Fevre Dream Read online

  “Yes sir, Cap’n,” Yoerger said. He was a tall, stooped, gaunt old man with a quiet voice, and he’d been working steamboats since there had been steamboats, so nothing much surprised him anymore, and his tone said as much.

  When the day came, Abner Marsh wore his white captain’s coat with the double row of silver buttons. It seemed fitting somehow. He ate himself a huge supper at the Planters’ House—the provisions on the Eli Reynolds weren’t too good, and the cook was barely fit to scrub out Toby’s fry pans—and walked down to the landing.

  The Eli Reynolds had her steam up, Marsh saw with approval. Still, she didn’t look like much. She was an upper river boat, built small and narrow and low for the shallow tight streams where she had to ply her trade. She was less than a fourth as long as the vanished Fevre Dream, and about half as wide, and full-loaded she could carry maybe 150 tons of cargo, against the thousand tons of the larger steamer. The Reynolds had only two decks; there was no texas, and the crew occupied the forward portion of the cabins on the boiler deck. She seldom had any cabin passengers anyway. A single big high-pressure boiler drove her stern wheel, and she was as plain as all get out. She was near empty of cargo now, so Marsh could see the boiler, sitting well forward. Rows of plain whitewashed wooden pillars supported the upper decks, looking like rickety stilts, and the columns that held up the weathered promenade roof were square and simple, plain as a picket fence. The aft wheelhouse was a big square wooden box, the stern wheel a sorry-looking afterthought, its red paint faded and streaked from long use. Elsewhere paint was flaking. The pilot house was a damn wood-and-glass outhouse set atop the steamboat, and the stubby chimneys were unadorned black iron. The Eli Reynolds showed her age sitting there in the water; she looked terribly weary and a bit lopsided, as if she was about to keel over and sink.

  She was a damn unlikely match for the huge, powerful Fevre Dream. But she was all he had now, Abner Marsh reflected, and she would have to do. He walked on down to the steamer and climbed aboard, across a stage that had been badly worn by the tread of countless boots. Cat Grove met him on the forecastle. “All ready, Cap’n.”

  “Tell the pilot to take her out,” Marsh said. Grove shouted up the order, and the Eli Reynolds sounded its whistle. The blast was thin and plaintive, and hopelessly brave, Marsh thought. He clomped up the steep, narrow stair to the main cabin, which was dim and cramped-feeling, barely forty foot long. The carpet was bare in spots, and the landscapes painted on the stateroom doors had long since faded into dullness. The whole interior of the steamer had an odor about it of stale food and sour wine and oil and smoke and sweat. It was unpleasantly hot, too, and the single plain skylight was too grimed-over to admit much light. Yoerger and the off-duty pilot were drinking cups of black coffee at a round table when Marsh entered. “My lard aboard?” Marsh asked.

  Yoerger nodded.

  “Not much else aboard, that I saw,” Marsh commented.

  Yoerger frowned. “I figured you’d like it that way, Cap’n. Loaded up, we’d be slower, and there’d be more stops to make, too.”

  Abner Marsh pondered that, and nodded in approval. “Good,” he said. “Makes sense. My other package get delivered?”

  “In your cabin,” Yoerger said.

  Marsh took his leave and retired to his stateroom. The bunk creaked beneath him when he sat down on its edge, opened the package, and took out the rifle and shells. He examined it carefully, hefting it in his hand, sighting down the barrel. It felt good. Maybe your ordinary pistol or rifle shot was nothing to the night folks, but this was something else again, custom made to his order by the best gunsmith in St. Louis. It was a buffalo gun, with a short, wide, octagonal barrel, designed to be fired from horseback and stop a charging buffalo in its tracks. The fifty custom shells were bigger than any the gunsmith had ever made before. “Hell,” the man had complained, “these’ll blow your game to pieces, won’t be nothing left to et.” Abner Marsh had only nodded. The rifle wouldn’t be worth much for accuracy, especially in Marsh’s hands, but it didn’t need to be. At close range it would wipe Damon Julian’s smile clean off his face, and blow his goddamn head off his shoulders for good measure. Marsh carefully loaded it up, and mounted it on the wall above his bed, where he could sit up and snatch it down in one easy motion. Only then did he let himself lie back.

  And so it began. Day after day the Eli Reynolds steamed downriver, through rain and fog, through sunshine and overcast, stopping at every town and steamboat landing and woodyard to ask a question or two. Abner Marsh sat up on the hurricane deck, in a wooden chair beside the steamer’s old cracked bell, and watched the river for hour after hour. Sometimes he even took his meals up there. When he had to sleep, Captain Yoerger or Cat Grove or the mud-clerk took his place, and the vigil went on. When rafts and flatboats and other steamers went sliding by, Marsh called out, “You there! You seen a steamer named the Fevre Dream?” But the answer, when he got an answer, always came back, “No, Cap’n, we sure ain’t,” and the folks on the landings and in the woodyards told them nothing, and the river was full of steamboats, steamboats day and night, steamboats big and little, going up the river or down it or lying half-sunk by the banks, but none of them were the Fevre Dream.

  She was a slow small boat on a big river, the Eli Reynolds, and she crept along at a pace that would make most steamboatmen ashamed, and her stops and her questions delayed her even more. But still the towns passed, the woodyards passed, the forests and the houses and other steamboats drifted on by in a blur of days and nights, islands and sandbars were left behind them, their pilot steered them deftly past the snags and sawyers, and they moved south, ever south. Sainte Genevieve came and went, Cape Girardeau and Crosno went by, they put in for a bit at Hickman and longer at New Madrid. Caruthersville was lost in fog, but they found it. Osceola was still and Memphis was loud. Helena. Rosedale. Arkansas City. Napoleon. Greenville. Lake Providence.

  When the Eli Reynolds came steaming into Vicksburg one blustery October morning, two men were waiting on the landing.

  Abner Marsh sent most of the crew ashore. He and Captain Yoerger and Cat Grove met with the visitors in the main cabin of the steamer. One of the men was a big, hard sort with red muttonchop whiskers and a head bald as a pigeon’s egg, dressed in a black broadcloth suit. The other was a slender, well-dressed black man with piercing dark eyes. Marsh sat them down and served them coffee. “Well?” he demanded. “Where is she?”

  The bald man blew on his coffee and scowled. “Don’t know.”

  “I paid you to find my steamer,” Marsh said.

  “She ain’t to be found, Cap’n Marsh,” the black man said. “Hank and me looked, I tell you that.”

  “Ain’t sayin’ we found nothin’,” the bald man said. “Only that we ain’t got the steamer pinned down yet.”

  “All right,” Abner Marsh said. “Tell me what you found.”

  The black man pulled a sheet of paper from inside his jacket and unfolded it. “Most of your steamer’s crew and near all her passengers left at Bayou Sara, after that yaller fever scare. Next morning, your Fevre Dream steamed out. Went upriver, from all accounts. We found some woodyard niggers who swear she wooded up with ’em. Maybe they was lyin’, but I can’t see why. So we know the direction your steamer went in. We got enough folks to swear they seen her go by. Or they think they did, anyway.”

  “Only she never reached Natchez,” his partner put in. “That’s . . . what . . . eight, ten hours upriver.”

  “Less,” said Abner Marsh. “The Fevre Dream was a damn fast boat.”

  “Fast or not, she got herself lost ’tween Bayou Sara and Natchez.”

  “The Red River branches off in there,” Marsh said.

  The black man nodded. “But your boat ain’t been in Shreveport nor Alexandria neither, and none of the woodyards we checked can recall any Fevre Dream.”

  “Damn,” said Marsh.

  “Maybe she did sink,” Cat Grove suggested.

  “We got more,” said the
bald detective. He took a swallow of coffee. “Your steamer was never seen in Natchez, you understand. But some of the folks you were lookin’ for were.”

  “Go on.” Marsh said.

  “We spent a lot of time on Silver Street,” he said. “Askin’ around. Man called Raymond Ortega, he was known there, and he was on your list, too. He came back one night, early in September, paid a social call to one of the nabobs on top of the hill, and a lot of calls down under the hill. Had four other men with him. One of ’em fits your description of this Sour Billy Tipton. They stayed about a week. Did some interesting things. Hired a lot of men, whites, colored, didn’t matter. You know the kind of men you can hire from Natchez-under-the-hill.”

  Abner Marsh knew all right. Sour Billy Tipton had scared off Marsh’s crew and replaced them with a gang of cutthroats like himself. “Steamboatmen?” he asked.

  The bald man nodded. “There’s more. This Tipton visited Fork-in-the-Road.”

  “It’s a big slave mart,” the black partner said.

  “He bought a mess of slaves. Paid with gold.” The bald man pulled a twenty-dollar gold piece from his pocket and set it on the table. “Like this. Bought some other stuff back in Natchez, too. Paid the same way.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Marsh asked.

  “Slaver’s stuff,” the black man said. “Manacles. Chains. Hammers.

  “Some paint, too,” said the other.

  And suddenly the truth of it burst on Abner Marsh like a shower of fireworks. “Jesus God,” he swore. “Paint! No wonder no one has seen her. Goddamn. They’re smarter than I thought, and I’m an eggsuckin’ fool not to have seen it straight off!” He slammed his big fist down on the table hard enough to make the coffee cups jump.

  “We figure just what you’re thinkin’,” the bald man said. “They painted her. Changed her name.”

  “A little paint ain’t enough to change a famous steamer,” objected Yoerger.

  “No,” said Abner Marsh, “but she wasn’t famous yet. Hell, we made one damn trip down the river, never did make it back up. How many folks goin’ to recognize her? How many even heard of her? There’s new boats comin’ out most every day. Slap a new name on her wheelhouse, maybe some new colors here and there, you got a new boat.”

  “But the Fevre Dream was big,”said Yoerger. “And fast, you said.”

  “Lots of big steamers on the damn river,” Marsh said. “Oh, she was bigger than nearly all of them except the Eclipse, but how many folks can tell that at a look, without another boat to measure her by? As for fast, hell, it’s easy enough to keep her times down. That way she don’t get talked about.” Marsh was furious. That was just what they’d do, he knew; run her slow, at well under her capability, and thereby keep her inconspicuous. Somehow that seemed obscene to him.

  “Problem is,” the bald man said, “there ain’t no way for us to know what name they painted on her. So findin’ her ain’t goin’ to be easy. We can board ever’ boat on the river, lookin’ for these people you want, but . . .” He shrugged.

  “No,” Abner Marsh said. “I’ll find her easier than that. No amount of paint is goin’ to change the Fevre Dream so I can’t tell her when I see her. We got this far, now we keep goin’, all the way down to New Orleans.” Marsh tugged at his beard. “Mister Grove,” he said, turning to the mate, “fetch me those pilots of ours. They’re lower river men, they ought to know the steamers down here pretty well. Ask ’em if they’ll go over those piles of newspapers I been savin’, and check off any boat that’s strange to ’em.”

  “Sure thing, Cap’n,” Grove said.

  Abner Marsh turned back to the detectives. “I won’t be needin’ you gentlemen any more, I don’t believe,” he said. “But if you should happen to run into that steamer, you know how to reach me. I’ll see that you get well paid.” He stood up. “Now if you’ll come back to the clerk’s office, I’ll give you the rest of what I owe you.”

  They spent the rest of the day tied up at Vicksburg. Marsh had just finished supper—a plate of fried chicken, sadly underdone, and some tired potatoes—when Cat Grove pulled up a chair next to him, a piece of paper in hand. “It took them most of the day, Cap’n, but they done it,” Grove said. “There’s too damn many boats, though. Must have been thirty neither of ’em knew. I went over the papers myself, checkin’ the advertisements and such to see what they said about the size of the boats, who the masters were, that kind of thing. Some names I recognized, and I was able to cross off a lot of stern-wheelers and undersized boats.”

  “How many left?”

  “Just four,” said Grove. “Four big side-wheelers that nobody’s ever heard of.” He handed the list to Abner Marsh. The names were printed out carefully in block capitals, one beneath the other.

  B. SCHROEDER

  QUEEN CITY

  OZYMANDIAS

  F. D. HECKINGER

  Marsh stared at the paper for a long time, frowning. Something there ought to mean something to him, he knew, but he couldn’t figure out what or why for the life of him.

  “Make any sense, Cap’n?”

  “It ain’t the B. Schroeder,”Marsh said suddenly. “They were puttin’ her together up to New Albany the same time they were workin’ on the Fevre Dream.” He scratched his head.

  “That last boat,” Grove said, pointing, “look at those initials, Cap’n. F. D. Like for Fevre Dream, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” Marsh said. He said the names aloud. “F. D. Heckinger. Queen City. Ozy—” That one was hard. He was glad he didn’t have to spell it. “Ozy-man-dee-us.”

  Then Abner Marsh’s mind, his slow deliberate mind that never forgot anything, chucked the answer up in front of him, like a piece of driftwood thrown up by the river. He’d puzzled over that damn word before, very briefly and not so long ago, when flipping through a book. “Wait,” he said to Grove. He rose and strode off to his cabin. The books were in the bottom drawer of his chest of drawers.

  “What’s that?” Grove asked when Marsh returned.

  “Goddamn poems,” Marsh said. He flipped through Byron, found nothing, turned to Shelley. And it was there in front of him. He read it over quickly, leaned back, frowned, read it over again.

  “Cap’n Marsh?” Grove said.

  “Listen to this,” Marsh said. He read aloud:

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  “What is it?”

  “A poem,” said Abner Marsh. “It’s a goddamn poem.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “It means,” said Marsh, closing the book, “that Joshua is feelin’ sorry and beaten. You wouldn’t understand why, though, Mister Grove. The important thing that it means is that we’re lookin’ for a steamboat name of Ozymandias.”

  Grove brought out another slip of paper. “I wrote down some stuff from the papers,” he explained, squinting at his own writing. “Let’s see, that Ozy . . . Ozy . . . whatever it is, it’s workin’ the Natchez trade. Master named J. Anthony.”

  “Anthony,” said Marsh. “Hell. Joshua’s middle name was Anton. Natchez, you say?”

  “Natchez to New Orleans, Cap’n.”

  “We’ll stay here for the night. Tomorrow, come dawn, we make for Natchez. You hear that, Mister Grove? I don’t want to waste a minute of light. When that damn sun comes up, I want our steam up too, so we’re ready to move.” Maybe poor Joshua had nothing left but despair, but Abner Marsh had a lot more than that. There were accounts that wanted settling, and when he was through, there wasn’t going to be any more left of Damon Julian than was left of that damned statue in the poem.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Aboard the Steamer Eli Reynolds,

  Mississippi River,

  October 1857

  Abner Marsh did not sleep that nig
ht. He spent the long hours of darkness in his chair on the hurricane deck, his back to the smoky lights of Vicksburg, looking out over the river. The night was cool and quiet, the water like black glass. Once in a while some steamer would heave into view, wreathed in flame and smoke and cinders, and the tranquility would shatter while she passed. But then the boat would tie up or steam on, the sound of her whistle would die away, and the darkness would mend itself, grow smooth once again. The moon was a silver dollar floating on the water, and Marsh heard wet creaking sounds from the tired Eli Reynolds, and occasionally a voice or a footfall or maybe a snatch of song from Vicksburg, and always beneath it all the sound of the river, the rush of the endless waters surging past, pushing at his boat, trying to take her with them, south, south, to where the night folks and the Fevre Dream were waiting.

  Marsh felt strangely filled with the night’s beauty, with the dark loveliness that Joshua’s gimp Britisher had been so moved by. He tilted his chair back against the old steamer’s bell and gazed out over the moon and stars and river, thinking that maybe this would be the last moment of peace he would ever know. For tomorrow, or the day after for sure, they would find the Fevre Dream, and the summer’s nightmare would begin again.

  His head was full of forebodings, full of memories and visions. He kept seeing Jonathon Jeffers, him with his sword cane, so damned cocksure and so damned helpless when Julian ran right up the blade. He heard the sound the clerk’s neck made when Julian snapped it, and remembered the way Jeffers’ spectacles had fallen off, the wink of gold as they tumbled to the deck, the terrible small sound that they had made. His big hands clenched tight around his walking stick. Against the dark river, he saw other things as well. That tiny hand impaled on a knife, dripping blood. Julian drinking Joshua’s dark potion. The wet smears on Hairy Mike’s iron billet when it had done its grisly work in the stateroom. Abner Marsh was afraid, afraid as he’d never been. To banish the specters that drifted across the night, he called up his own dream, a vision of him standing with the buffalo gun in hand at the door of the captain’s cabin. He heard the gun roar and felt its awful kick, and saw Damon Julian’s pale smile and dark curls burst apart, like a melon thrown from a height, a melon filled with blood.