by Win Blevins
But he wasn’t really angry. A start in the river trade. A chance to be a hunter, what he loved best in the world. Hunting the grounds of Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, which he’d heard tales about his whole life. Going to New Orleans on a flatboat.
Sam walked to the larboard beam. The four men on the sweeps were pushing the boat into the main current. Sam walked up along the bow. “My name’s Sam,” he said to the little fellow.
“I’m Frenchy, the pilot,” he said cheerfully. He wore a red flannel shirt and a black sailor’s cap—looked like the outfit was practically a uniform for the crew. “Zis is easy water so ze captain steers and I keep lookout.”
“How much we keep a lookout?”
Frenchy looked at Sam with surprise. “Always. Snags, rocks, bars, everything to watch for.”
“Damn. This happen much?”
“Oh, ze river, she is a temperament. You take your eyes off her, she slap your face. But look at zis boat, brand new. A beauty, no? Stout capstan and snubbing posts, new hawsers, gouger” (here he patted the short oar next to him), “thirty-five-foot sweeps.” He pointed to the huge oars manned from the top of the hold. “Truly a beauty.”
It looked like a huge, floating freight wagon to Sam.
In front of the hold was a big box of sand where Grumble was bending over something. “Playing in the sand?” Sam asked.
“We cook in the sand.” He looked up. “Or burn the boat down.”
“Rest your oars!” cried the captain.
The men stopped their work. The leveled sweeps dripped into the river, which was picking up speed. All eyes focused ahead. Sam hurried to the bow.
“Watch while we marry,” cried Frenchy happily. “Alleghen’ wed Monongahela. Which you think the boy, which the girl? Anyhow, union makes Ohio River.”
Both currents churned angrily. At the moment they came together, Sam felt a stomach-swooning drop, a fierce rise, a bigger, faster drop, and a huge spank of hull against water. Whoa—even a river wagon this big could jostle and bounce.
Then he felt something take hold of them.
“Earth’s big power, rivers. You feel?” He smiled like a comrade at arms. He held up both biceps and flexed them.
Sam looked intently at the current. He hadn’t imagined it, this power, this elemental energy.
“It take you forward or it take you under.” Frenchy made a diving motion with his right hand, rolled his eyes, and closed them.
The river slammed the hull on one side, the bow heaved sideways, and Sam fell down to one knee.
Frenchy laughed and bounced on his sailor’s legs.
Sam got up and grinned at Frenchy. Then he looked into the wild waves. He looked ahead, westward.
“Oh where does ze river carry us?” cried Frenchy melodically. “To the west? To money? To trouble? To love? To life? To death? O, to ze boatman it is all ze same.” He sang merrily—
“Den dance de boatman dance,
O dance de boatmen dance,
Dance all night till broad daylight,
Go home wiz ze gals in de morning.”
The river sang back in an unknown language, boiling and gurgling and whooshing, but gave no answer to Frenchy’s question.
The captain established a routine immediately. The men slept on the open deck and rose at first light to Grumble’s breakfast of a gruel made with cornmeal and salt pork, which Frenchy called sagamité and claimed was the only breakfast a boatman could do a day’s work on. They washed it down with the first of three “fillees” of whiskey the captain issued every day. (Sam drank one and sold two for a dime.) After they heaved the boat into the strongest part of the current, the men were at their leisure, except for the steersman and the lookout. The four deckhands took turns on lookout. The captain and Frenchy split the day on the tiller; most of the time all but steersman and lookout were idle. They lunched (more cornmeal gruel), lounged, told stories, and played cards. The games might have been exciting, but the captain forbade Grumble to play, not wanting fights among his crewmen.
The profanity was prodigious. Sam heard all sorts of words he didn’t know. Even more, he heard them used in wild style, so that they tickled him and made his ears smoke at the same time. He hesitated to use them, but something in him wanted to try everything new, at least once.
He liked the boat and the days of floating except for one thing. The crew spat tobacco everywhere. Captain Stuart, who abstained, cursed at them continually—“You damn Kentucks, spit overboard.”
The Kentucks (that seemed to be what American flatboatmen were called, no matter where they came from) made a point of ignoring him. Not in a bad spirit—with big grins. But the chaw made the boat a sticky mess.
“You can’ do not’ing wiz Kaintocks,” said Frenchy.
“Damn joskins,” said Grumble, looking at a gob on his shoe sole.
Sam had figured out that a “joskin” was a country bumpkin.
Sudden troubles would rouse everyone to hard work—row out of bends or out of eddies, do crossings, and especially make landings. When the lookout saw they were headed for a snag, he would sing loudly, “There’s a big rock in the river.” The melody sent the crew to the sweeps. The steersman would yell, “Push her out, push her out!” and turn the bow the way he wanted to go. All four hands would double-muscle the boat off the snag, to one side or the other. When an eddy caught them, they’d crawfish out in a like way.
The constant issue was running aground. When that happened, they loaded as much cargo as they could into the skiff to float the boat higher; or dug out a deeper channel by hand; or just pushed like hell. Frenchy said some captains waited for a little rise in the river, but Stuart had no patience for that.
Sam understood. He didn’t want to wait to find his life, wherever it was.
He pitched in on all this work, trying to show the cap’n he would make a worthy hand.
An entertaining distraction during a typical day’s float was a steamboat coming upstream, and a fine blast on the tin horn of each craft. Stuart, though, cursed the steamboats in his beard as they passed, and said they were taking his business. They’d put the keelboats mostly out of business already. Though steamboats couldn’t compete with flatboats for moving freight downstream cheaply, they had the passenger traffic and the upstream freight.
Sometimes another flatboat would come up on them while they were run aground, or tied up. Usually the boat drifted on by, the crews howling at each other like wolves or Indians for fun. Ned, a wiry Kaintock with a sly wit, liked to yell out something like, “I am an Ohio River snapping turkle. I have the teeth of an alligator, the claws of a bear, and the devil’s tail. By God I can whip any man on your boat.” Plus his curse words. Replies came back in kind. Though Sam mostly couldn’t make out the actual words, he didn’t need to.
As the boat passed by people on the banks, the Kentucks would cry out greetings, sassy sayings, and offers of king-sized love to any woman in view. At night sometimes settlers would come down to the boat. The crew liked the visits, because the hands wanted women to dance with, any women. Sam looked through the settlers’ eyes and saw what they saw in the boatman’s life—leisure, pleasure, fiddling, dancing, good talk, and fun. They didn’t see the hard work of sweeping, crossing, avoiding snags, landing. They missed the endless meals of corn gruel, didn’t suspect the Scotch-Irish itch, as what you got from lice was called. No wonder the young sons of farmers along the way hated their work in the fields, and dreamed of escaping to the freedom of the rivers.
Sam loved the river, hardships and all.
The hard part was the drunkenness. Besides their three fillees a day, two giant brothers, Elijah and Micajah, tapped a ship’s keg of corn whiskey and drank at will. Sam suspected the captain knew it, but also knew he was powerless to stop it. The fourth sweep man, with the giant brothers and Ned, was Lam. Somehow he was never sober, and once pitched into the river when he was supposed to be on lookout. He nearly drowned.
And the threat of violence. Elijah and
Micajah were talkative and silent, respectively. The only times they both talked was to brag about the brawls they’d won. Both kept their thumb-nails oiled and trimmed sharp as a hawk’s claw. Sam asked Elijah why. He answered, “I like to feel fur a feller’s eye-strings and make him tell the news.”
Somehow Stuart kept this rough crew working for a common goal, getting the boat downstream, delivering goods, picking up goods, buying merchandise for sale at a higher price downstream.
“You’re a Scots trader,” said Grumble, “and a good one.”
“Not truly a Scot,” said Stuart. “Took the name of the trader I worked for.”
Grumble raised an eyebrow that said he wanted the rest of the story, but Stuart stopped there.
“You have the Scottish urge to build an empire, though.”
“I damn well do.”
A couple of hours before sunset Frenchy would say what a good tie-up spot would be for the night. The captain would check the river bible, Cramer’s Ohio and Mississippi Navigator, but Frenchy’s mind held the river even better than the book.
Landing was a job. Basically, two hands rowed a skiff to shore above the camping spot and hitched off a two-hundred-foot line snubbed on the capstan. The line swung the boat into the eddy, which brought her slowly up and toward shore. Finally they secured her with another taut line.
The crew liked to eat immediately on landing and while away the evenings lazily. What Sam wanted, though, was to feed himself from Grumble’s kettle earlier and spend the late afternoons wandering the woods. The first two days it was Pennsylvania on both sides and the sorts of forest Sam was used to. The next ten days or so Ohio was river right, Virginia river left. Hills on both sides hid woodlands that rolled and climbed and stretched away for hundreds of miles north and south, and were a hunter’s dream. Sam brought back as much of the flesh of turkeys, deer, and squirrels as the men could eat. The hunting divided itself between Sam and the giant brothers. Elijah had a shotgun and brought down ducks, geese, pigeons, and doves; but he troubled only with what he could shoot from the boat. Micajah got inspired to string fixed lines with hooks into the water and catch catfish, perch, and buffalo fish. One night the two brothers used the skiff and gigged a huge turtle that Grumble turned into good soup. Sam thought he was far outdoing them in providing meat. Once, though, so many passenger pigeons flew over the boat that they blotted out the sun, and Elijah felled a dozen.
Sam would come back to camp about dark, seldom empty-handed, and join in the relaxation time. It was an odd little group for fun. The giant brothers, Elijah and Micajah, stayed around the sand box and helped themselves to the coffee pot and whiskey keg and seldom spoke. Sam was too shy to talk, and even slept on the bank, away from the others. Since Captain Stuart held himself apart, this made four of eight silent. Lam, a Kentucky man, constantly got card games started and always lost money. Ned, the wiry Pittsburgher, often begged to have a dance, even with other men as partners. Sam often asked himself, looking at these men, What do they want? What do they care about? What’s their hunger? It must be more than lots of whiskey and an occasional woman. But he could never tell what it was. He went to sleep every night nursing his own hunger. He didn’t know what he yearned for either.
An evening’s entertainment usually turned out to be Frenchy, telling stories of his years as a Canadian boatman and a hivemant, a man who went into the vasty Canadian wilderness and stayed the winter. His stories were fun, and Sam remembered lots of them for years. One evening the cap’n pitched in with a story, with himself as the hero:
“One evening, just dark, I was hurrying to camp along a deer trail, within smelling distance of the river. Wasn’t so late, I would never been careless and not noticed that big shadow on a low branch of a tree reached right across the path. By the time I saw the panther, he was in midair, leaping right at my face, them big claws reaching for my neck and his mouth wide open for my head. Wasn’t nothing I could do. I jammed my whole arm down that panther’s mouth and gullet, clear to where I grabbed his tail. I jerked as hard as I could and turned that critter inside out. Then he was leaping back onto the branch. He sat there, looking confused, with his innards showing, and his whiskers sticking out between his teeth. I walked calm-like away.”
All this was Sam’s first chance to soak himself in the comradeship of men, with their ways and their talk not softened for women. He thought seldom of Katherine, or of Owen’s lies and betrayals. He got to hunt day after day, without interruption, alone, learning and seeing. He got to spend day after day lounging on the deck of a boat, enjoying the restless, relentless motion of the river and the warmth of the sun. He got to see new country every day, hour after hour, bend after bend. Living like this was his dream. At least part if it—he was always hungry for something more.
He stood on the bow, looking downstream. The river glinted in the westering sun, and the river narrowed and funneled its vast, subsurface energy into a nearly silent rush of water. The rush bore hundreds of boats and thousands of men and ton upon ton of freight implacably westward, westward, westward.
Pull, pull, pull, river. But where?
Something crouched ahead somewhere, over a horizon, or beyond the turn of a year. He wanted to get there and face it.
Twilight. Still evening air. A nameless creek melding quietly into the Ohio. Blue shadows from the great trees on the west bank. A shimmery light you wished would last forever.
Grumble bustled around gathering kindling for his sand box. Men tramped around the woods, gathering firewood. Sam stood on the edge of the clearing listening to the hush, and looking at the last light caught gently on thousands of soft leaves stirring in the faint breeze.
“Get me two all-nighters!” Grumble grumped at Sam. A minute ago it was directed at the entire crew, “Leave off the kindling, you weaklings, I need some stout limbs!”
“You no are captain,” Frenchy sang saucily.
Grumble drew himself up. “More important! I am the COOK!” They went through this little charade almost every night. When Grumble roared, even the captain and pilot collected wood.
“He ees lucky none of us kook good,” said Frenchy, catching up with Sam from behind. “We cut him up for ze pot.”
Sam mumbled something, feeling awkward. He wished he knew how to talk to the others. Everyone liked the little Frenchy—he was small, lithe, and funny.
In the half darkness the captain stood up with a limb right in front of them. It was thick as his muscly calf. He stepped to the base of a big oak.
The light shivered right in front of Sam’s eyes.
THUNK!
An arrow pinned the limb fast against the oak trunk.
Frenchy dove for the nearest bush.
Sam lickey-splitted to a small tree and peeked back. He fished desperately for his knife.
Frenchy peered around, his flintlock pistol cocked. Sam would have killed for a pistol.
Captain Stuart stood calmly by the arrow and inspected it. “Very funny, Ten.” The captain said, “Show yourself.” Though his voice was all confidence, he was touching the top of his cap again.
A man slipped out of some bushes not ten feet behind Sam. An Indian, wearing white-man clothing. He set down his bow and arrow, reached into his hunting pouch, brought out a lucifer, and scratched it. The spurt of flame lit his face eerily against the trees and shadows. The face in the flame was doing everything it could not to laugh.
“You want to eat?” Stuart was scratching the top of his cap hard now.
“White man kill Shawnee game, no food, go hungry, demand you feed.”
Now Sly Stuart couldn’t help laughing. “Drop the clown act and let’s eat.”
Another Indian, thick as the trunk of a big tree, stepped out from behind bushes, bow raised and arrow nocked.
Sam tried to shrink.
“Very funny,” repeated Captain Stuart.
Everyone lounged on barrels, crates, the deck, whatever was handy. Ten collected squirrels from his companion and handed fi
ve to Grumble. “Poor Injun contribute to fine white-man pot,” he grunted.
“Would you cut the dumb redskin act?” said Stuart irritably. His manner was different, like suddenly he wasn’t the man in charge.
That only made Ten grin bigger.
“Scrawny things hardly worth skinning out,” complained Grumble.
“Nice taste next to the deer meat,” Ten answered in almost unaccented English, “a little peppery.” His companion, the tree trunk Indian, knelt and helped Grumble do the skinning.
Soon they sat down on the deck on either side of Sam, just like they had a right. His feet twitched a little—he’d never been so close to Indians, except for Hannibal. He’d forgotten the name of the big man on his right. He said, “What’s your name again?”
“Eleven.”
Sam chuckled. “Really, what’s your name?”
“In English it’s Eleven. In Shawnee it’s …” and he spoke a long, incomprehensible word. “White people can’t say that.” He pointed to his companion. “I’m his cousin, and he’s piss-ant compared to me, so I had to be more than Ten.” His accent was thicker than Ten’s.
Sam stuck out his hand, and Eleven shook it.
Grumble made bowls out of cups for the visitors and served everyone without distinction. The stew was soon down to the last scrapings.
Captain Stuart addressed the company at large. “There’s a story in this.” The style of leader and empire builder was completely gone now. “Fact is, I know Ten a lot better than I know most anyone. He’s my brother. Half-brother the white way, brother the Shawnee way. In truth, brother.”
Sam felt tipped into another world.
“You’re the family secret,” put in Ten.
Captain Stuart tried to make a silly face at him.
“I am nine years older than this little bug, thirty. Ten’s family raised me.”
“Wasted effort,” said Ten, grinning.
The captain looked at Ten like, You going to let me tell this story or not?
“Only they were my family too. This scalawag who keeps interrupting, his uncle is Tenskwatawa. You know about him?” This to Sam, who shook his head no. “Shawnee man of medicine. Prophet, the whites called him. You heard of Tecumseh?”
