George Martin - Fevre Dream

York nodded, seemingly satisfied. “I am going to change, and bother Toby for a meal, and then go on up to the pilot house to learn more of your river. Who has the after-watch tonight?”

“Mister Framm,” said Marsh.

“Good,” York said. “Karl is very entertaining.”

“That he is,” replied Marsh. “Excuse me, Joshua. Got to get down below and see to things, if we’re goin’ to get underway tonight.” He turned abruptly and left the cabin. But outside, in the heat of the night, Abner Marsh leaned heavily on his walking stick and stared off into the star-flecked darkness, trying to summon up the thing he thought he’d seen across the cabin.

If only his eyes were better. If only York had lit both oil lamps, instead of just one. If only he had dared to walk closer. It had been hard to make out, all the way over there on the chest of drawers. But Marsh couldn’t get it out of his mind. The cloth on which York had been wiping his hands had stains on it. Dark stains. Reddish.

And they’d looked too damn much like blood.

Aboard the Steamer Fevre Dream, Mississippi River, August 1857

Day after tedious day slipped by as the Fevre Dream crept down the Mississippi.

A fleet steamer could run from St. Louis to New Orleans and back in twenty-eight days or so, even allowing for intermediate stops and landings, for a week or more at wharfside loading or unloading, and for a reasonable amount of bad weather. But at the pace the Fevre Dream was keeping, it was going to take them a month just to reach New Orleans. It seemed to Abner Marsh as if the weather, the river, and Joshua York were all conspiring to slow him down. Fog lay over the water for two days, thick and gray as soiled cotton; Dan Albright ran through it for some six hours, cautiously steering the steamer into solid, shifting walls of mist that faded and gave way before her, leaving Marsh a mass of nerves. Had it been up to him, they would have laid up the moment the fog closed in rather than risk the Fevre Dream, but out on the river it was the pilot who decided such things, not the captain, and Albright pressed on. Finally, though, the mists grew too thick even for him, and they lost a day and a half at a landing near Memphis, watching the brown water rush past and tug at them, and listening to distant splashes in the fog. Once a raft came by, a fire burning on its deck, and they heard the raftsmen calling out to them, vague faint cries that echoed over the river before the gray swallowed raft and sound both.

When the fog had finally lifted enough so that Karl Framm judged it safe to try the river again, they steamed for less than an hour before coming up hard on a bar as Framm tried to run an uncertain cutoff and save some time. Deckhands and firemen and roustabouts spilled ashore, with Hairy Mike supervising, and walked the steamer over, but it took more than three hours, and afterward they crept along slow, with Albright out ahead in the yawl, taking soundings. Finally they got clear of the cutoff and into good water again, but that was not the end of their troubles. There was a thunderstorm three days later, and more than once the Fevre Dream had to take the long way around a bend in the river because of snags or low water in the chutes or cutoffs, or move along slow, paddles barely turning, while the sounding yawl edged out ahead with the off-duty pilot and an officer and a picked crew to drop lead and call back the news: “Quarter twain,” or “Quarter less three,” or “Mark three.” The nights were black and overcast when they weren’t foggy; if the steamer ran at all, she ran carefully, at quarter speed or less, with no smoking allowed up in the pilot house and all the windows below carefully curtained and shuttered so the boat gave off no light and the steersman could more easily see the river. The banks were pitch and desolate those nights, and moved around like restless corpses, shifting here and there so a man couldn’t easily make out where the deep water ran, or even where water ended and land began. The river ran dark as sin, with no moonlight or stars upon it. Some nights it was hard even to spy the nighthawk, the device partway up the flagpole by which pilots gauged their marks. But Framm and Albright, different as they were, were both lightning pilots, and they kept the Fevre Dream moving when it was possible to move at all. The times when they tied up were times when nothing moved on the river, except rafts and logs, and a handful of flatboats and small steamers that didn’t hardly draw nothing at all.

Joshua York helped them along; each night he was up in the pilot house to stand his watch like a proper cub. “I told him right off that a night like that weren’t no good,” Framm said to Marsh once over dinner. “I couldn’t learn him marks that I couldn’t rightly see myself, could I? Well, that man’s got the damndest eyes for the darkness I ever seen. There’s times I swear he’s seein’ right into the water, and it ain’t nothin’ to him how black it gets. I keep him by me and tell him the marks, and nine times out of ten he sees ’em before I do. Last night I think I would have tied her up halfway through the dog watch, but for Joshua.”

But York delayed the steamer as well. Six additional landings were made on his order, at Greenville and at two smaller towns and at a private wharf in Tennessee and twice at woodyards. Twice he was gone all night. At Memphis York had no business ashore, but elsewhere he dragged out their layovers intolerably. When they put in at Helena he was gone overnight, and at Napoleon he held them up three days, him and Simon, doing God knows what off by themselves. Vicksburg was even worse; there they idled four nights away before Joshua York finally returned to the Fevre Dream.

The day they steamed out of Memphis, the sunset was especially pretty. A few lingering wisps of mist took on an orange glow, and the clouds in the west turned a vivid, fiery red, until the sky itself seemed aflame. But Abner Marsh, standing alone up on the texas deck, had eyes only for the river. No other steamers were in sight. The water ahead of them was calm; here the wind sent up a series of ripples, and there the current flowed around the wicked black limbs of a fallen tree jutting out from the shore, but mostly the old devil was placid. And as the sun went down, the muddy water took on a reddish tinge, a tinge that grew and spread and darkened until it seemed as if the Fevre Dream moved upon a flowing river of blood. Then the sun vanished behind the trees and the clouds, and slowly the blood darkened, going brown as blood does when it dries, and finally black, dead black, black as the grave. Marsh watched the last crimson eddies vanish. No stars came out that night. He went down to supper with blood on his mind.

Days had passed since New Madrid, and Abner Marsh had done nothing, said nothing. But he had done a considerable amount of thinking about what he had seen, or what he hadn’t seen, in Joshua’s cabin. He couldn’t be sure he had seen anything, of course. Besides, what if he had? Perhaps Joshua had cut himself in the woods… though Marsh had looked closely at York’s hands the following night, and had seen no signs of a cut or scab. Perhaps he had butchered an animal, or defended himself against thieves; a dozen good reasons presented themselves, but all fell before the simple fact of Joshua’s silence. If York had nothing to hide, why was he so damn secretive? The more Abner Marsh thought on that, the less he liked it.

Marsh had seen blood before, plenty of it; fistfights and canings, duels and shootings. The river ran down into slave country, and blood flowed easily there for those whose skin was black. The free states weren’t much better. Marsh had been in bleeding Kansas for a time, had seen men burned and shot. He had served in the Illinois militia when he was younger, and had fought in the Black Hawk War. He still dreamt at times of the Battle of Bad Axe, when they’d cut down Black Hawk’s people, women and children too, as they tried to cross the Mississippi to the safety of the western shore. That had been a bloody day, but needed; Black Hawk had come a-warring and a-raiding over to Illinois, after all.