Fevre Dream Read online

  “Never mind about that,” Marsh said. The news heartened him somewhat. If Julian and his pack had taken over Marsh’s steamer, at least some of his crew had gotten clear. “Who was here?”

  “Why, I saw Jack Ely, the second engineer, and some waiters, and a couple of your strikers—Sam Kline and Sam Thompson, it was. There was a few others.”

  “Any of them still around?”

  Green shrugged. “When I didn’t hire ’em, they went looking around to other boats, Cap’n. I don’t know.”

  “Damn,” Marsh said.

  “Wait!” the agent said, raising a finger. “I know! Mister Albright, the pilot, he was one of ’em told me about the fever. He was here about four days ago, and he didn’t want no job—he’s a lower river pilot, you know, so the Eli Reynolds wasn’t for him. He said he was taking a room at the Planters’ House until he could find a position on one of the classier boats, a big side-wheeler like.”

  “Albright, eh,” Marsh said. “What about Karl Framm? You see him?” If Framm and Albright had both left the Fevre Dream, the steamer shouldn’t be hard to find. Without qualified pilots, she couldn’t move.

  But Green shook his head. “No. Ain’t seen Mister Framm.”

  Marsh’s hopes sank. If Karl Framm was still aboard her, the Fevre Dream could be anywhere along the river. She might have gone off any one of a number of tributaries, or maybe the Fevre Dream had even steamed back down to New Orleans while he was laid up in that woodyard south of Bayou Sara. “I’m goin’ to pay a call on Dan Albright,” he told the agent. “While I’m gone, I want you to write some letters. To agents, pilots, anybody you know along the river, from here to New Orleans. Ask about the Fevre Dream. Somebody has got to have seen her. Steamer like that don’t just vanish. You write those letters up this afternoon, you hear, and get down to the landing and post them on the fastest boats you see. I aim to find my steamer.”

  “Yes, sir,” the agent said. He got out a stack of paper and a pen, dipped it in the inkwell, and began to write.

  The clerk at the Planters’ House desk bobbed his head in greeting. “Why, it’s Cap’n Marsh,” he said. “Heard about your misfortune, just awful, Bronze John’s a wicked one, that he is. I’m glad you’re better, Cap’n, I truly am.”

  “Never mind about that,” Marsh said, annoyed. “What room is Dan Albright in?”

  Albright had been polishing his boots. He let Marsh in with a cool, polite nod of greeting, took his seat again, stuck an arm into one boot, and resumed shining as if he’d never been called to the door.

  Abner Marsh sat down heavily and wasted no time with pleasantries. “Why’d you leave the Fevre Dream?” he asked bluntly.

  “Fever, Cap’n,” Albright said. He studied Marsh briefly, then went back to work on his boot without another word.

  “Tell me about it, Mister Albright. I wasn’t there.”

  Dan Albright frowned. “You weren’t? I understood you and Mister Jeffers found the first sick man.”

  “You understood wrong. Now tell me.”

  Albright polished his boots and told him; the storm, the supper, the body that Joshua York and Sour Billy Tipton and the other man had carried through the saloon, the flight of passengers and crew. He told it all in as few words as possible. When he was finished, his boots were gleaming. He slid them on.

  “Everyone left?” Marsh said.

  “No,” said Albright. “Some stayed. Some don’t know the fever as well as I do.”

  “Who?”

  Albright shrugged. “Cap’n York. His friends. Hairy Mike. The stokers and roustabouts, too. Reckon they were too scared of Mike to run off. Specially down in slave country. Whitey Blake might have stayed. You and Jeffers, I thought.”

  “Mister Jeffers is dead,” said Marsh. Albright said nothing.

  “What about Karl Framm?” Marsh asked.

  “Can’t say.”

  “You were partners.”

  “We were different. I didn’t see him. I don’t know, Cap’n.”

  Marsh frowned. “What happened after you took your wages?”

  “I spent a day in Bayou Sara, then took a ride with Cap’n Leathers on the Natchez. I rode up to Natchez, looking over the river, spent about a week there, then came on up to St. Louis on the Robert Folk.”

  “What happened to the Fevre Dream?”

  “She left.”

  “Left?”

  “Steamed off, I figure. When I woke up, morning after the fever broke out, she was gone from Bayou Sara.”

  “Without a crew?”

  “Must have been enough left to run her,” Albright said.

  “Where’d she go?”

  Albright shrugged. “Didn’t see her from the Natchez. I could have missed her, though. Wasn’t looking. Maybe she went downstream.”

  “You’re really quite a goddamn help, Mister Albright,” Marsh said.

  Albright said, “Can’t tell you what I don’t know. Maybe they burned her. The fever. Never should have given her that name, I figure. Unlucky.”

  Abner Marsh was losing patience. “She ain’t been burned,” he said. “She’s on the river somewhere, and I’m goin’ to find her. She ain’t unlucky neither.”

  “I was the pilot, Cap’n. I saw it. Storms, fog, delays, and then the fever. She was cursed, that boat. If I was you, I’d give up on her. She’s no good for you. Godless.” He stood up. “That reminds me, I got something belongs to you.” He fetched out two books, and handed them to Marsh. “From the Fevre Dream library,” he explained. “I played a game of chess with Cap’n York back in New Orleans, and mentioned that I liked poetry, and he gave me these a day later. When I left, I took them along by mistake.”

  Abner Marsh turned the books over in his hands. Poetry. A volume of poems by Byron and one by Shelley. Just what he needed, he thought. His steamboat was gone, vanished off the river, and all he had left to show of her were two goddamn books of poems. “Keep them,” he said to Dan Albright.

  Albright shook his head. “Don’t want them. Not the kind of poems I like, Cap’n. Immoral, both of them. No wonder your boat got struck down, carrying books like those.”

  Abner Marsh slid the books into his pocket and stood up, scowling. “I had about enough of that, Mister Albright. I won’t hear that kind of talk about my boat. She’s as fine a boat as any on the river, and she ain’t cursed. Ain’t no such thing as curses. The Fevre Dream’s a real heller of . . .”

  “That she is,” Dan Albright interrupted. He stood, too. “I got to see about a berth,” he said, ushering Marsh toward the door. Marsh let himself be ushered. But as Albright was showing him out, the dapper little pilot said, “Cap’n Marsh, leave it be.”

  “What?”

  “That steamer,” Albright said. “She’s no good for you. You know the way I can smell a storm coming?”

  “Yes,” Marsh said. Albright could smell storms better than anyone Marsh had ever known.

  “Sometimes I can smell other things too,” the pilot said. “Don’t go looking for her, Cap’n. Forget about her. I figured you was dead. You’re not. You ought to be thankful. Finding the Fevre Dream won’t bring you no joy, Cap’n.”

  Abner Marsh stared at him. “You can say that. You stood at her wheel, and took her down the river, and you can say that.”

  Albright said nothing.

  “Well, I ain’t lissening,” Marsh said. “That’s my steamboat, Mister Albright, and someday I’m goin’ to pilot her myself, I’m goin’ to run her against the Eclipse, you hear, and . . . and . . .” Red-faced and angry, Marsh found himself choking on his own tongue. He could not go on.

  “Pride can be sinful, Cap’n,” Dan Albright said. “Leave it be.” He closed the door, leaving Marsh out in the hallway.

  Abner Marsh took his lunch in the Planters’ House dining room, eating off by himself in the corner. Albright had shaken him, and he found himself thinking the same thoughts he had run through his head going upriver aboard the Princess. He ate a leg of lamb in mint sau
ce, a mess of turnips and snap beans, and three helpings of tapioca, but even that didn’t calm him. As he drank his coffee, Marsh wondered if maybe Albright wasn’t right. Here he was back in St. Louis, just like he’d been before he met Joshua York in this very same room. He still had his company, the Eli Reynolds, and some money in the bank, too. He was an upper river man; it had been a terrible mistake ever to go down to New Orleans. His dream had turned into a nightmare down there in slave country, in the hot fevered south. But now it was over, his steamer had gone and vanished, and if he wanted to he could just pretend that it had never happened at all, that there had never been a steamboat called the Fevre Dream, nor people named Joshua York and Damon Julian and Sour Billy Tipton. Joshua had come out of nowhere and now he was gone again. The Fevre Dream hadn’t existed in April, and it didn’t seem to exist now, as far as Marsh could see. A sane man couldn’t believe that stuff anyhow, blood-drinking and skulking about by night and bottles of some foul liquor. It had all been a fever dream, Abner Marsh thought, but now the fever was gone from him, now he could get on with his life here in St. Louis.

  Marsh ordered up some more coffee. They will go on killing, he thought to himself as he drank it, they will go on with the blood-drinking and the murder with no one to stop them. “Can’t stop ’em anyway,” he muttered. He’d done his best, him and Joshua and Hairy Mike and poor old Mister Jeffers, who’d never raise an eyebrow or move a chessman again. It hadn’t gotten them anywhere. And it wouldn’t do no good to go to the authorities, not with a story about a bunch of vampires who stole his steamboat. They’d just believe that yellow fever yarn, and figure he’d gone soft in the head, and maybe lock him up someplace.

  Abner Marsh paid his bill and walked back to the office of Fevre River Packets. The landing was crowded and bustling. Above was a clear blue sky, and below was the river bright and clean in the sunlight, and the air had a tang to it, a scent of smoke and steam, and he heard the whistles of the boats passing each other on the river, and the big brass bell of a side-wheeler pulling in. The mates were bellowing and the roustabouts were singing as they loaded freight, and Abner Marsh stood and looked and listened. This was his life, the other had been a fever dream indeed. The vampires had been killing for thousands of years, Joshua had told him, so how could Marsh hope to change it? Maybe Julian had been right, anyway. It was their nature to kill. And it was Abner Marsh’s nature to be a steamboatman, nothing more, he wasn’t no fighter, York and Jeffers had tried to fight and they’d paid for it.

  When he entered the office, Marsh had just about decided that Dan Albright was dead right. He would forget about the Fevre Dream, forget everything that had happened, that was the sensible thing to do. He’d just run his company and maybe make some money, and in a year or two he might have enough to build another boat, a bigger one.

  Green was scurrying around the office. “I got twenty letters out, Cap’n,” he said to Marsh. “Already posted, just like you said.”

  “Fine,” said Marsh, sinking into a chair. He almost sat on the books of poems, jammed uncomfortably into his pocket. He pulled them out, leafed through them quickly, glancing at a few titles, then set them aside. They were poems all right. Marsh sighed. “Fetch out the books, Mister Green,” he said. “I want to take a look at ’em.”

  “Yes, Cap’n,” Green said. He went over and pulled them out. Then he saw something else, picked it up, and brought it over to Marsh with the ledgers. “Oh,” he said, “I almost forgot about this.” He handed Marsh a large package, wrapped with brown paper and cord. “Some little man brought this by about three weeks back, said you was supposed to pick it up but never showed. I told him you were still off with the Fevre Dream and paid him. I hope that was all right.”

  Abner Marsh frowned down at the package, snapped the cord with a twist of his bare hand, and ripped away the paper to open the box. Inside was a brand new captain’s coat, white as the snow that covered the upper river in winter, pure and clean, with a double row of flashing silver buttons, and Fevre Dream written in raised letters on every damn one. He took it out and the box fell to the floor and suddenly, finally, the tears came.

  “Get out!” roared Marsh. The agent took one look at his face and was gone. Abner Marsh rose and put on the white jacket, and buttoned up the silver buttons. It was a beautiful fit. It was cool, much cooler than the heavy blue captain’s coat he’d been wearing. There was no mirror in the office, so Marsh couldn’t see what he looked like, but he could imagine. In his mind he looked like Joshua York, he looked fine and regal and sophisticated. The cloth was so brilliantly white, he thought.

  “I look like the cap’n of the Fevre Dream,”Marsh said loudly, to himself. He stamped his stick hard on the floor, and felt the blood run to his face, and he stood there remembering. Remembering the way she’d looked in the mists of New Albany. Remembering the way her mirrors gleamed, remembering her silver, remembering the wild call of her steam whistle and stroke of her engine, loud as a thunderstorm. Remembering how she’d left the Southerner far behind her, how she’d gulped down the Mary Kaye. He remembered her people as well; Framm and his wild stories, Whitey Blake spotted with grease, Toby killing chickens, Hairy Mike roaring and cussing at the roustabouts and deckhands, Jeffers playing chess, defeating Dan Albright for the hundredth time. If Albright was so smart, Marsh thought, how come he could never beat Jeffers at chess?

  And Marsh recalled Joshua most of all, Joshua all in white, Joshua sipping his liquor, Joshua sitting in the darkness and spinning out his dreams. Gray eyes and strong hands and poetry. “We all make our choices,” whispered the memory. Morn came and went, and came, and brought no day.

  “GREEN!” Abner Marsh roared at the top of his lungs.

  The door opened and the agent poked his head in nervously.

  “I want my steamboat,” Marsh said. “Where the hell is she?”

  Green swallowed. “Cap’n, like I said, the Fevre Dream—”

  “Not her!” Marsh said, stamping his stick down hard. “My other steamboat. Where the hell is my other steamboat, now that I need her?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Aboard the Steamer Eli Reynolds,

  Mississippi River,

  October 1857

  On a cool evening in early autumn, Abner Marsh and the Eli Reynolds finally left St. Louis and headed downstream in search of the Fevre Dream. Marsh would just as soon have left several weeks earlier, but there had been too much to do. He’d had to wait for the Eli Reynolds to get back from her latest trip up the Illinois, and check her over to make sure she was fit for the lower river, and hire himself a couple of Mississippi pilots. Marsh had claims to settle as well, from planters and shippers who’d entrusted St. Louis-bound freight to the Fevre Dream down in New Orleans, and were irate at the steamer’s disappearance. Marsh might have insisted they share his loss, but he’d always prided himself on being fair, so he paid them off fifty cents on the dollar. There was also the unpleasant task of talking to Mister Jeffers’ relations—Marsh figured he could hardly tell them what had really happened, so he finally settled for the yellow fever yarn. Other folks had brothers or sons or husbands still unaccounted for and they pestered Marsh with questions he couldn’t answer, and he had to deal with a government inspector and a man from the pilots’ association, and he had accounts to square and books to go over and preparations to make, and it all toted up into a month of delay, frustration, and bother.

  But all the while, Marsh kept on looking. When the letters that Green had sent out on his behalf got no response, he sent out more. He met incoming steamers as often as he could find the time, and asked after the Fevre Dream, after Joshua York, after Karl Framm and Whitey Blake and Hairy Mike Dunne and Toby Lanyard. He hired a couple of detectives and sent them downriver, with instructions to find out what they could. He even borrowed a trick from Joshua, and started buying newspapers from all up and down the river system; he spent his nights poring over the shipping columns, the advertisements, the lists of steambo
at arrivals and departures from cities as distant as Cincinnati and New Orleans and St. Paul. He frequented the Planters’ House and other river haunts even more than was his custom, and asked a thousand questions.

  And learned nothing. The Fevre Dream was gone, it seemed, just plain gone from the river. No one had seen her. No one had talked to Whitey Blake or Mister Framm or Hairy Mike, or heard anything about them. The newspapers didn’t list her coming or going.

  “It ain’t sensible,” Marsh complained loudly to the officers of the Eli Reynolds, a week before their departure. “She’s three hundred sixty-foot long, brand new, fast enough to make any steamboatman blink. A boat like that has got to get noticed.”

  “Unless she went down,” suggested Cat Grove, the Eli Reynolds’ short, wiry mate. “There’s places on the river deep enough to drown whole towns. Could be she sunk, with all aboard.”

  “No,” said Marsh stubbornly. He hadn’t told them the whole story. He didn’t see how he could. None of them had been aboard the Fevre Dream; they’d never believe him. “No, she ain’t sunk. She’s down there somewhere, hidin’ from me. But I’m goin’ to find her.”

  “How?” asked Yoerger, the captain of the Eli Reynolds.

  “It’s a long river,” Marsh admitted, “and it’s got lots of creeks and smaller rivers and bayous leadin’ off it, cutoffs, and chutes, and bends, and all kinds of places a steamer can hide where she won’t be seen easy. But it ain’t so long that it can’t be searched. We can start at one end and go to the other, and ask questions along the way, and if we reach New Orleans and we still ain’t found her, then we can do the same on the Ohio and the Missouri and the Illinois and the Yazoo and the Red River and wherever the hell we got to go to find that goddamned boat.”

  “Could take a while,” said Yoerger.

  “And if it does?”

  Yoerger shrugged, and the officers of the Eli Reynolds traded uncertain glances. Abner Marsh scowled. “Don’t you worry your head about how long it’s goin’ to take,” he snapped. “You just get my steamboat ready, you hear?”