Dance on the Wind (72 page)

Placing a nail in the youth’s hand, the blacksmith declared, “If you was one, you’d know. You ain’t a Catholic?”

“No. If’n you mean the Catholics what … well, that bunch that worships God in their old way and has all them crosses with—”

“That’s them. You ain’t one?”

“No. Sir. I ain’t.”

“Good. Damned lot of ’em around here. What with the French and all. That big cathedral down the street too. I won’t hire no Mason or nary no Catholic. Them’s the two bunches what are the real threats to our republic. Plus slave holders and tax collectors and whiskey makers and army surveyors—not to mention the Injuns and the damned useless postal people.” He spit a stream of brown tobacco juice into a pile of manure mucked from a stall. “You ain’t a Knights Templar, are you?”

“No. Dunno what—”

“Them, and all their kind, whoever they be—all can go to hell for what I care. Any bunch what meets in secret, they’re a goddamned menace to this country. Slavers or bankers or even ship’s captains—if they lord themselves over another, they’re my enemy. Just like them Masons and Catholics—holding themselves all so high and mighty. But you said you wasn’t either of ’em—right?”

“I ain’t neither.”

“Then shuck yourself outta that shirt of your’n and hang it on a nail, young’un.”

“I … I got me the job?”

“We got us some teaching to do, by bloody damned. And you got yourself a passel of learning to get under your belt afore you’re gonna be worth a red piss to me around here.”

Right from that November day in 1763 when French fur traders Auguste Chouteau and Pierre Laclede Liguest pulled their dugouts out of the great Mississippi, St. Louis had flourished. Even though the Frenchmen were soon to learn that the surrounding region had recently been ceded to Spain, it made little consequence. Their trading post would prove to be the start of a very French community on Spanish soil.

It wasn’t but a matter of months before the settlement had gained its broad-shouldered reputation as word spread up and down the river systems of frontier North America. Soon the muddy streets bustled with not only the French fur men and a few Spanish governing officials, but British traders, Indians in from the prairies, Creoles and Acadians, as well as black slaves, and of course American frontiersmen.

Almost from the start the waterfront was a colorful cluster of keels and flats, canoes and dugouts from the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, and both ends of the great Mother of Waters. By the time Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana, the town could boast more than two hundred homes, most constructed of native stone. Soon thereafter Ohio flatboat merchant Moses Austin visited the
city, stating that many of the homes were “large but not elegant.” So while the socially elite and old-family French maintained a strict class structure in the midst of their busy provincial calendar, St. Louis was nonetheless a rowdy, rough-and-tumble, bruising city appropriately planted at the gateway to the greatest wilderness on the continent of North America.

By the autumn of 1815, when Titus began to sweat over Hysham Troost’s forge, hammering iron into wagon parts, beaver traps, and locks for guns, the war with the British up at the Great Lakes and down at New Orleans had all but strangled off the western movement. American trade retreated from the upper Missouri: unrest fomented by British traders among the distant tribes in that northern country drove American trappers from those beaver-rich regions.

For the next few years the Americans pulled back, biding their time as the British took advantage of the situation—reaching out from their posts, going among the tribes with a missionary zeal, reaping rich fur harvests in that land of bounty. But over time the westward-yearning tide from America’s east became undeniable. By 1820 fifty wagons a day were being ferried across the Mississippi to St. Louis. Already the most daring of settlers had pushed far beyond the city, 230 astounding miles from the mouth of the Missouri into the Boone’s Lick region! Advancing settlement was taming that great river valley at the unbelievable rate of some forty miles per year. Those vanguards straining against the eastern boundary of that greatest of all American frontiers were assuredly a much hardier breed than those who at the same time were content to seep across what empty space was left throughout the Ohio and the Tennessee country. Indeed, those who left St. Louis behind to settle among the fertile bottomlands foresting the capricious valley of the Missouri more closely resembled their forefathers who had pushed down the Monongahela, hacked their way into the Cumberland, blazed trails across the canebrakes of Kentucky a hundred or more years before.

Here at the edge of all that, Titus repaired their wagons.
He shod their horses. He sold them spare locks for their rifles. Then watched them go.

Farmers!

With every month and season and year he despaired that there ever would be ground left out there, in all that rumored expanse, that would not be turned by a plow, crossed by an ox, or flagged with surveyor’s stakes. Some place left wild enough that farmers and settlers and merchants had no desire to go and change it in their image.

Why, he even heard talk of Indian farmers! No longer the stuff of war paint and scalp dances, but Indians who raised acres of beans and maize, working the rich, black earth in neat green rows, some even harvesting peaches and apples from pruned orchards traced with footpaths and a web of watering ditches. There were no cities of gold, the passing settlers declared as they left St. Louis behind. At least no cities like those the Spanish searched for. Instead, the land’s true wealth lay in all that fertile soil among the river bottoms, ground long ago swept clear of timber by floods. Land where a man’s plow could cut as easily as a hot knife through churned butter just brought up from the chill of the springhouse.

After all those years watching their kind trickle across the river to St. Louis before putting the city at their backs as they spread out in a great, wide front like a fine dusting of human spoor, Titus decided that he would never lay eyes on country yet unseen by white men. Land where he was certain his grandfather’s spirit had gone to its final rest. That mythical Eden where rumor had it no man had ever, nor could he ever, reign supreme for it was ruled by the great beasts of the wilderness. If these hundreds, then thousands, of stoic settlers could push against that hardwood frontier where they intended to raise their cabins, clear the land, slash their plows into the great roll of the earth—then Bass despaired of ever finding where the buffalo had gone.

Perhaps they were mythical beasts, after all. Nothing but yarns, the stuff of nightmarish stories long ago spun for youngsters gathered at the knees of old ones first come to the Ohio and Cumberland borderlands. For certain, there must have been a few buffalo at one time—at least
until the Indians and the earliest settlers had finished them off.

With the sour taste of bile in his throat Bass many times recalled his grandpap’s story of how the founders of Rabbit Hash raised the alarm to put an end to the rattlesnakes in the surrounding area by once and for all raiding the dens of those serpents. All able-bodied men gathered on a succession of Sundays—the Lord’s Day normally given over to the study of the Word but now spent ferreting out evil embodied in the shape of Satan’s hissing serpent—the entire community marching out to climb among the stone ledges, prodding the cracks and crevices with their broadaxes and hatchets, pitchforks and hoes in hand, until the yellow and black rattlers were no more. In gleeful celebration the men tormented some of the last snakes before those too were dispatched. One of them, a yellow monster more than six feet in length, the men had teased and taunted with their hoe handles for more than an hour before the snake viciously clamped down on one of the hickory poles, therein releasing its deadly venom. Before their eyes those astonished men watched the poison rise through the grain of the wood a full twenty-two inches before the rattler’s head was severed with a blow from a belt ax.

Despite what frontier folk had long claimed and Titus himself had come to believe, wanted to believe,
needed
to believe—that unlike those yellow Kentucky rattlers hunted to extinction, the buffalo had merely moved west to escape the encroachments of man—Titus finally decided he had been fooling himself.

Now he knew there simply were no buffalo left.

As his sense of loss deepened, so he came to drink more with each passing year, despairing of ever finding a new dream to replace that great and shaggy one he had carried inside him so long, the dream that had lured him away from his father’s place, seduced him down the great rivers and eventually enticed him here to the gateway of the frontier.

At the first of those blurred, grog-sotted days, more than anything Titus sought a new dream to hang his fading
hopes on, something to fix his future squarely on besides those long-gone buffalo.

But as the seasons rolled past, even that no longer mattered. Not dreams, not hopes, nothing that faintly rattled of the future. With a little more numbing alcohol to deaden his pain come payday each week, he found himself caring just that much less that he no longer had a reason to hope. Eventually it no longer mattered that he had ceased to dream.

How Titus came to enjoy that contented reverie he sensed with the first sip of each mug of metheglin brewed from the fermented honey found in the pods of the honey-locust tree and mixed with water; or mead, a potent brew of metheglin fermented with yeast and spices—later on fighting down the panic that swept over him when he reached the bottom of each cup and grew desperate for more. What liquid amnesia burned its way down his gullet made it easier to forget all that he had left behind to get here and seize his dream at last … for now he realized his dream was nothing more than that—a wisp of fantasy, hope without substance.

Drink he did these days, haunting the stinking watering holes nearly every night when he had money in his pockets. After all, Titus had little else to spend his wages on. There in his corner of Troost’s livery he had enough blankets to hold winter’s bite at bay, them and a chamber pot Bass would empty when he got around to it. Beyond those simple requirements all Titus needed to provide himself were his infrequent meals, taking them out and about the town whenever and wherever he chose, then returning to darken the tavern doorways that dotted the gloomy streets and narrow alleyways near the wharf, there to drink himself into another numbing stupor. More and more of those mornings-after he discovered that instead of having stumbled his way back to the livery, he more often than not woke up beside some less-than-comely wench who occasionally smelled even worse than he.

Then there were the all too frequent fights—most of them nothing more than good-natured eye-gouging romps with his fists. Nothing more than raucous brawls wherein rowdy men wore off their pent-up energies or burned off
their cheap but stupefying liquor. Yet through the years Titus could recall standing in one of the wharfside grog-shops or beer-sties when a fight turned poisonous, downright deadly: the combatants no longer wrestled and pummeled, no longer bit and gouged in some degree of good backwoods sportsmanship with it all. Most times it stunned him just how quickly those tests of stamina and bloodied good humor would turn murderous, knives drawn or pistols pulled—one man to stand victorious over the other who lay dying, his life oozing onto some mud-soaked, slushy floor.

Bass lost all but a handful of his fights, usually ending up as the one dragged out into the snow or the rain, there to be left unconscious for what roaming curs might happen by, drawn by the scent of blood to lick at his wounds, some to raise a leg and mark him territorially with the true measure of their disdain. No, Titus Bass wasn’t really all that good with his fists, nor was he really nimble enough on his feet to dodge the hard and hammering blows, much less quick enough to make good a speedy retreat. But until that March of 1824 he could be thankful of one thing: at least he hadn’t run into a man who had pulled out a gun, or a knife, or some other weapon every bit as deadly.

“Lucky you were,” Hysham Troost growled at him early that cold morning. His words frosted about his head like a wreath of steam as he cradled his young apprentice’s head across one arm.

Titus came to slowly, eventually blinking up at the blacksmith through one swollen eye, the other crusted shut. His puffy, bruised lips tore apart their seam of bloody crust. “L-lucky?” His tongue felt swollen to twice its size, likely bitten. And old coagulate clogged the back of his throat. “This … don’t feel like lucky.”

“From the looks of it I’d say the bastards used devil’s claws on you.” Troost dipped the rag back into his cherrywood piggin and wrung it out before squeezing drops into the dark and crusting tracks matted in the thick brown hair behind Titus’s ear, lacerations extending on down the back of his neck, ending only at the shoulder. “You musta been turning when the feller what wore them claws smacked you. Damned lucky them cruel things
didn’t connect square on your face. It’d tore your eye plumb outta the skull if’n they had.”