“Hadley,” she said, “I’m goin home. If I got to hire out to a traveling circus...”
“Min...”
“As a trapeze artist or a bearded lady...”
“It ain’t really dangerous,” Will said. “The current’s fast, and the river changes width a lot....”
“I’m sure happy to hear that,” Minerva said.
“And there’s islands and rocks all along the way...
“Soundin better all the time.”
“But look down below there, Ma. Look at all them kinds of craft floatin on the river down there. Now they made it safe through the Falls, didn’t they? Ain’t no reason we can’t do the same.”
Below, there were flatboats and keelboats, galleys and barges; bateaux, pirogues, dugouts, and skiffs; scows and arks and rafts and canoes; steamboats and schooners and even brigs that had sailed from Europe. She could scarcely name a third of the vessels she saw down there on the river, but the very profusion of them filled her with a new dread. Even if they did make it safely over the Falls — or through them, as her son insisted — wouldn’t they then collide with one or another of the craft below, so clotted was the river?
“No,” she said, and shook her head.
“Let’s find a livery stable,” Hadley said, and sighed.
The city frightened her as much as had the river.
Back home, she knew what to expect, there were no surprises. You came into town on a wide dirt road lined with board-and-batten buildings. There were several smaller dirt roads branching off it on either side, likewise lined with wooden structures, some of them dating back to the time of the first settlement. The town proper started just beyond the branch to Bristol. The wide main street of the town was, in fact, the old Wilderness Road itself. They had followed it west when they left on the twenty-second — she would never forget that date — and it had taken them clear to the Cumberland Gap. There were four hundred some-odd people (“some of them mighty odd,” Hadley said) in the town Minerva called home. There were twenty thousand here in Louisville.
The noise alone was enough to make her ill.
She hurried her daughters along the sidewalks, clinging to their hands, one on either side of her, fearful they would all be trampled underfoot if they did not keep pace with a population that rushed and pushed and jostled shoulder to shoulder everywhere around them. The sidewalks were lined with lampposts. The streets were paved with limestone blocks. In the streets there were men riding horses, jackasses, and mules. Carriages and coaches clattered and rattled, carts and wagons rumbled by — it was worth a person’s life to try crossing to the other side! Here now came a burly black man pushing a wheelbarrow and shouting to another man lounging in the doorway of a saloon. The city was a blur of noise and motion, horses neighing and mules braying, peddlers shouting their wares to passers-by, delivery men banging crates on the sidewalk, even babies bawling louder than any Minerva had heard in her life. The din everywhere called to mind for sure the passage in Revelations, where John beheld a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his head, and his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did not cast them to the earth, and none of that could have made more commotion than was here in this noisy, noisome city of Louisville, Kentucky.
The girls wanted to dawdle, oohing and ahhing over whatever caught their fancy in shopwindows along the way. But Minerva briskly pulled them along past silversmith and coppersmith, tailor shop and pharmacy, a saddlery selling fancy Spanish saddles for forty dollars each, a furniture store and three mercantile stores, one of them advertising dry goods from Boston and New York. They rushed past theaters and dining rooms, taverns and more saloons than a thirsty man could drink his way through in a year. When at last Minerva found a store selling the staples she needed to replenish their dwindling supplies, she threw open the door as though she and her daughters were being chased by highwaymen, and closed it immediately behind her.
Silence.
Blessed silence.
The proprietor was a ruddy-faced man with a bald head; he regarded the three of them with mild amusement, his eyes twinkling behind gold-rimmed spectacles, a faint smile on his mouth. Minerva suddenly saw herself through his eyes — she was scared of this city, and was certain her fear showed on her face. The man’s smile annoyed her because she felt it indicated ridicule or pity, and she could abide neither.
“What do you find so amusing?” she snapped.
“Ma’m?” he said, and his eyes popped open wide behind his glasses, and she knew she’d made an error in judgment, and blushed as she hadn’t since she was Bonnie Sue’s age. In apology, she told the truth. “The streets frighten us,” she said.
“Not me,” Annabel said.
“Hush,” Minerva said. “We’re far from home, and have never seen a city this size.”
“It’s a good city,” he said, “though the waters are stagnant and the inns infested with varmints. Will you be staying at one of the hotels?”
“No,” Minerva said, “but much obliged. Is that coffee I spy?”
“That’s coffee.”
“How much the pound?”
“Fifty cents.”
“Fifty cents!” she said.
“That’s not a bad price,” he said.
“It’s an outrageous price. Back home I can get it for thirty.”
“It’s been thirty-eight here, even before it got scarce.”
“I’ll need it anyway,” Minerva said. “But you couldn’t do better with a pistol and a mask on your face.”
The man laughed.
“We’re going west,” Annabel said.
“Are you now?” he said. “How many pounds will you be wanting, ma’m?”
“Make it two. But just,” she said. “We’re not going west, Annabel.”
“Sure we are,” Annabel said.
“Where west, young lady?”
“California,” Annabel said.
“Or Oregon,” Bonnie Sue said.
“‘We haven’t decided yet,” Annabel said.
“We’re going home, is where we’re going,” Minerva said.
“And wise you’d be. How are you for corn-meal, ma’m?”
“How do you mean wise?”
“You’d be foolhardy to attempt the trip this time of year.”
“The Falls, do you mean?”
“Well, the Falls aren’t so bad. I’m talking about running into snow in the mountains. Did you say meal?”
“Five pounds,” Minerva said. “What snow?”
“In the Rockies. You’re late starting. Were you hoping to meet a wagon train in Independence? Cause they’re all gone by now, you see, and there’s nothing would please the Indians more than to come across a lone wagon on the prairies. Those bloody savages’ll—”
“You needn’t worry,” Minerva said. “We’re going—”
“—scalp your menfolk, burn your wagon, steal your horses, take you and your daughters captive.... How are you for molasses?”
The saloon was a long narrow room with a bar along one side of it and a cluster of tables at the far end. A mounted elk’s head was hanging in the center of the far wall, and there were five or six men looked like tough customers sitting at the tables there drinking hard liquor. Gideon and Will stood at the bar, drinking beer, three or four other men ranged along the bar beside them. A mirror framed in dark wood hung behind the bar, together with some portraits of what looked like riverboat pilots. There was also a picture of a showboat called the Delta Maiden, with a black dwarf wearing a checked suit and a straw skimmer, standing on the dock alongside the paddle wheel.
“Man was all out of linchpins,” Will said, and shook his head.