George Martin - Fevre Dream

The blood that might or might not have been on Joshua’s hands was different, somehow. It left Marsh uneasy, disquieted.

Still, he reminded himself, he had made a bargain. A bargain was a bargain to Abner Marsh, and a man was bound to keep those he made, whether good or bad, whether with a preacher or a sharper or the devil hisself. Joshua York had mentioned having enemies, Marsh recalled, and a man’s dealings with his enemies were his own business. York had been fair enough with Marsh.

So he reasoned, and tried to put the whole matter from his mind.

But the Mississippi turned to blood, and there was bleeding in his dreams as well. Aboard the Fevre Dream, the mood began to grow bored and somber. A striker got careless and was scalded by the steam, and had to be set ashore at Napoleon. A roustabout ran off at Vicksburg, which was crazy, it being slave country and him a free colored man. Fights broke out among the deck passengers. It was the boredom and the thick, suffocating wet heat of August, Jeffers told him. Trash gets crazy when it gets hot, Hairy Mike echoed. Abner Marsh wasn’t so sure. It seemed almost like they were being punished.

Missouri and Tennessee vanished behind them, and Marsh fretted. Cities and towns and woodyards drifted by, days turned into tortuously slow weeks, and they lost passengers and cargo because of York’s layovers. Marsh went ashore, into saloons and hotels popular with steamboatmen, and listened, and didn’t like the gab he heard about his boat. For all her boilers, one story ran, the Fevre Dream was built too big and heavy, and wasn’t very fast at all. Engine trouble, another rumor claimed; seams near to bursting on the boilers. That was bad talk; boiler explosions were greatly feared. A mate from some New Orleans boat told Marsh in Vicksburg that the Fevre Dream looked sweet enough, but her captain was just some no-count upper-river man who didn’t have the courage to run her full out. Marsh nearly broke open his head. There was talk about York as well, him and his queer friends and their ways. The Fevre Dream was starting to get herself a reputation, sure enough, but it was not one that Abner Marsh was over-partial to.

By the time they came steaming into Natchez, Marsh had had quite enough.

It was an hour shy of dusk when they first sighted Natchez in the distance, a few lights burning already in the ruddy afternoon, shadows lengthening from the west. It had been a fine day, but for the heat; they’d made their best time since leaving Cairo. The river had a golden sheen to it, and the sun shimmered upon it like a burnished brass ornament, gaudy as all get-out, rippling and dancing when the wind breathed upon the water. Marsh had taken to bed that afternoon, feeling a bit under the weather, but he got himself out of the cabin when he heard the whistle shriek, in answer to the call of another steamer that came high and sweet over the water. They were talking to each other, Marsh knew, an ascending and a descending boat deciding which would pass to the right and which to the left when they met. It happened a dozen times each day. But there was something in the voice of the other boat that called to him, dragged him from his sweaty sheets, and he came out of the texas just in time to see her pass; the Eclipse, swift and haughty, the gilded device between her chimneys glittering in the sun, her passengers thick on her decks, smoke rolling and tumbling from her. Marsh watched her recede upriver until only her smoke could be seen, a strange tightness in his gut all the while.

When the Eclipse had faded like a dream fades in the morning, Marsh turned, and there was Natchez up ahead of them. He heard the bells sounding the signal for a landing, and their whistle called again.

A tangle of steamers crowded the landing, and beyond them two cities waited for the Fevre Dream. Up on its lofty, precipitous bluffs was Natchez-on-the-hill, the proper city, with its broad streets, its trees and flowers, and all its grand houses. Each one had a name. Monmouth. Linden. Auburn. Ravenna. Concord and Belfast and Windy Hill. The Burn. Marsh had been in Natchez a half-dozen times in his younger days, before he’d had steamers of his own, and he had made it a point to go walking up there and see all those storied houses. They were goddamned palaces, every one of them, and Marsh didn’t feel quite comfortable there. The old families who lived inside them acted like kings, too; aloof and arrogant, drinking their mint juleps and their sherry cobblers, icing their damned wine, amusing themselves by racing their highbred horses and hunting bears, dueling with revolvers and bowie knives over the slightest trifling affront. The nabobs, Marsh had heard them called. They were a fine lot, and every goddamned one of them seemed to be a colonel. Sometimes they showed up on the landing, and then you had to invite them aboard your steamboat for cigars and drinks, no matter how they behaved.

But they were a curiously blind bunch. From their great houses on the bluffs, the nabobs looked out over the shining majesty of the river, but somehow they couldn’t see the things that were right underneath them.

For beneath the mansions, between the river and the bluffs, was another city: Natchez-under-the-hill. No marble columns stood there, and there were precious few flowers either. The streets were mud and dust. Brothels clustered round the steamer landing and lined Silver Street, or what was left of it. Much of the street had caved into the river twenty years ago, and the walks that remained were half-sunken and lined with tawdry women and dangerous, cold-eyed, foppish young men. Main Street was all saloons and billiard rooms and gambling halls, and each night the city below the city steamed and seethed. Brawls and brags and blood, crooked poker and Spanish burials, whores who’d do most anything and men who’d grin at you and take your purse and slit your throat in the bargain, that was Natchez-under-the-hill. Whiskey and flesh and cards, red lights and raucous song and watered gin, that was the way of it by the river. Steamboatmen loved and hated Natchez-under-the-hill and its milling population of cheap women and cutthroats and gamblers and free blacks and mulattoes, even though the older men swore that the city under the bluffs today wasn’t nothing near as wild as it had been forty years back, or even before the tornado that God had sent to clean it out in 1840. Marsh didn’t know about that; it was wild enough for him and he’d spent several memorable nights there, years ago. But this time he had a bad feeling about it.

Briefly Marsh entertained a notion to pass it by, to climb on up to the pilot house and tell Albright to keep on going. But they had passengers to land, freight to unload, and the crew would be looking forward to a night in fabled Natchez, so Marsh did nothing for all his misgivings. The Fevre Dream steamed in, and was made fast for the night. They quieted her down, damped her steam and let the fires die in her guts, and then her crew spilled from her like blood from an open wound. A few of them paused on the landing to buy frozen creams or fruit from the black peddlers with their carts, but most streamed right down Silver Street toward the hot bright lights.

Abner Marsh lingered on the texas porch until the stars began to peer out. Song came drifting over the water from the windows of the brothels, but it did not lighten his mood. At last Joshua York opened his cabin door and stepped out into the night. “You goin’ ashore, Joshua?” Marsh asked him.

York smiled coolly. “Yes, Abner.”

“How long will you be gone this time?”

Joshua York gave an elegant shrug. “I cannot say. I will return as soon as I can. Wait for me.”

“I’d sooner go with you, Joshua,” Marsh said. “That’s Natchez out there. Natchez-under-the-hill. It’s a rough place. We might be waitin’ here a month, while you lay in some gutter with your throat cut. Let me come with you, show you around. I’m a riverman. You ain’t.”