Bass listened to her words with not just his ears, but even more so with his heart, pounding as it was. Finally he asked, “St. Louie’s the w-western door?”
“That’s what I hear tell.”
Kingsbury leaned toward her to ask, “You ever heard of what’s out there?”
For a moment she cocked her head to the side, as if trying to pull something from her memory. “Only what I heard when Jefferson’s bunch—them explorers—come back years ago. You see, them other three doors—north, south, and east—they all open onto water. Water’s the way you get to the rest of the world.”
“But not from St. Louie?” Ovatt asked.
“Shit,” Root growled. “Everybody knows St. Louie’s on the river. Sure as hell a man can get west on the water.”
“I s’pose that’s true,” the woman agreed matter-of-factly. “But I heard there’s tall mountains atween St. Louie and the far ocean. Ain’t no river through them mountains what takes you to t’other side.”
Mumbling his unintelligible complaints while he scratched at the side of his hairy face, Root finally responded, “I don’t figure a man got any business going to no place where there ain’t a river to take him. I’m a waterman. Borned beside the river, raised up on it—figure I’ll live and die riding the rivers.”
“If there ain’t a river going there, Reuben don’t figure it’s worth the journey,” Kingsbury explained to Titus.
“Got to admit, Reuben’s got him something there,” Ovatt stated. “I allays found me everything I needed on the river, or right beside it.”
Turning from the boatmen, Titus peered intently at the woman. “You ever hear anything more about that country out there?”
“Only what I hear’d listening to menfolk talk up and down the river after Jefferson’s men come back from that far ocean.”
Bass leaned forward, excitement coursing through him. “They say anything about them mountains?”
“Only that they was so tall they touched the sky,” the woman replied, a look crossing her face that told him she understood. “Mountains higher’n anything we can’t even imagine out there.”
“And goddamned red-bellied Injuns too!” Kingsbury snarled.
“’Thout no big, fine rivers out there,” Root began, “sounds to me like that be country fit only for Injuns, and not at all fit for the likes of civil folk.”
“There gotta allays be a place for Injuns and wild critters,” Ovatt said. “Place where we can put ’em so just plain white folks like us can go on about our business of living.”
“Listen to you!” the woman cried. “Like you fellas was the cocks of the walk, wherever you choose to set down your boots!”
“Damn right—we are that!” Kingsbury shouted exuberantly. “Ever’ last one of us is half horse, half alligator—”
“Don’t even let me ever hear you go on and on about how you can whup up, outride, outdrink and all that better’n any other man alive.”
“We’re rivermen!” Root exclaimed. “By damn, we’re ring-tailed roarers—”
“By bloody damn, you just get us to Orlins,” Beulah interrupted the boatman’s verbal strut. “Then we’ll see if you can get us back north to Kentucky all to one piece.”
Kingsbury leaned forward from his perch to slap her on her ample rear. Whirling quickly on him, she squinted a flinty glare at first, but no sooner did it quickly soften into a grin.
“Why, Mr. Pilot,” she said, cocking her head coyly, “you do appear to be mending quite nicely.”
“I am at that,” Hames replied.
But now the woman doubled up a sizable fist and held it below the pilot’s nose. “But if I ever catch you taking a swat at my behind parts again, I’ll do even worse to you than you got visiting that whore’s gunboat.”
With a wide grin of his own Kingsbury ducked behind his arms as if about to be pummeled. “I hear you, ma’am. Won’t never have me grabbing for a feel of your behind parts no more.”
“Maybe since’t you ain’t making yourself useful steering this here broadhorn—you can grab one of them poles and do us some fishing for lunch.”
“I can do that,” Kingsbury said, starting to rise.
She laid a firm hand on his shoulder and shoved him back down on that rough bench beneath the awning. “And while you’re fishing, mister riverman—suppose you think about how you just might treat a lady proper, and not like one of your whores.”
Hames gazed up into her face, immediately contrite. “I’m sorry if’n I offended you, ma’am. Didn’t mean to treat you bad—”
“Not like them women you pay to hike up their skirts for you!” she said.
Titus listened and watched, amazed—never having heard a woman talk in such a bold-faced manner to a man. At least one who was not a foul-mouthed, hard-case whore.
“Just get to your fishing there, Pilot,” the woman ordered. “And prove to me you’re of some use besides rutting with poxed-up pay-women, making yourself tumble drunk at every river stop, and shoving your way into a fight at the drop of a boot.”
Hames glared, saying, “It’s fish you want, then fish you’ll get, woman.”
By midday Kingsbury had pulled all sorts of creatures from the waters of the lower Mississippi: besides perch and trout, he had hooked some buffalo fish, carp, and sturgeon, along with pike and even a soft-shelled turtle. Over the coals of her sandbox fire Beulah cooked the pilot’s catch, feeding them all until they were ready to burst.
“Maybe you’ll do,” she admitted to Kingsbury as he started from the warmth of the fire, intending to relieve Heman Ovatt at the stern rudder. “Maybe you are the sort of man what can provide for a woman proper.”
The pilot stopped, turned back to look closely at her face, then said, “If ever a man was intending to get himself tied up to one woman, I figure one like you ought to do a man nicely too.”
Bass watched her kneel back over the sandbox fire, her cheeks flushing with the compliment—Kingsbury 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-ma
sted 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 marketplace, where the Africans would be offered up—man, woman, and child alike—to the well-heeled bidders who journeyed here to this slave market from throughout the gulf coast.
Even now near the end of a busy day, slave traders cried out in voices shrill and falsetto, bass or soprano, announcing what they were buying. Each barker screeched or sang louder and louder to outdo his competition as the hawkers moved along through the throbbing mass of upriver boatmen, local stevedores, and sailors come from ports across great oceans.
Here in the market below the trees where the grass moss hung like tatters of dirty linen, the autumn air did not move near so well within such a crushing mass of bodies. It was then that Titus began to smell people. As he thought on it, he could not remember the last time he had been confined in a crowd, forced to smell the sweat and stink of other folks—but, surely, it must have been only last summer. Back in Boone County. Perhaps at the Longhunters Fair, where so many gathered. Yet nothing at all like this.
Back upriver at the ports on the Ohio, the commerce of a few prosperous communities, perhaps a few states at best, was all that was conducted. Yet here lay the crossroads of many cultures, many countries, all bringing their wares to this southwesternmost port of an infant nation.
The smells of these people from different lands mingled now with the fragrances of exotic spices, the hearty tang of generous quarters of beef, veal, and pork, along with headless poultry and monstrous, glassy-eyed ocean-going fish, all hung in the public market that crowded most of the levee’s length, every morsel baking benea
th the autumn sun, crusted with clusters of flying insects. In addition, from the backs of their carts some vendors hawked wild ducks and game from upriver in the Indian lands, while others sold what they held captive in their nearby cages: live turkeys, ducks, and geese, as well as varieties of barnyard fowl. As well, those men from upriver could purchase such exotic wares as packed vermilion from the Orient, French girdles of fine silk, embroidered shirts of Spanish linen, tiny round looking glasses, and dainty slippers for the tiniest of women’s feet. Here at New Orleans the world came knocking at America’s door.
On the docks lay a dizzying maze of goods just off-loaded from the downriver flats. Most Kentucky boatmen ran what they termed a “straight” load—consisting of one product easier to load, maintain, and unload en route. Things like pork, flour, coal, hay, and even cordwood. Fewer preferred a “mixed” load, hauling what they could buy cheap and sell for a considerable profit upon reaching New Orleans. Here on the wharf sat crates and kegs and casks of potatoes, dried apples, rolled cigars, lime, and tallow, very important to a lardless community. As well, the boatmen dodged around stacks of millstones and sprawling bundles of pig iron and corn brooms. Tobacco was a favorite of the Kentucky shippers: cured leaf purchased in Cincinnati or Louisville for $2.00 American for a hundredweight would increase in value to $9.50 by the time it reached the end of the line.
Everywhere was a splash of color and texture, with all the fruits and vegetables displayed at the top of open sacking or in huge wagon-borne boxes: all manner of melons, cucumbers, and Irish potatoes, both red and brown, along with the yams and sweet cherries, plums, and strawberries. Initially nervous at stealing—no matter how trifling—Titus nonetheless followed the example of the other boatmen as they threaded their way through the maze of vendors and displays, snatching up a treat here and there when they passed a veranda where no one was watching. Quickly stuffing their stolen treasure between their lips, sucking noisily, and commenting on the relative merits of the various purloined wares—finishing some while tossing the rest beyond the levee, where the refuse landed among that garbage floating on the chocolate-colored surface of the grand old Mississippi.
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