Fevre Dream (36 page)

“What does the whistle sound like?”

“ ’Zactly like a man screaming,” said Karl Framm.

“What’s her name agin?” a young pilot asked.

“Ozymandias,”
said Framm. He knew how to say it right.

“What does that mean?”

Abner Marsh stood up. “It’s from a poem,” he said.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

The party crowd looked at him blankly, and one fat lady laughed a nervous, tittering sort of laugh. “There are curses and worse things on that old devil river,” a short clerk started in. While he was talking, Marsh took Karl Framm by the arm and drew him outside.

“Why the hell did you tell that story?” Marsh demanded.

“To make them afraid,” said Framm. “So if they see her, some damned night, they’ll have the sense to run.”

Abner Marsh considered that, and finally gave a reluctant nod. “I suppose it’s alright. You called her by Sour Billy’s name. If you’d said
Fevre Dream,
Mister Framm, I would have twisted your goddamned head off right then and there. You hear me?”

Framm heard, but it didn’t matter. The story was out, for good or for ill. Marsh heard a garbled version of it from another man’s lips a month later, while he was dining in the Planters’ House, and twice more that winter. The story got changed some in the telling, of course, even to the name of the black steamboat.
Ozymandias
was too strange and too hard for most of the tellers, it seemed. But no matter what they named the boat, it was the same damned story.

A little over half a year later, Marsh heard another story, one that changed his life.

He had just sat down to dinner in a small St. Louis hotel, cheaper than the Planters’ House and the Southern, but with good food. It was less popular with rivermen as well, which suited Marsh fine. His old friends and rivals looked at him queer in recent years, or avoided him as unlucky, or just wanted to sit down and talk about his misfortunes, and Marsh had no patience with any of that. He preferred to be left alone. That day in 186o he was sitting there peacefully, drinking a glass of wine and waiting for the waiter to fetch out the roasted duck and yams and snap beans and hot bread he’d ordered, when he got interrupted. “Ain’t seen you in a year,” the man said. Marsh recognized him vaguely. The man had been a striker on the
A.L. Shotwell
a few years back. Grudgingly, he invited him to sit. “Don’t mind if I do,” the ex-striker said, and immediately pulled out a chair and commenced to gabbing. He was a second engineer on some New Orleans boat Marsh had never heard of, and full of gossip and river news. Marsh listened politely, wondering when his food would show up. He hadn’t eaten all day.

The duck had just arrived, and Marsh was spreading butter over a chunk of good hot bread, when the engineer said, “Say, you heard ’bout that windstorm down to N’Orleans?”

Marsh chewed on his bread, swallowed, took another bite. “No,” he said, not very interested. Isolated as he’d been, he didn’t hear much talk of floods and windstorms and other like calamities.

The man whistled through a gap in his yellow teeth. “Hell, it was a bad’un. A bunch of boats tore loose and got busted up good.
Eclipse
was one of ’em. Smashed her up pretty bad, I hear.”

Marsh swallowed his bread and put down the knife and fork he’d lifted to attack the duck. “The
Eclipse,
”he said.

“Yessuh.”

“How bad?” Marsh asked. “Cap’n Sturgeon’ll fix her up, won’t he?”

“Hell, she’s too busted up for that,” the engineer said. “I heard they’ll use what’s left as a wharfboat, up to Memphis.”

“A wharfboat,” Marsh repeated numbly, thinking of those tired old gray hulls that lined the landings in St. Louis and New Orleans and the other big river towns, boats gutted of engines and boilers, empty shells used only for stowing and transferring freight. “She ain’t . . . she’s . . .”

“Me, I figger that’s bout what she deserves,” the man said. “Hell, we would of beaten her with the
Shotwell,
only . . .”

Marsh made a strangled growling sound deep in his throat.
“Get the hell out of here,”
he roared. “If you weren’t a
Shotwell
man I’d kick your goddamned ass out in the street for what you just said. Now get out of here!”

The engineer got up real quickly. “You’re crazy as they say,” he blurted before he left.

Abner Marsh sat at that table for the longest time, his food untouched in front of him, staring off at nothing, a grim cold look settling over his face. Finally a waiter approached timidly. “Is somethin’ wrong with yo’ duck, Cap’n?”

Marsh looked down. The duck had gotten a little cold. Grease was starting to congeal around it. “I ain’t hungry no more,” he said. He pushed away the plate, paid his bill, and left.

He spent the following week going over his ledger books, adding up his debts. Then he called in Karl Framm. “It ain’t no goddamn use,” Marsh said to him. “She’ll never run against the
Eclipse
now, even if we find her, which we won’t. I’m tired of lookin’. I’m taking the
Reynolds
into the Missouri trade, Karl. I got to make some money.”

Framm stared at him accusingly. “I’m not licensed for the Missouri.”

“I know. I’m lettin’ you go. You deserve a better boat than the
Reynolds
anyway.”

Karl Framm sucked on his pipe and said nothing. Marsh could not look him in the eye. He shuffled some papers. “I’ll pay you all the wages due you,” he said.

Framm nodded and turned to go. At the door he stopped. “If I get a berth,” he said, “I’ll keep lookin’. If I find her, you’ll hear.”

“You won’t find her,” Marsh said bluntly. Then Framm closed the door and walked off his steamer and out of his life, and Abner Marsh was as alone as he had ever been. Now there was nobody left but him, nobody who remembered the
Fevre Dream
or Joshua’s white suit or the hell that beckoned behind Damon Julian’s eyes. Now it only lived because Marsh remembered, and Marsh was aiming to forget.

The years passed.

The
Eli Reynolds
made money in the Missouri trade. For almost a year she ran there, and Marsh captained her and sweated with her and tended to his freight and his passengers and his ledger books. He made enough in his first two trips to pay off three-quarters of his considerable debts. He might have grown rich, had not events in the larger world conspired against him: Lincoln’s election (Marsh voted for him, despite the fact that he was a Republican), the secession, the firing on Fort Sumter. Marsh thought of Joshua York’s words as the carnage approached:
the red thirst is on this nation, and only blood will sate it.

It took a great deal of blood, Marsh reflected afterward, bitterly. He seldom spoke about the war, or his experiences in it, and had little patience with those who fought the battles over and over again. “There was a war,” he would say loudly. “We won. Now it’s done with, and I don’t see why we got to yammer about it endlessly, like it was something to be proud of. Only good thing come out of it was endin’ slavery. The rest I got no use for. Shooting a man ain’t nothin’ to build a brag on, goddammit.” Marsh and the
Eli Reynolds
returned to the upper Mississippi during the early years of the fighting, bringing troops down from St. Paul and Wisconsin and Iowa. Later on, he served on a Union gunboat, and saw action in a couple of river battles.

Karl Framm fought on the river, too. Marsh heard that he died in the fighting at Vicksburg, but he never knew for sure.

When peace came, Marsh returned to St. Louis, and took the
Eli Reynolds
into the upper Mississippi trade. He formed a brief association with the owner/captains of four rival boats, setting up a packet line with regular schedules to compete more effectively with the larger companies that ruled the upper river. But they were all strong-willed, stubborn men, and after a half year of quarrels and bluster the company was dissolved. By that time Abner Marsh found he had no appetite for the steamboat business anymore. The river had changed, somehow. After the war, there didn’t seem to be a third as many steamers as there had been before it, yet the competition was fiercer, since the railroads were taking up more and more of the trade. Now when you steamed into St. Louis, you found maybe a dozen steamers along the levee, where once they had been crammed in for more than a mile. There were other changes as well, in those years following the war. Coal began to crowd out wood just about everywhere except on the wilder reaches of the Missouri. Federal regulators moved in with rules and laws that had to be followed, safety checks and registers and all manner of stuff, and even tried to prohibit racing. The steamboatmen changed too. Most of the men Marsh had known were dead or retired now, and those who took their places were strangers with strange ways. The old boisterous, cussing, free-spending, wild riverman who slapped you on the back, bought you drinks all night, and told you outrageous lies was a dying breed now. Even Natchez-under-the-hill was only a ghost of its former self, Marsh heard, nearly as sedate as the city on top of the hill with all its proper mansions with their fancy names.

One night in May of 1868, more than ten years after he had last seen Joshua York and the
Fevre Dream
, Abner Marsh took a walk along the levee. He thought back on the night when he and Joshua had first met, and walked along this same landing—the steamers had been crowded in then, great proud big side-wheelers and tough little stern-wheelers, old boats and new ones, and the
Eclipse
had been there among them, tied up to her wharfboat. Now the
Eclipse
had become a wharfboat herself, and there were boys on this river who called themselves strikers and mud-clerks and cub pilots who had never laid eyes on her. And the landing was nearly empty. Marsh stood and counted. Five boats. Six, if you counted the
Eli Reynolds
. The
Reynolds
was so old now that Marsh was half-afraid to take her out on the river. She must be the oldest damn steamboat in the world, he thought, with the oldest captain, and him and her were both just as tired.

The
Great Republic
was taking on freight. She was a huge new side-wheeler that had come out of some Pittsburgh boatyard the year before. They said she was 335 feet long, which made her the biggest steamer on the river now that the
Eclipse
and the
Fevre Dream
were both gone and forgotten. She was grand, too. Marsh had looked her over a dozen times, and gone aboard her once. Her pilot house was surrounded with all kinds of fancy trim and had an ornate cupola on top of it, and the paintings and glass and polished wood and carpets inside her were enough to break your heart. She was supposed to be the finest, prettiest steamboat ever built, luxurious enough to put all the older boats to shame. But she wasn’t especially fast, Marsh had heard, and she was said to be losing money at a frightening rate. He stood with his arms folded against his chest, looking gruff and stern in his severe black coat, and he watched the roustabouts load her up. The rousters were black, every man among them. That was another change. All the roustabouts on the river were blacks now. The immigrants who’d worked as rousters and stokers and deckers before the war were gone, Marsh didn’t know where, and the freedmen had taken their places.

As they worked, the rousters sung. Their song was a low, melancholy chant.
The night is dark, the day is long,
it went.
And we are far from home. Weep, my brothers, weep.
Marsh knew the chant. There was another verse, one that went,
The night is past, the long day done, And we are going home. Shout, my brothers, shout.
But they were not singing that verse. Not tonight, here on the empty steamer landing, loading up a boat that was spanking new and plush as any but still couldn’t get enough trade. Watching them, listening, it seemed to Abner Marsh as if the whole river was dying, and him with it. He had seen enough dark nights and long days for the rest of his time on earth, and he was no longer certain he even had a home.

Abner Marsh walked slowly away from the landing back to his hotel. The next day he discharged his officers and crew, dissolved Fevre River Packets, and put the
Eli Reynolds
up for sale.

Marsh took what money he had, left St. Louis entirely, and bought a small house in his old hometown, Galena, within sight of the river. Only it wasn’t the Fevre River any more. They’d gone and changed it to the Galena River, years ago, and now everyone was calling it that. The new name had better associations, folks said. Abner Marsh went on calling it the Fevre, like it was called when he was a boy.

He didn’t do much in Galena. He read a lot of newspapers. That had gotten to be a habit with him, during the years he was searching for Joshua, and he liked to keep up with the fast boats and their times. There were still a few of them. The
Robert E. Lee
had come out of New Albany in 1866, and was a real heller. The
Wild Bob Lee,
some rivermen called her, or just the
Bad Bob
. And Cap’n Tom Leathers, as tough and mean and cussed a riverman as ever captained a steamer, had launched a new
Natchez
in 1869, the sixth of that name. Leathers named all his steamboats
Natchez
. The new
Natchez
was faster than any of the earlier ones, according to the papers. She cut through the water like a knife, and Leathers was bragging all up and down the river how he was going to show up Cap’n John Cannon and his
Wild Bob Lee
. The newspapers were full of it. He could smell a race coming on even clear up in Illinois, and it sounded like one they’d talk about for years. “I’d like to see that goddamned race,” he said to the woman he’d hired to clean house for him one day. “Neither of ’em would have a chance against the
Eclipse,
though, you got my word on that.”

“Both of ’em got better times than your ol’
Eclipse,
”she said. She liked to sass him, that woman.

Marsh snorted. “Don’t mean nothin’. River’s shorter now. River gets shorter every year. Pretty soon you’ll be able to walk from St. Louis to New Orleans.”