An Embarrassment of Riches Read online

  Watts took his position at the right sweep whilst Uncle and I doubled up on the left. We cast off and hove into the mainstream. Within an hundred yards our velocity speeded up to at least twice its usual rate, a wake churning out of our stern. Like the falls of the Dismal River, these so-called falls of the Ohio were really a set of wild, foaming rapids rather than a plunging cataract, but on a much bigger scale than the former and navigable, though hazardous.

  As we approached, the mighty stream turned to a glassy sheet. Ahead, the water roared and boiled into a mist. It looked as though we would slip off the very edge of the world. I glanced over at Watts, whose jaw muscles twitched but whose face otherwise betrayed no emotion. The tumult became a thundering roar.

  “Up sweeps!” Watts cried, and we raised ours, Uncle and I both falling to our knees and hanging on for dear life as we left the sunshine of a summer day behind and plunged into the misty maelstrom, waves dashing and foaming, our craft pitching forward and back and side to side like a child’s toy boat tossed into the surf off Great South Beach. Here we entered what they called “the Chute,” our fate no longer in the hands of Pilot Watts but of Providence—and after seeing how Providence had looked after such poor souls as the Bottomleys, ’twas not a pair of hands I was altogether pleased to be in! Down we flew amid the angry currents, swirling eddies, and fearsome projecting rocks. Then, all of a sudden, it was over. The Chute discharged us and we emerged upon placid water, foam draining from our gunwales.

  Not five minutes later, Watts steered us to a dock just out of the current on the Kentucky side, an half mile below the inspection station, to which he would now pleasantly stroll back, having earned the equivalent of a week’s wages in less than fifteen minutes. I must add that he was as calm and collected as someone who had just climbed out of a pony cart, rather than one who had risked his neck in a churning deathtrap.

  Before he departed, Uncle inquired of Watts if the pilot knew some distinguishing landmark that would help us discern the mouth of the Tennessee River from other tributaries of the Ohio. I was surprised to see him wince at the mention of it.

  “You two gong down Misery way?” he replied, showing more trepidation than he had in the face of the falls.

  “We are indeed,” Uncle affirmed. “Knowest thee that stream?”

  “Supposed to be the ruins of an old garrison there at the mouth. Fort Assurance. Abandoned.”

  “Why so?”

  Watts pursed his lips and spit a brown plasm of tobacco juice into the water.

  “Can’t hardly say,” he finally replied in a low, ominous way. “Well, hope you two enjoyed the ride. Good luck and good day to ye.”

  Watts thrust his hands in his pockets and, whistling, began his stroll back to town. Uncle and I glanced at each other. I cannot vouch for the demons of imagination that may have lurched through his brain, but I know what skulked and lumbered through mine: visions of savage redskins daubed in blood and firelight; of roaring beasts—wolves, panthers, bears, of a massive, shaggy brute as big as a couch, with claws like scimitars.

  7

  Downriver from the falls of Louisville to the mouth of the Tennessee was a distance of roughly two hundred twisting miles. Signs of settlement were few, save the hamlets of Henderson and Shawneetown, to which a swineyard like Babylon might have compared as a very Athens.

  A few miles below Shawneetown lay that notorious thieves’ den called Cave in Rock, about which we had been forewarned at Louisville by the storekeeper Ames. “Such a nest of cutthroats and wickedness as would put to shame any stinking port of the Caribees,” he had described the establishment. We floated past Cave in Rock in a violent squall. Thieves were visible loitering at its entrance, indeed even beckoned and shouted, but would not venture out in the rain to molest us.

  Five days after our interview with Pilot Watts, we arrived at the mouth of the Tennessee River. The remains of Fort Assurance moldered there just as he had said, its stockade tumbled down, covered with moss and creeping vines; the barracks collapsed; the parade ground overgrown with thorny saplings of honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos). Not a single object of utility lay above ground, not a tin plate, a rusted bayonet, a nail.

  Now the human mind is a suggestible instrument. Like the mercury barometer it reacts to changes in the atmosphere. Certainly my imagination had been fired by Watts’s cautionary tales, but there was indeed something in the very air about Fort Assurance that weighed upon the soul. And while we did not talk about it, I believe Uncle too sensed this looming revenant of woe, for he did not pause to botanize the site after our initial inspection of the ruin—and our forays onto land had become rare since leaving Louisville, so wary were we of prowling savages.

  “There is nothing of interest here,” he declared unconvincingly, and we returned to our boat.

  As on our sojourn up the Dismal, we were now constrained to advance against a current by means of poling. But the current was sluggish, and without a Bilbo to oppress and hector us, it was not such a terrible labor—rather like punting for eels against the tide off Lloyd’s Neck back home. Though lethargic, this river’s water was fairly clear. The terrain was on the whole flatter here, with hardly any looming bluffs from which the Indians might launch an attack. But despite this, our method of searching for megatherium had become timorous. Perhaps we were both hoping to spot a sloth lumbering along the bank, shoot it, load it on the boat, and float posthaste downstream for the Ohio, thence to the Mississippi and New Orleans. We had certainly arranged things on deck for such a stroke of luck, for we each kept two charged pistols in our belts at all times now, and two loaded rifles close at hand on the cabin roof, so that we might hoist our poles and draw a bead at a moment’s notice.

  Not that this method was devoid of logic. For as we poled southward into the interior, we began to encounter patches of prairie, many several miles in extent along the river; and upon these savannahs teemed an abundance of game that staggered the mind, chiefly buffalo, but also vast herds of elk and deer—so that it was not entirely without reason that we might expect to sight a grazing sloth, or even an old rogue of a mastodon. One creature we saw virtually none of as we plied up the Tennessee was a single specimen of mankind, either red or white, until the afternoon of July 16, when we rounded a bend at a forested stretch of the river and blundered into a flotilla of painted savages.

  We knew from the instant they spied us that there was not a prayer of escape, and though they showed an avid determination to capture us, they went about it in a very polite manner.

  They had twelve boats, shallow-draft dugout canoes, highly maneuverable, and stable enough to be stood up in and poled like the gondolas of Venice. Each one held five savages. They had us surrounded in a matter of seconds after we rounded the bend. I hoisted my pole, threw it on the deck, and reached for my pistols.

  “Don’t be foolish,” Uncle said sotto voce, and I recalled at once Bilbo’s rash slaying of the Shannoah brave that had cost us so much grief. Our accosters, it appeared, were well furnished with firearms themselves. I put my hands up in the air. Ever so slowly, Megatherium’s bow swung ’round in the current. A dozen Indians leaped on board. One of them looked and acted the part of an officer.

  To begin with, they affected a different costume than the Shannoah, in hairstyle particularly. The braves wore their heads shaved or plucked, save for topknots that they teased into a coiffure like a parade horse’s tail. For dress this sultry day they wore only the breechcloth—but not of deerskin, I noted, rather of some sky-blue textile, a fact that struck me as curious. Their leader, a noble-faced, lithe, panther of a fellow, wore his hair in a brushy roach, and had dressed it so as to make it stand up stiffly, like an horse’s cropped mane. From the back of his head hung a spray of bright feathers, crimson, green, and iridescent blue. He too wore the breechcloth, but also an officer’s silver gorget on a chain ’round his throat. He jumped aboard our boat with two more braves by his side.

  “Good day to thee,” Uncle addressed
him in a buoyant-seeming way.

  “Bonjour,” the Indian spoke in French, to our surprise. He wore a thin, calculating smile. “You will come with us,” he declared.

  “Have we any choice?” I inquired.

  He spoke a few words to his associates in their tongue and they laughed.

  “Come,” he repeated. “You will not regret it.”

  “Then the honor is ours,” Uncle told him.

  “Where are you taking us?” I asked, not quite so eager to submit.

  “Tut, Sammy,” Uncle warned me.

  “Be patient, messieurs,” the officer reassured us coolly. “Soon everything will be explained.”

  Strange to relate, our weapons were not seized. Nor did they even request that we hand them over. They simply allowed us to keep them. This was not necessarily reassuring either. After all, if one is to be waylaid and abducted, oughtn’t the job be done with the requisite barefaced pugnacity?

  The officer bid us take seats on our own cabin roof while four braves on each side of the keelboat began to pole. The dugouts followed around us, as a squadron of prams might escort a royal barge on its progress up the Nile, the Thames, or the Seine.

  We were conveyed upstream in this luxurious manner for several hours. Our chief abductor yielded no further enlightenment as to our destination. In fact, he was a skillful dissembler, for every time I tried to extract some fragment of information he would smile and point my attention to a bird or flower in the verdure. The afternoon grew more sultry, and the sun vanished behind a suffocating blanket of gray-green clouds. Thunder boomed in the distance while the heat and humidity weighed down on us like buffalo robes and sweat drenched our clothes. Eventually, the forest on the left bank gave way to cultivated fields, as of a vast plantation. I could not identify the crop.

  “What is being grown out there, Uncle?”

  “Hemp,” he replied, clearly impressed with the extent of its cultivation. “Cannibas sativa. Here grows the riggings of an whole navy, by the looks of it.”

  The fields went on for miles. Far away in one of them I descried what looked like a gang of Negroes at work with hoes.

  I asked our captor if he would object to my fetching our telescope from the cabin. He shrugged an assent—after all, Uncle and I still retained our weapons, so he could hardly suspect mischief in that connection. I returned a minute later and scanned the horizon, then handed the glass to Uncle.

  “By heaven, Sammy, this is an huge estate,” he exclaimed. “Why there is quite a gang of slaves a’toiling out there. Wait … gad! One of them is getting an awful taste of the whip … and ’tis being wielded by a redskin. Here, look for thyself.”

  He gave me back the glass. Indeed, some poor staggering soul of a Negro was being lustily thrashed by an Indian mounted bareback upon a bay horse, acting in every respect the part of an overseer. The whip was a very sturdy and cruel-looking instrument.

  “Whose land is this?” I asked our captor.

  “LeBoeuf,” he answered.

  “Who is LeBoeuf?”

  “Look over there, at the pretty yellow bird,” he dissimulated, pointing at a goldfinch (Spinus tristis), and I sensed it would be useless to press the matter.

  We rounded a final bend and the river abruptly widened to a lakelike expanse more than a mile across. At an equal distance straight ahead loomed what looked like an island with massive and bristling trees. I raised the glass to examine it.

  “I’ll be Godalmighty blasted and buggered!” I exclaimed, lapsing into an unfortunate Bilboistical locution.

  “Sammy!” Uncle said, scandalized.

  “’Tis a floating palace!” I explained more succinctly.

  “The glass, nephew!”

  I handed it to him.

  “By heaven’s holy hymnal!” he declared. “’Tis just such a marvel. Gad…!”

  The savages of our escort fleet threw ropes up to the braves on board, who tied them fast about our bow, and the dugouts now commenced towing us, the water becoming too deep to pole. The sky grew ever darker. A stiff wind arose at our backs, whipping the water into whitecaps, as lightning flashed over the distant hemp fields and thunder rolled. The clouds yet withheld their torrents as we plied closer to the amazing “island.”

  It looked like one of the storybook castles of old Europe, but built from the crude materials of the New World wilderness. It was surrounded by a wooden stockade topped with crenellations. Within these walls rose the palace itself, three stories of unpainted wood showing above the stockade, with thirteen dormers along the garret story. Off center upon the right of this structure rose a square tower two stories higher, topped by a conical, shingled roof. In many of the palace windows, lamps burned warmly against the glowering sky.

  At the center of the outer stockade wall was an arched gate, and at the foot of this gate was a good-sized wharf, at which were berthed several barges, a small sloop, a keelboat, a gundalow, and many more Indian dugouts. They bobbed at their moorings in the rising storm, while behind them the whole massive palace slowly rocked like a monumental ark. I could see the waterline rise and fall.

  Uncle took his turn with the glass.

  “By heavens, Sammy!” he declared in fresh astonishment. “There is an orchestra of Negroes upon the quay. Fifteen, no, twenty, no, twenty-three pieces!”

  “Negroes?”

  “By thunder, yes! All a’fiddling and a’trumpeting. Their concertmaster is a white man! Here, look for thyself!”

  He gave me the glass. His report was correct in every bizarre particular. What is more, as we drew closer, I could make out the music above the shrieking wind and the crashing thunder. They were playing the glorious barge processional of George Frederick Handel, and performing the Bourrée beautifully, I might add. The gentleman wielding the baton was a gray-haired, diminutive, frail, slender figure, middle-aged, not elderly, a physical type resembling our Secretary of State, Mr. Madison. He was dressed in a beautiful suit of rose-colored bombazine about a decade out of fashion, with knee breeches of the old kind, a military-type coat, cutaway style with gold buttons, and no waistcoat. His shirt was white with frilled jabot and lacy sleeve ruffles. For a man of such apparent frailty, he brandished his baton with verve and authority. The look on his face—eyelids closed and thin-lipped mouth slightly agape—was an expression of the purest rapture.

  The Negroes, dressed in linen shirts, cream-colored breeches, and turbans, played the concluding notes of the final flourish as our boat bumped against the wharf. The concertmaster tucked his baton ’neath his arm like a riding crop, pressed his bony hands together, and smiled. Though birdlike in its angularity, his face radiated warmth.

  “Bonjour, messieurs! Buenas tardes, señores! Welcome, gentlemen!” he cried in three different languages above the howling wind.

  “Good day to thee, sir,” Uncle hallooed in return.

  “Ah, you are Americans!” he exclaimed happily. The Indians threw out mooring lines and made fast our boat. A wooden gangway was brought forward. Our keelboat rocked furiously in its storm-tossed berth. A lightning bolt crackled out of the sky and struck the distant shore, igniting a pine tree there. The Negroes stirred fearfully in their chairs.

  “I am Fernand LeBoeuf. Enchanted to make your acquaintance,” the small man in the rose-colored suit said, clasping our hands warmly as we debarked onto the quay. Suddenly, the first raindrops splattered on the wooden planks. We attempted to introduce ourselves, but LeBoeuf turned his back to us and waved at the musicians, yelling at them in French to get out of the rain.

  “Vite!” he cried. “Les instruments! Plus vite!”

  Clutching their cellos, brasses, and krumhorns, the Negroes ran for the gate.

  “S’il vous plait…” LeBoeuf turned back to us, gesturing graciously that we follow. I glanced at Uncle. He shrugged his shoulders. The rain now fell as though Niagara were overhead. We hurried down the wharf to the gate. As we entered I looked up to see a painted motto above the massive doorway:

 
LE TRAVAIL VOUS LIBÉRERA

  “What does it mean?” Uncle stopped to inquire.

  “It says, ‘Work will make you free,’” I explained.

  “What a noble sentiment,” he observed and we followed the Negroes inside.

  We debouched through the gate up a gravel path through an intricate garden of geometrically arranged rose beds in the formal French style, along which great tubs of orange trees were placed like sentinels. I noticed Uncle’s eyes widen as we hurried through it to the palace door.

  Once inside, we were conducted by M. LeBoeuf and a ragtag of Indians through a labyrinth of corridors painted in periwinkle blue and cream trim, then up a stairway to another hall, and finally to a veritable jewelbox of an apartment, as fine as any rooms in the best houses of Philadelphia or New York—nay, comparable to the great abodes of Europe. The first chamber was a sitting parlor, walls of the same blue and cream, with furniture so magnificent that the stuff of our American workshops would have compared as mere packing crates. Beautiful paintings in the manner of Watteau and Fragonard adorned the walls—playful maidens upon swings, et cetera. Gilt girandoles decorated with cut-crystal lusters held lighted candles atop the polished side tables. A Chinese carpet of rose and mint-green floral motifs ensplendored the floor.

  “I am dreaming,” I mumbled in wonder.

  “I hope you find these rooms satisfactory,” LeBoeuf said in what he could not have failed to realize was a stupendous understatement. “Come, gentlemen….”

  We followed him about the suite whilst our host gestured at the accommodations: two bedrooms, one decorated with green satin wallpaper set amid burnished mahogany panels; the other furbished in sunny tones of yellow, with wallpaper depicting an Arcadian pastoral opposite the canopied bed. A bolt of lightning illuminated it brightly for a moment.

  “The choice is yours, gentlemen,” LeBoeuf told us.