Minerva watched. She knew what was in the gunnysack. She suspected that Lester knew as well, though there was no sound from inside the sack, nothing to betray the coiled cool secret within. She’d heard that some men could smell the presence of danger, and she watched Lester’s eyes now and saw something other than intelligence sparking them, saw too the slight flaring of his nostrils. He either knew there was a rattlesnake inside that sack, or else he was reacting to Hadley’s stance and manner. Whatever was in that sack, Lester was sniffing hostility in the air, over and above the strong stench of horse sweat and mule dung.
“Five times or six, there’s small difference,” Hadley said. “What I’m driving at is I’m sure you’re a man skilled in the ways of the trail.”
“That I am, sir,” Lester said. His eyes were still on the sack.
“And being skilled in the ways of the trail, I’m sure you’ve many times seen what I’ve got right here in this old sack.” Hadley opened the sack, and reached into it, and came out with his hand clutched behind the rattler’s head. He squeezed gently and the jaws gaped wide.
Lester looked at the snake. “Yes, sir,” he said, “but of the western variety.”
“A brother or a cousin, aye,” Hadley said.
“It might be put that way.”
“Have a closer look at him,” Hadley said, and put the snake down on the hay-strewn floor, directly at Lester’s feet. The moment he released his grip, the snake began rattling and hissing.
Lester took a step to the right just as the snake struck, its fangs sinking into the leather of his left boot. The snake withdrew, was slithering into an S as Lester moved swiftly behind it and reached down and grabbed it back of the head, just as Hadley had done when pulling it from the sack not two minutes before. Lester was smiling. He lifted the snake up close to his face, the jaws gaping wide, venom dripping from the fangs. Looking into the snake’s mouth, he said, “Shall I break his back, sir, or did you still want him for a pet?”
The barge — for such she was, there was no disguising her name or her plainness — was carrying downriver a full load of flour and hemp, feathers, and soap, pork in bulk, dried beans, ginseng and Seneca oil, seven score chickens in cages, and a dozen slaves in chains. The slaves huddled near the stern, peering at the churning river below, wailing and moaning in despair — or else praying; Minerva couldn’t tell which. The Ohio was full; it had been raining on and off in Louisville for the past two weeks. Otherwise they could not have come through the chute on the Kentucky side, impassable when the river was low. The current was swift, too, the water choked with floating debris, jutting logs, pieces of timber buried in the silt below. Another barge had broken up on the rock ledge stretching across the river, and the sight of it did little to calm Minerva’s fears. She squeezed her eyes shut as they approached it, and then opened them again immediately when she heard Jimmy Jackson’s voice over the noise of the Falls.
“Is she afraid of the river?” he shouted.
“Mind your steering!” she shouted back.
“I’ve made this trip a thousand times before! I can do it blindfolded!”
“Do it in silence, would you please!”
“The drop’s but twenty-two feet—”
“Look out!” she yelled.
The barge veered sharply away from an island midriver. Jackson laughed. Behind them, the Falls pounded and roared. The slaves were moaning in unison now, a dirge that drowned out the cackling of the chickens in their cages. Over the moaning and the clucking and the braying and the pawing, Minerva could hear the patroon still laughing.
Then suddenly, all was still.
They had come through the passage alive; miraculously, it seemed to her. She looked ahead to where one of the slaves, a buxom girl in a hempen dress, was staring out over the river. The moaning had ceased now. The slaves were as silent as the water through which the boat moved.
“See those steamboats ahead?” Will said.
“Aye,” Minerva said.
“That’s Shippingport.”
“Is she still frightened?” Jackson yelled.
“What’s wrong with him?” Hadley asked. “Is the man daft?”
“It would seem so,” Minerva said, puzzled.
She had never met a man the likes of Jimmy Jackson.
He was six feet four inches tall, and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. As bearded and as shaggy as a grizzly, he made even huge Gideon seem small beside him. He wore a shirt with the sleeves cut off so that his massive arms were free to tug and pull at the rudder. His trousers were too small for his enormous bulk; they stretched tight across his thighs and groin and were short by at least four inches, his thick hairy shins showing between the trouser bottoms and the high tops of his shoes. He stood grinning out over the water, his face and his beard wet, a soggy woolen cap pulled down over his forehead, a small gold earring in the lobe of his right ear.
Minerva suspected he’d been flirting with her on the trip through the Falls, suspected she’d been flirting back a bit — but only the way she did when there was a barn-raising or a baptism, and everyone was feeling gaysome. Even then, it was “Jeremy, that’s the brightest cravat I ever did see. Was you plannin to start a fire?” Bantering more than flirting. On the ridges where she’d lived all her life, a man’s wife was respected by the men who were his neighbors, and passing strangers were careful not to cast glances that might be taken wrong. Minerva was fifty-three years old, and the banter she enjoyed was no more akin to darting eyes and flashing ankles than was a possum to a skunk. Liked sassing a man, liked to hear him sass her back. The tone she’d used with the patroon was the same she’d have used with Benjamin Lowery in his mercantile store if he’d tried to charge two dollars a yard for calico instead of a dollar seventy-five. Her best friend, Millie Bain, was the biggest flirt she knew, carried on with the greengrocer like it was a royal romance, batting her lashes over the peaches and pears, enough to make Minerva blush clear across the shop. Harmless, though. There wasn’t a woman on the ridges had ever...
Well, yes, Charity Lewis, who’d come from England three years before, and who’d lived up to her name when it came to bestowing favors. Andy Lewis never did know what was going on till he came back home one day and found six brawny young men sitting on the front step of his cabin. Wanted to know what was going on here. Fellows didn’t know this was Charity’s husband. They’d rode over from Damascus, where the news had already spread there was a lady doing things up there on the ridges. Came clear from just this side the Tennessee line, across Copper River and over Copper Ridge. Andy Lewis stood there asking them what this was all about, six hulking fellows sitting on his step. One of them told Andy they were waiting their turn with the English lady. Said Andy should take a seat like the rest of them. Andy went to get his rifle from the wagon. He stormed into the cabin and shot at the one on top of Charity, who scarcely missed a beat, or so the ladies on the ridges said while quilting. The six outside ran for their lives, Andy Lewis chasing them, and firing as fast as he could reload. He later divorced her, first divorce Minerva ever could recall on the ridges, though there’d been several in town. Charity went back to London to live with her father, who was an ironmonger there.
So yes, there was banter and there was also flirting, and here and there a pat or two (she’d seen Hadley with his hand on Fanny Carter’s behind one time, asked him in bed that night did he enjoy feeling Fanny’s fanny?), but none of it serious — except when you got somebody crazy like Charity Lewis, who was after all a foreigner. These were God-fearing people who’d no more dream of coveting their neighbor’s wife than coveting his ox.