Читать книгу The Burning Barn: Speed and Hattie In Civil War Missouri - Richard Boone's Black - Страница 5

Joycie could not leave Speed’s side. After an hour his calf had swelled as round as a six-month piglet and turned the purple of a storm cloud just before the rain. In his delirium Speed kept repeating, “The hole of the asp, the hole of the asp.” Joycie opened her wooden box to find one of her handkerchiefs, which she dipped into the brown waters of the Cumberland and applied to Speed’s fevered forehead.

Simmons used his sweep oar to keep the boat in the middle of the river where he could take maximum advantage of the April current and avoid the snags and sandbars closer to shore. Joycie looked up at Simmons.

“He will live, won’t he?” she pleaded.

“Don’t know,” replied Simmons. “Every hour he lives is good, long as he don’t get pneumonia. You ever see a prettier day? Look at those tulip trees over there. Bet those trees been there two hundred, three hundred years. Oh, she sure is pretty in April.”

Joycie cursed the boatman in her mind for remarking on the day when her son was comatose, but she kept silent. She offered a prayer to God that if he would spare Speed’s life, she would forever forsake the company of men and lead a righteous life for the rest of her days. The prospect of arriving alone in Missouri was more than she could bear. She resolved to drown in the river if Speed died.

“Mr. Simmons, when are we going to get there?” she asked in a flat voice.

“There, where?”

“Missouri, to Platte Purchase, Missouri, to our new place.”

“This flatboat goes as far as Cairo, Illinois. You get a steamboat from there. You might make it by September, depending on how fast the river goes. ”

As Joycie pondered this information, she realized she had begun this voyage with only the vaguest of understandings. She understood people left Kentucky and arrived at Missouri. Buford Crawford had told her Simmons would take her and her boy on a flatboat, but she had trusted that Simmons would take care of all of the particulars. Now she wondered if the dollars Buford Crawford had paid her would last all those months. As she considered her predicament, a blue heron broke from the shore and with rhythmic sweeps of its great wings landed on a snag downriver near the water, so she was not certain what was bird and what was branch protruding from the water. She wondered if it was her fate to likewise disappear with her son on some snag of a wilderness river.

“Mr. Simmons, can you go all night? Can we get to Cairo sooner?”

“Not here. Not on the Cumberland. The water’s too tricky. On the Ohio maybe.”

“Where are we going to sleep tonight?”

“On the flatboat. Too many critters on shore.” Joycie looked at the shore and saw that the trees came right to the riverbank. She could also observe that there were no beds or bunks on the flatboat. Just then Simmons let out a great whoop that startled the dazed woman. Simmons began to wave his hat toward a wisp of smoke on the southern shore. He put his sweep oar hard over so that the sluggish progress of the flatboat was oriented toward what proved to be a man sitting beside a small fire under the wall of vegetation still in the vulnerable green of early spring. When they were still some yards from shore Joycie heard them talking in almost conversational terms.

“How many barrels?” asked Simmons.

“Five.”

“Sid, you coming down to Cairo?”

“Thought I would.”

“I can use the help. Got passengers. The boy is sick. Snakebite.”

“He gonna make it?”

“Young kid. He’s got a chance.”

“Let’s get these barrels on.” Simmons threw one rope to Sid, who quickly wrapped it around a tree and held fast as the current began pulling the flatboat close to the two-foot bank. Simmons startled Joycie. “Arm! Arm! Lookee arm!” The rope rasped below Joycie’s elbow. She watched transfixed at her arm resting in the center of a coil of rope that was rapidly shrinking as it played toward shore. Just as she threw herself on her back, the rope thunked taut. Had her arm been there, the full force of the flatboat in the current of the Cumberland River would have snapped the rope through her forearm rather than merely etching a raw rope burn across it.

Simmons grinned at her, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Lady, that was close. I thought I might be burying two on this trip.” Joycie seemed to throw off the fog of her situation as she stood on deck to face Simmons squarely. In an even voice she said, “You ain’t burying nobody. My boy and me is going to the Platte Purchase in Missouri.”

Simmons returned her look, grunted, and turned to hand heavy wooden planks from the flatboat bulwark to Sid on shore. Both men set about rolling the heavy barrels onto the flatboat.

“What’s in the barrels?” asked Joycie, wishing to give the conversation a new focus.

“Tennessee whiskey. Best there is,” Simmons replied. “Pays better than passengers in Nashville.” After forty-five minutes of wrestling the barrels across the planks and onto the flatboat, the two men stowed the planks on board, and Simmons cast loose the downriver rope, then poled the flatboat a few yards upstream so the upstream rope would slacken. Sid untied it, let it drop in the water, and leaped from shore to boat.

Joycie returned her attention to Speed. By the time the flatboat was well out in the center of the river, she could observe, with resignation, the men were passing back and forth a small flat bottle of that good Tennessee whisky. She hoped the river could float them without the attention of these two men.

That first day on the river she learned that life could be very slow. Simmons rigged a lean-to canvas shelter for Joycie and Speed, and Joycie’s attention was entirely on the boy. The sun was hot on the deck, and the mother kept herself and her son under the shade of the lean-to. Simmons encouraged her to pick a feature well ahead on the riverbank, sometimes a dead tree, or perhaps a sandbar, or the mouth of a creek, and then watch as it passed. “If it was a mile when you first saw it, you make a mark on the deck every time we pass one. There ought to be thirty marks by the end of the day. But it’s gonna take us about forty days to get to Cairo, just like Noah in the Bible, forty days and forty nights, ’cept I don’t run at night mostly, so anyway I don’t know how many marks you’ll have by the time we get to Cairo.” He gave a great yellow grin. “We’ll have my boat filled with marks, ma’am, filled with marks by the time we get to Cairo.”

Just then Speed gave out a great cry and thrashed on the deck so much that Joycie had to lie on him to keep him from injuring himself. When Speed had calmed down, Sid pulled out his flat brown bottle, pinched Speed’s mouth open, and poured whiskey into it. The delirious boy swallowed, then gagged. “Best thing for a snake bite,” said Sid. “Fights the poison in the blood. I seen it lots.” Joycie thought it must have worked, because Speed shortly grew very calm, and his breath became deep and regular.

A half hour after the sun set, Simmons put the sweep oar hard over to the left, and they pulled into shore. Joycie dragged Speed against the opposite bulkhead to put him as far from ropes and branches as she could while the men made the flatboat fast. Sid went ashore to find deadwood. Simmons set a brown tin coffee pot among the burning branches and soon had the grounds boiling. “What did you bring, Mrs. Wilson? What you have to eat?” Simmons asked.

“There’s some fall carrots and a few turnips, but Crawford said you provided the victuals.” Just then a shot rang out in the woods back from the shore, and Sid emerged into the dusky firelight with a dead squirrel.

“Here, clean this,” he said to Joycie. “Maybe I can still find a rabbit.”

Joycie gutted and skinned the little animal, and put it on a stick over the fire to roast. There was another report from the woods, and Sid returned, this time with a rabbit. Simmons cleaned that and placed it over the fire as well. As he scraped the white hairs from the carrots, the three of them discovered the mosquitoes had given them two choices. They could either stand directly in the smoke, or retreat on board and cover themselves with any rag or blanket they could find. Joycie retrieved the quilt from her wooden box and was chewing silently on the meager meat and vegetables when a voice came from the lean-to. “Ma, my leg hurts real bad. I’m thirsty. Can I have a drink?” Joycie dropped the rabbit bones and ran to the youth.

“That’s good. I was worried,” said Simmons.