“It was an emergency,” Fawn offered.
“There will always be another emergency along. How long before a need becomes a habit becomes a corruption? Lordship comes too easy, for some. And it was lordship near slew the world.”
His stride, scrunching through the sand, had lengthened. Fawn quickened her steps to keep up. He continued, “Unless we keep separate lives. Did we come all this way down that long river just to find out the folks we were arguing with back at Hickory Lake were right all along?”
“Slow down, Dag!” Fawn panted.
He stopped. She gripped his sleeve and turned him to face her, looking up into his troubled gold eyes. “If that’s the truth, then that is what we came all this way to find, yes. And we’ll need to face it square. But I can’t believe it’s a truth so solid that there’s no cracks at all with space left for us to fit in.”
“As long as malices exist, then the patrol must be maintained, and everything that backs it.”
“Nobody’s arguing with that. But making farmers less ignorant and Lakewalkers less obnoxious doesn’t have to mean turning the whole world tail over teakettle. You made a good start on the way down here, I thought!”
“Yeah?” He dug his toe in the sand, bent, scooped up a smoothed rock lying there, swung back, and flung it out over the waves. It vanished with a faint plop. “I made a start like throwing a rock into this sea. I could stand here and throw for years and never make a difference you could tell.”
Fawn straightened her spine and scowled up at him. “You’re not fretting because you couldn’t keep your promise to show me the sea. You’re fretting because somewhere in that murky head of yours you were hoping to have the whole problem solved by now, and hand it to me tied up in a bow for my birthday present!”
His long silence after that broke in a rueful chuckle. “Oh, Spark. I’m afraid so.”
“I should have thought a patroller would be more patient.”
He snorted. “You should have met me at age nineteen. I was going to save the whole world that year, I was. Patience and exhaustion turn out to have a lot in common.”
“Well, then, you ought to be real patient right now!”
He laughed out loud, a real laugh finally, and hugged her in tight. “You would think so, wouldn’t you?”
They turned around and started walking back toward the distant carcass. Fawn was pleased to see that Barr and Remo had finally taken their boots off and were wading around in the surf with Hawthorn, even if they were only washing up after the fish-butchery. But there was a suspicious amount of splashing going on for such a practical purpose.
They collected the boys and their prizes—Fawn was fascinated to handle the sculpted teeth with their strange serrated edges, once the blood and smelly gristly bits had been cleaned off—and made their way back to their cache, where the men built a driftwood fire. Hawthorn made Dag light it while he watched closely, venting hoots of delight. Fawn was grateful for the orange heat on her face, because the breeze was still chilly and damp. Even the patrollers thought the colors licking up around the bleached wood—blues, greens, spurts of deep red—were magical.
At length, Berry and Whit came back. Only now they walked up the wet sand not just side by side, but holding hands tightly. As they came near, Fawn saw that Berry looked wistful, and Whit looked sappy. She and Dag, sharing a blanket like a cloak, glanced at each other and grinned in recognition.
As the pair came up to the fire, Dag leaned back, eyes crinkling, and called, “Congratulations!”
Whit looked faintly horrified.
“Lakewalkers,” sighed Berry.
“Dag!” Fawn poked him in reproof. “At least let them say it for themselves!”
“Well, um…” said Whit.
Berry scraped a strand of sea-blown hair out of her eyes. “Whit’s asked me to marry him.”
“And she said yes!” put in Whit, in a tone of wonder.
It made the ensuing picnic properly celebratory, to be sure. Hawthorn was quite taken with the notion that he would now have a tent-brother, in the Lakewalker style. Whit glanced at Hawthorn, glanced at Dag, and looked quite thoughtful all of a sudden.
Later, handing around the food, Fawn murmured to Whit, “Good work, but you sure took a chance. You were real lucky to bring it off so soon!”
He whispered back, “Well, you said I ought to wait till I was as far from that cave as it was possible to get.” He stared out at the gleaming sea. “You can’t get any farther than this.”
They ate, drank, rested—in some cases, napped—and watched the repeating miracle of the waves and the turning of the tide. The sun sloped down to the west, lighting distant clouds that towered peach and blue above the lavender horizon, making Fawn think of the tales of the great shining cities of the lost Lake League on a drowned shore halfway across the continent. On a lake so wide you could not see across, so it had to be something like this. I should like to see that lake, someday.
Dag was asleep with his head on her lap when a white speck out to sea resolved into a familiar sail. Distant figures waved at them from the deck as the fishing boat rode the tide and breeze into the estuary’s mouth. She awoke him with a kiss, and they packed up and climbed the line of dunes to meet it at their landing place.
At the top, Whit turned to walk backward, then stopped. “This is the end of the world, all right.”
I once said I would follow Dag to the end of the world. Well, here we are…
Whit continued, “Sure is impressive. But just too big. I think the river will be enough water for me, from now on.” He smiled at his river lady and tried to steal a kiss, thwarted because she gave him one first. Hawthorn only wrinkled his nose a little.
“The Fetch won’t go upstream,” Berry reminded him. “We’ll be walking home.”
“And all uphill, too,” said Whit, making a wry face.
“That’ll be one long walk,” said Remo, to which Barr added, “Yeah, I need to get me some new boots.”
Fawn turned from the sea to look out over the flat marsh, fading into immense hidden distances, and felt dizzy for a moment, imagining the wide green world tilting up before her feet.
“You know, Whit, it all depends which way you’re facing. This way around, it looks to me more like the world’s beginning.”
Dag’s grip on her hand tightened convulsively, though he said nothing. Together, they all slid down the slope of sand to meet the boat.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Feeling that my memories of houseboating on the Ohio River in my youth weren’t quite enough to support my tale, I turned with great reading pleasure to additional sources. I quickly found that while material on steamboating ran the length of the Mississippi, the earlier era of keelboats, flatboats, and muscle power was much less widely documented.
Especially worth sharing with the reader curious for more are: The Keelboat Age on Western Waters (1941) by L.D. Baldwin; Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: The recollections of a steamboat pilot from 1854 to 1863 (1909) by George Byron Merrick; A-Rafting on the Mississip’ (1928) by Charles Edward Russell; A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, by Himself (1834) (Bison Books facsimile reprint 1987); and, rather a prize because it was only printed in a limited edition of 750 copies, The Adventures of T.C. Collins—Boatman: Twenty-four Years on the Western Waters, 1849–1873, (1985) compiled and edited by Herbert L. Roush, Sr.
The Merrick, the Russell, the Crockett, and the Collins were all authentic firsthand accounts, immensely valuable for the kind of detail that cannot be found in general histories. I owe Russell for Whit’s memorable phrase when falling in love at first sight with a great river because I could not sum up those feelings any more perfectly and Crockett, not only for the flatboat-sinking incident, for inspiration for the charming character of Ford Chicory—himself. I heartily recommend this autobiography, which seems to have been penned as an early political memoir; its politics have been pared away by time, but its personal aspects remain riveting to this day.