Fevre Dream Page 0,153

home. Shout, my brothers, shout. But they were not singing that verse. Not tonight, here on the empty steamer landing, loading up a boat that was spanking new and plush as any but still couldn't get enough trade. Watching them, listening, it seemed to Abner Marsh as if the whole river was dying, and him with it. He had seen enough dark nights and long days for the rest of his time on earth, and he was no longer certain he even had a home.

Abner Marsh walked slowly away from the landing back to his hotel. The next day he discharged his officers and crew, dissolved Fevre River Packets, and put the Eli Reynolds up for sale.

Marsh took what money he had, left St. Louis entirely, and bought a small house in his old hometown, Galena, within sight of the river. Only it wasn't the Fevre River any more. They'd gone and changed it to the Galena River, years ago, and now everyone was calling it that. The new name had better associations, folks said. Abner Marsh went on calling it the Fevre, like it was called when he was a boy.

He didn't do much in Galena. He read a lot of newspapers. That had gotten to be a habit with him, during the years he was searching for Joshua, and he liked to keep up with the fast boats and their times. There were still a few of them. The Robert E. Lee had come out of New Albany in 1866, and was a real heller. The Wild Bob Lee, some rivemien called her, or just the Bad Bob. And Cap'n Tom Leathers, as tough and mean and cussed a riverman as ever captained a steamer, had launched a new Natchez in 1869, the sixth of that name. Leathers named all his steamboats Natchez. The new Natchez was faster than any of the earlier ones, according to the papers. She cut through the water like a knife, and Leathers was bragging all up and down the river how he was going to show up Cap'n John Cannon and his Wild Bob Lee. The newspapers were full of it. He could smell a race coming on even clear up in Illinois, and it sounded like one they'd talk about for years. "I'd like to see that goddamned race," he said to the woman he'd hired to clean house for him one day. "Neither of 'em would have a chance against the Eclipse, though, you got my word on that."

"Both of 'em got better times than your ol' Eclipse," she said. She liked to sass him, that woman.

Marsh snorted. "Don't mean nothin'. River's shorter now. River gets shorter every year. Pretty soon you'll be able to walk from St. Louis to New Orleans."

Marsh read more than just newspapers. Thanks to Joshua, he'd worked up a taste for poetry, of all the damn things, and he looked at an occasional novel, too. He also took up wood carving, and made himself detailed models of his steamboats, as he remembered them. He painted them and everything, and did them all to the same scale, so you could put them alongside each other and see how big they'd been. "That was my Elizabeth A.," he told his housekeeper proudly the day he finished the sixth and biggest model. "As sweet a boat as ever moved down the river. She would have set records, except for that damned ice jam. You can see how big she was, near three hundred feet. Look at how she dwarfs my ol' Nick Perrot there." He pointed. "And that's the Sweet Fevre, and the Dunleith-had a lot of trouble with the larboard engine on her, a lot of trouble-and next to her that's my Mary Clarke. She blew her boilers." Marsh shook his head. "Killed a lot of people, too. Maybe it was my fault. I don't know. I think about it sometimes. The little one on the end is the Eli Reynolds. Not much to look at, but she was a tough ol' gal. She took everything I could give her, and a lot more, and kept her steam up and her wheel turning. You know how long she lasted, that little ugly stern-wheeler?"

"No," the housekeeper said. "Didn't you have some other boat, too? A real fancy one? I heard-"

"Never mind what you heard, goddamn it. Yes, I had another boat. The Fevre Dream. Named her after the river."

The housekeeper made a rude noise at him. "No wonder