Dance on the Wind (55 page)

“All Negras gonna run off,” the first man said with a slit-eyed smile on his lips. There was an angry fire in those eyes.

“James here oughtta know,” a third horseman spoke up for the first time, indicating that first speaker with a thumb. “He’s ’bout the best man-hunter there is in this country.”

“Man-hunter?” Ovatt asked.

The second horseman nodded, saying, “We all of us hunt down runaways. Make a pretty fair living by it, we do.”

Now James spoke again. “Always plenty of work for us, you see. Lots of folks pay a good reward for bringing back a runaway Negra.”

Kingsbury finished a swallow of coffee and asked, “Why’ll folks pay you such good money just to get one Negra back?”

James held up his cup, signaling the daughter filling Titus’s. “It ain’t just the one Negra that may happen to run away from a man’s plantation that causes worry for that owner. It’s all the others still back at his place, you must understand.” He set his full cup down and adjusted the pair of huge horse pistols he carried in the wide woven sash tied around his waist.

“All the others,” the second man repeated for emphasis.

“We’re talking about a lot of money,” James continued.
“Because if that plantation owner doesn’t get back that one runaway Negra—chances are damned bloody good some of the rest are going to try running off too.”

“And no rich plantation owner wants that to happen,” added the third talkative horseman.

“That’s why rich land barons will pay such good money to get back just one poor Negra what dreams his foolish dreams of freedom,” James said with a wry grin. “So my men here and me afford to drink the finest whiskey, we smoke the best cigars, and lay with the best whores … pardon me, ladies, for my thoughtless tongue. We work hard for our money, and the money is very, very good.”

“Bet you’re tracking some Negra now, ain’cha?” Ovatt asked.

“You’re a smart fellow, boatman,” James said after he drank some of his coffee. “I’m being paid well right now as we speak. A man by the name of Lewis Robards—biggest slave trader in Mercer County, Kentucky.” Then he smiled immensely, saying, “Tell me, was your journey south a successful one?”

Kingsbury’s eyes touched his crew, then he answered, “Same as any year. But prices for near everything are down. Hard to make much of a fair living anymore. Not nowhere near the money you fellas make in your line of work.”

“I’m sure you’re not going north empty-handed,” James commented with a disarming smile. “Enough perhaps to build you another Kentucky boat, to load it with goods for another trip south. That’s always the way of things for rivermen, isn’t it, now?”

“The way it’s s’pose to work ain’t allays the way it does work,” Kingsbury replied.

“We run onto some trouble in Natchez.” Beulah suddenly entered the conversation. “This crew can be foolish a’times—not ones to walk away from a real hoot of a celebration. They tore up a gunboat and dramshop.”

James leaned his elbows on the table, slit eyes narrowing even more. “What’s that got to do with—”

“To get these boys out of that miserable jail,” the woman explained, “they had to pay a judge practically all
we made for the trip—just for the damages their spree cost ’em.”

“And vow we wouldn’t show our faces back in Natchez for a year,” Kingsbury added, taking up Beulah’s fanciful story.

“A full goddamned year,” Root echoed dolefully.

“Not much a man can do, is there?” James asked. “When he gets thrown out of a town—a real shame. You fellas must be hellions.”

“Regular ring-tailed swamp panthers,” Kingsbury boasted. “Every last one of this crew is half horse, half alligator.”

“Even the young’un here?” asked the second horseman, pointing at Titus with the knife onto which he was scooping the last of his beans.

“Him? Oh, he just got his first trip down under the belt,” Kingsbury answered. “He might have the makings for a riverman.”

“As for the Negra?” James inquired. “What you plan on doing with him?”

“Told you,” Titus snapped, banging his coffee cup down on the plank table. “He ain’t for selling.”

His face hardening, James turned to Kingsbury. “I’m sure as leader of this group, you are the sort who recognizes a good offer when you see one.”

“What you talking about?” the pilot asked.

“I’m certain I can sell that Negra for a good dollar,” James instructed. “In fact, I know plantation owners who would snatch him right up for top dollar tomorrow—and all I’d have to do is show up with that big buck in tow.”

“Tell him he’s wasting his breath,” Titus growled at Kingsbury.

Grim-lipped, the river pilot replied, “The Negra belongs to the young’un here. So if’n he says he ain’t for sale, he ain’t for sale.”

The cool smile returned to James’s face as he leaned closer to the table, rocking on both elbows, clunking the big curved butts of those flintlock pistols against the tabletop. “I’m sorry to hear that, my good man. Since your trading venture downriver in New Orleans didn’t turn out very well and you spent nearly everything you had just to
get out of Natchez—why, I was certain you might be interested in turning a quick and tidy profit on that Negra out there.”

“We ain’t talking about this no more, Kingsbury,” Titus snarled angrily as he stood, pushed back his end of the bench, and stepped over it. He moved to the open doorway, which allowed fresh air into the heated kitchen, then stopped before he would move into the splash of torchlight just beyond the dining room.

“You heard him,” Hames repeated. He turned to Beulah, saying, “I s’pose we ought’n be off to bed now. Morning will come awful early.”

James leaned back, pulling from inside his shirt a buckskin pouch he had hanging around his neck. From it he pulled a thick cigar. “Traveling in a hurry, are you?”

“Winter’s coming strong,” Kingsbury said. “Want to cover ground. January be here afore too long.”

“Tomorrow, in fact.”

Titus turned in the doorway. “Tomorrow? It’s January?”

“A new year, lad. The first of 1811,” James said. “Which makes this a night for us all to celebrate and fittingly frolic—to see in the new year in proper fashion.”

“My birthday,” Bass said quietly.

“Your birthday, is it?” Beulah exclaimed. “Why, yes! We ought to all celebrate that, even if we don’t celebrate the coming of the new year!”

Turning to the proprietor seated in his cane-backed chair beside the fireplace, James declared, “Mr. Colbert, be good enough to bring us your finest libations—whiskey, rye, what have you.”

The Scottish Colbert bowed graciously, saying, “My wife brewed us a good batch of potato beer not long ago. Perhaps you’d like to give that a try.”

“Yes, yes,” James replied, stroking one side of his mustache. “Along with any sweets you might have about. And see to it that your daughters stay close until the new year has arrived in all its glory … for I’m sure these boatmen love to dance even more than do my men.”

*  *  *

Those first hours of the new year brought with them the black belly of midnight as clouds bubbled across the heavens on the heels of distant thunder.

Lying there in that tiny hut with the two boatmen, sharing his blanket with that slave who had skin the color of rich, fertile humus, Titus listened wide-eyed to each celestial peal as it rumbled toward Colbert’s Ferry on the Tennessee River. In the throaty dying of every bark of that thunder he heard the raucous laughter of the horsemen as they reveled ever closer to dawn.

Eager to see in his birthday among real grown folk for the first time—especially since Bass fancied himself just as grown-up as the next man—he held out and wearily stayed up well past the ebbing of his own candle. Always before it had been parents and siblings, in later years some visiting friends come from across the county to celebrate that momentous day. They would bunk in and stay over, making for quite a time of it … but never anything as bawdy and uproarious as had been the merrymaking that began right after supper when all of them pushed back the long tables and benches, clearing the center of that packed-earth floor while Reuben Root scurried off to fetch his wheezing concertina.

“No matter what them others ask you to do when it comes the new year,” Kingsbury warned in a hush against Bass’s ear as everyone else hurried here and there, “don’t go showing ’em your guns.”

“M-my guns? What’re you talking—”

“Keep ’em hid, Titus. Better that way.”

“Why’s it better?”

The others had drawn too close for more talk then. “Just better we don’t ever have to find out.”

It wasn’t long before Heman Ovatt purloined a pair of pewter spoons, which he clacked against thigh, knee, and elbow, while one of the horsemen produced a jaw harp, and George Colbert pulled out his Tennessee mouth-bow, both of which added the right rhythmic twang to accompany the sweating, heaving dancers as they jigged and clogged, pranced and stomped, the ten male wayfarers keeping the Colbert daughters whirling nonstop, while the old man’s three sons took turns spinning across the tiny
dance floor with Beulah and their beaming, dark-skinned mother. Hezekiah squatted in a corner near the warmth of the fireplace, clapping, bobbing his head, and near grinning his face loose.

As midnight approached, the one called James announced the advent of the new year by his watch and ordered everyone out into the yard beneath the darkening skies as the first clouds rolled in to obliterate all traces of the moon and the far-flung stars. At the proper moment the horsemen and Colbert’s sons all pulled free their heavy armament and let roar at the deepening black of the heavens. In response to that gunfire, and what hooting and shouting accompanied the momentous hour, those oxen in the nearby corral bellowed while the nervous horses set loose their own shrill protest.

Not long after they all crowded back into the Colberts’ dining hall, Bass had grown bone weary and begged off, paying his respects to the ladies. He had made it to the open doorway when his hand was caught up and he was spun around, flung back into the arms of one of those tawny-skinned daughters. She led him spinning around the dance floor, bumping into some, bouncing off others as the unattached horsemen glared their jealousy while clapping in time with the wheezing music’s frenetic pace.

Before they circled the floor a fourth dizzying time, Titus realized he was smitten. Hard-bodied and rawboned, this tall half-breed girl smiled eye to eye at him, her cheeks flushed with excitement and energy and all that she put into her dance as they swung round and round. Almost more than anything, he liked the way the sweat glistened on her tawny skin, drops captured in that shallow cleft at the bottom of her neck, the way the rivulets of it streamed down to converge within the salty heave of her cleavage. Already the dancing lather plastered her blouse against those breasts, sticking to the flat of her belly. While she might not have been the best-looking of Colbert’s five, the one who seized hold of him at that moment did have one definite advantage over her sisters: she made no bones about just who it was she wanted to pair herself with.

As much as she threw herself into the dance, it did not
surprise Titus that a short time later she asked him to take her outside for a breath of the cool night air. Once immersed in those shadows playing against the wall of the cabin near the dog run, she pressed her mouth right against his. Stunned, he stumbled back, wide-eyed as one of her arms trapped his waist, slamming his hips against hers until she bumped him back into the wall. He was pinned as her free hand roamed up his belly to the neck of his shirt, then wandered across that bare skin drawn taut over his shoulder.

Of a sudden she had her tongue pressing against his lips. This was new, an unsettling sensation. As his lips relaxed, she pressed hard with her tongue, separating his teeth, searching out his tongue, exploring his mouth voraciously. Every bit as hungrily he swallowed the taste of her, the flavor of her father’s potato beer on her tongue, still so fresh on his own. Each time he closed his eyes, his head swam, sensing again a great tingling that swept over him like the lick of a burning flame.

Then his eyes flew open when he felt her hand tugging at the waistband of his britches—more than eager: the girl was downright hungry.

“Ho—… hold on,” he sputtered, seizing her hands in fear she would discover the coins sewn there where she fumbled in her hurry to get at his engorged flesh. “L-lemme.”

“Now,” she whispered. “Jest do it now.”

The girl pulled away from him, moved back beneath the covered dog run where the shadows lurked even deeper. As he fought those buttons out of their holes, Bass lurched close behind, nearly falling over her clumsily as she dropped to her knees, rolled over on her back, and hiked up her long cloth skirt. Placing himself between her outflung legs, he fumbled to get his flesh freed from his longhandles and the nankeen britches, feeling those two big pistols spill from the back of his waistband as his pants fell open. At that moment he cared little for what became of them.

Quickly he went to feel along her bare legs, surprised to find they were covered with what he felt were buckskin britches much like his. When she seized hold of his hot,
rigid flesh in one hand, the girl grasped one of his hands and guided it between her legs. It was then he discovered the britches were instead leggings. His appetite rising, Titus danced his fingers over the bare flesh of her loins, seeking that moist patch of hair where she wriggled as soon as he brushed his hand against her heat.

Roughly she dragged his engorged flesh forward as if it weren’t attached to him at all, forcing him to rock over her as she planted him within her moistness. Certain was he that he would spend himself right then and there—exactly as he had that first night at the swimming hole with Amy Whistler. But just as he began to tense and shudder, she suddenly stopped moving, reaching down to grab his scrotum, pulling on it gently, but insistently, until he sensed that overwhelming need to explode slowly dissipate.

He welcomed that wash of relief by immediately throwing himself back into his energetic thrusts. Likewise she imprisoned him with her legs, locking his head in a death-grip with both arms, flinging her hips up against him in a clumsy dance by this half-dressed two-headed beast.