Fevre Dream Read online

  With the little money he had left he went downriver, to where the Eli Reynolds still sat in the cutoff that had wrecked her. They fitted a new rudder to her, and patched up her stern wheel a little, and waited for the spring floods. The floods came, the cutoff became passable once more, and Yoerger and his crew nursed the Reynolds back up to St. Louis, where she was fitted with a brand new paddle, a new engine with twice the push, and a second boiler. She even got a new paint job, and a bright yellow carpet for her main cabin. Then Marsh launched her into the New Orleans trade, for which she was too small and too shabby and altogether poorly fitted, so he could continue his hunt personally.

  Abner Marsh knew even before he started that it was near hopeless. Between Cairo and New Orleans alone, there was some eleven hundred miles of river. Then there was the upper Mississippi above Cairo all the way to the Falls of St. Anthony, there was the Missouri, there was the Ohio and the Yazoo and the Red River and about fifty other secondary rivers and tributaries navigable by steamer, most of which had tributaries of their own, not to mention all the little creeks and streams and cutoffs that were navigable part of the year, if you had a good pilot. She could be hiding up any one of them, and if the Eli Reynolds steamed past and missed her, it would mean starting all over again. Thousands of steamboats plied the Mississippi river system, with newcomers entering the trade every month, which meant lots of damned names to sort through in the papers. But Marsh was nothing if not stubborn. He searched, and the Eli Reynolds became his home.

  She did not get much trade. The biggest, fastest, most luxurious steamboats on the river competed in the St. Louis-to-New Orleans run, and the Reynolds, old and slow as she was, attracted little custom away from the great side-wheelers. “It’s not just that she’s fast as a snail and twice as ugly,” Marsh’s New Orleans agent told him in the fall of 1858, while giving notice to take another job. “It’s you, too, damned if I ain’t telling the truth.”

  “Me?” Marsh roared. “What the hell you mean?”

  “Folks on the river talk, y’know. They say you’re the unluckiest man ever to own a steamboat. They say you got some kind of curse on you, worse’n the curse on the Drennan Whyte. One of your steamers blew her boilers, they say, and killed everybody. Four got crushed up in an ice jam. One got burned after everybody on her died of yaller fever. And the last one, they say you wrecked her yourself, after you went crazy and beat your pilot with a club.”

  “Damn that man,” Marsh swore.

  “Now, I ask you, who the hell is goin’ to ride with a cursed man like that? Or work for him either. Not me, I tell you that for sure. Not me.”

  The man he’d hired to replace Jonathon Jeffers begged Marsh more than once to take the Reynolds out of the New Orleans trade, and have her work the upper Mississippi or the Illinois, where she’d be better suited, or even the Missouri, which was rough and dangerous but enormously profitable if your steamboat didn’t get smashed to splinters. Abner Marsh refused, and fired the man when he persisted. He figured there was no chance that he’d find the Fevre Dream on the northern rivers. Besides, during the last few months he’d been making secret stops by night at certain Louisiana woodyards and deserted islands in Mississippi and Arkansas, taking on runaway slaves and bringing them up north to the free states. Toby had put him in touch with a bunch called the Underground Railroad, who made all the arrangements. Abner Marsh had no use for the goddamned railroads and insisted on calling it the underground river, but it made him feel good to help, kind of like he was hurting Damon Julian somehow. At times he’d hunker down with the runaways on the main deck, and ask them about night folks and the Fevre Dream and such, figuring that maybe the blacks knew things that white folks didn’t, but none of them ever told him anything useful.

  For nearly three years, Abner Marsh continued his hunt. They were hard years. By 1860 Marsh was heavily in debt due to the losses incurred in running the Reynolds. He had been forced to close the offices he had maintained in St. Louis, New Orleans, and other river towns. Nightmares no longer troubled him as they had, but he grew more and more isolated with the passage of years. At times it seemed to Marsh as if the time he had spent with Joshua York on the Fevre Dream was the last real life he had known, that the months and years since were drifting past as if in a dream. At other times, he felt just the opposite, felt that this was real, the red ink in his ledger books, the deck of the Eli Reynolds under him, the smell of her steam, the stains on her new yellow carpet. The memories of Joshua, the splendor of the great steamboat they had built together, the cold terror that Julian had stirred in him, these things were the dream, Marsh thought, and no wonder they had vanished, no wonder that folks along the river thought him mad.

  The events of the summer of 1857 became even more dreamlike as, one by one, those who had shared some of Marsh’s experiences began to drift out of his life. Old Toby Lanyard had gone east a month after they had returned to St. Louis. Being returned to slavery once had been enough for him, now he wanted to get as far from the slave states as possible. Marsh got a brief letter from him early in 1858, saying that he’d gotten a job cooking in a Boston hotel. After that he never heard from Toby again. Dan Albright had found himself a berth on a spanking new New Orleans side-wheeler. In the summer of 1858, however, Albright and his boat had the misfortune to be in New Orleans during a virulent outbreak of yellow fever. It killed thousands, including Albright, and eventually led to the city improving its sanitation so it wasn’t quite so much like an open sewer in summer. Captain Yoerger ran the Eli Reynolds for Marsh until after the season of 1859, when he retired to his farm in Wisconsin, where he died peacefully a year later. When Yoerger had gone, Marsh took over captaining the stern-wheeler himself, to save money. By then only a handful of familiar faces remained among the crew. Doc Turney had been killed and robbed in Natchez-under-the-hill the previous summer, and Cat Grove had left the river entirely to go west, first to Denver, then to San Francisco, and eventually all the way to China or Japan or some such godforsaken place. Marsh hired Jack Ely, the old second engineer from the Fevre Dream, to replace Turney, and took on a few of the other crewmen who’d served on the vanished side-wheeler as well, but they died or drifted on or took other jobs. By 1860, only Marsh himself and Karl Framm were left of all those who had lived through the triumph and terror of 1857. Framm piloted the Reynolds, for all that his skills entitled him to a much bigger and more prestigious boat. Framm remembered a whole lot of things he wouldn’t talk about, even to Marsh. The pilot was still good-natured, but he didn’t tell near so many stories as he used to, and Marsh could see a grimness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Framm wore a pistol now. “In case we find them,” he said.

  Marsh snorted. “That little thing ain’t goin’ to hurt Julian none.”

  Karl Framm’s grin was still crooked, and his gold tooth caught the light, but there was nothing funny in his eyes when he answered. “Ain’t for Julian, Cap’n. It’s for me. They ain’t getting me alive again.” He looked at Marsh. “I could do the same for you, if it comes to that.”

  Marsh scowled. “It ain’t comin’ to that,” he said, and he left the pilot house. He remembered that conversation for the rest of his days. He also remembered a Christmas party in St. Louis in 1859, given by the captain of one of the big Ohio boats. Marsh and Framm both attended, along with every other steamboatman in the town, and after everybody had been drinking some they got to telling river stories. He knew all the stories, but it was kind of peaceful and reassuring somehow to hear folks telling them all over again to the traders and bankers and pretty women who hadn’t ever heard none of them. They talked about Old Al the alligator king, about the phantom steamer of Raccourci, about Mike Fink and Jim Bowie and Roarin’ Jack Russell, about the great race between the Eclipse and the A.L. Shotwell, about the pilot who’d run a nasty stretch of river in the fog even though he’d gone and died, about the goddamn steamboat that had brought smallpox up the river twenty years before and killed something like twen
ty thousand Indians. “Ruined the hell out of the fur trade,” the storyteller concluded, and everybody laughed, except Marsh and a couple of others. Then someone went through the brags about the impossibly big steamers, the Hurricano and the E. Jenkins and such, that grew their own wood with forests on their hurricane decks, and had wheels so big they took a whole year to make a full turn. Abner Marsh smiled.

  Karl Framm pushed through the crowd, a brandy in his hand. “I know a story,” he said, sounding a little drunk. “ ’S true. There’s this steamboat named the Ozymandias, y’see . . .”

  “Never heard of it,” somebody said.

  Framm smiled thinly. “Y’better hope you never see it,” he said, “cause them what does is done for. She only runs by night, this boat. And she’s dark, all dark. Painted black as her stacks, every inch of her, except that inside she’s got a main cabin with a carpet the color of blood, and silver mirrors everywhere that don’t reflect nothing. Them mirrors is always empty, even though she’s got lots of folks aboard her, pale-looking folks in fine clothes. They smile a lot. Only they don’t show in the mirrors.”

  Someone shivered. They had all gone silent. “Why not?” asked an engineer Marsh knew slightly.

  “Cause they’re dead,”Framm said. “Ever’ damn one of ’em, dead. Only they won’t lie down. They’re sinners, and they got to ride that boat forever, that black boat with the red carpets and the empty mirrors, all up and down the river, never touching port, no sir.”

  “Phantoms,” somebody said.

  “Ha’nts,” added a woman, “like that Raccourci boat.”

  “Hell no,” said Karl Framm. “You can pass right through a ha’nt, but not the Ozymandias. She’s real enough, and you’ll learn it quick and to your sorrow if you come on her at night. Them dead folks is hungry. They drink blood, y’know. Hot red blood. They hide in the dark and when they see the lights of another steamer, they set out after her, and if they catch’er they come swarming aboard, all those dead white faces, smiling, dressed so fine. And they sink the boat afterward, or burn her, and the next mornin’ there’s nothing to see but a couple stacks stickin’ up out of the river, or maybe a wrecked boat full of corpses. Except for the sinners. The sinners go aboard that Ozymandias, and ride on her forever.” He sipped his brandy and smiled. “So if you’re out on the river some night, and you see a shadow on the water behind you, look close. It might be a steamer, painted black all over, with a crew white as ha’nts. She don’t show no lights, that Ozymandias, so sometimes you can’t see her till she’s right behind you, her black wheels kicking up the water. If you see her, you better hope you got a lightnin’ pilot, and maybe some coal oil on board, or a little lard. Cause she’s big and she’s fast, and when she catches you by night you’re finished. Listen for her whistle. She only sounds her whistle when she knows she’s got you, so if you hear it, start countin’ up your sins.”

  “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.