Dance on the Wind (52 page)

“What you figure to do with that knife, son?” He took a step closer. “Hear me talking to you? Asked you what you doing here round my boss’s wagons! Up to no damn good, I’ll bet.” Then his tone of voice changed as he tugged back at his cuffs. “Looks like I’ll just have to box your ears, boy—teach you some goddamned propers about staying away from ’nother man’s—”

He hadn’t seen Beulah roll out on the far side of the wagon, nor had he seen her creep over the tongue and around the far corner of the wagon box. But there she stood now as the white man sank slowly to the icy ground, his eyes rolling back to their whites. Titus winced, sensing how the man’s head would be ringing something fierce when he woke up, what with the wallop Beulah gave his head with that piece of firewood.

“Forget that lock,” she ordered as she stood breathing heavy over the man who had crumpled near the hind wheel. “Get on up there and break that Negra free.” Then she shot the other three boatmen a glance. “All four of you owe this here black-assed son of a savage your lives. Every last one of you.”

It was as if they had felt the shaming sting in her harsh whisper like an indictment of their equivocation, maybe even their cowardice. Ovatt, Root, and Kingsbury joined Bass in clambering up beside the cage.

“Get me two big rocks,” Kingsbury ordered.

“You gonna smash it?” Reuben asked as he climbed down to gather up the stones from the wagonyard.

“Break it clean off,” the pilot answered. When the other two had a large rock held beneath the lock, Kingsbury raised his stone and brought it down with a loud, metallic crash.

“Jesus God! We’re gonna get caught for stealin’!” Ovatt cried.

“They’ll stretch our necks, Kingsbury!” Root gasped.

“Just hold that goddamned rock right there!” he demanded, bringing his stone up once more and down even more savagely.

The padlock fell free of the hasp with a clatter of metal on wood. Titus lunged between them, dragging the bolt from the hasp and yanking back the narrow cage door. Back in the corner, the slave hesitated.

“C’mon!” Titus yelled, reaching in to pull the black man’s arm.

Quickly the big man ducked, sweeping up his black Barcelona hat before turning his shoulders to slip sideways out the cage door. As he squeezed past, Titus saw the long bands of welt and bloody crust striping the slave’s back, visible only through the tatters and tears of what had once been a shirt. Those swollen wounds stood out in bold relief against the darker satin finish of the skin.

And numbers. A whole shitload row of numbers tattooed right on the goddamned back of that Negra’s shoulder.

Kingsbury was pulling on Beulah’s arm, urging her away from the wagon. Ovatt and Root were, already halfway back to the corner as Titus heard a groan from the ground. The black man leaped from the wagon and sprinted past Bass. Titus turned, watching the white man groggily pick his face out of the gravel, swipe the tiny stones and mud from his cheek, then shake his head.

Bass brought the stone down on the back of the man’s head with a crack loud enough that it seemed to echo from the wall of the tavern. Like an anvil the slaver dropped onto the gravel and icy mud with a grunt, arms sprawled, and lay still, his chest slowly rising and falling.

Bass stared a moment at the man, then looked at the others frantically signaling him on. Dropping the stone beside the slaver as if it had suddenly grown too hot to hold, Bass darted at a crouch for the shadows. When he reached the group, he felt his right hand yanked up, gripped as if between two fine-grained slabs of second-growth hickory, and squeezed in a vise as it was pumped. The others stepped back as the slave brought Bass’s arm up and down, up and down.

“Just like white men do, this shake,” he said, beaming. “Me thank. Me thank, so shake with you. You make me not go to Miss’ippi.”

Kingsbury came between them, gently prying Bass’s hand from the slave’s. “That’s fine now. Shoo, boy. Just be on your way.”

“I go your way,” he said, turning back to gaze at Bass.

“Oh-h-h-h, no, you ain’t!” Root snarled.

“Just tell him you gotta be on your way, Titus,” Ovatt implored.

“We … I gotta be going,” Bass said.

The bald-headed slave remained steadfast, reaching out for Bass again. “Me go with you.”

Kingsbury clamped his hands around the black man’s wrists, saying, “We ain’t going to Nawlins.”

“Good.” And he jutted his chin. “Never like Nawlins no good.”

“And where we’re heading, we sure as hell can’t take you!” Ovatt added.

“G’won, now,” the pilot demanded. “You’re free, and you better be long gone afore that white man comes to with a lump on his head and finds you gone.”

Kingsbury grabbed Titus by one arm, the woman taking the other as Ovatt and Root led the way, all of them looking back over their shoulder at the big black shadow standing there at the corner of Kings Tavern as they hurried into the brush and timber for the trailhead of the Natchez Trace.

Bass watched the man’s eyes as he hustled off, how red-rimmed they were despite the blackness of the flesh. Then he realized that the Negra had to have his own feelings. Likely he had cried in anger and frustration at first, what with being sold off and put away in that cage like he was. Then those tears eventually changed to slow, sad ones as he felt his world closing in, and him shut off from the rest of it, torn away from friends and family, separated from everything he had come to know and understand over his short time in this white man’s world.

And as he watched that black face disappear in the shadows behind him, along with the cold curl of the slave’s breathsmoke and the spitting-hiss of those torches
outside Kings Tavern at the far edge of Natchez-Under-the-Hill, Bass figured he knew just how that felt.

By damn, he knew how it felt to have his own world ripped inside out.

From the Mississippi River the Natchez Trace pointed roughly in a northeasterly direction toward Tennessee for close to six hundred miles through Choctaw and Chickasaw country, ending up on the Cumberland River at a place called French Lick, in the last few years come to be known as Nashville.

Some early-day historians were already claiming this was the oldest road in the world, originally used by the beasts to cross ridges and rivers and high-flowing streams; later followed by the Indians who came tracking those flesh-bearing animals, long, long before the Romans ever dreamed of their famous Appian Way. Here in Mississippi country it was often known as the Chickasaw Trace. The Choctaw Path was the name given to the southern end, while the new American government, which had in mind to use the road in moving its mails, gave the Trace a grand and imperially democratic title: the Columbian Highway.

For Titus Bass and the rest who fled north into the wilderness that cold and misty night in December of 1810, there was nothing remotely grand nor glorious about the prospect of making their way on foot through the swamps and bayous, fording streams and ice-clogged rivers, ascending countless ridges and stumbling down countless more valleys, hoping they did not freeze at night, nor fall prey to any of the beasts, savages, nor white predators who murdered and robbed all along that narrow footpath pointing the way north—home.

Indeed, more so in the latter part of the eighteenth century than now, it had acquired the reputation of a robber’s road, a thoroughfare of the hunter and the hunted, prey and predator. Thrilling stories and splendid myths had already built up concerning the gruesome exploits of famous highwaymen along the Natchez Trace. The sort of brigands who painted their faces with berry juice and bark stain to appear like rogue Indians, for just often enough had the Chickasaw and Creek in fact swept down to make
their raids on the long men and lean women who plied that lonely road.

All too often only a circling buzzard called attention to the fate of other, less fortunate travelers. Because they dared not leave evidence of their bloody crimes, some of the more barbaric of thieves ripped open the bodies of their victims, tore out the entrails, and filled the cavities with rocks to sink all evidence of their black deeds beneath the placid waters of the swamps and bayous. What with an alarming number of murders and short list of celebrated outlaws, by the 1790s the road was commonly known as the “Devil’s Backbone.”

Most everyone on the frontier was a sojourner in those days, pilgrims all: traders and tinkers, medicine peddlers and missionaries, contract mail carriers and even an occasional settler on the tramp south to find richer soil. And always, always there were the Kentucky flatboatmen. Few if any were ever compelled to cordelle and warp their boats back up the Mississippi and Ohio, against the mighty current. Instead, with their cargo auctioned and their transportation sold by the board, the Kentuckians found themselves again afoot, staring at the prospect of a long walk home before they would begin to make plans for another float downriver.

Even young Tom Lincoln from Kentucky had made his trip to New Orleans back in 1806, then plied his way back home on foot, vowing never to return to such a wicked wilderness. He kept his promise, found himself a wife, and began to raise a family—the father of Abraham, the hickory-thin rail-splitter.

By the end of that first decade of the nineteenth century, the road pirates were all but a part of the past—no longer anything more than scary stories used to frighten young children in their beds on a dark and stormy night. Most boatmen returning home from their long trek downriver did so without giving a thought to any real danger from banditti. While a few took north a fat purse, most came back to the Ohio River country homesick and foot-sore. The hapless handful might well take north the bitter fruit of their bawdy frolics with the many-hued whores: blindness and idiocy for their offspring.

That first day on the trail after leaving the fertile, loess bluffs at Natchez, Titus proved his worth to the rest by bagging a fat turkey cock then out in search of his own meal. They took turns plucking the bird then and there that afternoon beside the worn footpath, building a fire to warm their cold, wet selves as night came down and the sounds of the wilderness began to swell around them.

“We’re in Choctaw land now,” Kingsbury explained. “Been past some of their villages a time or two walking north. I knowed ’em to strap small bags of sand onto the heads of their babes to make ’em flat.”

Beulah placed her hand on her forehead. “They think that makes their skulls pretty?”

Indeed, the Natchez Trace penetrated the heart of what had once been a great wilderness ruled only by tribes warring over disputed territory. For centuries the route had been no more than a buffalo trail when the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee came to blaze their own short woodland paths that took a man from the shellfish shore of the Mississippi to salt licks of steamy woodlands, past river and stream and hunting ground until the tribes eventually joined each small section to form the great road.

It wasn’t until their third night out of Natchez at their camp on the Bayou Pierre River that the slave finally worked up enough courage to slip up on their camp and show himself at the far edge of the firelight.

“Figured you was out there,” Kingsbury stated in a matter-of-fact tone as the black man emerged from the shadows.

When they all wheeled about, Titus nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden sight of the slave. Staring up at him now, just as he had gazed up at him in that cage on the wagon, Titus thought the Negro seemed all the taller. Almost like a huge, ebony monolith.

“What the hell you doing, Negra?” Root growled, finding his voice after the fright the slave’s surprise appearance had given him.

The man eyed the butchered carcass of a white-tailed deer, his hand across his belly. “Hungry.”

“Ain’t got nothing for you!” Heman Ovatt snapped. “Just get on with yourself and be gone!”

“Here,” Titus said, standing on shaking legs. “I’ll share what I got with you.”

The others fell silent as Bass stepped toward the slave, holding out his tin cup. In it steamed hunks of venison and broth.

Snapping that two-cornered Barcelona hat from his head, he performed a quick bow, then snatched the cup from Bass and brought it to his face, where he sucked its contents down ravenously.

“There’s more here,” Beulah said, passing over what she had left of her portion.

As he ate, the boatmen argued over the slave’s fate as if the man weren’t even there, or at the very least completely deaf.

“Mebbeso we can sell him up to home,” Root suggested eagerly. “Big Negra like him—sure to fetch us a lot a money.”

“What the hell you need with more money, Reuben Root?” the woman demanded.

“Leastwise, it’d pay for what he’ll eat on the journey!” Kingsbury replied.

“You all sound like addleheaded fools,” Beulah scolded. She laid a hand on Titus’s shoulder. “It’s the young’un here feeding the lot of you. Ain’t costing you a damn thing.”

“Then I say we leave him,” Ovatt grumbled. “Can’t sell him—he ain’t gonna be worth nothing to us.”

“Don’t you remember? We already tried leaving him,” Kingsbury said. “You see what that got us.”

“Maybeso we can tie him up till someone else comes along and finds him.”

“No!” Titus said a little too loudly. The other three and the slave all turned in his direction, freezing in place. “No. You won’t want that done to you. A man tied up, he can’t protect hisself from the wild critters in these here woods.”

“Boy’s right,” Beulah agreed, rising to a crouch to ladle more of the venison soup from the brass kettle into the slave’s cup. “You’ll just have to figure out something else. You fellas are so damned smart, ought’n be real easy.”

With the way the disgruntled Root and Ovatt glared at Kingsbury as if to tell him to do something—and quick—about that sassy woman, the pilot could only shrug in helplessness.

Bass watched the slave suck at the stew, chewing up the big morsels of meat with his huge teeth. At each gust of cruel wind which sliced through that shirt torn to ribbons, the black man shivered, doing his best to cradle the tin cup in both hands to keep it from sloshing. Not knowing what prompted him to, Titus dragged up one of his blankets and draped it around the slave’s shoulders. Those huge white eyes in that shiny black face looked up at him in the middle of chewing a bite. A look of stunned gratitude crossed the man’s face as Bass turned back to his place by the fire.