Dance on the Wind (28 page)

As he watched Abigail taking finger-pinches of fragrant tobacco from the pouch and dropping them in the tiny clay pipe bowl, Titus could clearly picture the scene in his mind: the hazy, lamplit tavern, so noisy and raucous no one would know what was happening right at first.

“That’s when Kingsbury got up and jumped for the steersman. About as far as he got, ’cause some others got him and started whopping on him while the pilot knocked Mathilda around good.”

“But when I come in last night, I watched a couple of fellas throwing a man out,” Titus said. “What about them she hires to protect her place?”

“She has help now. Since last summer, anyways,” Abigail explained, rising from the bed, clutching the blanket around her upper arms, her shoulders naked as she stepped to the fire. There he watched her squat, bare feet and ankles exposed as the blanket slurred out across the floor around her. He smiled to see that flesh while she took a straw from a bucket and for a moment held it in the fire. “But back when Kingsbury and her got whopped on, there was nobody in the place who could help. They all just backed away and let them strangers beat up that woman, and a good man too. Four of ’em throwed Kingsbury outside in the yard, good as dead. While’st the pilot dragged Mathilda outside too—carried her off down to their boat, where the bunch of ’em held her down and started using her bad.”

“Using her bad?”

Taking the burning straw from the fire, Abigail held it over the pipe bowl and inhaled, sucking noisily to light the tobacco. Then she pulled the stem from her lips and blew a great gush of smoke toward the low beam-and-mud roof, finally saying, “Like you and me just done, ’cept it’s one man right after ’nother—and none of ’em gentle about it,” she commented sourly, her pocked face gone hard again, “The more they hit her, the more she cried and bled. And the more she cried, the more they hit her.”

“How’d Ebenezer get in all of this?”

“Said he heard a woman moaning. The more he listened from where he was sick on his boat, with his belly hurting him—the more he figured out what was happening: a woman crying and men laughing. Said he could even hear them smacking her, they was whopping on her so hard.”

“That’s when he jumped on ’em?”

She nodded once as she rose to return to the edge of the bed. “He got him his cutlass—you ever see his cutlass?”

With a wag of his wide-eyed head, Titus looked down at the pipe she held out to him and said, “No, I ain’t.”

“Ask Ebenezer to see his cutlass sometime,” she advised knowingly. “Right then he come on that boat and got right in the middle of ’em afore he even saw it was Mathilda they was beating bad. When he started swinging that cutlass around, two of them sonsabitches run right off, wanting nothing of Ebenezer Zane and that big knife of his’n. Here—take this.”

He took the pipe, but when his palm met the heat of the clay bowl, Titus let it fall to the earthen floor.

“Silly man,” she said, bending over to pick it up by the stem, the blanket parting to expose most of those fleshy mounds, enough for him to see how her breastbone stood out beneath her pale skin like a freshly pressed sheet draped over a drying line. “Here, hold it like this.” She presented it to him again. “You try it again.”

“What of the other two?” he asked as he took the pipe, gripping it back on the stem, fingertips away from the hot bowl. He brought it to his lips, and his eyes met hers as he began to suck in.

“Them two what gave Ebenezer the worst of it? Well, now—one snatched out a pistol and brung it up to shoot, but Ebenezer was quicker with that cutlass, cleaving off a couple of fingers of that bastard’s pistol hand. But right about then Ebenezer went to his knees, a knife in his back. Say, you don’t gotta hold that smoke in so long, Titus. Let it out now if’n you want.”

With a gush it exploded from his mouth.

“Did you swaller it down into your chest?” she asked.

Titus swallowed, sensing the strong taste of it. “I dunno.”

“Then try it again. Just like breathing in. You’ll feel it down there in your chest, then you’ll know.”

“One of ’em, you said he stabbed Ebenezer?” and he put the stem to his lips.

Abigail waited to answer, watching his face as he drew long and slow on the pipe stem, pulling it into his lungs with all that was in him. The potent heat hit him hard: he found this smoking stuff like trying to force down a coarse old horseshoe file. As soon as it began to hurt more than he could stand, Titus coughed it right back up, gagging and retching, his face hot with embarrassment.

“That’s awright, Titus. Best to take it gentle and slow—not so much all at the first. Go ’head on and give ’nother try.”

He closed his eyes as he brought the pipe to his mouth a third time. Had to admit he’d always liked the smell of it, what with menfolk smoking around him all those years back in Boone County—something mighty flavorful. But getting it past his mouth into his chest appeared to be another matter. Still game for it, this time he did as she had suggested, drawing the smoke in slow and easy, a tiny bit at a time. He held it for a moment without coughing, opening his eyes wide in self-astonished celebration at his own triumph, then exhaled every bit as slowly as he had just pulled the smoke into his lungs. It was nothing less than a wonder to watch it all come back out in a steady stream.

Abigail smiled at him. “That’s it, Titus. Now you try some more.”

“G’won and tell me about Ebenezer getting stabbed.” Only then did he bring the pipe stem back to his lips.

“The pilot done it. With a big ol’ guttin’ knife—but lucky for Ebenezer Zane that the tip of the blade hit a rib and only sliced up some skin. Hurt him enough I s’pose that he went to his knees. That’s when Mathilda watched that bastard yank the knife back, ready to plant it in Ebenezer’s back again—’bout the time Zane grabbed hol’t of that pistol one of them others dropped out’n his chopped-up hand. Ebenezer turned and fired.”

“Who’d he hit?”

She wagged her head, insistent on telling the story her own way. “First thing Zane done was pick Mathilda up and wrap a blanket round her—what with the way them four had tored every stitch off her. She asked him if the pilot was dead, and when Ebenezer said he didn’t know, Mathilda said they should make sure he was. She told Ebenezer go pour some powder and coal oil all over the cargo.”

He blew out a gush of smoke, so damned proud of himself that he hadn’t coughed anymore nor made himself sick like his pap had warned him he would. Titus asked, “But he still didn’t know for sure if that river pilot was dead?”

“Didn’t matter,” she said matter-of-factly. “Mathilda wanted the bastard dead her own self. She was the one used that pistol’s flintlock to drop a spark down on the powder, setting it off and putting the coal oil to flame just as Ebenezer was loosing the mooring ropes. He pulled her onto the wharf afore he jumped back onto that flatboat and steered her long enough to get it out of the harbor into the main channel of the river.”

“Then what’d he do?”

She took the pipe from him, sucked on it twice without results, and said, “’Pears you’re out’n tobacco. I’ll get us some more.”

He sat up at the side of the bed and pulled a blanket around himself, anxious to hear the rest of the story as she went back to the skin pouch in the walnut chest, then squatted by the fire. “Tell me what Ebenezer done out on that burning boat headed into the river.”

Holding the stump of the straw in the flames, Abigail explained, “Why, he gone and jumped in the river—an’ don’t you know he was cut up and bleeding pretty bad—but he swum right back to where Mathilda was waiting for him at the wharf. By the time he got hisself swum there, a goodly crowd was watching, and they dragged him out of the water. I was there by that time too. We all stood, with the rest—watching that boat drifting off across the Ohio, burning to beat the band. Ever’ now and then there’d be a poof, and come a big shower of sparks like a cannon firing. And soon enough—there weren’t no more fire, and no more Pennsylvania flatboat.”

This time he readily took the pipe from her and put it to his lips.

“I gotta pee,” Abigail declared, as if she made such a confession to men all the time.

His eyes widening, he snatched for the blanket with one hand, pushing himself off the bed. “I’ll go stand … go outside—”

“You silly,” she chided, her smile one that involved her whole face. Abigail inched over to the chamber pot. “Just turn away and look at the fire.”

From the corner of his eye he watched her for a moment as she turned her back to him, then flipped out the bottom of the blanket to squat over the chamber pot. As she rose, he quickly looked back at the fire and sucked on the pipe. Once more he glanced from beneath the shock of brown hair that spilled across his brow, finding her scoop a handful of red cedar shavings from the copper kettle, which she tossed into the pot. He heard her slide open the crude door and carry the pot out.

While she was gone, the door hung open—the small fire’s warmth scurried from the room in one long draft. Then she was back, closing the door behind her, seeming to bring with her an aura of cold and dampness that clung about her threadbare blanket.

“I feel like I ain’t et in a week,” he said as she took the pipe from him. “How about us going out for some breakfast?”

“Ain’t time for breakfast yet,” she said, setting the pipe on the table and turning back to the bed.

Glancing at the door, he asked, “Ain’t morning yet?”

“Still dark out there. Hardly a soul moving.”

He watched her lie back on the bed, slowly sliding the blanket back from her body in that firelight and frail, wispy lamplight. Not able to help himself, he swallowed hard, staring at her bony hips, that dark delta between her legs, then up across her flat belly to those fleshy breasts. He licked his lips, mouth gone dry as he found her staring at him, her eyes intent.

Patting the narrow bed beside her, Abigail said, “C’mon in here with me, Titus. I’m certain we can find us something to do till it’s time for victuals.”

Ebenezer Zane chose to set off downriver in the worst possible weather yet to batter the valley that autumn.

The sky overhead hung just out of reach, every bit as cold and the color of a great slab of the rain-soaked granite that protruded from the barren, skeletal forest that formed both sides of the channel the Ohio carved out of this western land. Yellows, oranges, and reds had been long ago stripped from the trees, nipped by frosts, turned by the crawl of time toward winter, hurried on their way before every gust of the season’s winds. Everything smelled of dank decay and humus, coated with ice and frost.

And then the sky unleashed itself, beginning to fling down a sharp, needling sleet borne on the back of a twisting, thrashing gale.

Titus gulped the last of the coffee in the bottom of his tin cup and turned on the rough bench to pull on a second pair of moccasins, dragging them over the first he had tied over his thickest pair of woolen stockings. Not without their holes and worn fabric, they nonetheless still climbed to his knees. And they would simply have to do. Like the rest of what little he had plopped beside the table where he hunkered with the rest of the crew finishing their hearty breakfast of hominy and great slabs of bacon, as well as
baskets filled with biscuits and plenty of steaming coffee. Here in the Kangaroo other rivermen tied up at the wharf were beginning to show up for a hearty meal. But they would have to do without this choicest of tables near the fireplace, where Ebenezer Zane stuffed the other four who would that morning dare the Great Falls of the Ohio with him.

“Looks to be you’re still dead set on killing yourself, Ebenezer,” one of the other pilots growled as he came up to the table, wagging his head.

“Plan on getting my boat all the way down to New Orleans before the devil even knows I’ve cleared out of Louisville,” Zane replied. “Have some coffee, John.”

The boatman took the offered cup, cradling it in both hands just under his nose, soaking in the steamy warmth and aroma. After that first sip he said, “Looks like snow out there.”

“I’d just as soon it did,” Hames Kingsbury commented.

Zane nodded. “Better that than the ice I fear most.”

“It’s froze to everything,” Heman Ovatt said. “Hard for a man to lock on to the gouger. Even an oar. Everything coated thick with ice, Ebenezer.”

“Nothing what can’t be chipped away.” Zane glanced at a wide-eyed Titus for a flicker of a moment, then said, “Snow’s fine by me.”

The boatman looked up from his coffee and replied, “You nary was one to be afeared of that river, Ebenezer. Afeared of what it could do to your boat.”

“No sense in being afeared now.”

“Times we wondered if you was born with any sense at all,” the older pilot commented with a snort. When he looked around over the rim of his cup and found no smiles among the others, he quickly sank back into his tin.

Other rivermen continued to crowd in as the minutes passed, some hobbling over from the tavern side, where they might well have slept off their liquor sprawled on a table or crumpled under a bench, perhaps lumbering in from one of the barmaids’ beds, most hurrying up from the wharf, where they had sought shelter aboard their flatboats bobbing in the crowded harbor while the white, icy
arrow points had begun to lance out of the gray sky. At least half of those who entered the Kangaroo came over to make some greeting to Ebenezer Zane, more still to give their farewell—having heard the news that the pilot was pushing off downriver this nasty, forbidding day.