13

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.

From that point on it didn’t take him long to start sensing the whiskey’s effects as the tip of his nose steadily grew more numb and felt for all the world like it was swelling as large as a hog’s snout right there on the front of his face.

Mysterious thing about what he had been swilling down—the more he drank, the more beautiful that plump and fleshy half-dressed consort became.

It took a while as he sat there drinking, but that gunboat whore finally realized the youngest customer there that night at Annie Christmas’s was giving her all his attention from across the small windowless parlor that fronted a half-dozen tiny cribs. In all, the parlor and those six cribs took up the entire length of a flatboat salvaged after its owner had been murdered in one of the many uninvestigated, unsolved, unquestioned killings that seemed to be an everyday staple of life “Under-the-Hill.” It was seventy feet by eighteen feet of floating pleasure palace. No music save for the incessant humming and singing performed by the tall, bald-headed slave Annie kept behind the short, stinking bar. Patrons and the working girls had few tables to set their drinks upon, and only two chairs dressed the whole parlor. Everyone else had to satisfy themselves squatting on some soiled, grass-filled tick pillows covered in muslin or nankeen sheeting. There didn’t appear to be a single one that hadn’t recently seen a drunken customer pitch the contents of his stomach onto it, and a few even bore significant splotches of blood Annie’s girls had failed to bleach before the stains set.

At long last she returned to the parlor to find Titus still willing to stare at her. Taking up a clay mug for herself, she came to stand over him. “How old are you, honey?”

He looked up into her big, round, expressive eyes staring into his as if she were about to hang on his every word because what he had to say was sure to be the most important news of that day. When she smiled he saw where the whore was missing three of those teeth squarely behind the middle of her lower lip. And for a moment he sat there transfixed, dumbfounded, wondering how it was going to be kissing that mouth, what with that big gap in her teeth that made her look much older than he supposed her to be.

There at the corner of the parlor, his head was beginning to swim crazily. He watched her kneel, coming so close, he had to pull his head back, blink and strain to keep her in focus, the way she became two whores when he wasn’t concentrating.

“You hear me, sonny? Ain’cha gonna tell me how old are you?”

“Eight … eighteen.”

When he started to giggle at how funny that seemed right then, she turned arid motioned to the bartender, who wore a black Barcelona hat atop his smooth skull. “Hezekiah, get me and my young friend here another drink. Double up on mine ’cause it appears he’s a long way ahead of me.”

“Him paying, Miz Nina?”

Twisting about to shoot the muscular barman her most evil glare, she said, “You ain’t the idjit you make out to be, Hezekiah—so you best just get me my rum!”

“Eighteen’s what I said,” Titus repeated, and struggled to keep from laughing at his untruth this time.

“You ain’t eighteen, honey,” she cooed, running one beefy finger down the front of his shirt, “no more’n I’m the lily-white virgin you been waiting for on your wedding night,” then laid her hand on the inside of his thigh.

It grew warm where her palm pressed, those fat fingers kneading his leg ever so gently. He looked up when the canvas portal parted, two men coming in from the rainy deck, each one of them ducking out of the way of one of the many candle lanterns suspended from the canvas roof’s cross beam. Stopping at the bar, they hunched over, whispering low to Hezekiah. As the Negro bartender clanged down a pair of tin cups and began to pour a potent libation from a large wicker-wrapped clay jug, Titus turned his foggy attention back to the whore … for now she had her hand firmly in position to get all of his attention.

Don’t you dare fall asleep with one of them whores!

Recalling that warning was enough to scare himself: Titus seized her plump wrist, gripped it firmly.

“What you doing, honey?” she demanded in a coarse voice. “I was just getting ready to start pleasuring you.”

“No … no, you can’t—”

“We only gotta get you up and head on back to my crib—take off all your shucks so you can hump on top of me like I feel your young poker getting ready to,” she declared without preliminaries.

He didn’t move, staring instead at the deep crevice between her heavy breasts about to pour right out of that soiled chintz dressing gown she wore, its gay flowers dull and faded with too much use and too little soap. everything about her was big, fleshy, overflowing. He looked more closely, noticing the scratches and teeth marks, moles and freckles, that marred the white skin rounded across the top half of those breasts.

“I’ll bet you’re the kind just needs to put his face right into ’em,” she said, suddenly reaching behind his head and pulling him into her cleavage.

Soft as it was, as foul smelling as was her unwashed flesh, Bass drank in the pleasure of his predicament as if her earthy stench were sweet perfume. Feeling himself stir all the more beneath the hand she kept moving between his legs.

“Don’t wanna sleep,” he grumbled, reminding himself—becoming groggy with the growing numbness of the whiskey.

“Shit, honey—I ain’t gonna let you sleep.” She lapped at his ear, then slowly got to her feet, pulling him up beside her. “You’re gonna be thumping Miss Nina: the biggest, roundest whore in all of Natchez. Like Annie says: there’s more of me to pleasure a man than all the rest of ’em put together.”

When she bent over to retrieve her cup, one of Nina’s breasts spilled out of the dressing gown. Instead of taking care to cover herself immediately, she drained the rum from her cup, then stuffed her breast back beneath the loose folds of chintz.

Bass looked down into his own cup, saw his own dim reflection in what little of the tobacco-colored whiskey remained at the bottom. Then he turned it up and swallowed the last of the burning potion.

“You seventeen, boy?” she asked, nudging him away through the smoke, noise, raucous laughter, and the tangle of legs of those sprawled across the floor pillows. “For sure you ain’t eighteen.”

“Almost seventeen,” he admitted, glad to have her big arm to hold on to.

Nina stopped and whirled on him. “Almost seventeen! You sixteen years old, you li’l river tramp?”

He held a finger to his lips and hushed, “Shhhh! Don’t tell nobody how old I be.”

“Shit, no,” Nina replied with sarcasm. “We don’t want no one thinking bad of you for lying ’bout your age, now—what with all your other bad habits. So tell me, child—you got money for a poke with Nina?”

“I got me a piggy-yune,” he replied, slurring the word.

The whore held out her hand. “If you gimme your picayune, I’ll make sure this’ll be a night you don’t ever forget.”

“Just can’t sleep it off with you,” he repeated, stuffing a hand inside his oiled jerkin to produce the three coins.

In the blink of his bleary eye she snatched them away, stuffed them into that deep cleavage straining against the folds of her dressing gown.

“Say, Nina!”

She turned, with Bass clinging to her arm so he wouldn’t fall. He came tottering to a stop, his head wobbling, trying to focus on the two newcomers at the bar.

One of the pair asked, “When you gonna be done with tender britches there?”

“Soon enough. You jest be patient, Will. Won’t have to wait long.”

“Make quick work of him so you and me can have us a poke.”

Nina didn’t say another word as she wheeled Bass about, leading him down a narrow hallway formed by sheets of canvas hanging from the oak cross beams overhead. Off to the right sat three cribs. Off to the left, the other trio of cribs. He thought he could hear an impassioned grunt from behind one of the canvas walls rising in crescendo as the two of them shuffled toward the end of the flatboat. By the time they pushed past the canvas door flap into her crib, the hard rain was slacking off. Using one candle she kept lit, Nina lit two more. In the dim light Bass could see his breath, squinting cross-eyed at it while the vapors danced before his face. Concentrating on it as hard as he was, Titus bent, and bent some more, and almost keeled over to the side. From the next crib he heard a familiar voice growl.

“I ain’t giving you no money yet, you whore! First I lay, then I pay!”

Wobbly, feeling his stomach suddenly lurch, Bass put out his hand to keep himself from falling and stumbled against the canvas wall separating Nina’s from that adjoining crib.

“Hey! Watch it there!”

Titus was sure now that he recognized the voice. He stuck his face right up to the wall and hollered in reply, “That you, Ovatt?”

“No—dammit! It’s Root! Leave that wall be!”

Laughing easily with the sudden flush of companionship, he identified himself. “It’s me, Titus!”

“Good for you, Titus,” Root bellowed. “Now, just get on with what you’re about and leave me to my honey-daubin’.”

“Just don’t you go falling asleep with that whore, Reuben!” Titus replied every bit as sternly as he had been told, then giggled as Nina came over to him to begin pulling off his jerkin.

She guided him over to her pallet on the floor all of the three steps it took to get Titus there, then nudged him backward. On his back, head dizzied, he sensed her pulling at his wet moccasins, then the bottoms of his canvas britches. His head felt lighter and lighter, as if it might just screw itself off his shoulders and go floating right up through the low roof he fixed with a stare as he fought down the rising intimidation of his troubled stomach.

Just about the time he felt her cold, fleshy hands wrap around his penis, Bass tried rolling onto an elbow, growling, “I’m gonna be sick.”

She flew off him so fast he was amazed, struck at the way she moved for being so large. Nina reached over, snatching up the chamber pot that sat nearby, and stuffed its fragrant opening right under his face. It was there she held his head as he screwed up his face at the horrendous stench that filled his face and mouth. Titus emptied his stomach in one explosive lurch.

“That’s a good boy,” she cooed to him, running her fat, oily fingers over his forehead. “You just go ’head and fill that up if’n you need to.”

His belly knotted up another half-dozen tries at wrenching itself free from its moorings in his gut, and then he was done. As he rocked uncertainly atop that single elbow, Nina took the chamber pot to set it in the corner, turned, and got back down on her knees over him, her hands wrapping around his softening flesh once more.

He looked up at her and smiled, gradually collapsing backward while the world slowly went warm and black.

Unable to part the blackness that enveloped him like a suffocating hood, Titus instead let his head hang as he shuffled blindly beside the one who was dragging him along, lunging forward beside him a step at a time. As much as he wanted to wake up, he couldn’t. For all he knew, the big whore was dragging him off—maybe it was even one of those who had hollered at her from the bar a while back. They’d get him to the other side of the flatboat, away from the wharf, stab him—then throw his body into the harbor.

He wouldn’t be able to swim—wasn’t all that good at it anyway. Hell, he wasn’t even walking for himself right now, getting pulled along as he was. And if they pushed him into the Mississippi, he was bound to die. Sober, he might well fight his way through most any water if he had to. But not like this. Titus knew he’d sink like a boundary stone, struggling only a little before he sank all the way to the bottom of the river—unable to stroke and paddle. Hell, he couldn’t even open his eyes!

It was still black. As black as it would be on the bottom of the river where these killers hid the bodies of the men they robbed. They stumbled over something. A man grunted. Then Bass was wheeled suddenly, his shirt ripping.

If he was lucky, Titus thought, they’d slit his throat first, maybe shoot him in the head. No, they wouldn’t do that. Too much noise. Just slit his throat, and then he’d never reach St. Louis to see if Levi Gamble had made it there last summer.

“What the hell business is it of yours?”

He felt the rumble of angry speech in the chest of the man who held him against his side.

“That’s my friend you got there.”

Titus wondered about that. Who was this friend of the one who slung him around again and took a few steps back toward the far voice? Sounded just like Root’s.

“I seen you afore, ain’t I?” the one holding him growled.

“Maybeso,” the far voice said. “S’pose you put that boy down and come on over here in the light. Then you can take a good look at me.”

The one carrying him lurched forward another step, then stopped. “Say, now—lookee there. Just what you got in mind to do with that big sticker, you ugly son of a bitch?”

“Told you, put that boy down.”

“He a friend of yours? Whyn’t you say so in the first place?”

His senses all firmly dulled, Bass nonetheless felt his body flung toward the far voice, tumbling, colliding with a man who tried to step out of his way as Titus hurtled past, limp arms and legs akimbo. When he struck the hard-planked floor, it was with enough force that his eyes blinked open in shock at the sudden blow.

Above him for a long moment he watched a candle lantern sway precariously, its dirty-yellow corona swishing this way and that above the two shadows grappling between the two dark walls at his feet. Then he remembered: this was the narrow canvas hallway strung between the half-dozen cribs. The grunting pair rolled through the foot of one of the walls, gouging at eyes and pulling at hair for all they were worth.

Within that invaded crib a woman’s falsetto shriek rose above a man’s low, angry curse as the combatants tumbled back from the canvas wall, rolling toward Bass.

He blinked, wanting to see, make sense of it all, slowly clawing his hands up the canvas wall, pulling himself to his bare feet.

One of them was yelling names, sprawling atop the downed man, holding his opponent with one strong hand gripping the throat and the other raised above his head in a cruel fist. But the other arched his back violently, unseating his enemy to immediately begin hollering out for help of his own. Names that, though muffled in his foggy mind, snagged a familiar chord within Bass:

“Ovatt! Kingsbury!”

Titus knew them. Ungainly, he lunged forward a step, stood there wobbling, ready to take another when the voice ordered him:

“Back off or I’ll gut you like I done a hunnert afore you!”

Bass pitched to his hands and knees again.

“Christ a’mighty, they’re gonna kill the boy!”

Someone was behind him as suddenly as he tried to pull himself up once more. Whoever it was grabbed hold of Titus, tearing his old shirt nearly off his shoulders as they dragged him aside and lunged past him into the fray. Now he wasn’t sure how many there were as another kicked him aside and hurtled into that heap of grunting, cursing bodies … when the whole mass of them reversed direction in a blur, wheeling over him in cries of pain and gasps of exertion, that great roiling beast of many arms and legs careening this time toward the parlor, where women shouted and screamed in hysterics.

In that distance wrought of fog and the spiderweb of time distortion made sticky by his drunken stupor, Bass heard clay shattering—its aftermath echoed by the high-pitched, feral screech of a man’s voice—sounds of some frightened, cornered animal. More and more hard body blows delivered against muscles and bone, each like a maul cracking against the tough, tight grain of newly felled hickory. At each blow came an accompanying grunt of pain.

Then the sudden, blinding flare of a muzzle flash, brightening the whole of that end of the parlor where the first pair of cribs began. Someone screamed, and a body crashed through the canvas siding with a great ripping of coarse cloth. The man scrambled and attempted to rise—but sank slowly back, crumpling to the floor.

Root’s voice thundered down upon him, “Watchit! That bitch’s got a gun!”

Lurching to his knees, Bass felt his head complain, blood throbbing against one temple, then the other, side to side like Mississippi trashwood adrift inside his skull—battering this temple with shrill pain before tumbling for the other. He grew thirsty immediately: his mouth tasted as if he’d been sucking on the bitter contents of a hog’s gallbladder as he tried to speak, desperate for the attention of the shadows lumbering back and forth before him.

“I’ll slit your throat, whore—you don’t drop that gun of your’n!” Kingsbury threatened with a snarl.

Gazing up, with all his strength struggling to focus on the lunging shapes of lamplit shadows, he found them: Annie Christmas—all six feet eight inches of her—swinging a big horse pistol about, clutched in both hands, that skinny Hames Kingsbury clinging to her back like a tick on an ox, his wiry arms locked around hers as she careened past Titus, headed wildly toward the mahogany bar, and toppled against the wall behind it. As she came closer, all Titus could think to do was to lash out with his feet. He tripped Annie, the pistol flying into the dark as she pitched forward against the bar, toppling it against the wall behind with a crash and clatter of glass and clay and tin.

Kingsbury stuck to her like a cocklebur as they landed in a tangle. With a grunt she lay still beneath the boatman, groaning.

As those two had landed, Titus’s wide, fleshy whore burst from the shadows to straddle Kingsbury, starting to pummel the sides of his head with her big, soft fists. Back and forth Nina rocked the river pilot as Bass painfully dragged his legs under him, put his hands out to steady himself, and laid one atop something round. Bringing it up before his eyes for all of a heartbeat, not consciously recognizing what it was. Yet in some dim, primal way realizing he held in his hands Kingsbury’s fate.

Unsteadily Bass rocked backward, his head feeling like a burlap bag loosely filled with a load of stream-washed rocks. Righting himself, he rose to one leg. Closing one eye seemed to help him keep the fat whore in focus as he shakily got to his feet and careened forward, his hand swinging that leg busted from one of the broken chairs back and forth before him. Over his head he raised it, then brought the leg down across the woman’s shoulders. Time and again he struck her on the back, with no effect but that she turned and cursed him, trying unsuccessfully to grab him with her left hand.

“You li’l pissant!” she screamed, fending off the chair leg with one fleshy arm while she choked Kingsbury beneath the other. “I’ll cut your no-good pizzer off when I’m done here!”

In that instant he hated the mocking cruelty in her eyes, the angry curl to the folds of skin around her mouth. And struck out at them blindly, sneaking in beneath her arm to lay the hardwood leg against the whore’s cheekbone with a smart crack. Her face immediately opened up in a long, dark line that spurted a glistening spray over the yellowish lamp-lit paleness of her skin. He dragged the lathe-turned hardwood leg back behind his head for another blow.

Spitting blood from the corner of her mouth, her eyes became even more menacing as she turned on him, rising from Kingsbury’s body. “Now I’m gonna chop your balls off and feed ’em to you while I cut your heart out!”

As she was lumbering to her feet, he swung, connecting with the top of her skull just above the ear. Nina’s head snapped to the side, she rocked unsteadily, stunned as Bass brought the chair leg to his left and swung it back at her head with even more force. She growled at him, both her arms held out in his direction, hands opening and closing like claws before her eyes began to glaze. A third blow—this time driving it under her chin. Blood darkened her lips as her eyes half closed. Nina weaved atop Kingsbury, both arms still outstretched to grab at the youngster, fingers clutching, releasing, clutching again, with nothing caught between them but the smoky air.

Bringing the chair leg over his head, Titus brought it down on Nina’s skull as her eyes rolled all the way back, their sockets showing nothing but whites. With a loud snap her neck popped backward, and she toppled her great bulk into a heap beside the river pilot, like a forest slug spilling off the stem of some ground ivy.

Trudging forward one step, then another, Bass wobbled over to her, holding the chair leg high all the time, suspended there as he stared blearily at the whore sprawled on the floor … when the room erupted again with women’s screams.

One of them screeched right in his ear, “You killed Nina!” just as she landed on his back and they both went down in a heap against the overturned bar.

At their feet Kingsbury clambered slowly to all fours, gasping for breath, dragging it in noisily, labored and wheezing, as would a drowning boatman who was just pulled from certain death beneath a turbulent river. Hames pulled his knife as he came up, clutching one arm against his side with a pasty grimace.

“Get off him!” Kingsbury ordered.

Immediately the whore riding Titus’s back stopped pummeling Bass with her fists, whirled, and lunged for Kingsbury, baring her teeth like a fighting dog’s. As she flung herself at the river pilot, the whore fell against the long blade of his belt knife—stumbled suddenly with eyes wide, her mouth moving without a sound—then stared down at his hands gripping that knife pressed into her belly, up to the hilt.

With a grunt of great exertion, Kingsbury dragged the blade to the side, splattering the youth beneath him with the whore’s warm blood, then quickly snapped his head forward, cracking it against the woman’s forehead smartly. She lurched back, only then pulling herself off the knife blade as the front of her dirty dressing gown darkened like the underbelly of a thunderstorm.

“Let’s get!” Root hollered.

As the dying whore crumpled beside him, Bass turned slowly, numbed, to find Reuben holding down the Negro bartender, a knife at his throat. The slave’s white eyes muled angrily as he glared up at the boatman, his great coffee-colored hands spread in surrender, but his face bearing nothing but undisguised scorn for the victor. Backing slowly away before he inched the blade from the glistening black skin of that muscular neck, Root finally straightened as Heman Ovatt limped over, having held a pistol on two of the women through the last minutes of their whorehouse fight. Kingsbury hobbled up beside Reuben, half-bent at the waist, his left arm wrapped around his middle as he wheezed in pain with each shallow breath.

“Get up,” the pilot ordered Bass, his voice strangely hollow. It reminded Titus of how a person might sound if cast down a well. Hames turned to Ovatt and Root as they all three surveyed the scene. “Any of you know who them two was?”

With a nod Heman answered, “Think I seen ’em afore, yeah.”

“I thought so—first they came in here tonight,” Kingsbury replied, pointing at the white man’s body sprawled half in the parlor, half in the narrow hallway. “They was on the crew what took Mathilda to their boat last summer.”

“I cain’t be sure as you, Hames,” Reuben said as they stood huddled together, their eyes moving over the scene of blood and death, tattered furniture and broken clayware. “You two was what seen ’em in the Kangaroo afore Ebenezer took off on his own to break Mathilda loose.”

“I’m sure of it,” Kingsbury answered quietly, stonily. “They come in here tonight, looking us over—I got more sure of it. Can only be the two Ebenezer said jumped the boat afore he kill’t them other two.”

“All that over a whore,” Root moaned, wagging his head as he kept the knife held on the big slave. “And now this—with some more goddamned whores.”

“There’ll be others comin’ soon,” Ovatt warned.

“You best take me to the boat,” Kingsbury said as Root dragged Titus to his feet.

Ovatt asked, “You hurt bad?”

“Dunno,” and Hames swallowed down some pain that grayed his face even more. “Just get me there now!”

“What we gonna do with these whores?” Root asked.

“Take ’em up back there in them cribs. Have ’em tie each other up and gag ’em,” Kingsbury snapped, his eyes clenched fiercely. “Just do it quick—dunno how long I can stay on my feet like this.”

Bass and Ovatt did just that. While the pilot and Reuben held a pair of Annie Christmas’s big horse pistols on the whimpering prostitutes and that big, bald-headed bartender, Titus and Heman tore dressing gowns and petticoats into strips they forced the whores into tying around ankles and wrists, as well as knotting a tight gag around each mouth.

“Get outta here ’fore I shoot you!” Kingsbury snarled.

Bass poked his head out of a crib to find two men standing at the door flap. Their eyes flew around the parlor’s clutter, then back to that pair of wide muzzles Kingsbury and Root held pointed at them—before the pair turned and fled like frightened quail, bellowing like gored hogs.

“The fat’s in the fire now,” Root grumbled as the other two emerged from the cribs.

“Don’t worry ’bout gagging her now,” Kingsbury said, pointing his pistol at Annie Christmas, who, for the last few minutes, had been unleashing her wrath on her slave-bartender. “Just get that son of a bitch tied—every last damned body Under-the-Hill gonna be crawling over here in a shake of a bear’s tail. We gotta get when he’s tied down.”

“Where?”

Kingsbury glared at Ovatt. “You idjit! Back to our goddamned boat!”

“With them sonsabitches atween us and the boat—all of ’em coming this way to see what the ruckus is?” Root asked in a high pitch.

Titus didn’t know how the idea ignited in his mind of a sudden, but it was there—with a certainty that startled him. Something so sure and surprising, it damn near frightened him.

“We can make it back through the woods,” Titus suggested in a whisper so none of the whores would hear. When Annie Christmas stopped cursing the barman, Bass was frightened. Root held up one of the pistols, and the gunboat madam backed off while Titus looked at the Negro bartender, finding fear in the man’s yellow eyes. He immediately turned his black face away, then stared down at his hands bound in whorehouse rags.

“Bass got him a fine idea,” Kingsbury whispered, wheeling about to shove Ovatt ahead of him with a jab of his elbow. “Go! Go!”

Shivering in the shreds of his torn shirt, Titus stood there a moment in the wake of the others as they ducked out to the deck. Root stopped at the canvas flaps, whirled about, and leaned back in to snag Titus by the arm—hauling him right out to what there was of deck between the brothel’s canvas wall and the gunnel’s grayed wood.

“You’re leading us, god-blessit!” Root growled, back to his normal ill-tempered self.

As Titus vaulted off the gunboat and landed on the wharf beside the others, Kingsbury pressed his face in close, staring intently at Bass’s eyes, flicking his gaze back and forth. “Know where you’re headed?”

Titus pointed.

Nodding, the pilot asked, “Your head clear enough to get us through that timber and away from any crowds?”

“Like them what’s coming now?” Ovatt announced in a shrill voice.

They turned, gazing north along the crude wharf where the low rows of clapboard card houses and grogshops lay clustered. Two hundred yards off danced the flare of at least a dozen torches held high above a considerable knot of boisterous men. From the crowd came loud voices, noise without the words. Little matter: only a deaf and blind man would fail to understand the intent of that murderous crowd moving their way.

“Take us to the timber, Titus Bass!” Kingsbury hissed in agony, shoving the youngster ahead of him into that narrow patch of shadow between a pair of weathered buildings, each of those shanties about to lean its shoulder against the other as they slowly sank into disrepair with each new year.

Bass drew up at the back of the shacks, peered into the dark. Immediately behind the short streets that branched off the main thoroughfare stretched along the wharf, thick timber rose against the pale bluff. Without signaling the men behind him, Titus darted from the shadows of that alley, making for the shadows of the trees. Once he was beneath their cover, he waited for them all to catch up. Kingsbury was the last, hobbling up, gasping, clutching his side, his pasty face beaded in sweat.

“You gonna make it, Hames?” Root asked, wrapping an arm around the pilot’s shoulder.

Kingsbury looked up, his eyes narrowing. “We allays have us some scrap or another coming downriver, don’t we, Reuben?”

“I s’pose we do.”

“Good you remember that,” Hames replied. “I don’t want neither of you go blaming Titus Bass for the trouble been dogging us this trip.”

Ovatt and Root glanced at the youth a moment. Then both of them shook their heads.

“Only thing I wanna do is get you back to the boat,” Heman declared.

“And get us the hell out of Natchez,” Root added.

“Maybe things cool down by the time we get back here again come next summer,” Kingsbury told them. Then with a thin-lipped nod he instructed Titus to lead on.

Bass swore his heart was going to leap out of his chest or pop right out of his mouth, the way it made his head pound, when they hadn’t gone all that far and he had to shush them. They all knelt back in the timbered shadows when the frantic jig of torchlight drew close—splashes of light dancing just on the far side of the low-roofed shanties. More frightening still was the sound of that mob: snarling, snapping, its quest for blood like a living thing that snaked along the wharf, headed for Annie Christmas’s gunboat. It reminded Titus of how he’d once watched a cottonmouth eat a field gopher, the dying prey slowly drawn along the length of the snake’s scaly body.

As the mob thundered into the distance, they moved on into the welcome darkness. For now the four of them had a little time. Not much. But it might just be enough.

As he reached the side of the flatboat, Bass watched the woman sit up like a shadow suddenly taking shape out of the night. Her dark form stood, pulling that ratty old blanket about her shoulders. She stepped to the side when he stopped at the gunnel, able to make out the red glow of embers and low flames she had shielded behind her.

“You fellas home earlier’n I figured you—”

“Help us get Hames aboard, ma’am,” Reuben demanded.

Immediately crawling over the crates, she held down both her hands, the blanket falling from her shoulders. Rearing back, she pulled with all her might as Ovatt and Root hoisted the wounded pilot from the wharf, his body dragged against the side of the flatboat and onto the gunnel, where Kingsbury lay gasping, groaning.

“You shot?” she asked.

He clamped down on his lower lip and shook his head, eyes moistening.

“They cut you?”

“No,” he huffed, perhaps the pain easing.

“Your side?”

When he nodded, she carefully lifted his left arm braced against his belly. “I do believe they broke your ribs,” the woman declared. “How many, we’ll just have to find out.”

“Ain’t got time for none of that now,” Ovatt snarled at her as he pushed past. “I’ll take the rudder, fellas. Reuben, get them hawsers freed so we can push off.”

She watched the two move off in different directions, then turned to look at Kingsbury once more before she snagged hold of Titus’s jerkin.

“What happened out there tonight?”

“I don’t know,” he answered sheepishly, hungover already. As if his very own mother had caught him at something wicked and now he was about to pay the high price for having his fun. “I was drunk. I dunno—”

“We’re leaving for Nawlins,” Kingsbury announced, sprawled beneath them. “You ain’t got folks to stay with here, ma’am—”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then you got one choice or another,” and the pilot visibly sagged with the effort the talk took out of him.

So she spoke up while he gathered his breath. “I can jump off this here boat and take my chances till I can get a way north on the Trace,” Beulah declared. “Or—I can throw in with you fellas all the way to Orlins.”

The pilot swiped the back of a hand across his bloodied mouth and replied, “That’s only choices you got.”

“We’re free!” Root cried, flinging the last hawser across the gunnel, then slinging himself aboard.

“Push us off, you two!” Ovatt bellowed. “Give him a goddamned hand, Titus!”

“I ain’t rightly got but one choice,” the woman said quietly as Titus started to move off, snatching up one of the long snag poles.

Bass stopped, turned to hear what she said so very quietly as Beulah knelt beside their wounded pilot.

“You fellas picked me out of the river. You give me a ride on your boat when every last one of you ’cept that young’un believed in all your hearts what bad luck it was to have a woman on your boat—”

“I ain’t … none of us blaming you for this,” Kingsbury interrupted, then coughed soddenly.

“Damn,” she said with a sad wag of her head. “Sounds of it: bet you gone and poked one of them ribs right through your lights.”

Kingsbury turned his head to glance at the wharf Root was pushing his pole against with a loud growl. As he heaved against his long hardwood pole, Bass noticed the flare of the torches bobbing in the distance, this time headed back upriver. In their direction.

The pilot rolled toward Beulah slightly, warning, “This be your last chance to jump off, woman.”

With a shake of her head she nearly whispered, “And if I do jump off—just who the hell gonna take care of you men?”

“He ain’t getting any better, is he?” Titus asked.

The woman looked up from the feverish, unconscious Kingsbury, then wagged her head. “Nothing more I can do. It ain’t in my hands no more.”

If it wasn’t in her skilled, sure hands, Titus wondered—then in whose hands did the life of Hames Kingsbury lie? It troubled him that the woman expected him to understand her … when he had no earthly idea who might hold the power to save the man.

First off, he lost Ebenezer Zane. Now another man clung tenuously to life. No matter that he had people around him at this moment, Titus had rarely felt so alone.

He raised his eyes from the pilot’s pale, clammy face, looking at Root manning the gouger, turning to gaze again at Ovatt stationed at the stern rudder.

“It’s good water from here on down,” Heman had told him earlier that morning as the sun came up milk-pale in a cold sky. “I could get this broadhorn down to Nawlins, steering it on my lonesome, if’n I had to. Easy enough, though there’s cypress swamp what can fool a man if he don’t keep his nose locked in the main channel. But don’t you fret none, Titus. I’ll holler when I need you on one oar or t’other.”

Many, many night fires this crew of four had told him how they’d worked the rivers together for more than a decade, without much bloodletting at all: a few fights, a few knife cuts sewn up with the same thread they used to repair their clothing, mostly a lot of good-natured head thumping in the midst of one hell of a lot of work. As much as there had been Indian scares in years past, they had never caused much more than an anxious moment or two for Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen—nothing more than threats from a far bank now and again.

But what with that old pilot resting among the mud and catfish and sawyers at the bottom of the Mississippi, Heman Ovatt was beginning to think things had changed for the worse. And what was usually nothing more than some bruises and perhaps a broken bone now and then whenever they tied up for a frolic at Louisville’s red-candle district, Natchez-Under-the-Hill, or even the Swamp in New Orleans—now their raucous brawling had turned deadly. For no reason they could figure out.

Except that it just might have to do with settling an old score with Ebenezer Zane.

Kingsbury coughed in his sleep. Bass sensed the pilot slipping away from him too.

Hames had passed out about the time they were pushing free of the wharf, with that mob drawing ever closer below those bouncing torches, their discordant voices looming louder out of the dark. One of that drunken lot had spotted them making for the main channel of the river, shrieked his warning to the others, and a great cry of frustration and disappointment had gone up. More than a handful of that rabble had yanked pistols from their belts and fired at the southbound flatboat. Only one bullet had smacked against their craft, crashing noisily into a cask holding ironmongery. The clatter had made Bass jump there at the gunnel while the woman bent over Kingsbury protectively and the other two men hurried them away from Natchez.

For some time Ovatt and Root were convinced others would put up a chase, board some canoes or a pirogue and come slipping up after them. Overhead the stars in the Big Bear slowly slipped away from the middle of the sky and fell into the west as Titus fought a great weariness. He drank cup after cup of the woman’s coffee sweetened with thumb-sized clumps of homemade cake sugar there beside the sandbox fire and watched Root stoically wince with pain each time he had to lean against the long rudder handle to keep them in the running channel.

By now Heman had a dirty bandage wrapped round his head. One eye was nearly puffed shut, yet he gladly took his place at the gouger when he and Reuben spelled one another, rotating pilot’s chores at the stern rudder through that long night. Once more Natchez-Under-the-Hill had lived up to its rough-and-tumble, life-is-by-damn-cheap reputation.

Long after sundown the night following the fight at Annie Christmas’s gunboat brothel, Reuben Root admitted they had to put over and tie up just past Fort Adams, which stood on Loftus’s Heights at the thirty-first parallel, the southernmost military post erected on American soil in those days prior to Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana Territory.

“The river shrinks down here some,” Reuben explained after he and Ovatt secured to the exposed roots of some cypress trees. “Don’t run no wider’n two hunnert fifty … maybe three hunnert yards at the most. On downriver tomorrow we’ll pass Wilkinsonville—named after the army general what wanted to be king his own self over all that out there.” Heman swept an arm across the darkening western horizon.

Not so bad a dream, Bass figured as he slipped off the jerkin and removed what tatters were left of his old shirt. Bending over the tiny bundle of his belongings, he unwrapped the shirt his mam had finished for Thaddeus the night before Titus had slipped away. Ever since he had refused to wear it—feeling it to be ill-gotten, as if he had stolen that yoked shirt with its square arm holes, but now as he slipped it over his head—Bass sensed his mam just might have left it lying out on the table as she had because she knew her eldest son was taking his leave. Them biscuits and this new warm shirt: it was the best way she knew how to tell him good-bye without embarrassing him with a mother’s tears. Slowly he brushed his hand down the front of it after he got the shirt tucked into his britches.

And felt the sudden stirring of homesickness that did not leave him for the better part of a day.

By the time they approached Pointe Coupee the following morning, Root could hardly move his left shoulder. Close inspection by Beulah discovered the boatman’s shirt crusted to his back, right over the shoulder blade. Once she coaxed and coddled Reuben into sitting near the fire and sent Titus up to man the gouger, the woman clucked her disapproval as she slowly dripped warm water on the coagulate to free the shirt from a nasty knife wound.

“You’re a brave man, Reuben Root,” she told him loud enough for all to hear. “Plenty brave … and mighty stupid.”

When he started to rise in anger, she snagged hold of the back of his shirt and held tight—making him wince in pain as he settled back atop a low crate in a huff.

“Ain’t nothin’,” he grumbled. “Had worse.”

“Have you, now?” she replied in that tone guaranteed to make any man feel like a scolded child. “Ever you need someone to sew on you?”

Wheeling on her, his face blanched. “No. Allays kept my cuts bound up with—”

“You’re gonna need me sew on this’un. That much’s for sure, Reuben.”

“W-we don’t got us needle an’ thread,” Root said, smiling lamely. “S’pose you can’t do no sewin’—”

“Ebenezer allays keeps him some stout linen thread and some glover’s needles down in a chest there,” Ovatt reported from the rudder with a much wider, and more genuine, smile. “Never know when you’ll get your canvas tore.”

Wagging his head in utter disgust while glaring at Heman, Reuben spat, “You mean-assed, mule-headed son of a bitch! Why, one day I’ll make sure—”

“Beulah says you need some sewin’,” Ovatt interrupted calmly, “so we’ll see you get sewed up. Time for you be having your fillee.”

“Fillee, hell!” he roared impudently. “This woman gonna sew on me, I’ll damn well drink my fill!”

Reuben promptly set about drinking much more than his boatman’s ration of Monongahela rye—a fillee—and then some. Putting the backwoods liquor down on a stomach gone more than a day without food, and sedating a constitution having gone close to forty-eight hours without sleep—it wasn’t long before Root slid in and out of consciousness enough for Beulah to announce that she might as well get to sewing.

Just south of Pointe Coupee, Heman put over, and Titus struggled before he got them tied off to the roots of a single great cypress. As the boat rubbed and chafed, timber against timber, Bass and Ovatt ducked beneath the awning where the sandbox fire always kept the air at least ten degrees warmer, there to join the woman, who took the knife from Root’s belt and cut herself a length of fine linen cord. One end of this she placed between her teeth, soaking it with the moisture in her mouth before she began to peel back the tiny strands that formed the twisted cord. When she had one strand the thickness she desired for the job at hand, she peeled it from the rest of the cord and threaded her sharp three-sided glover’s needle.

Raising her eyes momentarily to Bass, she ordered, “Pour some more of that Monongahela into his cup.”

Sitting at Root’s head, Ovatt said, “Don’t figure you need to, Beulah—looks to be Reuben ain’t gonna be awake to want no more. He’s snoring through the rough water already.”

“I didn’t mean I wanted any for him to drink,” she replied curtly. “I want you to pour some on that there nasty cut afore I start.”

Holding the threaded needle in her mouth, she once more took the boatman’s knife in hand, raised her long skirt, and this time sliced through the long hem of a dirty petticoat. “Tug his shirt out’n his britches for me, fellas. Pull it way up on his shoulders.”

Heman and Titus did as they were instructed, both of them silent as sandbars and wide-eyed as deaf mules in a high wind, watching her every move as she dribbled a little of the rye along the crusty open wound. Taking an end to the strip of petticoat, she kneaded away a little of the coagulate. Time and again she dipped the cloth into the liquor and scrubbed at the neglected wound until the entire length of the angry gash lay raw and shiny with fresh ooze.

“Wish to God I had my medeecins,” she grumbled to herself as she knotted the linen thread, then looked at Titus. “A body can’t rightly do without some medeecins when folks need tending.”

Wincing involuntarily, Bass watched her poke the needle through the right side of the laceration, continuing over to the left side before she pulled the thread through the flaps of flesh. Reuben grunted and his eyes fluttered a few times, but he never stirred.

“Take hol’t of his arms there,” she said to Ovatt. Then turned her head to tell Titus, “An’ you, son—sit on his legs. There, like that. Just in case he decides to wake up and get in a fittle over this sewing I’ve got to do on him.”

Tugging against the knot as if to assure herself that it would hold, the woman clucked once and drove the needle through the skin a second time. Wrap by wrap she worked herself down the eight long inches of severely torn muscle. Each time Beulah pulled her thread tight, she would dab more of the fiery alcohol on the laceration as it continued to ooze and seep bright-red blood.

“That’s good,” she told them as she neared the last of her labors. “Better that it bleed. Gets all the evil out, seeing how we ain’t got no roots to put in it. My medeecins”—and Beulah bit her lip to stifle a sob—“all that I had in this world went down with that goddamned flatboat.”

Her curse struck Titus as something foreign, never having heard a woman of her age hint at profanity, much less take God’s name in vain. After all that she had said about Kingsbury’s life resting in the Almighty’s hand—he thought it strange indeed that she would pray to God one day and soundly curse Him the very next.

“Don’t look at me so odd, boy,” she commanded. “Close your mouth, or you’re likely to have something crawl right in it with more legs’n a Chickasaw war party.”

Knotting the linen thread, she cut off the excess and returned the bloody-handled knife to Root’s belt scabbard. Then she slowly poured the last of the rye from the cup up and down the wound, washing away some of the dark ooze one last time.

Handing the empty cup to Titus, she said, “Now, wipe that cup out and get me some more likker.”

When Bass turned to the side to use Root’s shirttail to wipe at the crimson coated inside of the cup, Ovatt asked, “You gonna put more of that Monongahela on your sewing job?”

“Hell, no,” she said. “I aim to drink my share, now that he’s done and Kingsbury over there seems like’n he’s turned the last bad bend in the river.”

As she took the cup from him, a frightened Titus asked, “You mean he ain’t … not likely to make it much longer?”

Swallowing long and slow with her eyes closed, the woman finally took the cup away and licked her lips, then swiped a sleeve across her mouth. “Didn’t mean nothing of the kind. Damn, but it’s been a long time since I felt that particular burn down in my gut.”

“Just what the hell you mean, then?” Ovatt demanded.

She looked offended, then peered down at her cup a moment more before answering. “Near as I can tell, fellas—looks like your pilot there is gonna be up and around soon.”

“He’s … he’s gonna pull through?” Bass demanded, feeling the tingle of hope coursing through all the bleakness of what had been his despair these last few days.

“His color’s lot better, the last little while, and he ain’t breathing near like he was. No more choking and gurgling a’tall. I do believe Hames Kingsbury’s gonna make it.”

“Whooeee!” Ovatt cried out, reaching out both arms to embrace the older woman, who sat there stunned by the boatman’s sudden affection.

When Heman took his arms from her, Titus leaned forward and clumsily hugged her, whispering in her ear, “Thankee, ma’am. For all you done … for the both of ’em.” And just before he released her, Bass kissed her lightly on the cheek.

As he pulled away from her, an astonished Beulah brushed her fingertips across her cheek, gazing at the youth wistfully. “T’weren’t nothing I wouldn’t done for nary boatman.”

“We had you with us, likely Ebenezer Zane be alive today,” Titus said.

Taking his hand in hers, she patted it maternally and wagged her head. “Ain’t nothing in this world gonna save a man what got his head caved in with a Chickasaw rock war club.”

“She’s right, Titus,” Ovatt agreed as he pulled his collar up and rose from the bench to move past Root toward the bow. “I see it’s time we got on down to Nawlins. Get on up there and get them hawsers heaved to on that capstan. We got us a boatload of cargo and these two ailing boatmen to get on downriver.”

The thick hemp ropes nearly filled his hands in their own right as he struggled with his knots against the nudge of the current, but they were soon moving south once more, through the last of that myriad of false channels and swamps just below Pointe Coupee, where Lower Louisiana began. Here long ago the French had begun construction of a great levee, that work later taken up by the Spanish in their own attempt to prevent seasonal flooding of the rich agricultural lands of the lower Mississippi Valley.

“You see that,” Ovatt called out, pointing at the levees on the eastern shore, “a riverman knows it ain’t far now till he’s with more and more folks. All this here stretch is called the German Coast.”

In his own crude way Heman had just expressed the riverboatman’s term for the civilization that began to dot the banks once he’d passed the northern end of the levee: behind its protection sat plantations, many small and quaint villages inhabited by the friendliest of French-speaking Louisianans. Here in the flooded fields they grew sugarcane and rice, along with cotton and one huge orange grove after another, many trees still heavy with fruit. A wondrous sight for young Titus to behold. Many of the inhabitants along the German Coast came to the riverbank to wave at the passing flatboat. Ovatt, Root, and Bass waved back in salute to the friendly riverfolk working their fields and orchards. And at the sight of every likely young maiden, the three all stood tall, boasting of their manhood while lustily crying out their claims of true love to her.

In three more days Kingsbury was able to sit up and take more sustenance than grease soup. They floated past Baton Rouge, the site of an abandoned Spanish fort and a small village still peopled by Acadians. From there south they were never out of sight of one small settlement, cluster of fishing boats, trading post, or fine, palatial plantation after another.

“I’m gonna get myself a drink of some real liquor,” Beulah said one afternoon as she came up and settled on a cask near Titus at the gouger. Root and Ovatt both sat near the stern rudder, singing one of their riverman songs to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”

Titus asked, “What’s real liquor taste like?”

She regarded him a moment in that afternoon light as a warming breeze crossed the bow. Then, peering off again to the south, the woman answered, “I allays get me a bottle of long-cork claret. Have every trip down. Figure it’s only fitting I should drink a final toast to Jameson. Only right.”

“Drink a toast? Of course—to your dead husband,” Bass replied.

“He damn well better appreciate it,” she said with a ghost of a smile, reaching out to slap Titus on the knee. “First time I made it to Norleans without him!”