An Embarrassment of Riches (32 page)

“The devil you know is never as bad as the devil you don't know,” quoth Doctor Melancton Bilbo. The Mississippi, he elaborated, was bound to be infested with piratical scum and therefore we would be foolish not to join forces upon our journey southward, we to Natchez, he to New Orleans. Besides, we had a keelboat while they possessed an open pirogue, and a leaky one at that. “Think of the newlyweds,” he appealed to us, and so we agreed to travel in their company.

The tent of the Western Museum was struck and stowed on board, and off we floated a few hours behind the damnable Corps of Discovery. In two days, without event, but in sizzling hot weather, we made the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi. The difference between the two streams was at once apparent.

The Ohio, except at spring flood, runs blue and clear, while the Mississippi flows like liquid earth. “Too thin to plow, but too thick to drink,” the old adage goes. Miles below the confluence, the water on the Kentucky side of the river remained clear, while that along the western bank ran as brown as coffee, with a clear line of demarcation between them. It was many more miles before the two waters completely mingled.

Where the Ohio runs relatively straight, especially below Cave in Rock, the Mississippi loops about in so many devilish meanders that you are as often floating north as south, and the length of your journey is double the distance that the crow flies. No sooner do you round one bend than the furtive river steals around the next. To every compass point you see nothing but a wall of vegetation, and the effect is like being trapped in a maze.

Unlike the rolling country of the Ohio Valley, the Mississippi flood plain offers little relief to the traveler's eye. In spring flood these flatlands are yearly submerged, often to the distance of twenty miles from the main channel. The course of the river is constantly changing. The action of the water undercuts the bank, sending trees crashing into the water. These beget the thousandfold snags that make navigation such a hazard and that send immense quantities of driftwood and silt to the Gulf of Mexico. Where the trees have been undermined and toppled there sprout prodigious canebrakes—called “bearbrakes” because they are a favorite haunt of old bruin.

The river is often two miles across, and if pirates lurked upon any of the innumerable islands, we were able to give them a very wide berth. Many commercial flatboats were abroad at this season, and their crews laid low with the ague. Bilbo did a brisk business with them for his Universal Physic. He had left Fort Assurance with enough of the weed to last a lifetime, but the old rogue was running out of whiskey and bottles, and so we stopped at the town of New Madrid to take on fresh supplies.

The old Spanish settlement had been one of their chief outposts during the somnolent centuries when Spain owned Louisiana. The town was still half Spanish and retained an air of decayed antiquity. A few grizzled
duennas
on the main boulevard regarded us with a baleful eye as they hurried home from market. A slaughtering ground lay hard by the river, and the stench of rotten meat was everywhere. Still, it was the first town that Louis had ever laid eyes on, and to watch him among the stalls of the shabby market was to see a babe newborn to a land of wonder.

“Look, Sammy,” he cried with delight, “commerce everywhere!”

While Bilbo hawked his physic on the town wharf, Uncle and I repaired to the only tavern in the village. There we dined on stewed goat and enjoyed cups of Spanish
Jerez
whilst I passed a sketch of megatherium around to the other patrons. Most shook their heads, but one hoary old bushranger avouched that he had seen such a monster years before in the country of the Creeks, and a thrill ran though me to think that we would soon be back upon the right trail.

Between New Madrid and Natchez lay not a single town of any consequence. For a thousand miles and three weeks' time we floated relentlessly southward. The monotonous bends and wearisome flatness were sometimes relieved by the sight of high clay bluffs. Upon several such cliffs we spied convocations of savages, whom Bilbo said were Chickasaw and “devils to whom the Shannoah compared as cherubim.” At night their lurid fires blazed against the dark forest, and not even Neddy dared set foot ashore to hunt us a supper lest he lose his scalp.

In this season of low water, and lacking any knowledge of the river, we daily encountered snags and shoals. Once, the keelboat became entangled in a most horrific puzzle of several whole trees. We hung there a day till an Ohio broadhorn loaded with fifty tons of hides threw us a line and towed us free. At last, on the third of August, we arrived at lovely Natchez.

The town had passed into American hands five years earlier, being prior to then the property of Spain. Yet it retained less of a Spanish flavor than New Madrid, a thousand miles inland.

Viewed from the river it presented a most romantic sight, perched on its green-topped bluff. The main street contained several houses of brick. Here cotton, not tobacco, was the king of crops, and several new mansions—the Belle View, Linden and Airlie houses—attested to its rising value. The population stood at roughly one thousand, with at least as many slaves. Yet they showed none of the swinish customs exhibited by the habitants of the Ohio towns. Everywhere could be seen attempts to create beauty—in the gardens, the verandahs, and the window boxes. Here was the northmost reach where the orange tree will endure winter out-of-doors. Pawpaws
(Asimina triloba)
stood in every dooryard, hung with their ripening custard apples. Pretty green parakeets
(Conuropsis carolinensis)
flitted raucously among the azaleas.

Louis was afire with questions at all the strange, new, and wonderful sights—“Sammy, what is that building with a pointed cap?” “That is a church, Louis”—and it was plainer than ever that his previous state of idiocy had been enforced upon him rather than inborn.

“Wait till he claps an eye on New Orleans,” Bilbo said over a rum punch on the verandah of the Brown Pelican Tavern, where we watched the sun set across the river. “Now then,” he cleared his throat, “there is the matter of the keelboat.”

“No doubt you intend to abscond with it to New Orleans,” I remarked.

“Wrong, sir,” Bilbo retorted, “for what more important baggage does a gentleman carry to a part of the world where he is unknown but his reputation! How much do you want for the old tub?”

“Old tub! Why, its keel was laid not four months ago!”

“Perhaps. But think what you have caused it to endure. Birds have beshit its deck. It has plunged down the falls of Louisville. This scow is verily a veteran of the wars. I will give you fifty dollars for it.”

Uncle and I glanced at each other in amazement. We had not expected to get half as much for it here at Natchez.

While we hesitated, Bilbo flung his purse upon the table. It rang with gold coins. “Well? What do you say?”

Uncle and I continued to look on dumbly as he made little stacks of the coins.

“There are the supplies on board,” I reminded him, “much of which we shan't be able to carry with us.”

“Don't be a little greedy-guts now,” Bilbo wagged his long finger before my nose. “The bacon is wormy, the cheese rotten, and the meal aswarm with weevils.”

“Back in May, when first you accosted us, it suited you perfectly well—not to mention all the whiskey you guzzled, not to speak of my chocolate filberts.”

“Very well,” Bilbo gave in easily, as only a man with bright prospects will. “Seventy-five and not a penny more.”

“Thee hast a deal!” said Uncle and winked at me, for he had the impression that we drove an exceedingly hard bargain.

“Only one thing do I ask you gentlemen,” Bilbo looked at us both with a beseeching face.

“What is that?” Uncle asked suspiciously.

“When you return to the states, put out of your mind my former regrettable career upon the Ohio and speak of me as the white knight of medicine you know me as today—for there will be those at New York, and even Philadelphia, who remember the young Melancton Bilbo before a cruel fate drove him west.”

“From hereon I shall advertise you as like unto the Nazarene who healed the sick and made the lame leap for joy.”

A tear came to his eye.

“'Tis close to the truth,” he averred. “Aint' it?”

And so the next morning, after a sound night's sleep upon a good rope bed, we bid adieu again to Bilbo
et famille
at the landing below the Natchez bluffs.

“Be so kind as to put this on a ship for Philadelphia,” Uncle said as he nailed shut the lid of a wooden crate upon the foredeck.

“What's in it?” Bilbo asked innocently.

“Specimens.”

“What sort o'specimens?”

“Rattlesnakes,” Uncle said, and Bilbo backed off. Actually, it contained
Puya
seed, plus many botanical oddments.

“If all goes well, we should be in New Orleans ourselves before too long,” I told Louis in a separate interview at the rail.

“You will visit us then?”

“Depend upon it.”

“O, my friend, I will miss you and Uncle William.”

“I will miss you too, Louis. You have a whole world to discover. Perhaps while we are gone you will think again about returning to the East.”

“Not to France.”

“No, to New York or Philadelphia.”

“Would you like that,
mon pois de senteur
?” Louis asked his bride.

She nodded her head, honked avidly, threw her arms around my neck, and basted my face with viscous kisses. Louis looked on with pride and delight. Next, Neddy stepped forward.

“The best of luck to you on your venture inland,” he said in that mellifluous baritone he employed so rarely, and then only at times of great moment.

Finally, Uncle and I returned to the landing as Bilbo cast off the lines. It was but two hundred miles to New Orleans and they would arrive there in a matter of days. I was not altogether easy in my mind about leaving Louis in Bilbo's care, but at least they would be in a city and not upon an island in the middle of no place. Who could say but that Louis might even gain some important lessons in human nature under the old rascal's tutelage.

When
Megatherium
had vanished round the bend, we climbed the steep road back to the village with as much of our equipment as we could well carry—muskets, rifles, powder, blankets, et cetera—and bargained with a trader in livestock for the purchase of an ass to bear this cargo into the unknown, and of course to carry back out the pelt of a giant sloth, or so we hoped. Before noon, with our ass loaded (I named him Tom, after the architect of our mission), we walked past the old Spanish burying ground and the town cow pasture and once again entered into the wilderness, on an old footpath known as the Three-Chopped Way.

Like Zane's Trace of Ohio and the Natchez Trace, which ran northward through daunting Tennessee, the Three-Chopped Way was an ancient game trail trodden by untold generations of deer and Indians. It made a line roughly east-west through what is today Mississippi and Alabama to Georgia. Since it transected the country of that most cruel and obstinate tribe, the Creeks, it was not a highway followed by many whites, and we were naturally apprehensive lest we fall into Indian hands. But in a week's march we encountered but one solitary warrior—upon what errand we never did learn—and this under strange circumstances.

We met at either end of a beargrass meadow. He did not skulk away at the sight of us, nor nock an arrow—he carried no firearms—but rather watched us with deep curiosity, as bears and other wild things sometimes do when you cross their paths in the forest. Nor did we brandish any weapons at him. We only returned his gaze in the fierce sunshine that flooded the little meadow. He took some steps toward us, then we toward him. At length we stood eyes to eyes, he scrutinizing us as though he had never seen our like before. There was something childlike in his face, an innocent wonder you do not see in the eyes of adult whites in the humdrum of their daily pursuits, nor even in church on Sunday when brought into contemplation of God and His miracles. Finally, with a little grunt, he tore himself from our own curious gazes and continued on his way, as if he had fully satisfied himself we were men and not manticores. Uncle, who had known many savages in his day, thought the incident passing strange. Nor in that week's march did we encounter any sign of megatherium, though the supply of game was profuse, a stupendous bounty of deer, turkey, snipe, and bear—so many walking hams, briskets, roasts, tenderloins, breasts, drumsticks, and chops as to make Kentucky compare like the pantry of some poor country parson. And here also was a botanical wonderland for Uncle: new species enough to exhaust the supply of names of colleagues, relations, and friends to honor. Three varieties of
Yucca
, for example, he named after the children of his associate in natural philosophy and fellow Philadelphian, Mr. Peale
(Yucca raphaelis, rembrandtis, titianis)
. I followed him with brush and paintbox at the ready, absorbing myself in the art of natural portraiture for the first time since we had set out on our mission—for the first time, really, since those leisurely days of the summer previous, when Columbia College had invited me to depart and I had rediscovered my love of painting.