Dance on the Wind (21 page)

Likely he’d be nothing but a rack of bones by the time he limped into Louisville. Looking like something ol’ Tink’d drag into the yard out of the woods.

No chance I’ll go and land myself some work on the
wharf, looking so puny and poor the way I do. A hiring man take one gander at me and think: man as can’t provide for hisself surely ain’t worth hiring on to be doing no heavy work.

As his laughter withered, a faint and distant sound pierced the forest clearing where he stood. Not sure at first, he listened with all his being while human voices be came distinct. A slight echo reverberated behind what was clearly an attempt at song. With that echo, and its direction, Titus realized the voices came not from the forest surrounding him on three sides. Instead, the off-key melody rose from the timbered canyon of the Ohio River somewhere below him.

Through the wet leaves and soggy grass he bolted away in the song’s direction. Perhaps only to see another human. Perhaps to assure himself that his mind hadn’t been teched after going without real food for so long, and three days without the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice.

Standing on the edge of the tall granite escarpment less than a hundred feet above the river, he gazed up the Ohio anxiously, not seeing a boat upon the water. Downriver he turned expectantly. Nothing there. Turning to peer upriver once more as the echoing voices drew closer, he watched a single flatboat emerge at the far bend from the great, green, verdant tunnel of the Ohio. How many men stood on its deck, he could not tell at the distance, yet as the flatboat closed that next mile, their forms began to take shape.

Foremost was the helmsman, standing as he was at the rear of the boat, one arm drooped over a long rudder pole set down in the forks of support that reached as tall as the man’s waist. Coming out of the turn, this steersman worked to inch his craft over toward the far bank, yard by yard, keeping his flatboat guided down the main channel of the river.

Bass waved, hoping he might catch the pilot’s eye. But there was no sign of recognition from the boat.

Closer they came, until Titus could make out two more men, one on either side of the craft, each squatting down inside the low gunnels of the boat, gripping a short
oar they worked at from time to time as the pilot bellowed his orders above their song. Then Bass spotted a fourth man, who until now had been hunkered down in the front of the boat, getting up from his knees among the barrels and kegs, chests and bundles of goods. Crawling over and around them, he made his way slowly back through the center of the craft and disappeared beneath an awning of cloth stretched taut from a ridgepole that ran along the midsection of the flatboat. He emerged from the back end of the low, sideless awning and went to stand near the helmsman.

Although Titus could not make out the words of their spoken voices, he could tell that those two were talking while the two oarsmen were singing their joyous air. For a brief moment it appeared they looked up his way among the trees at the edge of the escarpment. Bass waved again.

Still no one waved back.

“Halloo!” he cried out.

It echoed back from the far side of the forested canyon.

On the flatboat below, the singing immediately stopped. It seemed all four looked up to study both sides of the river, turning their heads this way and that, searching the forested banks.

“Up here!” he cried out, waving his hat, holding the rifle out at the end with his other hand.

Then one of the oarsmen spotted him and hollered out to the others, pointing with one arm. They all seemed to turn his way, so Titus waved his rifle again. Two of the boatmen took their hats off and gave a salute. They called out with a garbled, distant greeting he could not make out.

It mattered not, for that place within him burned warm to catch this sight of others, his ears to hear the sounds of voices speaking, even singing. As they bobbed on below Titus, the two continued their off-key song. He watched them, his eyes bouncing over all four men as the helmsman began to ease his craft to the south channel of the Ohio before slipping through another bend in that mighty river where the mist and fog clung like dirty linen.

Smaller they became, smaller still, until the flatboat disappeared around a piece of land, keeling to the north
into the distant rain. Swallowed by the river and its canyon. In the silence of their wake, Titus could hear their voices fade for some time after they had gone from view. Then that too was gone, all traces of boat and crew.

So close to others, for only moments. And gone so quickly that he felt strange, as if something had been torn from him whole. The loneliness returned, this time with a vengeance—a solid, metallic ache to it as he continued to watch the very spot where the flatboat had disappeared.

Of a sudden he realized how quickly the sun was falling from the fading light. The river’s canyon below grew darker still as he gaped into its depths.

He had to push on, keep moving until he ran across some game—or until it got too dark to hunt. Either one, and he’d finally give up and stop for the night.

Turning back into the timber was like peeling away a strip of flesh from his own body, forcing himself to press on—back into the wet, soggy forest, teeth chattering, his nose so cold it had begun to hurt. Trudging on, he followed step by step the game trail as it wound higher along the side of the canyon, through the forest—as he prayed he would run across something. Even another squirrel.

His stomach tumbled. Yes, even another damned squirrel. Far better than creek water and sucking on a gum twig.

What little light there had been all that gloomy day was eventually squeezed right out of the river’s canyon, seeming to shimmer for a moment as the last rays peeked from beneath the western clouds. And with the sun’s sinking the wind came up, as cold as it had ever been. Enough to drive a damp, chilling finger all the way to his marrow.

With no supper, and no prospect of bringing anything down—not even another squirrel—Titus ached all the more in every bone, knowing that when he would make another fire tonight, this time he faced climbing within his blanket-and-leaf burrow without even a few poor mouthfuls of some small, bony creature who haunted the ceiling of the forest above him.

As it grew steadily darker, Titus found himself squinting at the ground, forced to let his feet in those soggy moccasins make out the narrow game trail for him. Feeling
his way up the last of that climb along the south side of the Ohio, he slowly started a gradual descent as the river bent itself around to the right, flowing north by west.

Once on that trip down he stopped and listened to the night, staring up at the sky. Back to the east no moon could he see. Everywhere else the sky thickened like blood pudding without a single star to mar its ominous monotony. In a matter of minutes he would have to think of moving up the slope to find himself a place to spend the night. A good chance of rain. The dark and the cold settled into his spirit. To stop and rest, however, would make for too much time to think. To brood on mistakes made, to conjure up the faces of folks left behind.

As he hefted the rifle across his shoulder and stepped off the trail toward the timber above him, Titus heard something—a sound out of place.

The way a man hunted the distance in a thick forest: looking for something that did not belong.

But this was a sound the forest did not own.

Immediately he stopped. Listened. Downriver. So distant he wasn’t sure. He might tell better if he moved on a while farther. Perhaps make it around the rest of that bend in the river. Then he would know for sure.

Both his eyes and his toes strained to make out the trail as he leaned into a faster pace, spurred on by the prospect that those sounds promised. One hundred yards, then two hundred and he stopped again. Listening for several moments without hearing a thing.

Just when he had convinced himself that his mind had been charling him—as cold and wet as he was, as hungry as he was for human company—just when he was about to give up and give in and make a camp of it for the night … he heard the voices.

Bounding off into the dark, he found his heart thundering in his ears. Hurrying him ever faster.

The closer he got, the more his ears made sense of things. Not just voices, but singing. A few thready notes of a wheezing squeeze-box. Behind it the low thump of someone drumming and another of them clacking tinware spoons in back rhythm.

The trees a few hundred yards ahead seemed to part,
and he caught a glimpse of light. Titus lunged to a stop, unable to see it now. Took a step, then another back and spotted it again. Flickering. Dancing. Firelight.

Warmth. And they were sure to have food.

On he surged, renewed, invigorated. Assured of closing the distance in no time now.

And even sooner than he could have imagined, Bass stood at the edge of the trees, gazing down at the bank some thirty yards away. In those moments he remained motionless at the last fringe of timber watching that fire. The half-moon made its brief appearance below the clouds in the east. Below him lay a wide strip of the river, a flatboat tied up at the bank, gently bobbing in the cold, silvery light tracing lacy patterns on the black water.

Laughter drew his gaze back to the fire.

What that sound could do for his young soul.

Laughter!

His heart rising in his throat, Titus moved out of the timber, watching two of the men rise from their stumps.

“Who goes?”

He stopped, called back, “Just me.” And stayed rooted to that spot a moment more. “I was the one hollered out to you while back. Upriver, it was.”

One of the forms moved in front of the fire now, coming his way. He stopped, backlit by the cheery, yellow, beckoning flames.

“You’re alone?”

“Just me.”

That one signaled Titus on. “You’ve got our welcome.”

Bass inched into the light, licking his lips at the fragrance of something frying, smelling biscuits baking in a skillet to the side of the fire. He couldn’t take his eyes off that steaming kettle, the simmering coffeepot as his mouth worked at a gallop, salivating like a hound’s.

“Hell, he’s just a boy,” one of the others grumbled, placing his fists on his hips.

“Yeah,” the closest one cheered as Titus came closer. He had on a worn flannel shirt and buff-colored nankeen britches. “C’mon over here, boy. You look a mite hongry.”

“I … I am. Real hungry.”

The one in greasy flannel stepped close. As hairy as any man Titus had ever seen. “We got us plenty. You’re welcome to share.”

“He don’t get none of my share,” a third, short and stocky man grumbled, then spat into the fire with a loud hiss. He wore a jacket and waistcoat of quilted Spanish silk.

“How long it been since you et last?” asked the first man with his Kentucky accent.

“Been a day … or two,” Titus said, his eyes wandering nowhere from the frying pan and kettle at the fire’s edge.

“God-glory-damned, Ebenezer,” the last of the men exclaimed. “I do b’lieve this here boy’s done runned away from home!”

He couldn’t ever remember eating so much. It seemed his mouth and gullet and belly kept crying out for more, for every last bite he could lay his hands on.

“How long you say it been since you last et?” asked Hames Kingsbury, the head oarsman, who wore beneath his blanket coat a shirt of poor man’s tow cloth, topped with a bright-red handkerchief for a cravat. Crowning it all was a dark-green hat in which a long red feather was prominently displayed—a strutting cock of a boatman’s symbol of martial prowess.

Titus looked over the rim of his coffee tin at the blond, short-cropped man with a matted beard. “Two … two days.”

Kingsbury glanced up at the one called Ebenezer Zane, the long-haired, heavily bearded pilot and patroon of that flatboat bobbing gently nearby in the black water of the Ohio. “This boy’s got him a natural appetite, Ebenezer. If he gets hisself this hongry in two days—think what a pitiful sight he’ll make if he happed to go a week ’thout a bite.”

Zane squatted next to the youngster, grinning within that black beard and unkempt hair of his that surrounded his ruddy face like the mane of a lion. “Don’t you give
none of these river riffraff no mind, Titus Bass. G’won and eat your fill.”

“I had a way,” Titus garbled around a chunk of the boiled salt pork, “I’d do something pay you back for the victuals.”

“Now, don’t go and tell our patroon that!” grumbled Reuben Root, just about the sourest-faced man Titus thought he’d ever had the displeasure to run across. Besides his jacket and waistcoat of Spanish silk that had seen finer days, Root sported a shapeless, low-crowned hat, the like of which protected a man from rain. “Man always pays up for what he eats.”

Stopping the corn dodger at his lips, Titus looked over at Root across the fire. “I … I ain’t got no money to pay for this food.”

In his fox-fur cap, with its legs dangling from either side of the pilot’s head and the tail bobbing down his back, Ebenezer Zane clapped a hand on the back of Bass’s shoulder and said, “Told you not to pay these’r hired fellers no mind. Eat your fill. An’ if’n that ain’t enough, we’ll boil up some more.”