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.
Chapter 3––April 1835––People Ain’t Property
The report of the musket had brought Speed back to a reeling pain-saturated consciousness. He lay looking up at the cobalt blue sky where the evening star swirled as a tiny gold pinprick. He wanted three things: to make the point of gold stay still, quench his thirst, and escape the pain that throbbed rhythmically from his calf to a place just behind his ears. He could command only one resource, his own will. He found that with concentration he could slow the motion of the star, and so he fixed on it with all the more determination. He would stop it. He could stop it. He did stop it. He found he was still powerless against the thirst and pain, but his success in arresting the star gave him confidence to cry out to his mother. He felt her hand under his head, the cup she put to his lips, and the subsequent cushion of her bosom as she held his head to herself. After a sustained period when the star stayed fixed, Speed felt Joycie offer him a few morsels of some meat and then gently lay his head back down on the cotton sack of his belongings.
When Speed awoke the next morning, he found that the sun had been up for several hours. His mother stared vacantly at a ripple in the water three or four yards from the side of the flatboat, while Sid and Simmons, their eyes on the western sky, were engaged in serious conversation from the stern of the cumbersome vessel. Speed, wondering if his mother was overwhelmed by the trip, wanted to sit by her to refocus her thoughts. He rolled onto his hands and knees, drew the knee of his good leg up under his chin, and thrust himself upright. With the first step on his bad leg, the searing pain shot up his spine to the base of his skull, but the leg held. He did not collapse. Instantaneously he put his weight on his good leg and then threw himself down next to his mother.
“Why, Speed, I woulda come to you,” said Joycie.
Speed said nothing, but leaned himself against his mother. He noticed that the two men were now both looking at his mother as they continued their conversation, and he was relieved he was conscious again. If he had to, if they threatened her, he pictured himself bumping them into the river, then beating them on the head and shoulders as they tried to climb back aboard. He would leave them to drown while he and his mother floated on to Missouri. When Joycie rose to bring Speed water, he abandoned his murderous fantasy, propped himself upright, drank the water proffered him, and grasped the knee above his still swollen calf so he could flex his leg. A few minutes later he staggered to the down-river end of the flatboat, where he collapsed, only to arise again after an interval and rock the flatboat as he swayed to where he had been sitting.
“That’s what I like to see, boy. Use that leg. Work that poison out,” Simmons called. “No reason to lie around. See that bend up there?” Simmons pointed ahead to where the Cumberland twisted out of sight. “Every time we go around a bend, you walk those paces. You’ll have that leg back in no time.”
Speed feared Joycie would sink into another languid stare, so he was relieved when she gave him an assignment. “Go over to the box, get your Bible, and I’ll give you a passage. You read scripture, then walk. Read and walk. That’s how it’ll be.”
Speed lurched over to their small pile of possessions, which he had dumped on the deck a scant twenty-four hours before, opened the box, and retrieved Ruth’s Bible. Joycie said, “Genesis Three.” Speed began the passage with “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field…” When he finished he clapped the book shut and rose to stagger to the stern, where he overheard Sid say, “Anyway, where did you hear this Birney fellow?”
As Speed returned, he overheard Simmons say something about a James Birney at a Presbyterian church. “Exodus 3,” Joycie called. When Speed came to the phrase about the land of milk and honey, he paused and asked, “Is that like Missouri, Ma?”
“Well, we can hope. We can always hope,” said Joycie.
His mother’s tepid response made it easier for Speed to abandon thoughts of Missouri to listen to the men’s conversation. Sid was finishing a rather long discourse by asking emphatically, “How’s Birney going to get enough money to buy all them Negroes and send them back to Africa?