, chertlike eyes barely visible between the slits he made of them. “Only us three got a vote on her staying, or us putting her off right now.”

  Bass was about to open his mouth in hopes of cajoling, in some way to convince them into allowing him his voice in this, if not his outright vote, when the skinny Kingsbury wheeled on the explosive and powerful Reuben Root.

  “Time you listen to me: I been first in charge of this boat for Ebenezer ever since’t him and me started down the Ohio years ago,” Hames said evenly, setting full measure by every one of the words he chose. “He picked him the best crew could be had on the river—so I damned well know any of us could be the one Ebenezer picked to watch over things if ever he wasn’t around or was just sleeping off part of a day’s float. Any one of us—”

  “That’s right!” Root interrupted.

  “But he picked me, Reuben.”

  “Still, that don’t give you no extra vote over us,” Heman said, his own pocked and pitted face gone cold, suspicious, perhaps even downright superstitious in clinging to that riverboatman’s oldest and worst taboo with such fervent and steadfast belief.

  “I ain’t taking a extra vote for me,” Kingsbury replied. “I’m just telling you as pilot on this here boat now—that I’m doing just what I figure Ebenezer’d do hisself if’n he was here. He’d give Titus a vote.”

  “Like I said,” Root disagreed with a snarl, “the boy here never was hired on like the rest of us.”

  “It ain’t right, Titus having as much say as us what been working Ebenezer’s boats for years now,” Ovatt added.

  “You don’t wanna give the boy a vote, well—let’s just set that aside for a minute and talk over something else,” Kingsbury said with the sure ease of a man used to steering a boat out of troubled waters.

  And something in the boatman’s face told Titus that Hames was going to try something smooth.

  Hames continued, “S’pose you boys sit there and ponder what Ebenezer Zane would do ’bout that woman we pulled from the river back there. Reuben? How you think Ebenezer would vote?”

  Ovatt’s eyes flared, knowing he’d been bested. “Ah, shit,” he said sourly. “We all three of us know Ebenezer’d vote to keep her on his goddamned boat—and he’d throw any of us off if’n we grumped about it too.”

  “But Ebenezer ain’t here to throw us off,” Root declared, slowly crossing his beefy arms across his stout powder keg of a chest.

  “Yes, he is,” Kingsbury said with great conviction, and pointed at the corpse lying in its canvas shroud. “I figure we’re carrying him on to Natchez … so we sure as hell can do the same for a living, breathing woman.”

  “Ah, sweet Jupiter!” Root cried out, flinging his arms about in frustration. “No telling what kind of bad luck we’re going to have now!”

  “Things in life ain’t that simple,” Kingsbury attempted to explain.

  Ovatt laughed without humor, then said, “Listen to you, Hames! That woman sure as hell wasn’t no good luck on her husband’s boat. All the crew and him gone too—like she told it. The boat sunk in the river, scuttled by Injuns.”

  “That man and woman been working the river together for more’n twenty years, Heman,” Kingsbury reminded. “Sure took that thing you call a woman’s curse a helluva long time to catch up to ’em, didn’t it?”

  Bass watched the two of them grumble for a moment, then Ovatt turned to Kingsbury.

  “She stays right there,” Heman demanded with noticeable reluctance. “She don’t come out to curse the rest of the boat.”

  “What’s done is done,” Root groaned. “We’re already cursed, Heman. It don’t matter where she stays on this goddamned boat. The whole lot of us is already cursed.”

  “But—she can stay, right?” Bass asked.

  “Yes,” Kingsbury answered with finality. “The woman’s gonna ride with us till we get to Natchez—where we can let her off and put Ebenezer to his final rest.”

  Later that afternoon Titus was surprised to hear the first notes from Reuben’s squeeze-box in a long time. Sliding mournfully up and down the scales with his wheezing concertina, the oarsman sat at the gunnel to begin playing snatches of melancholy ballads and slow airs in the cold drizzle that seeped from the brims of their hats, hammered the taut oil sheeting of their awning where the woman kept a fire going and coffee brewing throughout the day when she wasn’t fishing.

  “Funny,” Bass said to Kingsbury quietly enough so that no one else would hear, then sniffed the aroma coming from the awning. “Never did I think of fish being something I’d get my hungers up for. That does smell good.”

  “Ain’t ever had but one bite of catfish,” Hames replied. “Never had me another. But from what I seen that woman doing all afternoon, if she hauls in a catfish on her line, she just throws it back. Only keeping the fish what don’t taste like mud.”

  “S’pose she’d mind me asking for some to eat?”

  “I reckon you can go ask her,” he said with a smile.

  Ducking out of the rain beneath the awning, Titus stood there, dripping, then thought to remove his hat. He found himself back in the company of women, where a man had to remember his good manners.

  “Ma’am?”

  She turned to regard him with her crow-footed face scored by wrinkles across her brow and reaching from her nose down to her chin in deep clefts. Pushing a long, unruly strand of hair from her eye, she did not speak to Bass, just stared as if expecting him to get on with his question.

  As he watched her, he found himself liking the way working over the fire’s heat brought a flush to the woman’s leathery, tanned cheeks, after they had been so damned pasty and white the time they’d pulled her from the cold river.

  “What’s that you’re cooking there?”

  She glanced down at the big cast-iron skillet spitting and spewing the fish she’d halved and dipped into a cornmeal batter. And the woman smiled, her eyes softening.

  “Fish.”

  “Not catfish?”

  She chuckled a little as she leaned over the skillet with a long fork and speared the fish around in the grease. “Don’t like catfish, me either. This here’s perch. Good eating.” Then she looked up at him, blowing the hair back from her nose and eyes. “You want you some?”

  “I’d be awfully pleasured to have some, yes, ma’am.”

  “Gonna need more of that grease,” she replied, turning back to her spewing skillet from which rose such enticing aromas. “Get me some more, and I’ll dish you up a trencher of this hot perch.”

  In a long canvas-lined white-oak chest where the crew kept their mess utensils sat several clay pots into which the men always scraped the bacon grease left over after their endless, monotonous meals of pork. One of these he brought her, pulling off the metal latch that held the flat top on the pot. Stuffing her big iron fork into the congealed grease, the woman took a speckled, translucent gob over to the skillet and plopped it in with a spitting hiss. With the fork she pulled the largest piece of fish from the heat and laid it in one of the scooped-out oaken trenchers the crew used as plate and bowl in one. How Titus’s mouth watered just to look at the deep, rich, golden brown of that cornmeal breading, just to breathe in that fragrance of something other than salt pork, bacon, and boiled hocks. The anticipation of this meal was enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  “How long since you et?” she asked.

  “Yesterday night,” Bass replied, settling and pulling his knife from his belt.

  “Acting starved to me.”

  “He’s just a growing boy, ma’am,” Kingsbury defended from the stern rudder nearby. “The sort what needs a lot of victuals.”

  Suddenly, with a second bite in his mouth, Titus was seized with another, even bigger, fear over his incomplete manners. “You ate, didn’t you, ma’am?”

  “I fed myself first
, son,” she answered. “Don’t you worry. If I didn’t eat first, I’d not had the strength to keep on fishing and frying. By the by—you might just as well be calling me by my name. I’m Beulah.”

  “Beulah. Yes, ma’am. So how long’d you go without food?” Kingsbury asked from the stern rudder.

  “Better’n three days: from the morning we was set upon by them Chickasaws, till yestiddy afternoon you come downriver and finded me floating on that piece of the boat.”

  The pilot said, “Can’t imagine them Injuns letting you off alive like they done.”

  “They didn’t,” she replied. “Figured us all being dead.”

  “You slipped off ’thout them knowing?” asked Reuben Root.

  With a wag of her head she plopped another slab of perch into a trencher dusted with cornmeal, then laid it in the greased skillet. “Me and Jameson—that’s my … that was my husband: Jameson Hartshorn,” she said, seeming to choke for a moment, her eyes blinking in the smoke rising from the fire and the pork grease. “We was both in the water after the Injuns got the four other fellas on the boat. Busting up the cargo, those red devils was, tossing it all over the side, making a awful mess of everything. Yelling and screaming and kicking fire out of the sandbox, catching our boat to burn.”

  “They burned it right down to the water, I’ll bet,” Ovatt said acidly from the starboard oar.

  “They might have,” she answered. “I wasn’t there to see it. Jameson and me—we was hanging on to some oakcask staves, trying to slip off ’thout any of them killers spying us. We was just lucky to slip over the side them not seeing us, way I figure it. We was paddling and kicking out from the boat—I looked around once and saw ’em dancing and screaming, couple of them Injuns throwing one of our men into the fire they had burning the boat. That’s when one of ’em spotted Jameson and me. They come to the gunnel shouting and pointing, shooting arrows, and finally one of ’em got his gun and shot Jameson in the back of the head.”

  A few uneasy moments passed while she pushed at the portions of fish in the spitting skillet. Then Kingsbury asked quietly, “That when you lost him?”

  “No. He started to slip off the stave, but I held him up for some time while his eyes was still open. Jameson … he said a couple things to me afore he went under. Last thing he told me was it was all right to let him go. Said he was done for and I ought’n save myself.”

  “You waited to let him go till he died,” Root said, some new, begrudging respect showing on his broad face. “You’re a … a strong woman, ma’am.”

  “I let the river take him,” she continued, pulling some of the fried fish out and heaping it into a big wooden trencher. “I’ll fetch up some of this for each of you and bring it over, you just wait a minute more.”

  “It’s a wonder they didn’t shoot you too!” Titus exclaimed.

  “They tried,” she said matter-of-factly. “After the third shot I quit paddling. Just hung myself over that chunk of wood I was floating on, barely kept my nose and mouth outta the water.”

  “Playing possum, was you?” Ovatt asked.

  “Playing dead is what I done,” the woman replied. “Drifted off into some brush by the far bank and they never come to look after me then on out. Next morning I pushed away of that brush to try to make it to the east shore, but the tow caught me, and I ended up getting pulled on out into the river. Hung there for more’n another day afore you come along—the first boat I seen come down after them Injuns jumped us all.”

  “You was near froze by the time we come along,” Kingsbury said.

  “I’m mighty grateful to you fellas,” she said, straightening, looking at each of them in turn when she continued. “I know how most folks look at a woman on a Kentucky-boat—but you still took me on for the trip down to Natchez. I promise you I won’t be in your way none, you just get me to where I can start my walk back up the Trace to home. I’ll help out all you want me to till then.”

  “I think you’re doing us just fine, ma’am,” Kingsbury said.

  “Hames is right,” Ovatt agreed reluctantly as he took the oak trencher from her. “This fish and all.”

  “I can make us up a mess of beans—you got any beans for supper tonight? I best get to soaking ’em.”

  “Titus, you’re in there. Fetch off the top of that barrel got our beans in it for her.”

  After she had scooped out what she wanted into a brass kettle, the woman ladled some of their drinking water over it and set the beans aside to soak.

  “Ma’am, you got any family, any friends, in Natchez?” Titus asked as she went back to breading more of the perch she’d dragged from the river that morning.

  With a doleful wag of her head she answered, “We neither one had any family there.”

  Kingsbury asked, “You fixing on setting off up the Natchez Trace all by yourself?”

  She began to wag her head, saying, “No, I don’t.” Then she shrugged and stared at the fire. “I reckon there’ll be some wagons to ride in eventual. Maybe they’ll let me ride along like you done, what with me working for my keep by cooking and cleaning all the way north.”

  “Ought to be a way for it to work out for you,” Ovatt commented.

  “Hope it’s so: just ain’t right for a woman to have to face all them miles alone by herself,” Kingsbury said.

  She looked up from her cooking, pushing some hair back from her sad eyes again, cheeks rosy with warmth, and said with courageous melancholy, “Looks like I’m bound to be lonely for a long, long time now. What with Jameson gone at the bottom of this here goddamned river.”

  “We lost us a good friend to the Injuns too,” Root said.

  “That him?” And she pointed to the shroud lashed near the bow.

  “The pilot and owner of this boat,” Kingsbury answered. “We all been riding the rivers with him for some time now.”

  She touched each one of them with her doleful eyes, baggy with fatigue and woe. Finally her gaze landed on the youngster. “How ’bout you?” she asked. “You don’t look to be a riverman.”

  “I ain’t. Truth is—”

  “He wasn’t till our pilot made a riverman out of him,” Kingsbury interrupted.

  “He don’t got the look of a boatman,” she replied, hunching back over her work at the sandbox fire. “I know boatmen and you ain’t one, young’un.”

  “This here’s his first trip down,” Ovatt explained. “An’ he’s taking to it real slick.”

  Still she wagged her head. “That’un”—and she gestured up toward Bass with that long iron fork, not even raising her eyes to him—“he looks more like some lost mother’s child what ain’t got no business out here where he’s throwed in with a rascal bunch like you at best, mayhaps he’s gonna be killed at the worst of it.”

  Titus instantly bristled with shame, roiling with boyish pride. “I’m old enough to take care of myself!”

  “I had seven young’uns of my own,” she explained with a knowing smirk that made any man feel like a boy. “Lost two of ’em to the river. And now my husband—gone. Lemme tell you I know there’s a mother somewhere worrying herself sick about you. I never been able to own up to knowing all that much about a lot of things—but a mother knows something like that for certain.”

  Prickling with anger, Bass felt the eyes of the others clawing at him as he stared down at the woman while she aimlessly poked at the burning limbs beneath her spitting skillet. What could he say in his own defense, he wondered, that wouldn’t let his words betray him when they come out?

  “No matter that you might think different,” Kingsbury said offhandedly as he watched Bass turn without a complaint and silently shuffle away. “He’s a man now, and one of our crew … here on what’s to be Ebenezer Zane’s last trip to Natchez.”

  * * *

  “I heard how you put up for me back there when them others was wanting to set me off their boat,” Beulah said to him in the gray light more than a week later. “I wasn’t intending on being a burden—didn’t ev
en ask any of you go looking for my husband.”

  “He’s … likely gone, ma’am,” Titus replied.

  She blinked, as if that worked something mechanical inside her to own up to the reality of it. “I might’ve asked—but I didn’t have the shirt he was wearing.”

  “His shirt? How’d that help you?”

  “Folks believe it—howsomever I ain’t never had occasion to prove it wrong,” Beulah explained. “You take a loaf of bread and wrap it in the missing person’s shirt. Put it on the water and it will sink over the spot where we can find his body.”

  He thought on that, hard.

  Finally she asked, “You don’t think that’s crazy, do you, young’un?”

  With a shrug he replied, “Maybe not near as crazy as what some folks do. Hell—no matter that you didn’t have your husband’s shirt. We ain’t even got any bread to do it with anyways. But if we had, I’d talked ’em into giving it a try for you.”

  She smiled warmly. “Want you to know I’m in your debt and didn’t mean you to take no offense when I was calling you a young’un, talking about your ma.”

  “Wish you’d just left my mam out’n this,” Titus said as he watched the river ahead for obstacles, scratching at the incessant itch under his arms, at his waistband.

  “There’s difference ’tween leaving home when it’s time … and running off,” she said as the cold wisps of river fog glided slowly past them.

  “It was my time.”

  “Just looking at you, I can tell that ain’t near enough the truth.”

  Bristling like a short-haired hog at butcher time, Titus replied, “Ain’t none of your concern nohow.”

  “How long you been itching the way you are?”

  “I dunno,” he said, suddenly conscious of the fact that he had been scratching himself almost raw in places.

  “Likely you got the Scotch-Irish itch.”