Crescent City Read Free

They were decent people, a fat man and his fat wife, silent, hardworking folk. They’d sit at meals and there wouldn’t be a sound but chewing and forks clattering. They fed me well, I will say that, yet they were stingy with pay. When the time came for my wages, he only gave me half of what he’d promised. Said he’d had a bad year, which wasn’t true, because the crops were good. We’d had the best weather, enough sun and enough rain, and I’d gone with him to market and seen him sell his corn. It was just that his big fist didn’t want to let the coins go loose. Well, I said to myself, I’d promised to stay two years and he’d promised to pay, but he’d broken his promise, so I had no qualms about breaking mine. Ijust got up very early one morning and slipped away out of the barn where I slept.”
    Fall Fall of the leaves. Such golden, rosy leaves! Sour-sweet apples lay rotted on the grass. Dawn was cold; in a few hours the sun would be hot and the warmed air humming with bee buzz in the apples. By that time I would be far down the road, any road, as long as it was going west.
    “This time I had a plan. I’d met a peddler who came by every few months with knickknacks for the farmwives: cotton cloth and thread, needles and toothbrushes. I saw he could do pretty well for himself. So that’s what I did. Got a pack full of stuff with the money the farmer had paid me, and I worked along the road from farm to farm all the way to the Ohio River. And this wasn’t a bad life, either, walking through the country with the coins jingling, growing heavier in your pocket. Or riding the riverboat, turning and curving, wondering what’s around the next curve .…”
    After a hundred hills and valleys, remember the debarkation at the spot where the Ohio rode into the Mississippi; the green shimmer of just-beginning spring the smell of grass and all the vast space, the vast silence. Remember how one threw one’s hat off and alone there, unobserved, flung oneself into a crazy dance just for the joy of freedom, of answering to no man, of being young enough to feel one’s own strength and no longer being afraid of anything not having to be afraid of anything anymore.
    “After a while I was able to buy a horse. It was such a poor thing, all worn out and sick with saddle sores! I could have afforded a better creature, but I felt sorry for it. So I let it rest awhile and get its strength. We made friends, he and I, and went on together. In and out, back and forth, inland and back to the river. Atthe wholesalers’ in the towns I replenished my sacks. Sometimes I’d get back onto the riverboat for ten or fifteen miles to the next landing.”
    Ferdinand, in the telling, was living it all again, telling as much now to himself as to the others.
    “I saw great plantations on the riverfront, grand columned houses, hundreds of black slaves, miles and miles of cotton fields. I saw poor settlements, three or four log houses in the woods. There are no forests like those in Europe, no …” He thought for words. “You can’t imagine the distances, the wildness of those forests. Sometimes it startles you to think how seldom a human foot has been there before you. Often it is hours between settlements. You will see a cluster of men in deerskins, women and children in ragged woolen. You wonder what brought them, what keeps them in this primitive, hard life.”
    Forest and swamp and trail Darkness falls under the pines and the thorny underbrush, pressing across the path, whips at your face so that you must protect it with your hand. Your footsteps crackle. Then comes the fright, the old terror out of childhood, everyone’s childhood; something is following at one’s back. In another instant it will spring forward, it will grasp. And you force yourself to steady your mind toward common sense. You will yourself not to turn around and look behind.
    “Lonely, empty—”
    “And Indians?” David had gone tense with interest. With finger