Read Fevre Dream for Free Online Page A

wears garters. The wheel seemed to cry out for a pilot’s hands.
    Joshua York came up to the wheel and touched it, running a pale hand over the black wood and silver. Then he took hold of it, as if he were a pilot himself, and for a long moment he stood like that, the wheel in his hands and his gray eyes brooding as they stared out into the night and the unseasonable June fog. The others all fell silent, and for a brief moment Abner Marsh could almost feel the steamboat move, over some dark river of the mind, on a voyage strange and endless.
    Joshua York turned then, and broke the spell. “Abner,” he said, “I would like to learn to steer this boat. Can you teach me to pilot?”
    “Pilot, eh?” Marsh said, surprised. He had no difficulty imagining York as a master and a captain, but piloting was something else—yet somehow the very asking made him warm to his partner, made him understandable after all. Abner Marsh knew what it was to want to pilot. “Well, Joshua,” he said, “I’ve done my share of piloting, and it’s the grandest feeling in the world. Being a captain, that ain’t nothin’ to piloting. But it ain’t something you just pick up, if you know what I’m saying.”
    “The wheel looks simple enough to master,” York said.
    Marsh laughed. “Hell yes, but it’s not the wheel you got to learn. It’s the river, York, the river. The old Mississippi hisself. I was a pilot for eight years, before I got my own boats, licensed for the upper Mississippi and the Illinois. Never for the Ohio, though, or the lower Mississippi, and for all I knew about steamboatin’ I couldn’t have piloted no boat on those rivers to save my life—didn’t know ’em. Those I did know, it took me years to learn ’em, and the learnin’ never stopped. By now I been out of the pilot house for so long that I’d have to learn ’em all over again. The river changes, Joshua, that it does. Ain’t never the same twice in a row, and you got to know every inch of it.” Marsh strolled to the wheel and put one of his own hands on it, fondly. “Now, I plan to pilot this boat, at least once. I dreamed about her too long not to want to take her in my hands. When we go against the
Eclipse,
I mean to stand a spell in the pilot house, that I do. But she’s too grand a boat for anything but the New Orleans trade, and that means the lower river, so I’m going to have to start learnin’ myself, learn every damn foot. Takes time, takes work.” He looked at York. “You still want to pilot, now that you know what it means?”
    “We can learn together, Abner,” York replied.
    York’s companions were growing restless. They wandered from window to window, Brown shifting the lantern from one hand to the other, Simon as grim as a cadaver. Smith said something to York in their foreign tongue. York nodded. “We must be going back,” he said.
    Marsh glanced around one final time, reluctant to leave even now, and led them from the pilot house.
    When they had trudged partway through the boatyards, York turned and looked back toward their steamboat where she sat on her pilings, pale against the darkness. The others stopped as well, and waited silently.
    “Do you know Byron?” York asked Marsh.
    Marsh thought a minute. “Know a fellow named Blackjack Pete used to pilot on the
Grand Turk
. I think his last name was Brian.”
    York smiled. “Not Brian, Byron. Lord Byron, the English poet.”
    “Oh,” said Marsh. “Him. I’m not much a one for poems. I think I heard of him, though. Gimp, wasn’t he? And quite a one for the ladies.”
    “The very one, Abner. An astounding man. I had the good fortune to meet him once. Our steamboat put me in mind of a poem he once wrote.” He began to recite.
    She walks in Beauty, like the night
                      
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
    And all that’s best of dark and bright
                      
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
    Thus mellowed to