George Martin - Fevre Dream

For the first two hours, they made good time, past Warrenton and Hard Times and Grand Gulf. Three or four larger steamers passed them up, but that was to be expected; the Eli Reynolds wasn’t built for racing. Abner Marsh was satisfied enough with her progress so that he took himself below for thirty minutes, long enough to check and clean his gun and make sure it was loaded, and eat a quick breakfast of hotcakes and blueberries and fried eggs. Between St. Joseph and Rodney, the sky began to overcast, which Marsh didn’t like one bit. A short time later, a small storm broke over the river, not enough thunder nor lightning nor rain to hurt a fly, Marsh thought, but the pilot respected it enough to keep them tied up for a hour at a woodyard, while Marsh prowled the boat restlessly. Framm or Albright would have just pushed on through the weather, but you couldn’t expect to get a lightnin’ pilot on a boat like this. The rain was cold and gray. When it finally ended, however, there was a nice rainbow in the sky, which Marsh liked quite a lot, and still more than enough time to reach Natchez before dark.

Fifteen minutes after casting off again, the Eli Reynolds fetched up hard against a sandbar.

It was a stupid, frustrating mistake. The young pilot, barely past being a cub, had tried to make up some lost time by running an uncertain cutoff instead of staying with the main channel, which made a wide bend to the east. A month or two back it might have been a slick bit of piloting, but now the river stage was too low, even for a steamer drawing as little as the Eli Reynolds.

Abner Marsh swore and fumed and stomped about angrily, especially when it became clear that they couldn’t back her clear of the bar. Cat Grove and his men fetched out the winches and grasshopper poles and set to. It rained on them a couple times, just to make things more difficult, but four-and-a-half wet, weary hours later, the pilot started the stern wheel up again and the Eli Reynolds wrenched herself forward with a spray of mud and sand, shaking like she was about to fall to pieces. And then she was afloat. Her whistle blew in triumph.

They crept along the cutoff cautiously for another half-hour, but once they regained the river, the current took hold of them and the Reynolds picked up speed. She shot downriver smoking and rattling like the very devil, but there was no way to make up the time she’d lost.

Abner Marsh was sitting on the faded yellow couch in the pilot house when they first glimpsed the city, up ahead on its bluffs. He set down his coffee cup on top of the big pot-bellied stove and stood behind the pilot, who was busy making a crossing. Marsh paid him no mind; his eyes were on the distant landing, where twenty or more steamers were nuzzling up against Natchez-under-the-hill.

She was there, as he had known she’d be.

Marsh knew her right off. She was the biggest boat on the landing, and stuck out a good fifty feet beyond her nearest rival, and her stacks were tallest, too. As the Eli Reynolds drew nearer, Marsh saw that they hadn’t changed her much. She was still mostly blue and white and silver, though they’d painted her wheelhouses a tawdry bright red, like the lips of a Natchez whore. Her name was spelled out in yellow lettering curved around the side of the paddlebox, crudely; OZYMANDIAS, it said. Marsh scowled. “See the big one there?” he said to the pilot, pointing. “You put us close to her as you can, you hear?”

“Yessuh, Cap’n.”

Marsh looked at the town ahead with distaste. Already the shadows were growing in the streets, and the river waters wore the scarlet and gold tinge of sunset. It was cloudy too, too damn cloudy. They had lost too much time at the woodyard and the cutoff, he thought, and sunset came a lot earlier in October than in summer.

Captain Yoerger had entered the pilot house and moved to his side, and now he put words to Marsh’s thoughts. “You can’t go tonight, Cap’n Marsh. It’s too late. It will be dark in less than an hour. Wait till tomorrow.”

“What kind of damned fool you take me for?” Marsh said. “Course I’ll wait. I made that damn mistake once, I ain’t makin’ it again.” He stamped his walking stick hard against the deck in frustration. Yoerger started to say something else, but Marsh wasn’t listening. He was still studying the big side-wheeler by the landing. “Hell,” he said suddenly.

“What’s wrong?”

Marsh pointed with his hickory stick. “Smoke,” he said. “Damn them, they got her steam up! She must be leavin’.”

“Don’t be rash,” Yoerger cautioned. “If she leaves, she leaves, but we’ll catch up to her somewhere else downriver.”

“They must run her by night,” Marsh said, “tie up during the day. I should have figured that.” He turned to the pilot. “Mister Norman,” he said, “don’t you land after all. Keep goin’ downstream and put in at the first woodyard you see, wait till that boat there passes you by. Then follow her, well as you can. She’s a hell of a lot faster’n the Reynolds, so don’t you worry if she loses you, just keep on downriver as close behind her as you can.”

“Whatever you say, Cap’n,” the pilot replied. He swung the worn wooden wheel hand over hand, and the Eli Reynolds turned her head abruptly and began to angle back out into the channel.

They had been at the woodyard for ninety minutes, and it had been full night for at least twenty, when the Fevre Dream came steaming past. Marsh shivered when he saw her approach. The huge side-wheeler moved downriver with a terrible liquid grace, a quiet smoothness that reminded him somehow of Damon Julian and the way he walked. She was half-dark. The main deck glowed a faint reddish-pink from the fires of her furnaces, but only a few of the cabin windows on the boiler deck were lit up, and the texas was entirely black, as was the pilot house. Marsh thought he could see a solitary figure up there, standing at the wheel, but she was too far off to be sure. The moon and stars shone pale on her white paint and silver trim, and the red wheelhouses looked obscene. As she passed by, another steamer’s lights appeared way downstream, ascending toward her, and they called out to one another in the night. Marsh would have known her whistle anywhere, he thought, but now it seemed to him that it had a cold and mournful sound to it that he had never heard before, a melancholy wail that spoke of pain and despair.

“Keep your distance,” he said to his pilot, “but follow her.” A deckhand cast off the rope holding them to the woodyard’s snubbing post, and the Eli Reynolds swallowed a mess of tar and pine-knots and snorted out into the river after her larger, wayward cousin. A minute or two later, the stranger steamer ascending toward Natchez crossed the Fevre Dream and steamed toward them, sounding a deep three-toned blast on her whistle. The Reynolds answered, but her call sounded so thin and weak compared to the Fevre Dream ’s wild shrill that it filled Marsh with unease.

He had expected that the Fevre Dream would outdistance them within minutes, but it did not turn out that way. The Eli Reynolds steamed downstream in her wake for two solid hours. She lost the bigger boat a half-dozen times around river bends, but always caught sight of her again within minutes. The distance between the two steamboats widened, but so gradually that it was hardly worth mentioning. “We’re runnin’ full out, or near it,” Marsh said to Captain Yoerger, “but they’re just loafin’. Unless they turn up the Red River, I reckon they’ll stop at Bayou Sara. That’s where we’ll catch ’em.” He smiled. “Fittin’, ain’t it?”

With eighteen big boilers to heat and a lot of boat to move, the Fevre Dream ate up a lot more wood than her small shadow. She stopped to wood up several times, and each time the Eli Reynolds crept up on her a bit, although Marsh was careful to have his pilot slow to quarter-speed so as not to catch the side-wheeler while she was taking on wood. The Reynolds herself stopped once to load up her neary-empty main deck with twenty cords of fresh-cut beech, and when she pushed back out into the river the lights of the Fevre Dream had receded to a vague reddish blur on the black waters ahead. But Marsh ordered a barrel of lard chucked into the furnace, and the burst of heat and steam soon made up most of the lost distance.