Dance on the Wind

20

A great covey of passenger pigeons beat the autumn air overhead, enough of them to blot a great shadow upon the land and he walking within it, flew right over Titus, darkening the sky so that he turned with a start and looked up, frightened. The birds passed so close above the thick and fiery orange and red canopy that he could make out the pinkish breasts until they had flapped out of sight.

He sat there on the old broken-down horse’s back, watching them go, beating their way off to the south. In their wake suddenly opened in all that great expanse of blue sky sailed a lone osprey. Wide of wing it was, possessing that singular luxury of taking its time while the pigeons hurried on in flock. The osprey careened down from on high to inspect more closely this strange four-legged, two-headed creature below it, then beat its angular wings to climb back into the sparkling fall sky, circled once more over the man and horse, then disappeared beyond the horizon.

It had all taken less than a half-dozen heartbeats, his chest hammering like the devil as he watched the bird go. Wishing. Wishing …

He had simply stayed too long. Titus cursed himself for hanging on as long with the Guthries as he had. Was a time four years back when he had vowed to the heavens that he would never again raise blisters on his hands with farmwork. But for the sake of that warm and willing body, for the sake of that sweet ecstasy of having a woman wrapped around his manhood, for the sake of knowing he meant the world to at least one person—he had forgotten that vow.

Denied it because he had made the mistake of falling in love with Marissa Guthrie.

For sure, his young, curious, eager body may have hungered for Amy Whistler in the worst way as she’d escorted him to the brink of manhood … but his heart had been captured by Able Guthrie’s daughter. He hadn’t counted on it, no more than he had counted on running into Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat and crew and floating with them on down to New Orleans. No more than he had counted on staying on all those seasons with the skinny whore who held him tightly until it was she who was ready to leave. No, he hadn’t counted on a lot of things that had happened in these years since slipping away from Rabbit Hash and Boone County.

Still, he never would have dreamed things would turn out like this with Marissa. Him running again, that is.

Twice now in his young life Titus had been forced to make his choice. Both times fleeing what he feared most. First off his pap and that land Thaddeus kept clearing, more land for more crops every season. And now he’d fled the girl and the land. Running from family and children and sinking down roots—all that Marissa Guthrie represented.

Time and again he had convinced himself he wasn’t really in love with her. It was only the way she felt lying next to him. That and the smell of her hair, the taste of her skin. No, it couldn’t really be love that he felt for her.

Yet it was his fear that he already had fallen in love with her that drove him to leave in the first gray of a frosty dawn like some sham thief.

Five days ago he had awakened with the seeping of first light into that new barn’s loft, where he lay beneath that new cedar-shake roof, awakening to the damp chill at that coldest time of day before the sun even prepared to make its rise over the earth. He had rolled over, shivering, at first attempting to go back to sleep, to secure some warmth beneath those two thick blankets he owned. Then he’d suddenly snapped awake, poking his head out to peer into the dim, ashen light. Blinking, Titus had rubbed the grit from them, then looked again—until he’d realized the fog surrounding him was his own breath. Frost borne of the chill of that early-autumn morn as the crystalline air defined the edges of all things, sharp and crisp.

Making clear what he had to do.

Already there too long. Spring had tumbled into summer. Summer had drained into fall. That ancient toll of seasons within him had once more sounded its warning knell—announcing the time for leave-taking had come. To be on the march once more, moving north to the city that had lured Levi Gamble west. The very city Able Guthrie had warned him against.

“Maybe I can take you with me to St. Louie one time of the coming winter, Titus,” the settler had grunted as they had shouldered one of the roof beams across the wright pole. “Hap that you can see for yourself the devilment that lures a man away from his rightful place making the land fruitful.”

Day after day that spring into summer they had harnessed Abie’s oxen to the long logs they’d felled and trimmed, then snaked them through the forest toward the site where they were raising Guthrie’s barn. Using their hand axes, they had notched every corner before hoisting each log into position, using ropes and oak pulleys and the backs of those snorting oxen heaving the timbers ever higher.

Then the farmer had carefully shimmed and trimmed the corners as he’d needed to square them with the world. Not owning a carpenter’s level, Able—like most men on the frontier—had improvised with a small bottle so filled with water that one good-sized bubble remained when it was turned on its side.

“We make every log right, Titus,” Guthrie had seemed to repeat each day they’d devoted time to raising that barn. “Make every one square and level. And just like a man chooses the right tools for his job, he must choose the right wood.”

Able had gone on to explain much of what Titus’s grandpap had taught him years before concerning the building of a proper structure to keep out the cold and the beasts and the red man too. From generation down to generation such wisdom was passed on: that first tree cut should be hardwood, like maple, providing pegs for the job at hand; next came oak or cedar, some wood easily split for roof boards and doors, anything requiring rived planks—things made of seasoned wood carefully stacked and allowed to dry properly.

“But a man with a family to feed and protect might not always have him the time to wait on seasoned wood,” Able had added. “He has to get his family behind some walls.”

Each generation was taught those walls should not be of oak, for it was far too heavy when green, and even dry, tending to split with age. Beech and hickory must be avoided as well because they tended to rot beneath the onslaught of rains and snows, damps and dews. Pine too should not be used, as it decayed far too easily, fried and smelled to the eternal heavens, besides being highly flammable after seasoning.

Instead, the most solid homes on the far frontier were built of hewed cedar—when a man could have it—even the more abundant poplar, soft as it was and therefore easily worked with an adze, hewn into a rectangular instead of a square shape, which allowed a man two wall timbers from one log instead of one. Stacked on their short ends, most cabins therefore rarely required more than six timbers from doorsill to doortop.

One by one, hour by hour, a few logs a day inched the long barn walls ever higher until the final bearers of the roof timbers were in place, then wright poles notched in, secured with long iron spikes as a bed for the successive support beams. That shell of the roof was ready for the broad clapboards they eventually laid over with huge cedar shakes. Down below them in those waning days of summer Lottie and Marissa mixed water and clay, then stomped in just the right proportion of hay and daubed their recipe between every wall log to chink the barn against the coming winter.

Many were the times he had gazed down at her pigtails tied up with ribbon to pull her chestnut curls back from her mud-smeared face, finding her glancing up at him to smile before she went back to stomping more chink in that clay pit.

That dark morning of escape he had glanced below at the barn furniture they were beginning to hew out now that the roof was finished, ready to hold back the autumn rains: things like those feed boxes and water troughs, wooden latches for the stable doors, and a new shovel for mucking out manure. … He knew Able could finish the last details with his own hands. Alone.

From the dark timber came the howl of a wolf on the heels of an owl hoot.

Shuddering as much with anticipation as with the cold, Titus had pulled on his canvas britches and tucked in that shirt Marissa had sewn him out of mixed cloth. All that he possessed: few folks on the frontier had more than one change of clothing. After lashing his freshly tallowed moccasins around his ankles, he bent to collect what little else he owned, rolling an extra shirt, a small kettle and skillet, along with a handful of iron utensils and blacksmith tools Able Guthrie had helped him make at the hot and sooty work of the forge.

Maybe it had been all the talk over that last week or so that had rekindled the same old restlessness. What farmers there were clearing homes for their families out of that Missouri wilderness north of the old French settlement at Cape Girardeau had determined they should have themselves an autumn jubilee—to come together and celebrate the arrival of another harvest season come and gone with the bounty of the land spread across their tables, as well as an excuse to bring out a little spruce beer or cherry flip or homemade brandy. Autumn was, after all, cause for celebration.

The women had fluttered around the long line of tables strung end to end through the center of the neighbor’s yard, setting every dish and pot and kettle just so while the young children needed no formal introductions and got right down to playing blindman’s buff and hide-and-seek. Titus had come there with the Guthries, finding how contented it made him to watch Marissa among the women-folk, seeing her eyes find his from time to time while he stayed with the men, old and young alike. They loaded their pipes, drank from their great clay mugs, and told their bawdy stories when there were no women about nor children playing among their legs. Stories of St. Louie. Unbelievable tales of the rouged and willing women that beckoned all passersby to come use their manhood on them, promising wild and devilish delights. Titus knew such places were not the stuff of myth and fable. He had seen Natchez-Under-the-Hill and the Swamp with his own eyes.

So he had watched Abie’s impassive face as the talk went on and on as the men poured down more and more of their own home brew. Then Guthrie wagged his head, knocked the black dollop from the bottom of his pipe bowl, and strode off muttering that he would be with Lottie. Titus started to move off as well at the settler’s elbow.

“No, you stay with those others, son,” Able said with some resignation. “Might just learn all for yourself about the sinful delights waiting to lure a man to St. Louie. Time that you listen, and pay heed.”

Bass needed no further coaxing. He had seen enough down the Mississippi to whet his appetite for more. So he sipped at his spruce beer, listening wide-eyed to the farmers who had made that journey north to the mouth of the Missouri for supplies and equipment.

“Thar’s Natchez, an’ Norleans,” a man was saying. “But the king of ’em all has to be St. Lou.”

Another asked, “How come you figure it’s the king?”

“’Cause it ain’t got a lick of nothing to do with the Spanish, that’s why,” the first answered, pounding his clay mug against his chest hard enough that he sprayed himself with cherry flip.

A third man in a scraggly beard nodded knowingly. “We all know the French can damn well show a man a better time than any else, don’t we, fellers?”

The whole lot of them gushed and laughed, guffawed and poked one another in the ribs.

“Why the French better?” Titus inquired.

One of them turned and eyed the young man, then explained, “Them Spanish is mean li’l bastards, nasty and fighters.”

When another agreed, “But them French, they allays been lovers.”

“Never was good at fighting and such,” a third piped in. “That’s why the English throwed ’em out more’n fifty year ago.”

“Yep, the French sure know how to show a man the time of his life.”

“Why—there’s so much shameful delight up that way—”

“Sh-sh! Here comes your woman, Henry,” one warned, and they all went silent.

After supper, when the fiddle and squeeze-box were brought out, Titus again clung to that group regaling themselves with tales of the houses of pleasure and the great French homes built behind the tall limestone walls, stories of the stinking, brawling watering holes where a man’s life might well be worth little or nothing, depending on how a man might look at another. It sounded no different from life down the Mississippi—but St. Louis was all the closer right then.

Soon she had come to Titus and asked him to dance. When he begged off, embarrassed, Marissa asked if he knew how.

“Course I know how to dance,” he growled.

“Then dance with me,” she begged.

“You likely dance different here in this country than I learn’t back in Kentucky.”

“Dancing is dancing,” she pleaded. “Just come here and hold my hand, like this. Good. And put your other hand here on my hip, like that, Titus. Oh, dear—you’re blushing, ain’cha?” she whispered. “Now, you’ve had your hand on my hip lots before.”

“But these here folks never knowed it!” he rasped.

With the perfume of those hillsides matted with ivy and laurel’s aromatic green leaves and greenish-yellow flowers brought on that evening breeze, she led him away across the cropped grass in a simple pattern, slowly describing a large circle as Marissa guided him across the yard, closer and closer to meld with the other dancers. Soon enough he was whirling her in great, dizzying spins, her head flung back as she gasped and giggled, the whole world blurring around them. At times they even fell, sitting there in a heap, laughter gushing from them until they caught their breath and rose to spin again.

“I can’t wait until next year,” she confessed that next morning when all the celebrants had shared breakfast and families were parting for home, saying their farewells beneath the trees draped with hop vine.

“Next year?”

“Yes,” Marissa replied. “Everyone’s decided we need at least one good celebration a year.”

“End of summer,” Lottie added as she pulled her shawl over her head. “We’ve decided to get back together come the end of harvest next year. All that wheat and barley, corn and potatoes. Good cause to dance and laugh, don’t you say?”

“I can’t wait, dear,” Able said, grinning, rubbing a hand across his belly.

Neither could Titus. On that long, long ride back to the Guthrie place, he thought and thought on it. One celebration a year was just not enough. To wait four whole seasons without busting loose and forgetting one’s cares? Simply unreasonable. Why, it was just like the Longhunters Fair back to Boone County. Even the boatmen with their hard and dangerous life grabbed for more excitement and celebration than that! Such men reveled and made merry whenever and wherever!

Now, up to that St. Louie—that was the place, he had brooded. From the sounds of it there was a celebration going on there every night. Winter, summer, fall, or spring. The folks up there didn’t wait for harvest to come around once a year. They made themselves happy just for the sprig of it!

That was the life for a young man.

But then his gaze was drawn over to Marissa, seated opposite him in the back of that big dray wagon the oxen were pulling home to the Guthrie place. And just looking at her, he doubted. Confused. Torn. Was he meant to stay? Or was he meant to go? Just to look into her eyes made him want to stay.

Oh, how he had wanted her last night after the spruce beer and the dancing and the way the aroma of her heated body rose to his nostrils as they whirled and laughed. She looked at him in that way of hers on the way home, and he knew she was coming to him that night. Titus decided he would stay.

Yet over the next eight days he changed his mind twice as many times. Lunging back and forth on the horns of his own private dilemma. Like an unbearable torture.

Until at last that morning came and he arose to the first real hard frost of the season. Knowing if he did not go then, he never would. What might hold him there was something much, much stronger than what would ever hold him to Rabbit Hash in Boone County. If he were to be free, he would have to be free of her.

Trembling even more with his fear of leaving—with his fear that he wouldn’t—he had found a slip of paper. Looked to be a bill of sale as he smoothed it out across his thigh. On the back he rubbed the letters with a stub of a lead pencil, not sure of all of them as he formed the few words in making his good-bye to Marissa and her parents. Then he stood and tore a small hole in the corner of the paper, slipping it over the peg where he always hung his shirt of an evening before sinking into the blankets and the hay to await her coming to him all those hot summer nights.

That big barn smelled of oiled leather and new wood and animal sweat. His throat seized as he descended the ladder and stepped around Lottie’s keeler—that shallow tub the women used for cooling milk and to catch drippings from the cheese press. From a peg he seized the hackamore he looped over the old horse Able Guthrie had given him many weeks ago: “Too old to work a plow, too weak to pull a wagon, son. It ain’t much use to me nowdays, but maybe you can get the animal to ride under you.”

Titus had done just that since last summer, many times taking Marissa for a ride through the cool timber, the two of them bareback atop that old, plodding plowhorse.

He led it through the low door into the cows’ paddock, where he pulled out the corral rails, leading the horse through the opening, then refit the rails in their posts before he slipped into the forest just as he had that morning more than four years before. The frosty blades of dying grass crunched, the thick mat of big orange and red leaves crackled beneath his moccasins and those four old hooves.

Titus stopped back in the still-dark shadows, looking at the cabin where he had first seen her at the hearth, the fire’s glow igniting the red in her chestnut curls. Bringing a blush to her cheeks, the same blush painted there when she became aroused in the hayloft with him. The merest hint of smoke rose from the chimney in a ghostly wisp above the leafy canopy turning gold and orange and sienna-brown with autumn’s first cold kiss.

Maybe if he crept to the window for one last look inside … to see her, a last lingering look at what he was leaving behind.

Closing his eyes instead, he sought to remember that cabin where he had his first look at her. In his mind once again seeing the gleam of a hair ribbon poking from Marissa’s sewing basket. The glossy spray of feathers in a turkey wing hung by the fireplace, used to stir the fire or shoo away pesky flies. The dull sheen of the black walnut highboy in a corner, atop it resting the Irish Book of Kells—that Latin manuscript of the New Testament. The white and satiny shine of a pair of slat-backed, split-bottomed chairs made from gouged buckeye where Lottie and Marissa sat as they carded and spun. Those Cumberland baskets filled with weaver’s spools, warping frame, wool and cotton cards, flax and hemp hackles. The old family safe, its doors lined with hammered tin, where Mrs. Guthrie stored her flour and herbs away from the ever-present mice and spiders, its poplar wood softly yellow in the firelight from so many scrubbings.

Yes, Titus thought, forcing himself to turn quickly before he gave in. Yes, there would surely be pain in his leaving.

She loved him.

But perhaps every bit as great was the pain he felt right then at leaving without ever telling Marissa to her face that he loved her too. He hoped the few words in that note would say it for him.

He was more afraid than he had ever been. Not strong enough nor brave enough to tell Marissa to her face. To say that he loved her, but he still had to go. He wasn’t man enough to do that, so he stole away before he caused her even greater pain: marrying; beginning a family; her believing they were putting down roots. Then he would up and leave her.

No. The pain he felt at that moment was nowhere near as great as her pain would be if he failed to leave right then. So he would let the note tell her, and decided to leave in silence.

Heading southwest through the timber, he kept himself deep among the trees before he circled back to the west, then pointed his feet due north. Those first moments in turning away had been so hard. All through the first hour. And that first day—the pull still so strong. Her smell clung to his shirt every time he opened his blanket coat and brought the homespun tow cloth to his nose—forced to remember what he was leaving behind, to remind himself of why he had forced himself to go.

Titus had struck the river the following day near Grand Tower Rock as the Mississippi angled lazily toward the northwest, his mind still coming back again and again to Marissa.

Now he had nothing more difficult to do but follow the river to St. Louie.

And pray that glittering old French city was enough balm to ease the sharp pain he still carried even after all these days and distance put between them.

With his heels now, he set the old horse into motion, his eyes still straining to find in all the aching autumn blue overhead that solitary osprey.

“Whereaway you bound, my son?”

With a start Titus peered up at the old man leading a fine horse up to his evening fire. Night came early, and with it the cold as he drew near the city of his dreams.

“St. Louie.”

“Ah.” The older man halted, staring down in study at the fire a moment, then regarded the youth and the rifle across his lap. “I am but a poor wayfarer. Do you mind if I share your fire and a bit of conversation this night?”

He tossed another limb onto the flames and shrugged. “I was just getting used to the lonesome.”

Turning toward a tow sack he had tied behind his old, worn saddle, the stranger said, “I have food to offer, young man. You decide to share your fire and your talk, I’ll share supper.”

Looking more closely now at the dance of the firelight across the man’s deeply seamed face, Titus decided he liked the gap-toothed grin. The eyes were kind, yet possessed of great, great sadness. “What you got to eat?”

“Capons. A farmyard cock—castrated to improve the flavor of his meat for the table. Fresh as can be, I suppose. Butchered this morning just before I took my leave of a farmer’s place north of here—a family where I spent the night as their guest.” The old man squatted, began tugging at the huge knot in the tow sack. “The truth to it, we stayed up most of the night talking on ships and kings and sealing wax.”

Bass watched the bony, veiny old hands struggle over that knot, thinking how strange this stranger was—to talk in such an outlandish, confusing manner.

“I mean to say we spoke of all sorts of critical matters.” The stranger tugged the tow sack open.

“Didn’t know what the hell you meant.”

“Aye, easy to see that on your face, young man.” He pulled forth a dead bird, handing it over to Titus. “This one be yours.” Then stuffed his hand into the sack again and pulled forth another, smiling with those gapped teeth. “God’s rich bounty.” Laying the bird aside, he next retrieved four potatoes and a half-dozen ears of corn from the sack. “I must tell you the corn might be past its prime—long gone is the sweet milk in the ear, I say. But they truly will do for a man hungry for the manna of the fields.”

Titus put his hand over his mouth, catching himself about to laugh. After all these past days of loneliness and dark brooding, it brought merriment to him just listening to the way this old man talked.

So he asked of his guest, “Where are you off to?”

Raising an arm that looked more like a winter branch inside the huge, ill-fitting coat he wore, the stranger pointed off here, there, and over there. “No place special. Off to where the spirit moves me. God tells me where I am to go—as He told the wandering Israelites of Moses and Joshua of old. Yet, truth be it, I—like you—am alone. Alas, that is God’s condition yoked upon the shoulders of some, is it not, son? As many as we might have around us, family and acquaintances, we are still alone in this life, and God makes the only sure friend we will ever truly have.”

With a snort Titus said, “I had me lots of friends.”

From beneath the bushy eyebrows that stood out like a pair of hairy caterpillars on the pronounced and bony brow, the stranger sneered, “Yes—I can see by all these companions you have brought along with you on this journey.”

“They are here!” he snapped at the sudden, harsh judgment, and tapped a finger against his chest. Then added, more quietly, “Right in here.”

For a long moment the stranger regarded that, then smiled warmly as he tossed Bass three ears of the corn. “Yes. I believe you might just be the sort who would hold a friend dear in your heart. But be busy now: find us something to boil our corn and potatoes in.”

“I ain’t got nothing near big enough—”

“Tied on the far side of my saddle,” the stranger interrupted. “A wandering wayfarer like myself must always have himself an all-purpose kettle in which to boil anything and everything that God provides for the table. For a prayerful man of the Lord, nothing he finds is ill-gotten gain.”

“You lost me on your track again.”

“God has taken care of me for more years than you have been breathing, young man. And I trust in Him for when there are not folks to take me in and spread their board before me. At such times God will provide me the opportunity to feed myself.”

Titus looked down at the capon, a castrated rooster grown plump for the table. “You … you didn’t steal all of this, did—”

“By the heavens, no!” he roared, laughing. “The farmer I spent last night with—but I already told you, didn’t I? Get that kettle of mine from the horse and see that it’s filled with water from yonder creek. Once you’ve removed his saddle for me, you best be plucking feathers from that bird, unless you want to mud him.”

Titus stopped on his knees. “M-mud him?”

“Ahh, yes,” he said, regarding the fire pit. “You seem to have a good bed of coals going already. Let’s mud these gamecocks tonight, my young friend. You go on about your chores and get to boiling those fruits of God’s fields while you and I find a spot of dirt where we can mix in a little water to make a good, stiff mud.”

“You ain’t told me what the hell for.”

The old man laughed easily, that gap-toothed mouth working with a throb. “Not what the hell for! For a heavenly repast! We’re going to coat these fat little roosters with mud, a thick shell it must be. Then stuff them down in the coals to cook themselves inside that shell of temporal earth.”

“They’ll cook up like that?”

“And when we drag them out of the fire, prepare to dine on the outskirts of paradise, my young friend,” the old man explained. “All we have to do is crack the hardened mud shell, and in pulling it off, we tear away the feathers. Sacré bleu! as the French in St. Louie would say. We are ready to eat!”

When it came time for everything to come off the fire and out of the coals, Titus discovered he was much hungrier than he had ever imagined. He hadn’t eaten like that in days. Ever since that last of Lottie’s meals … Lottie and Marissa’s.

Something about the chill, frosty air and the crackle of the campfire gave muscle to his appetite. All of his hungers. So he tried desperately to force her into the recesses of his mind as he pushed himself back from the pile of bones and gristle and three corncobs.

“You damn near made that bird disappear,” the stranger said. “Along with those potatoes, skin and all.”

“I like the skin,” Titus replied. “And them birds—mudded an’ all.”

“It was a fine feast, wasn’t it?”

“A good change from pig meat.”

With a visible shudder the old man wagged his head. “How I have come to hate Ned.”

“Ned? Why you hate him? Who’s he, anyhow?”

“Not who—what. Ned is pork. Ned is pig meat. Ned is the sustenance of the devil himself! No, I haven’t partaken of Ned in so long, I cannot remember.” He pointed a bony finger at Titus. “And you would do well to swear off it as well. Cloven-hooved, unclean, filthy beasts that they are.”

“But if a man’s hungry—”

“He’s better off going hungry than biting into any Ned! God will provide for His redeemed souls … without any of us having to descend into the fiery depths and dine on the devil’s fodder.” He raised his face and arms to the sky, closed his eyes, to say, “Praise God I no longer eat such a beast.” Then he quickly opened his eyes and looked directly at Titus. “Don’t you hunt, son?”

“Y-yes, sir. I hunt.”

“That’s a fine piece of workmanship there.”

Titus rubbed it, looking at what he took to be wanton envy and desire for the weapon on the stranger’s face. “It was my grandpap’s.”

“I see.” And the stranger peered into Bass’s eyes again. “With such a beautiful piece, a man would never again have an excuse for eating Ned.”

“No, I s’pose he wouldn’t,” Titus admitted, feeling backed into a corner as he watched the old man dust off the front of his clothing, so old and worn they were slickened, shiny with age.

The stranger dragged over the leather satchel he had worn over his shoulder when he’d first walked up to the fire. From it he took a pipe, then another, and finally a small pouch he pitched carelessly over his shoulder and caught in his hand behind his back dramatically.

“Would you care to share a smoke with an old man?”

“I would. Yes,” Titus answered enthusiastically.

“I take it you’ve smoked before?” He handed over the pipe and pouch.

“Years now,” Titus lied as he opened the pouch. “I been on the river. The Ohio clear down the Messessap to Norleans.”

With the pouch back in the old man’s possession, he asked Titus, “What brings you north to St. Lou?”

“Been wanting to go there for years now.”

“Years?” And he leaned forward to snag a twig from the fire, holding it over his pipe bowl.

“For about as long as I can remember.”

The stranger regarded Titus over the pipe bowl he huffed on until it glowed, watching the youth tamp the dark tobacco shreds into the pipe. “You’ve got it packed too tight for to draw good. Loosen it some before you try to light it.”

Titus nodded, feeling the hot burn of embarrassment rise along his neck.

“It’s all right, young man,” the stranger confided as he leaned back against the poor saddle and blanket Titus had removed from the big, bony horse he’d brought north from the Guthries’. “Every man has to learn for himself the feel of filling a pipe’s bowl, to sense when it is packed tightly enough. Too tight, it won’t draw and you can’t keep it lit. Too loose—about the same problem, and it smokes too fast or goes out on you. Rest assured, this is one of the lessons in life that all young men like yourself are bound to learn. Among many, many others.”

When he had loosened the tobacco and had it going, he drew in his first long pull of smoke. It bit and burned. Coughing, he flushed with embarrassment again.

“No matter, son,” the stranger said. “You go ahead and learn on your own.”

“But I learn’t four winters back at Louisville—”

“No need to be ashamed for a little cough or two—”

Titus interrupted, “Maybe I just be a little out of practice.”

“Likely so, young man,” he said with a grin. “Likely so.”

At last Titus felt the heady impact of the tobacco seep across his brow, similar to the first sensations he had enjoyed from a liquid elixir, the likes of Monongahela rye or spruce beer. Titus leaned back against the stump of a tree and regarded the fire, smoking contentedly. Then he asked as maturely as he could make it sound, “What is it you’re bound to the south to do?”

“Me? I always go to the south. And to the west, before I head north again to St. Lou.”

“Around and around in a circle?”

He pulled the pipe from his gapped teeth. “That’s what circuit-riding preachers do.”

“Should’ve knowed you was a preacher man. From the way you … the way—”

“I talked?” And he chuckled. “But—I ain’t one of the rappers. Trust in that.”

“A r-rapper?” Titus asked.

“A queersome breed of spiritualist, to my way of thinking, young man. One who summons communication from the dead, who make knocking sounds from the world beyond.”

He felt a chill course down his spine just from the mere mention of dead spirits, that instant thinking on Ebenezer Zane. “You ain’t one of them, is you?”

“Told you I wasn’t,” the stranger explained. “I make my circuit a month’s time every trip. As far south as I can go in two weeks before turning back around to head north to the land of the wealthy and very, very Catholic French in St. Lou. What is it you’ll be doing in that city you so long desired to visit?”L

“I don’t plan on visiting. I plan on staying awhile.”

“I see,” he answered, regarding his pipe bowl thoughtfully. “And pray—what can you do to provide for yourself? I take it you won’t be hunting for a living?”

“Don’t plan on it—but if’n I got to, I’ll do it.”

“Ah, yes. An enterprising young man who I am certain I will never find sitting on one of St. Louie’s street corners with all the rest of the tattered beggars, hands outstretched, pleading with all who pass by to drop in their dirty hands a ha’penny, a schilling, a guinea. Any trifle so they don’t have to work. Why, to think of it—there have been those who had the gall to call me a beggar!”

“You’re a preacher, can’t folks see that?”

He smiled widely, that gap between his two front teeth seeming to widen as he dusted off the front of his coat and shirt once more. “Yes. It is plain to see that while I am not a man of substance and means, I am nonetheless a man who takes care of himself and does not rely on charity. Tell me, my astute young observer of life and the manner of mankind—have you ever thought of taking up the staff of God and preaching His word?”

“Me? A preacher like you?”

“It is not easy work, let me assure you. But it is very, very satisfying.”

“No, sir. I never thought on it at all. I got me my hope to make it to St. Louie. See where things sit up there. Everything on beyond is wild and open.”

“Every man must find his own call. You’ve heard your own call, then. We’ll let it rest at that,” the old man said, seeming satisfied. “Yes. The beasts and the savages of the wild. Perhaps it is you are called to see them for yourself.”

“Maybeso I’ll get to do that one day.”

“By the grace of God, you will, my son,” the preacher replied. “Myself, why—I’ve traveled through the land of the red heathen for most of my life, and God has not once delivered me into the hands of mine enemies. Even the Shawnee, who were driven across the great Mississipp not long ago to begin a new life in the country south of Cape Girardeau. They and the Miami. On south, farther still, below the mouth of the Ohio, yes—I have gone among the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, and the Natchez of a time. All of them Eden’s children: savage in every respect and by and large not ready for the teachings of God.”

“So you just preach to white folks when you take your rides, make your circle?”

“It wasn’t always that way, mind you,” he explained, relighting his pipe with the burning twig as the night became all the deeper around them. “As a young man I first received the gift of tongues. I gave powerful sermons in the great cities of the east, dined in the finest of homes, held people in the palm of my hand by the thousands. Then one night at a camp meeting outside Philadelphia, I saw her.”

“Her?”

His eyelids fell contritely. “The woman who was to be my downfall.”

“Woman?”

“She sat in the second row,” he replied, looking off into the distance. “Once my eyes touched her, I could not take them off her beauty. No, not that she was the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen—for there had been others prettier. But there was something so altogether striking, appealing … seductive about her. With the way she stirred my carnal appetites—why, I knew immediately, there and then, that she was the devil himself come to tempt me.”

“The devil himself?” Titus asked in growing wonder, then swallowed, forgetting all about his pipe as he was completely drawn into the story.

“I spent the rest of the night preaching only to her. Forget the thousands who had flocked to hear my words that evening. Forget them all! I preached only to her. And in the end my faith was not enough. When the night was done and morning came through the windows of that grand hotel room, I awoke to find myself lying in bed beside that creature of temptation. I had succumbed. I had sinned. I had fallen as Adam fell—tempted by the devil made incarnate.”

“You … you had you … you diddled with that woman?”

The stranger nodded, gazing now into the fire. “I suppose I could have gone on preaching in those eastern cities—but in my heart I felt the ruin. My safe, secure life of preaching to the wealthy and numerous along the Atlantic seaboard was over. I disappeared over the mountains, wandered down the Ohio, on down the Tennessee River, finding my way into the Cumberland as if guided by some unseen hand. Now I do what I have always done since leaving that rich, prosperous life behind: I ride and preach. Many a morning do I arise early to prepare myself to speak to a small congregation in some faraway place in the forest.”

“How you find them?”

The old man smiled. “God takes me to them, to all those who are in need, don’t you see? So I go among them, a new community nearly every day or so. Arising from my blankets before the sun and preparing my sermon. Sometimes there is a handful to listen to the word. Other times there may be fifteen or so. Faith is spread mighty thin in the wilderness, young man. Mighty thin indeed.”

“But no matter,” Titus commented. “You preach to ’em all, like God wants you to.”

“As God commands me to,” he answered. “Yes. Those sheep in my flock seem to suck the life energy right out of me anymore—never was it like this back east when I spoke in tongues, preaching for hours in tongues of the ancient and dead languages. But now these poor pioneering folk draw energy from me and my faith—sucking enough from this man of God that they can go from me back to their fields and their cabins to pit themselves against the harsh land for another month until I come round again.”

“And so you ride on to another place?”

“Yes, I do that. I go on, at first I am weak and limp as this frostbitten grass—my power sapped by the wayward sheep. Yet, I trust in God. On I ride to my next flock, gathering my strength all the while, renewing my vigor in the Lord—for God will provide.”

Titus gazed at the fire, the corn husks and chicken bones heaped beside the coals.

“Never should you doubt it, young man. The Almighty will provide.”

“And He will provide for you, my son,” the old preacher repeated the next morning after they had arisen, saddled, and were preparing to separate.

“I don’t know that I ever asked nothing of the Lord. Never been much of a one to pray.”

With that hard-boned and angular face of his, the stranger replied, “You yourself told me last night that for a long time you’ve been praying to get to St. Louie.”

“Maybe you misunderstood me. I ain’t never prayed to get to St. Louie—”

“But you’ve hoped, and dreamed, and done all that you could to get there.”

“And I am getting there on my own.”

A smile wrinkled the lined face. “You’re getting there because God is answering your prayer.”

Titus felt uneasy of a sudden, on unfamiliar ground. Frightened that he might just be in the presence of something far, far bigger than himself. “I don’t know nothing about that, sir…. What is your name anyway?”

Removing his old felt hat from his head and dipping in a little bow, he answered, “Garrity Tremble is the name.” He slapped the hat on his head and presented a hand to Titus. “Who have I had the honor of meeting and sharing so much conversation with?”

“Titus Bass.”

He tugged the hat down on his brow, saying, “Well, Titus Bass. I will be looking forward to seeing you again in St. Louis in something on the order of a month. Perhaps we can talk again about prayer at that time, for I must be on my way now. There are the faithful and the faithless who beckon me into the wilderness.” He swung into that old saddle atop that fine, blooded horse. “Many times have I prayed God to remove this burdensome yoke from my shoulders … but He will not. I certainly hope that what you pray for, Titus Bass—will not become a yoke locked about your shoulders.”

In bewildered silence he watched Tremble turn the big animal away and move off into the cold, frosty stillness of the forest. Before he climbed atop the old plowhorse, Titus cautiously placed a hand upon one shoulder, as if to feel for any invisible weight there. Then touched the other shoulder in the same way. Still not satisfied, he shook his shoulders as if to rock loose anything perchance resting there. And decided it was all a little ghosty and superstitious of him to believe any preacher knew what he was talking about.

To think of it! Him, praying! Why, Titus knew he’d never prayed a prayer one in his entire life—leastways ever since he’d stopped going to church hand in hand with his mam.

Folks must just get crazy with their praying and all that talk of God and such, he decided as he urged the plodding horse into a walk. Any man who gave up everything for a woman, then gave her up and counted on God to provide everything for him from then on out had to be a fool. If not a fool, then perhaps downright touched.

A man had to provide for himself.

Just as he always had, Titus figured.

Anything else was nothing more than superstition.

He found work in St. Louis his first day.

Reporting to the crowded docks the following dawn, Titus stayed all morning long at the shoulder of the man who had hired him. There he quickly learned what was expected of him in his new position. Instead of toting the loads on and off the boats at the great riverside wharf, Bass was hired as a tallyman. To count the casks and kegs, bales and boxes, oak barrels and hemp coils coming off from boats struggling north against the current up to St. Louis, to count as well all the cargo going onto boats bound for points south.

“You can count?” the man had asked.

“Yes, sir. I can count,” he had answered, a bit confused by that sort of question when he had shown up to ask for stevedore work, ready to tell of his experience in Owensboro.

“Can you write your numbers?”

“Yes, sir. It’s been some time, but I figure I can—”

“Good. Come with me and see if you can catch on to what I’m doing before the dinner hour.”

By noon the job was his. Struggling to control the great and unruly sheets of foolscap he had to write upon, standing at the tall but tiny desk he was instructed to place at the bottom of the cleated gangplank that stretched from the dock to a boat’s gunnel. There he was given the wharfmaster’s authority to make sure nothing came off, nor went on, without his first making a count of it in the proper column, in the proper box, afterward to make a final tally for his boss of what was now lashed on board for shipping, or what had just arrived for storage in one of the many stone warehouses that lined the great and bustling wharf.

By the following spring he’d had himself enough of that mind-twisting work and went off in search of something else, seeking something better to do one rainy afternoon when his labors with ink and quill at the dock were cut short as the skies opened up. By late afternoon, soaked and chilled to the marrow, Bass despaired of finding proper work for someone with such an adventuresome spirit as he. But then his keen nose caught wind of that particular scent of fiery charcoal and ironwork slaked in oil carried on the sodden air. He followed his nose, turning when necessary, until he found the livery hulking at the end of Second Street. One of the great doors was flung open, the man within standing over his hissing fire, shirtless and sweating on such a cold spring day—heaving up and down on a great bellows that shot tremendous blasts of air into that glowing bed of coals. His long graying hair he had tied back with a leather whang, worn in a queue popular at the time.

Standing there at the open doorway, drinking it all in—Bass knew why his nose had led him there. Why he was meant to work in this place.

He promised himself that he would never again despair of finding proper work for a man to do. Let others tally their counts or even carry cargo from one place to the next. But this—yes, this was proper work for a man. Fire and iron. Water and muscle. With them and his own unbounded will—Titus knew he could make anything.

There hung from nails driven into every post, and hammered along most every board that served as the livery’s wall, great hanks of thick leather. Some of it crafted into bridles, bits, harnesses of all description. And laying atop most of those nails were thin black strips of iron banding. Stacked back beyond the bellows and the fire lay wide sheets of iron in all shapes and thicknesses.

He breathed deep again, taking in the fiery fragrance of this place. It so reminded him of that short time with Able Guthrie. How the settler had taught him the use of hammer and anvil and fire, to bring a piece of metal to a red heat before repairing a plowshare or making new bands to secure around a maul they had just carved out of a huge chunk of hickory.

“Something I can help you with?”

His eyes came back to the big, lantern-jawed blacksmith. “You’re busy. I come back later.”

“I’m always busy,” the older man replied sternly, but without a hint of rancor. Then he sighed. “More work than I can do sometimes. What is it you need done?” He eyed the youngster up, then down again. “If it’s that rifle of yours, that will take some time. That’s close work. Not like this. And my eyes ain’t all they used to—”

“My rifle? No, sir. I don’t need no work done on it. Don’t need nothing worked on.”

The thick, heavy brows knitted. Titus watched some of the great diamonds of sweat run together in the deep crevices of that brow and become drops that tumbled into the man’s eyes. They must have stung, for he blinked and yanked a great red bandanna from his waistband, swiping it down the whole of his face.

Turning away, he said, “Then I’ve got work to do, young’un.”

With his back to Titus, his great right arm swinging up, then down with that sixteen-pound hammer clanging upon the anvil, Bass watched the man’s shoulders and arms ripple as he smashed a glowing semicircle of iron band between the immutable force of that hammer and anvil. Sparks sprayed in great gusts like June fireflies with each hammer strike. Muscle swelled and bulged with every arc of the arm, sinew strained and rocked with each blow to the unmoving anvil.

Bass swallowed, forcing himself to ask. Daring to speak. To wrench the words free—words that he knew he had to say, or he would forever be sorry they went unspoken.

“You’re awful busy—”

“I just said that,” he snapped without anger, not taking his eyes off his work. “Now, if you don’t need nothing, I’d be pleased if you were on your way. Go find another place to get warm.”

“I come ’cause you … you ’pear to need me.”

The hammer came down, this time with a dull clink, then lay still on the horseshoe he was forming for that animal tied to the nearby stall. Turning only his head, the blacksmith peered at the youngster again for a long moment. And finally turned his whole body.

“I hear you right?” he asked. “I need you?”

“Yes, sir. You’re busier’n … busier’n any man deserves to be. So I figure you need my help.”

The man snorted, but he didn’t come right out and laugh. Not just yet. Instead, he turned back around, gripped the tongs, and stuffed the horseshoe back among the glowing cinders. Still pumping the great bellows with his left arm, the blacksmith turned back to speak.

“You ever do any of this?”

“Some. A little.”

“Shoe a horse?”

“No, sir.”

“Lots of horseshoeing in St. Lou, mind you.”

“You can teach me.”

“Maybe. If you can learn.”

“I can learn. I can learn anything.”

“Where you from?”

“Kentucky, sir.”

“Good country, that,” he said with careful appraisal of the young man once again, then regarded the muddy clay floor beneath his own boots. “Yessirree. I remember that as real good country.” When he looked up at Bass again, the man resumed pumping the bellows. “Why you come here from such good country?”

“To see this country.”

“Maybe even what’s out there?” he asked, his head bobbing off in the general direction of the west.

“Likely, sir. But when I say I’ll work for you, that means I’ll work. I give my word—”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one, last birthday.”

“And you can learn what I teach you?”

“That’s how I learn’t most ever’thing I know.”

The older man chuckled. “If you’re lucky, young’un. That’s how we all learn, if we’re lucky. Well, now. Come over here and let’s see you make a shoe for this here ornery horse.”

“M-make a shoe?”

“You said you can learn, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did—”

“Put your stuff there by the door and get over here. If you can’t learn what I teach you right now, your truck will be right there by the door, so you can pick it up when I throw you out my place. But, on the other hand, if you can do like you say—learn what I can teach you—then you’ll have you a job, and a place to stay, right here. So that truck and rifle of your’n can stay under this roof. Here, pull on this bellows like you was wanting to squeeze the bejesus out of it.”

Bass took over the bellows handle. That first pull surprised him. It was harder than he had imagined it would be. He locked a second hand around the handle.

“No, mister.” The blacksmith swung an open hand at the second wrist Titus put to work at the bellows, knocking it off the handle. “You get to use just one.”

“Don’t know if I’m strong ’nough—”

“Then you get your ass right on outta here and don’t come back asking for nary work you can’t do.”

He gritted and strained, rocking the shoulder up and down, refusing to give in. He felt the pull all the way into his belly muscles. Felt the fortitude not to give in all the way to his toes.

“That’s it, son! You might just have some hair in you after all,” the man said. “Now, why you think I want you to do that with just one of them skinny arms of your’n?”

“D-dunno,” he rasped with effort, fighting on against the bellows.

“’Cause with the other’n you’re gonna pick up those tongs and take that fired piece of horseshoe outta the coals and plop it down on the anvil.”

He did as he was told, releasing the bellows when finally told to, and picked up the heavy hammer. Step by step, strike by strike, he hammered that glowing red arc of iron around the snout of the anvil, shaping, pounding, sweating even after he shucked out of his heavy, wet wool coat that steamed and stank hanging there on a nail near the fire. He didn’t know who smelled worse—the older man whose great chest beaded and ran with perspiration, or him working off what little bit of tallow he had on his scrawny bones.

“There, now, you begun to get the shape,” the blacksmith explained. “But the fine work’s yet to come. Bring that shoe over here and let’s see what we gotta do to make ’er fit this here mare.”

Back and forth between the fire and anvil and the horse he sweated, refining the shape just as the blacksmith instructed. Until at last the time arrived to fasten on the fitted shoe.

From the pocket on his leather apron the man took a small iron nail. “Here. Start at the top of the shoe.”

When Bass began tapping the nail through the hole he had just drilled through the softened iron, the blacksmith asked, “Say, now—you ain’t a Mason, are you?”

“No, sir. I don’t reckon I am,” Titus answered, tapping on the nail. He put his hand out for a second nail. “But, then—I don’t rightly know what a Mason is.”

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.”