Dance on the Wind

24

The Indian pony resisted him at first, not liking the nearness of that dead body. Maybe it was true what some folks said about animals sensing death more strongly than humans ever could.

As many years as he had worked around horses and hunted the creatures of the woods, Titus had to admit he really knew damned little about the beasts whose flesh he ate, the brutes he shoed and harnessed for Hysham Troost.

With a great struggle he at last draped Washburn’s body over his own shoulder, struggled to rise. Tied off to a tree, the pony sidestepped round the trunk, skittish and wide-eyed, nostrils taking the caliber of the dead man’s scent as it inched away until the hackamore was wrapped around the tree and the pony’s nose was snubbed right against the oak’s trunk. A final heave from Bass meant the frightened pony gave one last jostle, shivering beneath the deadweight.

“There, now,” he whispered to the animal, stroking its muzzle. “Last time you’ll ever carry him. Easy, easy—just ease down, girl. This here’s the last ride for Isaac Washburn.”

Bass had returned to the livery after the sun’s orange orb had peeled itself fully off the far side of the river. Troost was already in for the day, laying out the first of the harness on his workbench, readying it for a good soaping as Titus trudged past without a word.

Perhaps it was the pain written on the young man’s face and nothing more that had compelled Troost not to utter a word. Silently he had watched Bass move by on his special purpose, taking down a long braided horsehair hackamore from one of the stable posts without slowing a step. Out in the paddock behind the barn where Troost fed boscage to his oxen, he had caught up the reluctant pony, brought it among the stables, then latched the half door. Tying the animal beside the opening to his cell, Titus had reappeared with Washburn’s old sleeping blankets, folding it over the pony’s back.

Past Troost he had trudged, again without a word from either one of them. Near the wide double doors that fronted onto Third Street, Titus had taken down one of the mucking shovels hanging from a peg near the last stall. From the moment he had entered the livery, he had barely touched the blacksmith with his eyes. Still, through it all, he could feel Hysham’s wondering, curious stare strike him dead center between his shoulder blades as Bass finally moved out of shadow and into the sunshine splashing St. Louis on that morning. He had led the pony down to the riverbank.

With the dripping, muddy corpse finally draped over the animal’s back, Titus headed downriver. A mile. Another. Then two more as he sought out a place far enough from settlement, from walls of wood or stone, far enough from the walls of too many people. Eventually he stopped in a small glade and tied the pony to one of the trees that ringed the meadow. Leaves rustled in the morning breeze above him as he dragged the body from the animal’s back. It reflexively backed away from Isaac Washburn, as far as the hackamore would allow it. Snorting as it sidestepped, on the far side of the tree, the pony bent its head to graze among spring’s tall grass.

For some time Bass walked over every foot of that glade, then decided on a place before returning to the tree, where he took up that worn and rusted shovel he would now use to scratch at the thick carpet of green, marking out a rectangle wide enough, long enough, for the trapper. The rain-soaked earth gave easily beneath his labor, piling the moist, dark soil in a mound beside the deepening hole where he worked. Man against the ground, forcing the earth to open itself, give of itself, just wide enough for man’s final pillow.

This reminded him of farming. Of Thaddeus and the others back yonder in Boone County. Slashing their shares down through the earth, forcing the soil open—demanding it give what they wanted most. Like a man prying open a reluctant woman’s legs until she at last gives herself to him, where he can plant his seed—there in her moistness so that it too would grow.

But this was different, he convinced himself. This was returning something … someone … to the soil. No, he was not taking anything from the earth. This completion of the circle was something altogether different.

Down, down, down into the ground he sweated, removing first his coat, and later his shirt—those taut, lean muscles and sinews aching before he tossed out the shovel and heaved himself out of that long black hole punched out of the deep emerald green of the meadow. There in the shade, among the roots of that big elm tree. He turned, inspecting his work. Deep enough for him to stand up to his armpits.

After spreading the two blankets upon the grass and gently laying out the body, Bass carefully draped the worn and greasy wool over Washburn’s face for the last time.

“It’s time, Isaac,” he sighed in a whisper.

Beside the hole he laid Washburn, then descended into the grave once again. Bracing himself against the side, Bass dragged the body into his arms, slowly lowering Isaac to the bottom. He quickly scrambled out once he sensed the sun inching itself ever higher, arching its way upward across the sky, warming the air. Now he sweated even more as he stabbed that mound of fresh earth, shoveling it back atop those old blankets with the solemn thump of falling sod.

“Damn you, Isaac—you wanted that spree of your’n more’n you wanted me to be your friend,” Titus hurled his words down at the form wrapped in the blankets. Clod by clod, the soil spilled back into the hole.

“Went out after your whiskey, figuring it would be a better friend than I ever could make you,” he growled as he hunched into his work, stung by his sweat, blinded by his tears.

“Not any different’n that ol’ man Glass, was you? All’s said and done—just like him you give up on folks what cared something for you. Just look at you now!” he sobbed.

Flinging the clumps of earth into that yawning pit, shovel by shovel until he was drenched with sweat, itching at the black earth smeared in great streaks across his heaving chest, tracked with tears over his cheeks, striped in beaded ribbons on his forehead. Wiping the stinging salt from his eyes, he blinked, then kept on hurling the last of that dark earth atop what remained of Isaac Washburn.

Patting the last shovelful down on that long black mound, he shuddered, resting his hands across the hickory handle. Then gazed about at the sunlit meadow he had chosen. Suddenly aware of the wildflowers. Spring’s gift to the land.

Clump after clump he speared up with the old shovel, carrying them tenderly back to the grave, there to replant each bouquet with his bare hands, scratching out each hole with his fingers until that long black mound lay ablaze with color.

“These here orange ones are for the sunsets in them mountains—the ones you told me about, Isaac,” he said little above a whisper, his dirty, black-caked fingers touching the soft velvet of the brilliant petals.

“And these red ones—like them hills you said the Powder River called its home. The blue’uns for the sky out yonder—the sky you told me brushes them mountains you wanted to see again so bad.”

Titus swiped a grimy finger below each eye as tears began to spill across his cheeks.

“And the yellow ones, Isaac. Yellow, just as bright as that grass on the prerra you said looked like a carpet of gold—where a man can find him the buffalo ground. I put them yellow ones here special.”

For the longest time Bass sat there in the shade of the tree sheltering that spot. Watching the flowers nod beneath the breeze while sunlight and shadow chased one another across the meadow … until at last the day grew late. Twilight’s last golden kiss soon to brush the cheek of the land.

The sweat from his efforts had long ago dried by the time he pulled on his shirt, tugging it down over the black streaks of grime from that special ground. Taking up the pony’s hackamore and laying the shovel over his shoulder, Titus trudged back across the belly of that glade. Miles to go before dark. Miles to go before he returned to what was, and was never to be again.

At the far line of trees rustling above him, Bass stopped. Turning, he gazed back, struck that no longer did the long black grave look so much like a dark scar in that meadow of green.

Wildflowers danced like so many bursts of color in the breeze that whispered past Isaac Washburn’s final rest.

Titus had buried more than the trapper in that shady spot last spring.

He had buried his hopes as well.

Then returned to town, and the livery that was all he had.

“Where’s that fur man?” Hysham Troost had asked, eyeing the pony, the blankets gone from its back, when Bass had shown up late that afternoon.

“Dead.”

The blacksmith stiffened. “You … you didn’t have anything to do with it?”

Turning to look at Troost in the long shadows piercing the west doorway of that livery, Bass shook his head. “Kill’t his own self.”

“How?”

“Likely drunk hisself to death.”

Chewing on his lower lip a minute, Troost finally volunteered, “I’m sorry, Titus.”

“Not nowhere near as sorry as I am, Hysham,” he replied, starting away with the pony, moving toward the paddock outside the rear door. “Damn shame Isaac Washburn died like he did. Been more fitting he died out yonder.”

“You still set on going out there your own self?”

He stopped in his tracks, his back still to Troost, and wagged his head, it suddenly feeling very, very heavy upon his shoulders. “No. I ain’t fixing to do nothing but go back to what I been doing all along, Hysham.”

And he did.

Through that summer, on into the fall and winter’s cold squeeze upon the lower Missouri, Titus threw himself back into his work. Each week Troost paid him for the last six days, Bass buried a little of it beneath a stone laid behind the small stove in his cell. The rest he used to buy himself a drink now and then, the feral pleasure of a good meal, and the company of a succession of women who each one helped Bass hold at bay the numbness slowly creeping to penetrate to his very marrow. Gone for good were the days of whiskey fever and whoring until he passed out. Gone were those days of dreaming on the buffalo.

For months there he routinely had pleasured himself one evening a week with that coffee-skinned quadroon, of times sharing a bottle of West Indian sweet rum with her before she hiked up her nettle-bark petticoat and climbed astride him. At least until the Saturday night he came to call, fresh from the bathhouse and a warm meal, ready to have that beauty work her magic on his flesh so he could swallow down what troubled him so.

The old woman who watched over the girls told Titus that his favorite was no longer there—having taken up residence in a private place farther up the hill, closer to where the rich and very French families dwelled. Bass touched the blue scarf he tied around his neck every Saturday night.

“I’ll go see her there. What’s the place so I’ll know it?”

“You can’t see her up there,” she tried to explain, the wounded look in her eyes showing how she tried to understand.

“She ain’t coming back?”

“Rich man bought her, took her off to the place where he’s gonna keep her for himself, now on and always. Buy her all the soft clothes she’d ever wanna wear. There’s a tree outside her window, she told me when she left—where she’ll sit and watch the birds sing come the end of this goddamned winter.”

“He married her?”

The woman had laughed at that. “Sakes, no! He’s already got him a wife—likely one cold as ice. He don’t ever intend to marry the girl. Just keep her in that fancy place he bought her—to be there whenever he shows up so she can pleasure only him.”

“Maybeso I can see her still. Sneak up there.”

The woman wagged her head sadly. “She went there on her own. That means she wasn’t thinking ’bout no one else. The girl left everything behind. And that means you too. Best you forget her now.”

For a moment he stared at the planks beneath their feet. Another piece of him chipped away, like a flake of plaster from one of those painted saints down at the cathedral on Rue d’Eglise. Then Titus looked into the woman’s eyes, vowing he would not let it hurt. And remembered Isaac’s favorite.

“What about that one with the brown hair down to the middle of her back? Think she was called Jenny.”

“You’re two days late, son,” the woman replied morosely. “A mean bastard cut her up good. Up to the pauper’s cemetery they buried Jenny in a shallow hole just this morning.”

Swallowing, Bass said, “Any other’n. Any one a t’ali.”

“You ain’t so choosy no more?”

His eyes went left down the corridor, then right. Back to the woman. “Not choosy at all.”

Far from it.

From that night on Titus rutted with the fleshy ones, the pocked ones, the ones who hadn’t cared to bathe in a month or more—the quality and color of whores in that city always depended upon the size of a man’s purse. But it wasn’t money that was determining his choice of solace for Bass. For no reason at all he simply wasn’t particular where he took his pleasure, seeking only that salve to rub into all those hidden wounds he kept covered so well.

It was simply too cruel to fool himself anymore into believing in hope. Never again would he cling to any dream.

For six days a week he choked down his despair at never hoping again, daring never to dream again—pounding out his rage on that anvil, sweating on into that early spring. Of each Saturday night he found himself a new whore to stab with his anger as he rutted above her. Until he had gone through them all and by those cold days as winter waned, Titus started pleasuring his way back through what women he could afford. Frightened that each week it took just a little more of that balm to soothe his deepest wounds. Scared they never would heal.

When he found himself weakest, Titus would brood on that faraway land—mythical as it was, the stuff of children’s bedtime stories. He was weakest in those moments when the whiskey could no longer stiffen his backbone, when he was drained, done with the sweating torment of driving his rage into a woman, and he lay beside her, gone limp and soft inside as well as out.

A cruel hoax his grandpap and Washburn had played on him: this stuff of longing for that place where the horizon ran black with buffalo.

Bitterness became a feast for him as he held those last days of winter’s retreat at bay.

With the melting drip of that last snow slowly disappearing from the shakes on the livery roof, Titus stood gazing at the sun as it settled atop the trees from the western door of the livery. It glowed so yellow, as golden as those wildflowers he had rooted down into that black mound where he’d planted Isaac Washburn’s remains. As golden as that prairie the trapper had said was the faraway kingdom of the buffalo.

Every bit as yellow as the candle faintly flickering within Titus Bass’s soul.

Perhaps it was that late-winter sun. Perhaps it was the remembrance of those flowers planted for a burial shroud. Then again, maybe it was the sudden and inescapable remembrance of that distant land, admitting that some part of him still clung to hope … whatever it was, Bass stood there at that western door sensing for the first time that the candle of his dream was there and then being rekindled. No longer did he wish to drown its warmth in the tears of self-pity and the wrenching agony of his despair.

Before that yellow sun had settled any farther into the land beyond those trees outside Troost’s livery, Titus had snatched up Washburn’s old rifle and hurried with it over to Main Street, where a year before, he had his eye coveting some of the fine workmanship on display in the small shop of a local riflesmith.

“It ain’t wuth very much,” the old man told him.

“What you give me for it?”

The riflesmith eyed the weapon again. “Seen a lot of use.”

“It was in the mountains.”

The old man eyed him appraisingly now. “What you want to trade it fer?”

“To get me that’un.” Titus pointed to the one hung on the big pegsnear the top of the wall.

“That’s a big caliber,” the riflesmith clucked.

“What’s the bore?”

“Fifty-four.”

Titus said, “I figure that’s what it takes to bring down a buffler, don’t you?”

With a grin the old man slipped the spectacles off his nose. “I wouldn’t know, son. Never see’d a buffler for myself.”

“I aim to,” Titus promised. “And I aim to have me a gun what’ll bring one down too. I’ll trade you that there rifle—and bring you my pay each week till we’re square.”

“Had lots of fellers want that rifle—”

“But I’m the one gonna take it to the mountains,” Bass said evenly, his eyes steady on the old man. “Now, you tell me what you need in the way of cash money, and we got us a deal.”

For long moments the old man did not say a thing; then he eventually straightened and hobbled around the counter, over to that wall where the rifles hung on their pegs. “This’un?”

“Yes—that’s the one I want.”

Titus watched the man take it down off the pegs, running his old hands over the wood, the wrinkles on every finger etched with cherry-red or maple stains, browning for each weapon’s iron furniture.

When he had the long flintlock down, the riflesmith asked, “You’re the smithy been making them lock springs an’ such Hysham Troost’s sold me over the years, ain’t you?”

“I am.”

Step by step the old man hobbled up to Titus, handed the rifle over. “S’pose you ought’n feel how she lays agin your shoulder, son.”

Once the rifle lay in his hands, went to his shoulder, rested against his cheek—their bargain was struck: Washburn’s rifle, the next two weeks’ pay, and a goodly order of lock parts, ramrod thimbles, front blades, and rear buckhorn sights. Enough work to keep him busy long into the night for weeks yet to come.

At long last came that Saturday afternoon he carried in the final payment in cash money and a small linen sack of polished lock springs. To the wall behind his workbench the old riflesmith turned. Reaching up, he took down a sign that hung on string from the flintlock’s graceful frizzen, his own crude lettering stating:

“I allays liked this gun,” the man said when he passed it over the counter to Bass. “But I knowed there’d be a man come in one day that’d give me more’n just money for it. I knowed for certain there’d come a fella who’d gimme a real good reason to sell it to him. You done that, son.”

How Titus caressed that .54-caliber flintlock now. Not the prettiest Pennsylvanian he had wrapped his hands around at those Longhunters Fairs in his youth back to Boone County, Kentucky, but by damned it would do for a workingman’s rifle. Being a heavy Derringer, Bass knew it would shoot as true as any engraved, wire-inlaid Kentucky squirrel gun. And unlike those eastern rifles, this one would pack enough wallop to bring down the beasts where he was fixing to go.

Just as lovingly as he had touched all his women before, Titus now ran his hands over the slightly Romannosed stock, the big goosenecked hammer and cast-brass patchbox, its top finial filed in the shape of an eagle’s head.

“What reason did I give you?” Titus asked of a sudden, remembering the certainty of the old man’s declaration.

“You told me you was the one gonna take that there rifle to the mountains,” the shopkeeper replied. “From what I come to know of folks in my many years—I’ll wager hard money you are the man to carry this here big rifle out to that far yonder. I can see it … right there in your eyes.”

Through the following five weeks he labored long hours to pay off Troost what he owed him in barter for what Titus had used in crafting springs and lock plates, thimbles and other furniture for the riflesmith. And without fail every one of those spring nights Bass threw the pouch over his shoulder and the saddle on that Indian pony—riding down to the grove, where he blazed a new mark on the tree where Washburn had him shoot of a bygone time. The sting of sulfur in that black homemade powder like a rich perfume in his nostrils.

So it was that the pony came to know the man’s particular smell, the way he touched the animal, the way that rider felt upon its back, over the weeks, and months, and all those seasons as he brushed and curried the animal, fed it Troost’s best cut grass, riding that rawboned pony every evening as he set off to practice with that big-bored full-stocked flintlock. Slowly coming to know the man all the more because Titus rode him from sunrise to sundown each Sunday—his one day off each week—not returning until the sun had milked itself from the sky, when from the pony’s back he would pull the old saddle he had patched and repaired for Washburn, finally to curl up within his new wool blankets and dream on those far and Shining Mountains.

“You and me’r even,” Hysham gruffly declared early of a morning as Titus strolled in from the outhouse, ready to stoke the fires in the forge for another day.

Bass stopped dead in his tracks, not sure he could believe what he had heard. “E-even?”

“Means you don’t owe me ’nother day’s wages, Titus,” Troost explained with more than an edge of sadness, “less’n mayhaps you want to stay on and work for me ’nother eight or nine more years.”

He stared, unbelieving, into the older man’s glistening eyes, asking, “We … we’re even you say?”

“Said it already,” the burly blacksmith replied a little angrily, blinking at the smart of the tears. “You’re free to go. And when you do, damn well be sure to take that good-for-nothing jug-head of a Injun cayuse with you. I don’t want ’er around here, raising ruckus with my good studs when she comes into season again.”

His heart pounding, Titus took a step closer to the blacksmith. “This … this means … I can go?”

“Gonna miss you,” Troost said, volving his head slightly so Bass would not see him stab a big finger at his offending eyes. “Goddamned dust you stirred up shuffling in just now got me—”

Titus caught him in a fierce embrace before the blacksmith realized it. “You’re a good man, Hysham Troost. A damned good, good man.”

“G-g’won now, Titus Bass,” he growled, trying to wiggle himself loose from the younger man’s arms. “Get what all you got to take with you packed on that ol’ dun mare back there.”

“The … the mare?”

He gazed at the younger man through the haze filming his eyes. “She’s as sure a packhorse as there ever was, or Hysham Troost don’t know stink from horseflesh. Good of hoof, and nary a stronger back have I seen in many a year.”

Bass started to turn, nearly stumbling over his own feet as part of him began to move away in giddy anticipation, yet another part of him stood rooted to the spot in fear, uncertainty, and loss he sensed beginning to well up within.

“Now, get, Titus Bass,” Troost growled. “You’ll find a pack frame I left for you sitting on the top rail of that last corral down aside your stall.”

By then Bass was crying, bawling every bit as much as a babe. Tears spilled as he careened back close and swept up Hysham’s hand, squeezing it. “You … I’ll … can’t never forget you for this.”

“I don’t ’spect you ever will, Titus,” he said, his voice back to blustering. “Now, go and get yourself packed afore I find you something else to do round here.”

Titus whirled frenetically about the few square feet of that tiny stall he had turned into his home for those many seasons of waiting, of moving through one day after another without hope. Quickly he lashed up within the six blankets what he had purchased with Washburn: kettles and flints, beads and mirrors, vermilion and knives, camp axes and all the rest that together he and Isaac had purchased with Titus’s forge money. Then he took down that sawbuck pack saddle he had repaired just last week for Troost, realizing as he cinched it onto the back of that dun mare that the old blacksmith had planned even then to make a gift of it to Bass. New rawhide and iron rivets, brand-new sheep-hide padding. The mare turned at Titus’s gentle touch and nuzzled his shoulder as the man knotted the last loop of látigo, everything he owned strapped now on the horse’s back in those two pitifully small bundles of what little Titus would take west.

Sweeping up his pouch, then his rifle, Bass led the pony and the dun mare toward the street-side doors that faced Third, where Troost stood with his fists balled on his hips, the birth of that Sunday rising behind him as Titus came up and stopped.

“Light’s got a head start on you already, boy. Don’t ’spect you should waste any more of the day—seeing how far you got to go.”

Bass couldn’t say a word. Didn’t, as much as he tried, his jaw working in futility the way it was. So what he did instead was grab that blacksmith again and this time plant a kiss on the gruff old man’s hairy cheek.

Then he flung himself right into the old saddle as Troost stood rooted to that spot at the doorway, stunned into silence, the fingers of one huge, muscular hand brushing the cheek where Titus had left that kiss of farewell.

Blinking into the dawn’s bright arrival, Hysham said, “You find that place what you’re looking for, you let me know.”

Shifting the fullstock rifle so that it rested across the tops of his thighs, Bass replied, “I’ll be back one day. Count on that.”

“Titus, I’m counting on you finding what it is calling you out there.”

“I will, Hysham. I damn well will.”

Troost took his hand from his cheek and held it up to the younger man. Titus gripped it in his, then let go and suddenly turned his face west as the tears began to fall, nudging his heels into that Indian pony’s ribs, leading the dun mare out of the livery into that first morning of freedom.

Pointing his nose toward the Buffalo Palace.