Dance on the Wind (62 page)

The rest of the men laughed and hooted, as crude and foul a bunch of flatboaters and wood-raftsmen as he had ever seen clear down to New Orleans. He could still hear some of those poor, sick, womanless drunkards plain as anything when she took him out the low front door of that cabin and pointed to some tarps stretched between some nearby trees.

“Tell your Negra he can bed down there. You an’ me going over yonder way.”

When Hezekiah moved off to spread his blankets beneath the sections of oiled canvas lashed above a fire pit where sat a three-legged stool and cooking pot suspended on a chain from a tall tripod, the woman yanked Titus away, leading him through the folds of a canvas door into her small log lean-to. No sooner had he tried to stand inside than he banged his head on the rough-barked logs of the low ceiling. Bass dragged off his crumpled hat and rubbed his scalp.

“Get down here with me,” she instructed as she pulled back the pile of blankets from a thin pallet of bear and deer hides before she began yanking off her own grimy, smoke-stained garments. “C’mere an’ gimme what you gimme before at the Kangaroo. Dangerous up there, ain’t it, Titus?” She quickly pulled her long dress up and over her head. “Banging your head on that roof ’stead of being down here banging on me.”

When he collapsed beside her on the pallet, Bass found she smelled of stale whiskey, old meals, a day’s suffocation of tobacco smoke, and the rancid stench of other men—but, God! how he found himself ignited by the mere sight of her naked flesh, the feel of the generous curves to her as he hurried out of his shucks and slid beneath those icy blankets atop her. It didn’t stay cold in there for long.

That first time the woman didn’t fall back on ceremony or any of the preliminaries; instead she stroked him so savagely that he had no choice but to rise to the occasion before she placed him home and thrust her bony hips upward against him. Within moments Titus spent himself in great waves of relief, then slept against her, awakening in the darkness of that winter’s night to find himself hungry once more.

“You can take me all you want, when you want,” she vowed with a whisper in the dark. “Long as you promise you’ll never call me Mincemeat again.”

“I … I promise … Ab-abigail.”

Back again with her body now, the way she flung herself at him with such fiery abandon in the dark and the cold of that shanty, he came to realize how he had yearned for her.

Only with the coming of predawn’s dim, gray light did
he remember Hezekiah. As cold as it was in that log and canvas shanty, Titus grew ashamed—rock-certain it must surely be much, much colder for the freedman who had joined him on this journey downriver to Owensboro. Tugging on his clothes as he ground at the sleep crusting both eyes, the youth hobbled through the low doorway, past the canvas flaps, surprised to find Hezekiah squatting on a nearby stump, waiting for him.

“Dis morning I gotta go,” the tall man explained softly, gesturing downriver with a slight bob of his head.

Bass glanced over his shoulder to the shanty at his back. “I … I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t make no big matter of it. I got me a good night’s sleep in them blankets you give me. Et me on some meat left over in that fire pot. Time now to do my business getting on ’way from here.”

Titus stuffed in his shirt, shivering with the cold, sunless chill, and pulled his belt tight in the buckle. “You wasn’t going ’thout saying nothing, was you?”

“You see’d I was waiting for you, Titus Bass. Tell you my fare-thees right to your face. Tell you my thanks for making me a free man.”

He stood looking at the big man, that bald head covered with a bright red bandanna Titus had bought him in Louisville. “You need find you a hat.” Then he impetuously pulled his own shapeless felt from his head and set it atop Hezekiah’s. “There, now. How’s that fit you?”

A big smile illuminated his face like a Christmas bonfire, his eyes rolling upward to regard the floppy brim. “Like it was made for me.”

“It’s your’n now.”

“I’ll pay you back someday, Titus Bass.”

“No need. It ain’t much.”

“Said I’d pay you back.”

Titus nodded. “All right. I know I can count on you to do just that.”

“Saying my fare-thees is a hard thing.”

“Harder thing for me was to leave you standing there in that cage—bound away for some man’s fields,” Titus answered. Then he shook his head, remembering Boone County, and said, “Working the ground is hard enough for
a man what wants such a life … I just can’t imagine what possesses a man to buy another to do his work for him.”

For a long moment they both stood all but toe to toe, perhaps both in wonder at what to say next as wisps of thick ground fog swirled at their feet and the cold breeze nudged at Titus’s hair across his shoulders.

“That woman in there,” Hezekiah began, “she good poon?”

“Poon?”

“Poon-tang,” he explained in a dumbfounded sort of way, and shrugged. “What men come to Annie Christmas’s place told me was what they wanted from a hoah.”

“Poon-tang,” Titus repeated, and glanced back at the shanty. “Yes,” he answered. “Maybe good enough for me to stay on here for a while.”

The freedman shuffled his feet for a bit, then finally blurted out, “We come ’cross’t each t’other one day?”

That stunned him for a moment. Then Bass brought his eyes back up to look at those yellowed ones of Hezekiah’s. “I hope so, my friend. Cain’t say as it’s likely, even possible to count on. I hear there’s so much country west of here—man can get lost out there if he’s a mind to.”

Titus watched some of the brightness drain from the freedman’s features.

“I was hoping …”

“Why don’t you count on it, then, Hezekiah?”

Some of the smile came back as the big man’s eyes pooled. He swept the youth’s hand up in his, shaking it tightly between both of his. “I count on that, Titus Bass. I pay you back for all you done one day. Pay you back in spades.”

“I know you will,” he answered, choking on the words when he saw Hezekiah’s eyes begin to spill.

“Gotta go,” the freedman said clumsily, half turning away with great reluctance.

“Man’s gotta leave when a man’s gotta leave,” Titus replied, holding his hand out again.

“No, like this,” Hezekiah said softly, pushing the hand aside and pulling the youth against him. “Is the best way to say my fare-thees.”

“A damn good way,” Bass whimpered against the Negro’s chest.

Eventually Hezekiah released him, whirled on his heel, and sprinted off all before Titus realized. He raised his hand to wave at the freedman’s back, not saying a word, and stood still as stone, feeling the loss of that last, fierce embrace, sensing that great emptiness come with the going of that friend after the farewells of so many friends. Now Bass was alone again. Except for the woman.

The slithering gray fingers of ground fog and the sharp, black, skeletal fingers of winter-bare trees swallowed Hezekiah as the man pushed west, away from the coming sun.

Titus felt the cold of a sudden. He stood there, barely seventeen. No home to speak of but a tarp and log shanty that belonged to a whore. No friends left in this settlement but Abigail. He had killed some Indians, a white man, and saved the lives of others. Bass wasn’t sure if growing up to be a man was all that great a thing or not anymore.

Turning slightly, he gazed at the shanty. Figured he could likely find work in a new place like Owensboro—an infant settlement sorely in need of strong backs and iron constitutions. As far as it was downriver from Louisville, chances were a man would make a go of it down at the landing, unloading goods from far upriver one day, loading timber and other staples for downriver the next. He felt certain he would find work and just might venture out to do so that very afternoon.

Just about the time the sun was sucked into the dark gut of the clouds overhead, the first icy snowflake struck his cheek, sharp as a patch knife and cold as the belly of the earth itself in these last weeks before spring. A time of year when it seemed spring would never come. When it seemed he had said good-bye to just about everything he had ever known, everyone he had ever come to care about.

Quit miserating, he scolded himself. At least here he would find work. At least here he had her. No matter that he would have to share her with others day and night. Titus figured there just might be enough warmth left over for him when Mincemeat quit for the night and dragged herself back to that pallet of bear hides and dirty wool
blankets where he had banged his head before he had banged her.

Turning east, he looked upriver. Not sure where Kingsbury and the others might have put in for the night. Suddenly wondering how his mother had passed his seventeenth birthday. For the first time caring that his brothers should be giving their father a hand in the fields.

Then he looked to the west as it began to snow with a surprising ferocity. Hezekiah was gone into the teeth of that storm, alone. Truly alone now.

Already Titus had struggled against just about everything else and come out all right. Yet there remained one final struggle to pit himself against.

One day soon, when he was finally ready, he would move on as Hezekiah had done: by himself. Knowing he could not until the day when he could finally hack up this great pain of loneliness like a man hacked up something choking him, damn near suffocating him.

Hack himself free of it. And move on.

When that first great quiver of the earth’s crust rocked the lower Ohio River valley, Titus was on the cleated plank leading him across the icy water from a flatboat’s gunnel to the Owensboro wharf, where another two dozen broadhorns were tied up.

All that December morning long he and others had been hiring themselves out to merchants from distant points overland, and to upriver boat captains, taking cargo off the flats to begin its cross-country journey by horseback or wagon, perhaps hoisting bales and kegs and barrels onto what rivercraft were bound for Natchez and New Orleans. The icy air clung about a man, hoarfrost wreathed about his face, a sharp chill in every one of those wispy strands of fog that danced like greasy gauze clear across the river to the north bank of the Ohio. A pewter-pale, buttermilk-colored sun sulled in the sky overhead, every bit as cold and devoid of warmth as were the cast-iron hoppers squatting here and there along the dock where the stevedores kept fires going, over which they warmed their hands, rubbed their frozen fingers, even turned and kneaded their numbed asses over the feeble
warmth that itself seemed to shrink beneath the mighty onslaught of this most recent cold snap gripping the lower Ohio.

Ice coated everything: tree branches and trunks, thick sheets of it whirling out of the northwest over the past three days to plaster the sides of cabins and shops, to slick the wharf itself. If the sun had ever chosen to put in a grand and bright appearance, it would have made for a dazzling show. But, instead, the sun hid behind the thick layer of icy frost blanketing the earth.

At dawn that morning Titus and some of the others had dragged in handcarts filled with mounds of sandy earth scraped from the bank east of town. This they scattered with their shovels over the crude, wide planks of the wharf, even spreading the sand up the length of those cleated planks that stretched from dock to flatboat like bands of thick and mortified connective tissue.

So it was that one moment he was plodding toward the wharf, planting each thick-soled, fur-lined pac moccasin deliberately along the sanded plank, glancing inquisitively at the ice riming the river below him around every trunklike stanchion supporting the dock … when the next heartbeat found him freed of the ninety-pound keg of ironmongery bound south for the settlement at Bowling Green. Like a dog flinging water from its hide—the keg flew one way, Bass the other. Just before he hit the water, the oak cask crashed against the side of the wharf with a great metallic clatter, splintering and splashing … but by then he was beneath the surface of the Ohio, numbed immediately, shocked by the cold immersion, his mind slow to react—until he realized he damn well might drown.

Not that he really hated water. It was something he might admit to drinking every now and then. And water enjoyed a fair enough reputation on those rare occasions when a man wanted himself a bath. But, by and large, if Titus was about to confront water, he wanted it on his own terms: shallow enough for him to stand in, no deeper. Those months floating down the Ohio and the Mississippi on a flatboat manned by a good and savvy crew had been one thing, but to confront water all on his lonesome—that
took an entirely different sort of courage. The very courage he found himself still in want of at that moment.

Sluggishly clawing his way through the black, icy water, Titus burst to the surface, gasping at the freezing air, teeth chattering uncontrollably, his heavy woolen clothing like great stones capturing his limbs, dragging him down. Struggling through the water for the side of the wharf, he found his arms heavy and unresponsive, his legs sodden, reluctant to help him. The frosty air above the choppy water was alive with screams and wails, the cries of bellowing animals lashed to wagons they jerked and reared against, frightened screeches of the people who careened off in all directions, crashing into one another as the wharf suddenly heaved itself up right before Bass’s eyes.

As if the riverbed below him had sunk in that instant, the mighty Ohio surged back from the bank with the strength of some unseen, mighty hand—and in that momentary lull he struggled to reach a wharf piling. Clutching it with all his might with both arms and legs, he turned, trembling, to gaze at the main channel of the Ohio and beheld a terrifying sight. What water had been mysteriously sucked away toward the northern bank was at that very moment cresting against itself in a frothy gray tidal wave rearing some fifteen feet high, one long and billowy wall of dingy-brown water beginning to hurtle back his way—aiming right for the dock at Owensboro.

“Gimme your hand!”

Titus jerked around, looked up, stared at the bony hand extended down to him—recognizing those wide eyes in that half-pretty face of hers—then lunged to grab hold.