Dance on the Wind (42 page)

Bass watched them roll the shroud off the six-inch-wide plank that formed the top of the gunnel, heard the body splash into the river. By the time Titus got to the side of the flatboat, the gray shroud had darkened, taking on water as it slowly sank with the weights Root and Ovatt had tied to it.

We vow to remember,
he echoed the words in his head, peering down with the rest of them as Ebenezer Zane sank slowly beneath the murky brown surface of the river, became a dark, oblong shape, then disappeared completely.

Once more the wind came up, and he had to swipe the hair from his eyes as he pushed back from the gunnel, stood, and moved away to the awning. In a moment more, the rest of them joined him there, all kneeling to warm their hands over the sandbox fire, eyes red-rimmed and the skin over their noses and cheeks flushed with the cold’s cruel bite.

“We’ll be putting up at Natchez in less’n a hour,” Kingsbury said to the woman. “But you’re welcome to stay over the night with us—seeing how you ain’t got no family there to put yourself up with.”

“Didn’t I hear talk of you fellas planning on making a hoot of it this evening Under-the-Hill?” she asked, without raising her eyes to any of them.

“We allays do,” Ovatt answered as he began to hold his right thumbnail over the flame of a candle in one of the lanterns.

“What the devil’re you doing?” she asked him.

“Hardenin’ my fingernails’s all.”

“Whatever for?”

This time Kingsbury explained with a grin, “Why, the better to feel for a feller’s eye strings, woman. Heman goes to gouging with them nails—he can make any bad son of a bitch tell the news! Natchez can be a damn hard town for
a man what can’t take care of hisself in a scrap. But just ’cause we go off and have ourselves a hoot don’t mean you won’t have you a place to sleep tonight.”

With a visible shudder she turned away from watching Ovatt harden his thumbnails. “I’m ’bliged,” she replied. “My boys, an’ them others what hired on to work our boat—they never said much ’bout what they done when we reached Natchez, nary what they done at the Swamp when we got on down to Orlins too. Early on I come to figure it all just had to do with a man whoring and drinking, having himself a spree when his boat comes to port.”

Titus peered at those three roughened men, surprised to find them suddenly shy and sheepish in the presence of this woman looking every bit as worn enough to be their maiden aunt, a woman who had just spoken moving words as she watched them bury their pilot—then minutes afterward forced them to own up to just what it was rivermen tied up at Natchez to do.

Poking at the embers with a twig she stirred some more life into the fire, then shrugged a shoulder as she pulled the big coffee kettle from the heat. “I suppose it’s what men are about, and there’s never gonna be no changing it. So don’t pay me no mind. I’m much obliged for your giving me a place to lay my head on your boat tonight.” She picked up a tinned mug and asked, “Any of you care for more of my coffee?”

As for anything remotely resembling civilization in this river wilderness, there were but three sizable outposts of settlement that joined those tiny villages, far-flung trading posts, and the occasional military fort: at the far northern end of the lower Mississippi Valley sat the old French colony, St. Louis; all the way south at the other end of the river sprawled the even larger New Orleans; and between them squatted Natchez—a town more of dubious reputation than of any real note.

Not only could a boatman look forward to some ribald female companionship along with some head-thumping whiskey in the brothels and watering holes that sat at the river’s edge—but there was still even more cause to
celebrate. Reaching Natchez meant the most treacherous sections of the Mississippi were now behind them. Sitting where it did on the eastern shore, the town had quickly proved itself an ideal way station where the flatboat crews put in to resupply, rest, and recreate before making the last short run on down to New Orleans.

Long before, the place had been nothing more than a semipermanent encampment of the Natchez Indians. With the coming of the white man the first settlement high upon the bluff overlooking the river was eventually wrangled over by three European countries. First to arrive were the Spanish, followed by the French, and eventually the British brought their influence to bear on this Mississippi port. Ultimately the infant United States came to reign supreme in recent years. Each of those conflicting cultures had added the same full-bodied, international flavor any traveler would find in St. Louis and New Orleans. All told, the entire Natchez district numbered some seventy-five hundred souls, due in large part to the cultivation of the unusually rich soil found on numerous farms and expansive plantations. Yet the town served as the center of more than mere trade—early-day Natchez boasted an extremely varied and exciting social life of theater, balls, and what traveling acts happened by.

The winter sun had set and twilight was slipping down around them as the four boatmen climbed over the gunnel to stand on the wharf, peering past the rickety clapboard and canvas-topped shanties to the lights of the town itself on the heights above.

Kingsbury turned and asked the woman, “You’re gonna be all right here?”

“Got me all I need,” she replied, then gestured them to be off. “Now, get—and have yourselves a hoot. I’ll be right here when you mosey on back.”

“Likely be back afore morning,” the boat’s skinny pilot replied as he turned away with the others.

They pressed into the last throb of that busy wharf, pushing past all manner of those who made the river and this wilderness their home. Here beneath the Natchez hill Bass not only rubbed elbows with many other homespun boatmen and leather-clad frontiersmen, but with Brits and
Frenchmen, African slaves and freedmen, along with Indians, Spaniards, Acadians, and Creoles as well.

“What be that up there?” Titus asked, stopping to point up the bluff to the town built on the high ground at a distance of a mile from the river.

Kingsbury stopped with the rest of them right behind Bass, saying, “Natchez.”

“Ain’t we going up there?” Titus asked.

Heman Ovatt explained, “We ain’t allowed.”

“That’s right,” Kingsbury continued. “Rivermen like us get arrested if’n they go up there to the town where the proper folks live.”

Bass looked up the bluff again, then quickly at the collection of vulgar shacks and hovels raised along the wharf in one long, jagged strip. “If’n that’s Natchez up there, then what’s this place down here where they ’llow us to go?”

“This here’s called Natchez-Under-the-Hill,” Kingsbury answered.

That name was not only picturesque, but apt and clearly fitting. Tucked here under the fine houses and rich shops catering only to the most cultured of Natchez residents sat the squalid, low-roofed sheds where the rivermen flocked to celebrate a bawdy and profane life. Above them stood the big houses, all finished off with ornate balconies and ivy-covered piazzas, the town’s streets crowded by handsome carriages, while here beside the river huddled only those monuments to man’s timeless attraction to the varied sins of the flesh.

Kingsbury set the group off again, draping an arm over the youngster’s shoulder to say, “I’m wanting Titus here to have him a look at Annie Christmas’s gunboat down the way.”

“Gunboat?” Titus asked. “What the devil that be?”

“Just what they call a flatboat been left behind by a crew long ago and some working girls took it over,” Ovatt declared.

Bass asked him, “Working girls? Like them at the Kangaroo in Louisville?”

“That’s the idea!” Kingsbury replied. “It’s their floating whorehouse.”

“But why is it called a gunboat?”

“Don’t you go there to shoot off your gun?” Root inquired.

“I didn’t bring me my rifle—”

“Naw!” Kingsbury interrupted with a chuckle. “Didn’t Mincemeat go an’ teach you all about how to use your gun?”

“Yeah,” added Root. “You was locked up with her for all that time—I figured you’d learn’t you couldn’t have you near the fun with your rifle you can have with your gun!”

It came over him slowly as he looked from face to grinning, gaping face in that deepening twilight. “All right,” Bass said. “Let’s go see this here gunboat.”

Ovatt asked, “Maybe you’ll shoot your gun off tonight, eh?”

“Count on it,” Bass replied enthusiastically as they started off down the wharf once more, passing noisy whorehouses, grogshops, card rooms, and gambling dens where laughter and music, shouts and screams, as well as drunken men all came tumbling out onto the cold plank thoroughfare. Here and there a short street ran perpendicular to the single long avenue that corded itself beside the river—streets named: Choctaw, Silver, Cherokee, Arkansas, and Chickasaw, all of them littered with filth, trash, and human excrement. Hundreds of men poured from one dimly lit place to the other, hooting and hollering at the pinnacle of bawdy revelry, while half-feral dogs and other wild creatures slunk back in the dark places and fought wrinkle-necked vultures among the shadows over the rotting garbage heaved right out of each establishment’s front door.

“Here you go, Titus,” Kingsbury said when they finally reached the southern end of the wharf to stand near a long flatboat badly in need of repair.

“What’s this?” Bass inquired as the pilot held his palm open and there laid three coins.

“A picayune.”

“What’s it for?”

“Man needs money to buy hisself a place to shoot off his gun!” Root exclaimed as Kingsbury handed the other two boatmen their picayune—the equivalent of six cents.

“What’m I gonna do with only this?” Titus protested.

Kingsbury snorted a loud guffaw, then said, “Here at Annie Christmas’s gunboat, that there picayune gonna get you drunk, get you a woman near all night long, and a bed till morning.”

“But you don’t wanna let yourself fall asleep, Titus,” Ovatt warned.

“Listen to him,” Root echoed. “Don’t you dare fall asleep with one of Annie’s whores.”

“Why can’t I just sleep it off if’n I take a mind to—like I done with—”

“Ain’t like Mincemeat,” Kingsbury started to explain. “Most of these here gals got ’em steady men they flock with. The women work on their backs and those fellas go gamble off what the women make getting poked by boatmen.”

“So? What’s that mean to me?”

“It means a lot of them gals don’t give a good goddamn about you after they let you poke ’em,” Ovatt said. “You fall asleep, and you’re likely as not to never wake up—at the bottom of the river.”

He glanced down at the three coins in his palm, then clenched them tightly as he asked, “N-never wake up? How?”

Kingsbury slapped a hand on Bass’s shoulder in the way of a big brother explaining sharp realities, “You go to sleeping, that gal you’re with might let in her feller to do the blood work.”

“B-blood work?” He was suspicious they were yanking on his leg.

Root dragged an index finger from one ear, across his throat to the other ear, making a distasteful sound as he did so.

“Or that gal might just be the sort of whore cut your throat her own self!” Ovatt said.

“Like a hog hung up at the slaughter!” Kingsbury added.

Wide-eyed, Titus regarded them all in turn, then blinked and asked, “Why … why all you fellas—and Ebenezer too—let me go off by my own self with that one named Mincemeat?”

“Shit!” Kingsbury replied, rubbing a hand across the top of Bass’s head. “None of us, ’specially Ebenezer, gonna let you go off with some whore what’d open you up a new breathing hole in your neck! Ebenezer Zane was taking good care of you, sending you off with Mincemeat.”

“She’s a good whore!” Root exclaimed.

“Not like none of these here bitches in Natchez,” Ovatt said. “G’won and dip your stinger in their honey-pot, then get on outta there to do some more drinking. Or get your bones back to the boat.”

“That’s the only way, Titus,” Kingsbury warned. “Don’t trust none of them spread-legged bitches here in Natchez. They all likely murdered a man or two their own selves.”

Ovatt agreed, saying, “You just figure that’s why they’re working here, and not up to St. Louie, or on down to Norlins.”

“Likely got runned out of those towns,” Kingsbury said, “or escaped afore they was strung up for murderin’ customers.”

“Ain’t much law hereabouts,” Root said, gesturing this way and that. “Best thing for a man to do is to hang together with his crew when he ain’t humping ’tween the legs of one of them bang-tailed bitches.”

A hard, cold rain hammered the heavy oiled-canvas sheeting stretched over Bass’s head like the rattle of hailstones against the white-oak top of an empty shipping cask.

At first he was too frightened to allow himself to be pleasured by one of Annie Christmas’s homely castaways.

Instead Titus sought relief at the bottom of a clay mug filled with a fiery concoction of corn spirits, for the longest time unable to take his eyes off the gunboat madam. He’d never seen anyone, much less a woman, near so tall—over six and a half feet of her. She laughed and drank, roared and cussed with the other three boatmen, and then he watched her disappear in the back with Kingsbury. Bass found another big one to stare at. This one—just about as wide as Annie was tall.