Dance on the Wind (61 page)

Softly, Titus asked, “You’re comin’, ain’t you?”

The big man answered, “You be going away from me soon, yes?”

“Hezekiah—I’m gonna see that you’re set free. Ain’t that what you want?”

“Free, yes. Free and go with Titus Bass.”

“Maybeso you ought’n not be free with me no longer,” Titus replied, trying to explain. “Maybeso you ought’n move on, go and try out your own wings now, Hezekiah.”

The big chert-black eyes sought his out with their moistness. “Then we say good-bye soon.”

“Not soon. Not tonight, anyways. Don’t have to be tonight. C’mon, you go with us over to Mathilda’s place. A fine place, with good food and lots of noisy folks.”

“T-titus,” Root began tentatively in a harsh whisper. “They don’t ’llow Negras in Mathilda’s place.”

“The hell they don’t!” Bass snapped indignantly. “I seen some back to the kitchen.”

“They the help. So that’s right where he can stay when we go in the place,” Ovatt suggested. “Back with Mathilda’s help.”

Titus turned on the slave. “That be awright with you? Get your meal and maybe a place to curl up for the night back in the kitchen?”

“Be good to eat,” he answered. “Good to find a warm place to sleep too.”

Titus patted the tall slave on the arm. “Then in the morning we find us someone what can write, to make out my paper says you’re a freedman now.”

“Damn!” Root exclaimed, slapping himself alongside the head. “Why didn’t I think of it sooner?”

Titus asked, “Think of what?”

“Mathilda her own self,” Root said, grinning. “She knows how to make her letters and cipher her numbers with the best of ’em. There ain’t many in Louisville gonna be any better’n her at it.”

A sudden relief washed over Bass, despite all the raw tearing away and loss. The whorehouse madam would be the one to inscribe for Hezekiah that handwritten gift of freedom, thereby lifting a yoke from Titus’s own neck with the same stroke of her quill. Now more than ever Bass realized no man should ever belong to another.

“There, Hezekiah!” he cheered. “Tomorry you’ll be a freedman. You can go where you want. When you want. Ain’t gonna belong to no man but your own self from then on.”

“But,” the big slave said, his eyes still brimming, “I allays belong to you.”

Bass shook his head. “No, don’t you understand? I’m freeing you. Don’t belong to no one no more. Never did belong to me.”

Hezekiah wagged his head emphatically. “No, Titus Bass. You not understand,” he replied sternly. “You go make me a freedman, sure enough. But in here”—and he again tapped a single finger against his chest—“no matter what: I allays belong to you.”

Mincemeat wasn’t there when Titus showed up at Mathilda’s that bittersweet night of parting mingled with homecoming.

“She’s up and left me to work downriver,” the madam said a little huffily.

“Downriver?” Titus asked anxiously. “How far?”

“Place called Owensboro. Gone off on her own—and the trollop took two of my girls with her!” the madam explained. “Said the three of ’em going into business for themselves.”

Turning to Root, Bass hurriedly asked, “Where’s Owensboro?”

“If’n it’s the place I’m thinking it be, wasn’t much there—”

“Where?” Titus interrupted.

“Only a few poor cabins ’long the wharf—”

“Where?” And he grabbed the boatman’s coat flap.

“Downriver a ways,” Reuben explained. “They was just clearing a spot for it on the south bank when we come past few months back.”

“On the Ohio?”

Root nodded. “I’d make it ’bout halfways to the Messessap from here.”

“I took her in, give her a chance to make something of herself,” Mathilda grumbled as she turned away, waving toward one of her Negro lackeys. “I’ll see that the help brings you boys your supper while I go off to fetch my writing things … if you’re still of a mind to free up that skin-headed Negra of yours.”

Titus bobbed his head. “Yes’m. I am.”

Mathilda smiled as she started away, smoothing the chintz cloth that covered only half of her ample bosom. “Anyone who’s got manners enough to call me ma’am gets my attention, fellas.”

When she returned, the madam eloquently worded two copies of the same declaration freeing Hezekiah. One, of course, would go with the freedman, and the second Titus chose to keep for himself, protected inside a small waxed fold of foolscap. Then she had one of her lackeys escort Bass back to her own room, where a steaming kettle of soapy water was soon delivered. With a scrap of cambric cloth he scrubbed himself from the washbasin in the corner of the lamplit room, then found the plush softness of her feather mattress an inviting contrast from the crude grass ticks he had so far encountered.

When at last he was awakened there in Mathilda’s bed, all but one of the oil lamps had been snuffed. Soft, pudgy fingers were at his flesh, arousing him gently. A hot whisper clung to his ear as the madam declared she would give him all the sweet delights she could that night, in fact, whenever he wanted to visit her, seeing how he was going to stay on in Louisville.

As good as it felt, what with her fingers raking up and down the hard, hot length of him, the way she smelled good and sweet from cinnamon and tamarind she had rubbed on her neck and down her heaving cleavage—how he found her fleshy plumpness so startling after Mincemeat’s angular hardness—right then Titus didn’t have the will to tell Mathilda that he had determined to move on.

That hadn’t even come up at all when he’d slipped out to gulp down some coffee and swallow the hot breakfast the Kangaroo’s kitchen served. There among the great boiling kettles and the sweaty, shiny faces of Mathilda’s black-skinned help, Titus retrieved one of the declarations
from inside his shirt. As Hezekiah held one corner of the wrinkled paper, Bass held the other, preparing to read it aloud for all in that stunned kitchen where thick aromas swirled up from three fireplaces.

“I cain’t rightly read all these proper words Mathilda put down on this here paper,” he explained to the freed-man with some frustration. “But I do recall what I told her to put down, and she read it over to me when she was done. This says I was your owner. Says I fair and square are setting you free, a slave man no more. This paper tells that you’re free to go where you want from here on out. Then I put my mark down right here. She signed her name to it, and here’s where two other gals she got to come in put their names last evening after watching the both of us put our marks to it. G’won now, as a freedman. That paper you carry is your’n to show any man what don’t believe you be your own man from here on out.”

That dawn the kitchen cradled them in such warmth, downright steamy and fragrant was it. Just like the embrace he suddenly gave to that tall black man.

“You’re free, Hezekiah.”

“I never forget you, Titus Bass.”

“You damn well better not,” he replied, then pulled his blanket roll off his shoulders and handed it to the freedman. “Here, now. Want you to have this.”

“But it’s your’n,” he exclaimed in a harsh half sob of a whisper, his yellowed eyes brimming.

“Your’n now. This morning I seen to it I put some fire-makings in there, my old tin cup and that knife I first brung me from home … ’long with a li’l pouch of coins just in case you need buy yourself some food or a place to stay till you get where you’re wanting to go.”

His big hands trembled as he clutched the thick roll of blankets enclosing the precious gifts to his breast. Hezekiah said, “Going to do like you said—see what’s west, Titus. Maybe even a place for me out there.”

“If’n I stood in your place, Hezekiah—I’d likely be looking for to find me a place where a man can be just a man. Where there ain’t no slave owner. No man made to be a slave. Out yonder there’s bound to be a place for you.
Just like there’s bound to be a place for ary man … we look hard enough, long enough.”

“You stay here when I go?” the freedman asked.

“No. Last night I figured I’d just push on,” Titus replied. “Want to see someone I know—now they gone west to a new place downriver. Maybeso we can walk that road west together. Least as far as Owensboro afore we say farewell.”

They took their breakfast together there in the kitchen, squatting in the corner with steaming mugs of coffee, before Titus went out as the town’s shopkeepers were beginning to put out their wares for the day. Slipping more coins from the waistband of his britches, he bought himself a new pair of blankets, a small tin in which to carry his new fire steels and flints, along with a new belt knife in an oiled leather sheath that he proudly hung at his hip. At the side of the river he and Hezekiah bade the rest a farewell as the boatmen and Beulah moved off toward the light of a climbing sun, while the youth and the tall freedman pointed their noses west.

For more than eight short winter days and something on the order of 130 miles, the pair followed the twisting course of the Ohio’s south bank until they reached the timbered hillside overlooking the land being cleared for Owensboro. Girdled trees strained for the sky as others were felled, then quickly dragged off by grunting teams of oxen while knots of men poured oil atop the fresh stumps and set them afire until the sky was corduroyed with black streamers. Still more laborers laid log upon log, raising the walls of cabins that would hold at bay the last of winter’s chill from these hardy pioneering folk pushing west with the migrating frontier. Below Titus the air hung ripe with fresh sweat and steaming dung, burning hardwood and lye soap coming to a boil, those open fires attended by women who slowly worked great paddles round and round in the pungent brew, fingering sprigs of hair back from their rosy faces as the trail-weary pair pushed through their midst toward the cluster of shacks and lean-tos and cabins gathered close by the river’s edge.

There in the cold shadows of that late afternoon he found her in the makeshift watering hole not any bigger
than his folks cabin back in Boone County. Mincemeat had one stockinged leg kicked up on a crude bench hacked from half a length of a tree trunk supported by four wobbly pegs, her arm draped over the shoulder of an old man whose five-day stubble showed more gray than it did the same mousy brown of what little hair still remained atop his sunburnt head.

“Mathilda told me I’d find you downriver,” he began in a happy gush.

At first she only turned her head, squinted at him through the musty haze of that poorly drafted fireplace and the smoke of more than a dozen pipes, candles flutting the air with their dancing fingers of light. The room fell to a hush; all the customers turned to study not only Bass, but the big Negro behind him.

“Mathilda?” Then the woman dropped her skinny leg in its worn stocking to the pounded clay floor and turned on him wearily. “Do I know you?”

“Sure you know me, Mincemeat,” he replied with sudden alarm. “We knowed each other up to the Kangaroo.”

“I just come from Louisville,” she said sourly, her bleary, bloodshot eyes peering over his shoulder at the tall, bald man behind him. “It’s a good place to be from. He’ll have to go—his kind ain’t ’llowed in here.”

“He’s with me.”

“Looks to be you’ll both have to leave too,” she replied a bit acidly, almost too wearily. “C’mon back when you’re by your own self and ready to have some fun with Mincemeat.”

His heart was sinking. Titus felt himself beginning to tremble. “You … you don’t know me?”

“I supposed to?”

“I come all this way to find you.”

“Find me?” And she laughed a bit too forced and shrill. “Must be you’re wanting a roll.” Mincemeat put out her hand. “As you can see, I’m still a working woman, mister. That means a roll will cost you a shilling—an’ that’s good till you’re satisfied. Half-shilling for each time you’re satisfied after that till the night’s done.” She began to turn back to the small group of hardened, dirty men she
had been regaling at the moment Titus walked in. “You come back when you ain’t got him along and you fix to spend some money on Mincemeat.”

Smarting in anger, Bass quickly glanced at the other two bawdy women looking on with amused attention, their arms draped over their customers. Shreds of memory placed them as Mathilda’s girls too.

“Abigail—” Then he watched as she smarted with the name. Flinching as if struck with a flat hand, slowly turning back to gaze at him with a studious squint.

“I’m Titus,” he continued softly as the noise in that grogshop started to swell once more, like a deer’s bladder he would fill with tiny pebbles from river gravel, to stretch it out while it dried to make himself a pouch. “Titus Bass. Don’t you remember me?”

Shoving a long strand of unruly hair back from her cheek, she whirled away from the others, stepping his way with one red-rimmed eye clenched. “By damn, you don’t say! It for certain is the boy what come to the Kangaroo not long back—all ready to become a man, this’un was.”

At the table behind her some of the others snorted. Bass sensed the first burn of embarrassment. But as suddenly her face became open and lit up with undisguised glee. Mincemeat lunged against him, her bony arms wrapped around his waist.

“Course I remember you,” she exclaimed, then whirled to explain to the room, “I’m sure you older fellas understand if I spend some time here with the young’un.” She sniggered, saying, “You all ought’n remember what it was like when you had you a peeder what stayed hard all night long. Lemme tell you when this girl gets a chance to slip one of them atween her legs—she does it!”