Chapter 5

V.

I will tell you how it happened.
It fell apart.

***

She was my boat, and she was always meant to be my last. After our last run, down that little leg from Knoxville to Chattanooga—hardly a hundred miles—I was going home. My wife was waiting for me there, at her sister’s place on Lookout Mountain. I was to lean hard on the whistle treadle three times when I passed between the hills. She would know to look outside and see me coming. The smoke from the big black stacks would show my progress even at a very great distance.

Her sister would bring her down to the landing.

We might stay in the valley for awhile; the weather was good and there was no rush to head back home.

But we hadn’t talked about that, yet—whether or not we’d really go home. We weren’t certain anything was left of it. Last we heard, the Yankees hadn’t burned it; but however Bellehurst was standing, word had it, the place wasn’t doing so well.

Maybe we’d heard wrong. The news coming up was spotty and unreliable, or that’s how we liked to think.

In Chattanooga, the war hadn’t treated the city too bad. It was too important, with the river and the rails. Everyone needed to use it. It took some beating, sure—but nothing like what they got down in Georgia. Nothing like Chickamauga, maybe ten or twelve miles south.

I hear the mountains took the worst of it, but I don’t know if it’s true. I know soldiers and generals always try to take the highest ground, and there’s nothing higher around there than Lookout and Signal.

But after it was over…after Appomattox, there was no going back to the way things were. Not in Tennessee, not in Georgia, and not anywhere else.

I did say they left the house standing, though, didn’t I? Sherman went another way, and burned another stretched-out scar on someone else’s land. But they didn’t take our place—even though we left it for them.

I went into the service. They made me a Major, because they couldn’t expect a man with stature to enlist in the infantry. I pray I did them proud.

Nancy went to go stay with family. I’d say that between us, she sure got the better part of the deal. My wife had cousins down in Florida—on an indigo plantation, if I remember right. When the war came, these cousins of hers didn’t just leave the state or the Confederacy, they left the continent altogether. They went to the Caribbean and waited out the conflict there on the sandy islands to the south and east.

In my private thoughts, I felt they were being disloyal. They should have stayed and fought with the rest of us. But if they were determined to leave, then it was just as well they took Nancy with them. I don’t know how well she would have handled it, staying there. She could’ve been killed, or worse.

But when the war ended and the homestead was gone—or out of commission, anyway, since everyone who worked it was scattered or free, I didn’t know what to do. Fortune hadn’t favored us, to say the least. I was out of money, though Nancy was spared that trouble, being in the islands like she was. I am glad for that. I should speak better of her cousins. I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t taken her with them.

After my discharge, I sat down and wrote a very painful letter to my wife. I didn’t go into any more detail than necessary; but I told her the truth about our money situation—and I told her that she should stay with her family as long as it was necessary, since I couldn’t provide for her the way I did before. I told her, in short, that I’d made my fortune on the Mississippi, and I lost it to the Union.

I did not tell her how, exactly. It would not have mattered and it would have bothered her something awful. She didn’t need to know about the camp. She didn’t need to know about the drinking, the wandering, and the smuggling.

But I told her I loved her, and I meant to repair the rest.

For two years, I’d been rebuilding my reputation—transporting goods and people up and down the Tennessee River. I taught the roof captains how to watch and guide, and I helped apprentice the mud clerks until they could dock a boat without scraping bottom. I’d done it all before, and I believe that my advice and guidance proved invaluable. I was paid for it, anyway. They needed people like me on the rivers.

The south was being “reconstructed,” as the politicians liked to say it. I had another word for it, but it was not a polite one that I would have used in front of my wife.

But any construction needs ready supply, and a man with my experience could make a fair living off a river. Granted, a man might need to make a few deals he couldn’t share with his family—but I was accumulating a stash of such secrets, and I was getting better by the day at keeping them covered.

I might say, if anyone asked, that all it took was a stash of good scotch.

My wife would have objected, though. That’s why I brought her a nice bottle of wine—a glorious green bottle with a foil-trimmed label, straight from France. I bought it from a dealer who was wending his own way down to New Orleans, or so he said.

Maybe it was a ruse, and maybe he had some other plans. He didn’t owe me the truth, and I shouldn’t have bothered him for it. I do know this much: the first two bottles I drank alone, and they were as fine as the labels promised.

I saved the last, and assumed the best. But Nancy never got to try it.