Dance on the Wind (31 page)

“Gimme a hand here!” Ovatt cried out at the capstan, where he began to turn the wheel with one of the short, stout, removable poles, walking round and round in that cramped area left free of deck cargo clutter. Already the flatboat was beginning to jolt and shudder as the ropes snapped, went taut with a creak, and the timbers groaned, Ebenezer’s Kentuckyboat bouncing against the current as she was drawn toward the bank.

“You heard the man, Titus!” Zane shouted. “Get up there and put your back into it so we can set you off on that shore.”

“Eb—Ebenezer?”

For a moment Zane watched Heman Ovatt and the others over the youth’s shoulder, then peered into the lad’s face. “What is it, Titus Bass? You of a sudden got something agin hard work?”

“No … no, sir! You won’t think ill of me if’n I go an’ break our bargain, will you?”

“Goddammit, boy!” Ovatt growled menacingly as he struggled against the capstan. “Get over here help me out!”

“Keep your back into it, Heman! Titus got something to say to me!” Ebenezer hollered. Then, squinting sternly at Bass with one eye, the pilot replied, “So you ain’t a man of your word, that it?”

“Nothing of the kind. I—”

Ebenezer interrupted, “Just how you figure on breaking our bargain? I brung you downriver like I said I would, and you rode with us through the Falls. Sounds to me we’re square.”

“But I didn’t do nothing to help us—”

“Nothing nobody could do. Allays just river an’ me”—then Zane’s eyes flickered to the sleeting heavens—“an’ God too what brung us through. It don’t matter none that I didn’t work you for your passage. But that ain’t breaking your bargain. You get on up there and help Heman haul us in to shore.”

His tongue felt pasty inside his mouth, his heart hammering and breath coming short and hard.

With sweaty palms Titus said, “I wanna stay.”

“Stay?”

Root and Kingsbury slogged down the muddy bank clutching the ends of their ropes, both of them intent on trying to overhear the talk. Ovatt continued to grunt, pushing round and round a step at a time there at the capstan among the ice-coated cargo lashed near the bow.

“Wanna stay on down the river with you fellas.”

“You know where we’re heading?”

“Natchez you said. On to Norleans.”

Zane wagged his head thoughtfully. “I dunno. Got me half a year’s earnings here.”

Bass said quickly, “I wanna go with you. See what’s there.”

“Thought you was wanting to go to St. Lou.”

He tried out a smile on Zane. “I figure it’ll still be there come next year. Plenty of time for me.”

“I was young as you once,” the wrinkled river pilot replied. “Seemed there was all the time in the world back then.”

For a moment Titus looked around him at the other three boatmen, then said, “You consider taking me?”

“Figure to hire on, are you?”

“A man don’t ride for free,” Root grumbled.

Bass nodded. “Reuben’s right. I don’t ’spect to ride for free.”

A grin grew within that great black tangle of hair Zane called his head. “I’ll work you, Titus Bass. I’ll work you hard.”

Bass gulped, asking, “That the hardest piece of river we go through to get to Norleans?”

Zane tilted his head back and roared with laughter, so deep and hearty was it that he showed his tonsils. “Just about, son.”

“Then I figure to ride the river with you fellas.”

Leaning forward, he held out his hand to the youth. “Good to have you with us, Titus Bass.” He straightened and hollered at the two on shore, “Loose that hemp, boys!”

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” Kingsbury yelled in exasperation from the bank. “What in the goddamned hell?”

Zane waved his free arm, gesturing his crew in. “We’re bound for the Mississip with a new man!”

Grumbling, Root and Kingsbury freed the double-fist-sized knots from their moorings, then pushed off, paddling furiously, heading out into the channel to catch the flatboat while Ovatt hurriedly coiled in the hundred or so feet of loose hawsers across the wind-whipped surface of the Ohio.

Coming alongside, Reuben and Hames tied off the skiff to a pair of check-poles along the flatboat’s gunnel and clambered aboard.

Root asked of Zane, “This here green man you’re fixing to hire on—ain’t we gonna get him started right, Ebenezer?”

“How you mean—
started right?”
the pilot asked.

“Have the boy here scour and grease the anchor?”

Ebenezer chuckled. “You can sure be one mean son of a bitch, Reuben. No, sir. I never did cotton to pulling such pranks on a feller what sets foot on my flatboat for his first trip downriver.”

“Not even a li’l fun?” Root whined, disappointment now where glee had been.

“What you figure to have Titus Bass do to make fun for you, Reuben?” Kingsbury asked.

He turned to Hames, saying, “I was figuring on him cooning the steering oar.”

With a lusty guffaw Zane shook his bushy head like a lion’s mane. “No, Reuben—less’n you’re willing to coon it yourself.”

“Shit! I ain’t no green hand like him—”

“Hap that you remember I never made you do nothing of the kind when you was a green hand?” Zane snapped. “You hap to think back on that?”

Sullen, Root nodded.

Having watched and listened in confusion, Titus finally asked, “What’s cooning the steering oar?”

All four of the boatmen roared in great peals of laughter.

Nearly out of breath, Kingsbury finally explained, “On many a boat the old hands will play some mean trick on a new hand—something like Reuben wanted you to do.”

“Cooning the steering oar,” Zane continued, “means we’d have you climb out to the end of this here rudder of mine.”

Bass’s eyes grew big as coffee tins as he stared at the water flowing around the back of the boat where the pole sank beneath the river’s surface. He gulped. “You’d had me climb out there, hanging on to just the rudder pole?”

Root was still hooting, slapping his knee in merriment. “Make sure you touch the rudder out there now, Titus … or we don’t let you climb back onter the boat!”

“It’s easy enough,” Ovatt confided. “Just hang on with your arms and legs. I done it years afore.”

“Yeah!” Root roared. “Best you hang on real tight!”

“Or you get a cold bath in the river,” Kingsbury concluded with a shudder. “Like I done.”

“B-but, none of you gonna make me do that, are you?” Bass inquired.

“You’re part of the crew anyways,” the bushy-headed pilot replied. “I see no need for them silly games just to make these fellers laugh on your account.”

“I thankee for that, Mr. Zane,” Titus replied, wanting
to sense some real gratitude, but not really sure how he should feel at that moment. Perhaps such a ritual of initiation was really necessary for him to become part of the crew. Maybe they never would accept him as one of their own if he didn’t suffer some of their lighthearted pranks.

“No need to thank me, Titus,” Ebenezer said, his eyes softening in that kind, hairy face.

Titus started to turn away, ready to head to the bow, where he intended to lend his muscle to Heman’s efforts at the gouger, when Zane caught him by the shoulder, saying, “Why’n’t you stay back here with me for now, Titus Bass? That’s easy rope work for Ovatt now—and I could use the company, I could at that.”

As Hames and Reuben reached the stern of the flatboat to tie the skiff off to a snubbing post before clambering up the side and over the gunnel, Titus settled in near Zane, his heart still hammering, desperately wanting this to be the right thing for him to do.

“I don’t figure I done enough yet to thank you, Ebenezer,” he began. “I was fixing on helping the rest of you get through the Falls. But I didn’t do nothing. ’Stead of troubling yourself with me—why didn’t you just leave me back at Louisville when I told you I was all for staying on there?”

Grinning into the slanting hammer of the wind-driven sleet, Zane replied, “I figured there was no other way to find out if you was a riverman or not—but to take you with us through the Falls.”

“So what’d you find out?”

The pilot tousled Titus’s hair, then peered on down the gray Ohio once more. “You’ll do to ride the river with, Titus Bass. By damned, you’ll do.”

Autumn was all but done for by the time Ebenezer Zane’s broadhorn reached the mouth of the Ohio. What ducks and geese and other species of winged creatures hadn’t already flapped their way overhead were destined to struggle out the winter here in the north: all manner of doves, redheaded woodpeckers, and nighthawks too. The sort that stayed behind.

One day on the trip they spotted some gray and black
squirrels, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all sweeping down from the north bank, plunging into the river to bob and swim with all their might against the current, like a mighty exodus that crossed to the south. Hundreds of heads dotted the murky brown water all about the boat, hundreds more pressing behind. And every day the men watched the shorelines for bigger species. Titus was amazed at the growing numbers of bear and deer, turkey and fox, he spotted as they rode the river farther west, heading for the Mississippi.

And always they sang—ballads of death and love and hard-hearted maidens.

For the longest time he pondered that the old song said just what his grandpap had told him: there had been buffalo in the canebrakes. Which set Titus to brooding on how those who had gone before him had shot the buffalo until there were no more.

Then Hames Kingsbury would always lift Bass’s spirits by singing what had long been Ebenezer Zane’s favorite, sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”

Then Heman Ovatt started in on one of his own.

When Root bellowed forth with “Bird in a Cage”:

“Burlington?” Titus asked Ovatt. “Is he singing ’bout the Kentucky Burlington?”

“I don’t know no other Burlington.”

“Sing me ’nother of those I like,” Ebenezer commanded from the stern.

Kingsbury began to sing another to the tune of a 1766 hymn by Isaac Watts.

Titus took his eyes off Zane to ask of Ovatt, “Ebenezer married?”

“He was,” Heman replied.

“And had he children?”

“Them too.” But Heman warned, “Wouldn’t do for you to ask after them. It makes the man powerful sorry.”

“What happened to his family?”

“They was kill’t.”

“Injuns?”

“Long ago, when the children was but babes,” Ovatt explained. “All boys, they was. Their heads smashed in by Shawnee.”

Titus turned to gaze at the pilot, regarding the man studiously, wondering how it was to have one’s family taken by a sudden act of savagery, rather than merely an act of leaving.

Zane winked at Titus as he called out to Kingsbury, “Sing ‘The Boatmen’s Dance.’”

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.