She knew at once, however, that Jimmy Jackson was not the sort of man you’d joke with about the moth-eaten woolen cap he kept pulled down over his forehead, or the single gold earring in his right ear. There was a fierceness in his eyes and a lunacy in his laughter. What she had thought to be banter, she suspected he considered brazenness.
She decided to stay far away from him on the journey downriver.
“Is she lonesome?” he asked.
He sidled up beside her as stealthily as a cat, startling her. She was looking out over the side at the farms lining the riverbanks. The sight of women bustling about their yards filled her with a longing for her home in Virginia. Jackson had almost reckoned her mood correctly; she wasn’t feeling lonesome, but she was feeling homesick, and the two were akin.
“Good day,” she said. There was only one way to discourse with this man, and that was on the plainest level. Give him a hint of humor, and he’d take it wrong. She glanced up forward to where Hadley was in conversation with the man who owned the slaves. “Where are they bound?” she asked Jackson.
“Is she interested in slaves then?” Jackson asked. “New Orleans,” he said. “The man talking with your good husband there is breaking up his farm in the Shenadoah. Moving north, bought himself a mill there. Carried the niggers by wagon to Louisville.”
“Will he sell them in New Orleans?”
“That’s his plan. He’d damn well better sell them,” Jackson said, and burst out laughing. “He’s paying me five dollars a head for transporting them, which is more’n I’m getting for you and your entire load. Offered to hire me his strongest bucks for two dollars apiece on the trip downriver, told him I already had two in crew, didn’t need any damn niggers underfoot. What d’you think of the shape on the wench there?”
“Pardon?” Minerva said.
“Teats on her like a brood mare,” Jackson said. “Like to hire her for two...”
But Minerva had already walked away.
He referred to her constantly as “she,” as though he were talking about a person other than Minerva herself.
“Does she see the sawmills?” he asked when they passed New Albany. “Are there any like that in Virginia?”
“There’s sawed lumber aplenty back home,” she snapped, and realized at once that he’d been teasing and had elicited from her the angry response he’d expected. She paused a moment, and then continued in a calmer tone, as if she were talking to a reasonable man and not someone crazy. “When I was a girl,” she said, “you couldn’t get sawed lumber for less than five or six dollars a hundred feet, depending on how far it’d traveled down the Clinch.”
“But now there’s fine and fancy furniture in her house, ain’t that so?”
“Our house back home was plain but cheery,” she said calmly.
“Was it bigger than the cabin there in the middle of the boat?”
“Quite,” Minerva said.
“With all in it homemade save for the cherrywood dresser she’s carrying west.”
“How’d you...?”
“I spied it through the open cover,” Jackson said, and laughed. “There’s enough in that wagon to furnish the governor’s mansion! Pewter plates and wooden bowls, shot bags and—”
“You didn’t spy all that through the cover,” Minerva said. “Have you been inside our wagon?”
“Only to sniff at her pillow,” Jackson said.
“Would you like to be sniffing it through a bloodied nose?” she asked, and moved away from him at once.
But she was trembling.
On the third day out, she stayed close by Hadley and her sons, keeping Jackson constantly in sight, making certain she was never alone in the cabin or by its exterior sides sheltered from view. But along about three that afternoon, Lester asked the men if they wanted to play some poker.
“Don’t know the game,” Hadley said.
“Be happy to teach you, sir,” Lester said, and Hadley burst out laughing.
“You’re a sharper for sure,” he said. “Do you plan to win from us all you lost on the steamboat?”
Lester turned toward where Jackson stood at the rudder, the woolen cap pulled over one eye, the golden earring glinting in the sun. “Hey, captain!” he shouted. “Can we have a fistful of those beans you’re carrying?”
“For what purpose?” Jackson shouted back.
“To use for money.”
“Be a trick I’d like to see,” Jackson said. “Help yourself, but don’t go spilling them all over my deck.”
“Let’s find a spot in the sun,” Lester said, and the men rose, and Minerva rose with them. Hadley took her aside.
“What is it, Min?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Is something ailing you?”
“No,” she said.
“Then what is it? You’re clinging to me like...”
“It’s the farms and all.”
“The farms?”
“Seeing them along the river.”
“Well, Min, we’re about to play some cards here.”
“I know that.”
“There’s apt to be talk I wouldn’t want you hearin.”
“Ain’t no talk in the world I haven’t heard. Could give you some talk of my own would blister your eyeballs.”
“That’s the truth,” he said, and smiled. “But I know you don’t like cussin, Min, and there might be some if the cards run wrong one way or another.”
“I don’t mind cussin,” she said.
“That’s news,” he said.
“I suppose it is.”
“But I mind your hearin it. Now you set yourself down right here, and leave us play the game in peace. Be enough trouble us trying to learn it without havin to worry over every word we say.”
“Hadley...”
“Yes, Min?”
“Nothing.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said.
She watched them as they walked to where the beans were stored up forward in hempen sacks. Lester scooped up a hatful of them and the men went to sit in the sun on the starboard side of the boat. She was coming around the side of the cabin, thinking to find her daughters and sit with them, when Jackson stepped suddenly into her path. He was grinning wide, tobacco-stained teeth showing in the black beard, brown eyes glinting under the woolen cap tilted onto his forehead. She noticed at once that the earring was missing from his ear. He held out his clenched fist, and then opened it. The golden circlet caught the afternoon sun, glowed as though alive on his palm.
“Does she want it?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“She’ll take it,” he said, “want it or not,” and moved swiftly to where she was standing. Holding the earring between thumb and forefinger, he dropped it into her bodice. She felt it moving over her breasts, sliding down inside her petticoat. In a moment, it fell from the bottom of her skirt and clattered onto the deck.
“Ah, and I thought she might catch it between her legs,” he said, and threw back his head and laughed.
“Leave me alone,” she said.
“I think not,” Jackson said, and was moving toward her when Annabel came around the corner of the cabin.
“Ma!” she shouted. “Come look! There’s a ferry crossing the river, all red, yellow, and blue!”
“Coming,” Minerva said, and picked up the earring and threw it overboard.
On a rusted iron stove in the cabin, Minerva cooked their supper and brewed a pot of coffee from the precious two pounds she’d bought in Louisville. This was the night of the sixth; they would be in Evansville tomorrow morning. The air was almost balmy, more like August than May. On the deck outside, the men were talking with the Shenandoah farmer. Their voices drifted out over the water. From the banks of the river Minerva could hear the lowing of a solitary cow. Lifting the coffeepot from the stove, she listened, transfixed, the sound of the cow calling to mind sharply and vividly the cow Bonnie Sue had made her pet years back. Couldn’t slaughter the animal to eat when times got bad because Bonnie Sue fussed and cried at the very mention of it. Finally had to sell her for less than what they’d—