Dance on the Wind (24 page)

“Steady on that gouger!” the pilot ordered, watching the river, his two oarsmen, and Heman Ovatt struggling at that bow rudder.

“Get ready to bring her over!”

“Ready when you are, Ebenezer!” Ovatt bellowed.

From where he crouched out of the cold wind and coming mist, Titus watched less and less of the four rivermen as he turned his attention to the increasing signs of civilization they had been passing in the last few miles. Infrequent squatter farms had eventually given way to larger spreads until there were more and more lamps lit in the windows of cabins and shops as Ebenezer Zane eased them over to the Kentucky side of the Ohio.

While there were three other towns in the immediate area—Shippingsport in Kentucky, along with Jeffersonville and Clarksville across the river in Indiana Territory—Louisville had not only been the first river port, but from the start had remained the most successful, primarily due to the small harbor that lay at the mouth of the Bear Grass, which made for an ideal patch of calm water where boatmen would tie up and lay to before braving the Great Falls of the Ohio—just downriver from the town.

“Aport! Ho! Bring her hard to port!”

With the pilot’s command Ovatt lunged against the
small gouger, clutching it beneath his armpits, pushing the rudder toward the starboard side of the craft. At the same time Zane was performing the opposite maneuver with his larger, longer, deeper-plunging stern rudder. While the bow of the flatboat began to swing out toward the main channel of the river, the stern was already inching in toward the south shore as they cleared the northern boundary of the bay, a grassy, timbered fingertip of rocky land.

“Goddammit! She’s cluttered up, Ebenezer!” Root bellowed his warning as they all got their first view of the crowded port.

“I can damn well see that!” Zane spat. “Loosen up on that gouger, Heman!”

As soon as Ovatt brought the rudder out of the water, the flatboat’s bow eased back into line with the stern as Zane worked his rudder back and forth in long, sure, deep strokes. More than half a hundred flatboats already bobbed in the bay, tied up bow to stern all along the shore, every last one of them awash in the saffron light of at least one oil lantern as the rainy twilight flooded out of the western sky. On shore the wharf bustled as men shouted and barked their orders, hefting loads on and off the boats, clomping up and down the sagging gangplanks, laughing and cursing.

Beyond, on up the southern bank, lay the flickering yellowed diamond dots of Louisville. Titus hadn’t seen this many people in one place at one time since last summer’s Longhunters Fair—likely not since his family’s last trip to Cincinnati.

“Hames, you and Reuben give me some drag!”

At the steersman’s order both Kingsbury and Root dipped their oars into the murky Ohio and braced their legs in the bottom of the boat as they sought to slow the flatboat’s speed. The river tugged, shoved, popped its might at the oarsmen, both of them grunting, huffing, hunching over their work as their voices blended with the loud creak of wood and iron strained to the limit at both gunnels.

“Likely we can put to on the far side of the harbor,”
Kingsbury advised, his words no more than a growl as he fought to hold his oar deep in the moving water.

“Figure you’re right,” Zane replied. “Heman! Swing her about and take her across to yonder side!”

Once more Ovatt plunged his gouger into the water, bringing the bow out more in line with the main current of the Ohio as the pilot sweated in concert with him, together keeping the flatboat all but on a dead reckoning for the far side of the Bear Grass harbor.

“Dig in, boys!” Zane reminded his oarsmen. “More drag! More drag! Mind you, I’ve never landed over here, so we don’t know what we got in store for us.”

In the fading light Titus found himself growing more scared as the broadhorn rushed on across the mouth of the harbor toward the south side. There the number of flatboats thinned out and dwindled down to nothing as the lights of Louisville lumbered past on their left, then winked out of sight behind them.

Bass inched around to ask of Kingsbury, barely above a whisper, “What happens we don’t land here?”

“Ain’t no
don’t,
boy. We gotta land here. We don’t—we’ll face the Great Falls of the Ohio in the dark.”

A shudder ran down his spine. “In the dark?”

“And a man might just as well put a pistol to his own head as head down them chutes at night, with this wet weather blowing into our teeth way it is. You know how to pray—you might wanna give Ebenezer a hand.”

“He p-praying?” Bass asked, feeling himself go weak inside. He’d never been on rough water, much less any falls.

“Hell no, he ain’t prayin’!” Kingsbury replied with a grimace as the oar just about dislodged him where he had his legs braced between some kegs of nails. “Ebenezer’s too damn busy saving this boat—”

“Hard to port, Heman! Put everything you got into it!”

“She’s fighting me, Ebenezer!”

“Stand on it!” Zane commanded. “Don’t let ’er throw you off!” Then he flung his voice down at the youngster. “Titus Bass! Crawl up outta there and lay on that gouger with Heman!”

He started to rise slowly, cautiously, frightened.

“We need you up there right now, Titus,” Kingsbury urged.

“That boy ain’t gonna do us no good!” Root snarled.

“He will too,” the pilot snapped, fighting his rudder. “Get up there now, Titus—and help us get this god-damned Kentuckyboat landed.”

Clawing his way around barrels and over crates, Titus eventually slid down onto the slippery deck in what foot room there was standing opposite Heman Ovatt.

“Lay on it!” the gouger ordered.

Bass hurled himself onto the short shaft of the rudder, face-to-face with Ovatt.

“You don’t weigh much, do you?” Ovatt grunted.

“My mam … she always trying to fatten me up. Said … I had me no tallow. Only b-bone and gristle.”

“Push! Or pull, Titus Bass!”

Zane hollered above the cry of the wind and the hammer of the rain, “We’re doing it, boys!”

Titus didn’t allow himself a look right then, able only to feel the lurch and bob of the flatboat’s bottom as it passed out of the river’s main channel, heaving over toward the calmer water near the Ohio’s south shore. By now the mist had become a steady rain, cold as springwater running down the back of his shirt and jerkin.

“Bring ’er over hard, Heman. Bring it over, Titus Bass!” Zane cried out. “Reuben, bring your oar out and get this’r stern line ready.”

In less time than it takes to tell, Root had pulled his oar from the hammered surface of the brown water and slid back to the rear of the craft, where he laid a loop of thick oiled hemp over one shoulder.

“There’s some likely stumps up ahead, Ebenezer,” Reuben suggested. “They been clearing more and more land.”

“I’ll bring you over and you snag a likely one,” the pilot advised with a grunt.

As Zane brought the slowing flatboat side-sliding to the shore, Root bent and lunged toward the bank in a smooth, practiced motion. He landed on the shiny grass, his moccasins slipping on the mud. He went to his knees
but was up in a fluid motion, ripping the coil of rope from his shoulder to fling a great loop of it around the stump of a long-ago girdled tree.

“Tie ’er off stout, Reuben!” Zane advised as the flatboat began to ease on past the stump where Root stood knotting the length of hemp as thick as a man’s four fingers.

At the first straining creak of the stretching rope, it proved certain the huge, oiled knot was going to hold, bringing the stern of the craft closer to the shore as it bobbed on down the bank.

“Bring it about, Heman! Show the boy what to do!”

“Push, goddammit!” Ovatt commanded. “Now’s the time to push!”

Together they plunged the gouger deeper into the water speckled with icy, hammering rain. Beneath him Titus could feel the bow of the boat beginning to sweep around, held firm astern by the one line to their rear, the front of the craft being nudged over by the strong muscle of the river’s current against the gouger and the two men who clung to her.

“Hames! Take the bowline ashore!”

Against the steady drumming of the rain atop flat oaken kegs and barrels, against the hardwood crates, he heard Kingsbury grunting up behind him with his burden, listened as the boatman dragged the rope across the top of their cargo, heard him land in the sodden mud onshore. Kingsbury flung a loop once around a second tree stump, and working in concert with the two men straining at the gouger, he steadily took up the slack in the rope, easing the bow into the shore.

“Tie ’er off,” Zane commanded, stepping away from his rudder pole for the first time in those long, anxious minutes. He twisted from side to side, working a kink out of his back, then tugged down the brim of his shapeless hat before disappearing beneath the awning.

“You can let go now,” Ovatt said.

Only then did Titus realize he still had a deathlike grip on the gouger pole. It took him a moment before he could get his cramped fingers to obey his wishes. When they finally came off, he flexed them.

“C’mon, fellas,” Zane called out, reappearing from the awning. He scooted to the left side of the craft and heaved himself down into the mud.

Ovatt was next, while Bass was the last to land. His legs felt unsteady beneath him at first, what with struggling to keep his balance on the bobbing, weaving flatboat.

Ebenezer Zane was beside him, grabbing his shoulder, helping him straighten there on the shore. “C’mon, boy. I owe you a drink. This Titus Bass did fine, did he not, Heman?”

“He did better’n fine, Ebenezer. He did a man’s work this afternoon.”

Zane pounded him on the back. “Then a man’s drink it is for Titus Bass.”

“At the Kangaroo?” Kingsbury asked.

“Hell, yes,” Zane replied. “There is no better place where we could celebrate this boy’s passage to manhood in Louisville.”

Twenty families accompanying George Rogers Clark on one of his many forays in the Old Northwest during the Revolutionary War had first settled in the area in 1778. Until Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte, Louisville officially served as the young country’s western port of entry, with headquarters for a single U.S. customs agent. Now some thirty-two years later the town boasted a population of at least five hundred, and growing. Besides the grogshops, alehouses, and inns frequented by the rivermen, there were a score of more respectable hotels and restaurants, as well as two long blocks of shops and stores of all description. The town even boasted its own theater, recently built in 1808, establishing what the Louisville
Gazette
called a true home for “the golden era of Drama in the West,” where theater patrons had “created a high standard of taste and judgment.”

But try as Louisville’s respectable citizens might, it was still the river that had created the town, and it was the river from which Louisville drew its sustenance. Here, close to two out of three men in one way or another owed their livelihood to the Ohio flatboat trade. All along the wharf surrounding the harbor pulsed the bustling commerce
of boat building and repair, the riverbank crowded with wagon masters loading goods for their trek inland to the heart of Kentucky, from dawn till dark throbbing with the jostle and shove of draymen and hired lackeys.

Louisville was just about the most exciting place Titus had been in his life. All he had ever dreamed of already, and he hadn’t yet moved a step from Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat.

“The ever-loving Kangaroo!” Hames Kingsbury sang out prayerfully as they pushed on up the soggy bank. “God, but I hope to lay eyes on sweet Mathilda.”

To which Zane exclaimed, “That ain’t all you want to lay on her, I’ll wager!”

All five of them belly-laughed as they strode through the mud into the splotches of hissing torchlight fronting the infamous low-roofed Kangaroo Tavern. Titus stumbled into something, leaping over it as he peered down at the ground.

“You’ll have to watch where you’re walking,” Ovatt advised, “there’s more of ’em.” He pointed out the half-dozen or more bodies sprawled here and there among the mud puddles shimmering in the torchlight dancing on the breeze outside the tippling house.

A crude door blew open and out poured three men, two of whom had a secure hold on the third. A burst of noise, squeals of womankind, and sharp gusts of cruel laughter rolled out in their wake. Intent on their business, the two shoved their way right through the boatmen, stopped, and heaved the one between them into the night. Bass watched the man hurtle a good ten feet through the air until he landed facedown in the rutted muddy lane, where he struggled to rise on all fours at first, then gave up and sank back into the mire.

“Such’ll teach you: don’t never get yourself thrown out, Titus Bass,” Zane warned with a wag of his finger.

The other three rivermen laughed as Titus’s eyes followed that pair of monstrous, stoop-shouldered bouncers back into the Kangaroo.

“Maybe there’s ’nother place—”

Heman Ovatt snatched him by the arm, Kingsbury
securing the other as they set him in motion between them, all four laughing.

“There ain’t ’nother place holds a candle to the likes of the Kangaroo!” Hames cried as they passed beneath two wavering, spitting torches and plunged into the tavern’s raucous, smoky depths.

“Man overboard!”

Titus whirled at the frantic cry of alarm, finding a disheveled riverman perched high atop the huge stone mantel fronting the fireplace, weaving for a moment before he flung himself out into the crowd with abandon. A half-dozen others caught him, some grumbling their curses, many laughing, a few splashing ale on his head as they lowered him to the soppy floor below. There on his belly he thrashed with his legs and stroked with his arms disjointedly as if swimming, worming his way across the floor’s mud and muck in good fashion as more and more of the drinkers continued to splatter ale on the swimmer.

Titus found the noise almost ear shattering, unable to make out a single voice in the mad, raucous cacophony—

“Man overboard!”

Another cried out, causing Bass to whirl and look as he was swept along with his crew. This caller as well flung himself out from the wall into the crowd, which broke his fall, then dropped him without ceremony onto the muddy puncheon floor. But like a great beached carp, this one flopped over on his back and began to mimic something of a crude backstroke. Keeping his mouth open for the most part, the swimmer gaped like a fish as he inched himself along in that worming backstroke, swallowing most every drop of that ale bystanders sloshed upon him from above. Titus watched until the swimmer, his front completely soaked, disappeared among the tangle of legs in the milling throng.