Crack in the Sky

3

“They ain’t gone and pulled out on us awready—are they, Jack?” whined John Rowland.

“I dunno, boys.” Hatcher shook his head in consternation. “That down there’s s’posed to be the place—right where we come together last year.”

“Where the blazes is our ronnyvoo?” Isaac Simms growled as he shaded his eyes and squinted into the distance.

Digging frantically in the possibles pouch hanging at his hip, Caleb Wood roared in alarm, “Cain’t see a goddamned camp down there!”

“You reckon we’re late?” Elbridge Gray groaned, his big bulb of a nose looking all the bigger for the morose look on his face.

Scratch peered up at the sky, reckoning from the track of the sun just what part of summer it was right then. “I don’t callate as we’re late, Jack.”

“There!” Caleb Wood suddenly cried, the short brass-cased looking glass stretched out from his right eye. “I see some horses, way off yonder!”

Squinting in the high sunlight, the rest shielded eyes to peer into the distance, eager for that reassurance.

“A herd?” Hatcher asked skeptically.

Wood shook his head. “Not no big cavvyyard, but there be a bunch.”

“Hope to shout they’re white men,” Solomon Fish prayed, sweeping a hand under that long beard of blond ringlets.

Wood went on to explain, “And I see some white spots back in the brush and trees, Jack.”

“Take ’em to be tents?”

“Reckon they are,” Caleb replied, his eye locked against that brass telescope.

“Bring up them packhorses,” Hatcher ordered as he gave heels to his own animal. “Move ’em on down torst the bottom, where we’ll get us a better look at things there along the shore of the lake.”

“I was here my own self,” Bass commented as they descended off the low hills at the southeast shore of that inviting body of blue water reflecting a patchless summer sky. “Back to twenty-six.”

“The Willow Valley,” Rufus Graham replied. He was missing his four front teeth, two top and two bottom, which gave him an appealing lisp. “Leastwise, that’s what the fur outfits call it.”

At that moment several figures emerged from the tall willow and cottonwood far ahead of them at the bottom of the gentle slope.

Hatcher groaned with disappointment. “Figgered there’d be more coons come in by now.”

Titus assured, “’Pears we’re just a mite early, is all.”

“Longer we wait,” Hatcher snorted, that wild smile there of a sudden, “the thirstier Mad Jack gets!”

“Been two year for me,” and Bass wiped the back of his hand across his lips. “You ain’t the only child half-froze for whiskey!”

“Whiskey, or rum—don’t make me no never-mind,” declared Graham. “Long as it’s got the kick of a mule when it hits the bottom!”

Isaac said, “Trader ain’t in yet, so it looks to be we got us a leetle more wait afore you get your eggs kicked, Rufus!”

On down into the lush meadows of that fertile bottomland at the south end of Sweet Lake, Hatcher’s brigade whooped, called, and whistled, wrangling their cavvyyard of pack animals and Blackfoot ponies. The closer they drew toward the narrow creek that fed itself into the lake, the more figures stepped from the shade and shadows, all carrying rifles. Suddenly one of those men raised a shout, lifting his long weapon into the air. Bass saw the puff of muzzle smoke appear an instant before the low boom reached their ears.

In concert more of those distant figures raised their rifles and fired them, then went to waving hats and bandannas at the ends of their outflung arms.

Off to Bass’s right, Elbridge Gray was the first to fire his rifle in reply. In the space of three heartbeats the shooting became general as Hatcher’s brigade was welcomed by some thirty men streaming into the open. Screeching wildly with the whole lot of them, yahooing and whooping, keerawing like Missouri mules, or hoo-hooing with a hand clapping over their mouths in the manner of attacking Indians, Scratch lifted his fullstock Derringer flintlock and yanked back first on the rear set trigger, then barely touched the front trigger. The rifle went off—a universal sign of peace for those who traveled the early far west. To empty one’s gun upon approaching a camp was the surest way to show one’s peaceful intentions.

“Boys, let’s keep these here horses of our’n from mixing in with theirs,” Hatcher hollered to his men as they approached the figures that had emerged from the groves of shady trees. Just beyond that camp dotted with canvas pyramid tents and blanket arbors grazed a herd of horses and mules.

“What say we cross the crik and raise our own camp yonder?” Titus asked, pointing off to the west.

For a moment Hatcher stood in the stirrups, gazing this way, then that. When he plopped back down in the saddle, he agreed, “Follow Scratch, boys! Yonder—cross the crik!”

In a matter of seconds the others were bellowing and screaming, slapping coils of buffalo-hair ropes to turn their herd of horses, whistling and calling to the animals, shouting at one another, congratulating their companions on surviving another year, every last man among them busting his buttons to have made it through to another rendezvous with his hair.

On came those who rushed afoot to welcome the new arrivals, some loping through the tall grass, others strolling more casually, most every one of them stripped to the waist in the midsummer heat, their flesh about as white as white men could be—save for the oak-browned tan of their hands from the wrists down, the same leathery look from the base of the neck up. Their leather flap-front trousers and pantaloons were blackened with seasons of grease and blood, smoked by countless fires. At the end of their arms they waved their low-crowned, big-brimmed wool hats, many of which were nearly shapeless after countless soakings by rain and snow. A few had red-and-blue bandannas tied about their heads, while some had tied the popular black silk handkerchiefs to keep their long hair from spilling into their eyes. Even a handful had their tresses braided or wrapped with strips of fur in the fashion of Indian warriors.

“Where from you bound?” cried one of the closest ones who plunged right into the creek, approaching Bass as Hatcher’s men urged their animals off the east bank, crossing to the far side.

Hatcher shouted back, “Up to Blackfoot country for the spring hunt!”

“That bunch of motherless sons chased us right on out!” Bass added.

The squat, powerful stranger cried, “Har—with your tails atween your legs I’ll wager!”

Rising immediately in his stirrups, Scratch looked behind him in mock surprise as he patted his own rump with a hand. “I’ll be damned, Jack! Them Blackfoot bastards done bit my tail off!”

They all roared with lusty laughter as the greeters loping up on foot splashed out of the creek right alongside those on horseback, their leather and nankeen britches soaked above their knees.

The short trapper trotted up to Bass’s side, holding up his hand, grinning like a house cat caught with feathers still tangled in its whiskers.

“Name’s Porter,” he announced. “Nathan Porter.”

“Who you with?” Caleb Wood called out.

“Smith, Jackson, and Sublette,” the man answered, holding a hand at his brow to shade his eyes in looking up at the arriving horsemen.

Wood asked, “You was one of Ashley’s men, eh?”

“Till two year ago.”

“Trader ain’t in yet?” Jack inquired.

“Hell—Ashley sent his supply train out early,” Porter explained as Hatcher’s horsemen came to a halt and some began to drop to the ground. “Why, Billy Sublette and Davy Jackson brung us out our necessaries last winter, fellers.”

“L-last winter!” squeaked Elbridge Gray.

Graham lunged in closer. “Summer’s nigh the time for ronnyvoo!”

Porter drew back a step as the others closed in menacingly. “You fellers ain’t with the company?”

“Hell, no,” Hatcher spat.

“You ain’t American Fur neither?”

Jack roared with laughter, dropping his head back and letting go at the sky. “Wouldn’t take orders from Pilcher if’n he was the last outfit in the mountains!”

“We’re free men,” Solomon explained, slapping John Rowland on the back. “And we don’t owe no man our allegiance.”

“November, it were, when they come early with supplies,” Porter started, apology in his voice and eyes. “Damn, I reckon I know just how you boys feel—no way to hear word they brung out our necessaries early. We wasn’t in winter camp yet ourselves.”

Two summers, come and gone, and still no rendezvous for him. Bass heaved a mighty sigh of disappointment, “’Thout no trader, not gonna be no ronnyvoo now.”

“Just what you boys come here to do if not for ronnyvoo?” Kinkead demanded.

“Not all the brigades got ’em provisions back to winter,” Porter stated. Then he threw a thumb back in the direction of their camp. “Our bunch didn’t get us a chance to take on supplies with the rest in the spring.”

Now Hatcher’s face was growing crimson. Gritting his teeth, he growled, “Winter and spring … and now it’s the goddamned summer! So ye’re telling us there ain’t gonna be no trade goods come to ronnyvoo?”

“Ashley ain’t figgering to be out his own self,” Porter explained as more of his bunch came up to stand nearby in the bright midsummer sun among Hatcher’s men.

“Each one of the big brigades we still ’spect to come in all got ’em supplies they can trade off to you fellers for your skins, I s’pose,” a new and taller man declared, coming to a halt at Porter’s shoulder. “What outfit you men with?”

“Like we just told him—we ain’t with no outfit,” Scratch declared, surprised to discover just how proud that made him to state it so unequivocally. “We are an outfit.”

“This bunch is on its own hook,” Caleb Wood emphasized.

“Thort you might be some of American Fur coming in,” the second man said. “They been dogging near every one of our brigades since last summer.”

“This here’s Mad Jack Hatcher,” Scratch exclaimed proudly, sweeping an extended arm toward their leader. “He’s the one what heads this outfit of free mountaineers.”

“Hatcher, is it?” Nathan Porter asked, extending his hand to Jack. “From the sounds of it, you got a passel of furs to trade.”

“We got plenty of plew,” Hatcher agreed as they shook. “But where’s my men to find something to trade them furs for?”

The taller of the company men said, “Just as soon’s the rest of the brigades ride in, we’ll start the trading.”

“At mountain prices, I’ll lay!” Scratch snarled.

Porter nodded. “After all, this here’s the mountains—”

“Wagh!” Hatcher snorted with the guttural roar of the grizzly boar. “Mountain prices, he said, boys!”

“Get ready to get yourselves honey-fuggled by them company booshways!” Caleb Wood cried as he pounded a hand on Porter’s back, both of them laughing easily.

But the second man was clearly uncomfortable as Hatcher’s men guffawed along with many of the company men. “Mountain prices is what we all take in exchange. Ain’t no man better’n any other.”

“No, I savvy you’re right there,” Scratch said as he stepped up before the tall trapper. “But just as long as we get what’s fair for our plew here in the mountains, a man don’t mind paying mountain prices for his necessaries.”

“Hold on!” Rowland jumped forward, his face drawn and gray with concern. “Y-you mean … if’n there ain’t gonna be no trader come out—there ain’t gonna be no whiskey?”

“No whiskey!” shrieked Rufus Graham.

Now it was Porter’s turn to roar with laughter. “Ain’t got enough to float a bullboat back to St. Louie, boys … but we have us enough to wash the dust out’n your gullet!”

“Whooo-haw!” Bass shouted with glee, sidling up to fling an arm over Porter’s shoulder. “How smooth it be? Like a Natchez whore’s baby-haired bum?”

Nathan Porter turned and looked at Bass in alarm. “Smooth? Hell, it ain’t smooth!”

A new trapper stepped forward. “Ain’t no such a thing as smooth likker in these here mountains, friend. Ever’ drink’ll cut’cha going down and land like a bar of Galena lead when it hits bottom.”

“I wanna know if it can take the shine off my traps,” Hatcher said.

“An’ can it peel the varnish off my saddle tree?” Bass inquired.

“Hell if it can’t!” the man replied with a near toothless grin.

Bass looked over at Hatcher, and they both smiled so broadly, it nearly cracked their faces in half.

Scratch screamed, “Then bring on that there likker, fellers—’cause I got me a two-year thirst to rid myself of!”

Although there was indeed a small supply of crude grain alcohol at the south shore of Sweet Lake, that summer of 1828 there would be no great and boisterous revelry because Sublette and Jackson had already reached the mountains with some twenty thousand dollars in supplies the winter before. Despite the shortage of trade goods and liquor, the air of excitement, camaraderie, and fellowship swelled as the sun began to drop and twilight approached each evening.

Rendezvous was rendezvous. Make no mistake of that. A man worked a whole year to journey off to some prearranged valley for this reunion with faces and friends he had not seen in all those months of grueling labor in freezing streams, fighting off the numbing cold of the past winter, defending himself against horse-raiders and scalping parties. This July a double handful of the new company’s men would be missing.

Survivors of one more year in the wilderness, Hatcher’s men joined other free trappers and brigade men at their fires for swapping stories, generously lathered with exaggeration bordering on lies, catching up on any fragment of the stale news brought out from the settlements by the traders last winter—news seemingly as fresh as these men in the wilderness wished to make every report and flat-out rumor.

As night eased down, black-necked stilts called out softly from the rushes in the nearby marsh bordering the lake.

“Listen to that, won’t you?” a stranger said to Bass at that cluster of fires in the brigade camp where all of them had gathered.

“A purty sound,” Titus replied, hearing the birds’ calls fade across the water.

“If’n you think that’s purty,” Rowland said to the stranger as he strode up, “then you ain’t never heard Jack play his fiddle.”

The man whirled on Rowland. “One of your men has him a fiddle?”

“We do,” Bass declared proudly.

A new stranger with a big red nose leaped up from the ground where he had been lying. “He can play it?”

“Damn if he can’t,” Rowland declared.

Bass nodded. “Plays so damned bad, it hurts more’n your ears when you’re nursing a hangover!”

“Hey, Squeeg!” the man with the big red nose roared across the fire. “One of these here free men plays the fiddle!”

“Who’s the one with the fiddle?” demanded a tall, barrel-chested man.

“I am,” Hatcher volunteered, standing from his stump. “Jack Hatcher’s the name.”

“Mine’s Brody.”

Then Jack warned, “But I don’t play for free.”

“That’s right,” Solomon Fish agreed. “None of us play for free.”

Brody wheeled around on Fish. “What’s it you play?”

“Gimme a kettle an’ a stick,” Solomon said with a straight face.

“The hell with you,” and Brody turned back to Hatcher. “You play for a drink, won’cha?”

“The devil hisself got a tail, don’t he?”

The tall man took a wide, playful swing at Hatcher. “Go get your fiddle, coon! This bunch is half-froze for sweet music!”

That twilight as the sky grew dark and meat broiled on the end of sharpened sticks, spitted and sizzling over the leaping flames, Jack Hatcher returned with the scuffed and scratched, journey-weary oak-brown violin case.

“I’ll be dogged!” some man quietly exclaimed. “He do have him a fiddle!”

Another voice asked across the fire, “Can he really play it?”

“Your toes’ll be tapping in less time’n takes to lift a Blackfoot’s hair!” Caleb Wood explained.

“By doggy! Lookee thar’!” one of them marveled as they all bent over Jack when he knelt beside one of the numerous fires. One at a time he took the narrow straps from their buckles until he slowly folded back the top to expose the violin.

Gently taking hold of it by the slim neck, Jack retrieved the instrument from the case and with his right hand took out the bow. Several wild strands of worn catgut sprayed in all directions as he stood. Scratch smiled at the sight of Hatcher turning slowly toward the others, his face beaming with crazed anticipation of this moment: rendezvous, his music, and that wild revelry he brought other men at these all-too-short summer gatherings.

With his bow hand he shoved an unruly shock of black hair from his eyes, then swept the bow around in a wide arc, describing the greater part of a circle.

“Stand back, boys!” he warned ominously. All of them obeyed, eagerly retreating to give him wide berth. “I gets to playing—Jack Hatcher needs him plenty of room!”

“Back, you dogs!” Caleb repeated, nudging a couple of men back a bit farther.

How handsome Hatcher looked at that moment, Scratch thought. He was proud to be here, proud it was this very time in the seasons of man. These borning days in the mountains. Most proud to stand among these iron-mounted men, proud not only of this breed—but most proud to be one of those whom Jack called friend.

As Hatcher dragged that ragged bow across the strings slowly, tightening a peg here, another there, dragging the bow slowly again and again until he had each string to his liking—then suddenly kicked off with the wild, appealing strains of a high-pitched Kentucky reel … Bass felt a lump grow in his throat. Never could he remember Hatcher looking so happy, so content, so—complete. Not even when the man was well into his cups.

Scratch had only to gaze around the fire at the others, the greater of them strangers, to see just how true was the expression that music calmed the savage breast. Here were the roughest cut of mankind, every last one of them sitting in rapt attention, struck silent in unabashed awe, their eyes every bit as big as the smiles that creased their hairy faces. Slowly, step by measured step, Hatcher moved through them, in and out of the crowd as he swayed side to side with the tempo of his reel, circumscribing a sunwise circle around this largest of the fires. More figures appeared out of the deepening darkness to stand or kneel at the edge of the light thrown off by the leaping flames.

How it seemed Jack thrived on this hypnotic sway he could command over groups large and small when he began to caress the crying strings of his fiddle. Then that first song was done before any of them realized, and the summer night fell quiet for a matter of heartbeats before any of them stirred, or spoke, leaving it up to Caleb Wood and Titus Bass to slap their hands together.

In an instant the others were hooting as well, whistling and roaring their approval. They finally fell quiet when Jack jabbed the violin beneath his chin once more.

“There’s one I’d like to play: a song that makes this child remember where we all come from, where it is we’re all bound,” Jack explained when all had grown completely still.

“Is it loud?” a man demanded.

“No,” Solomon Fish roared angrily.

A new voice declared, “We want something loud we can stomp to!”

“You want the man to play for you or not?” Wood asked the assembly as Jack lowered the violin from beneath his chin.

“Play, goddammit!”

Another bellowed, “Just let ’im play anythin’ he wants!”

They were shoving and shouldering one another now that he had them expectant. Hatcher knelt, starting to lay his violin back in its case.

“Hatcher!” cried Brody as he tore away from a knot of others. “I’ve got me likker for your gullet, but only if’n you play that fiddle o’ your’n.”

“Likker?” Jack asked, holding the violin suspended in midair over the battered case.

Isaac Simms lunged up a huge step into the merry dance of light. “Real lik … likker?”

“Traders’ likker?” John Rowland wanted to know.

“Right here,” Brody said. “Right now. So you gonna play?”

Standing once more with the violin and bow clutched in one hand, Jack drew a forearm across his mouth. “Fiddle playin’s hard work, coon. Dry work too. What say ye: pour me a tin of that traders’ likker, and I’ll see what I can do to play a while for ye niggers.”

While the others set to hollering in merriment, Brody turned to wave two men out of the dark at the edge of the grove where they had been waiting offstage with their prize: a small five-gallon keg constructed of pale oak staves clamped together with three dark iron bands. The pair hobbled forward with it slung between them until they reached an open spot near the biggest fire and eased the keg to the grass. Then, as Hatcher stuffed the fiddle beneath his chin, one of the pair stuck his hand into his shooting pouch and pulled out a wooden spout.

“Punch ’er!” Brody ordered.

And with that the trapper ripped the camp ax from his belt, using it to drive the spout into the bunghole. The keg was tapped.

As the notes from Hatcher’s fiddle climbed higher still, and the fires spat sparks into the coal-cotton night, the men clamored to fill their cups with the clear grain alcohol David Jackson and Bill Sublette had freighted west from St. Louis after sealing up a small plug of tobacco and a handful of red peppers inside each diluted keg. While the plug had dissolved to give the potent brew the pale, imitation color of sour-mash whiskey, the peppers lent this Rocky Mountain libation its peculiar bite. Not that the pure grain liquor wouldn’t already have the kick of an unrepentant Missouri mule.

Squeeg Brody was the first to shove his cup beneath the spout and the first to take a sip of the night’s squeezin’s. Smacking his lips with approval, he turned and parted the rest as he stepped back to the fire, cup held out, and stopped before Hatcher. Jack stopped playing immediately, looped the bow at the end of a finger on his left hand, and accepted the offered cup.

“Thankee, most kindly!” and he bowed graciously.

When Hatcher brought the cup to his lips, the rest of his outfit came to stand around him, all of them staring at that magical vessel, some unconsciously licking their lips, most of them gone wild-eyed with whiskey-thirst. Jack sipped in a manner most genteel, then brought the tin from his mouth and savored the taste of it a moment, eyes closed.

At last he declared, “That’s some!” And with that, Jack threw back his head and went to guzzling the cup dry without drawing a breath.

Fish, Wood, Simms, and the others joined Bass in screeching like scalded alley cats as they leaped away from Hatcher, lunging for the keg themselves. Among the company men there were suddenly tussles, shoving, and some playful wrestling as they all jockeyed to be the next in line to have their cup filled.

“Keep on playing, Jack!” Titus hollered as he knelt with his tin beneath the spout that the keg keepers never had to turn off.

“Get me some more, then, dammit!” Jack flung his empty cup at Scratch, then resumed sawing the bow back and forth across the strings as he dipped and swayed, wriggling his hips, prancing about on his skinny legs, cavorting this way and that like the madman he was.

As the men had their cups filled and rose to return to fireside, each of them swayed or tapped a foot, some stomping harder than the others as they sipped or guzzled at their pint tin cups of grain. Among them a man plopped to the ground with a beaver skin still stretched tightly inside a willow hoop, crossing his legs before him. Snapping off a short piece of kindling a little bigger than two of his stubby fingers, he set about slapping the stiffened, dried flesh of the beaver hide with his make-do drumstick right in cadence with Hatcher’s merry tune.

As soon as he heard the loud thumping, Jack himself turned and jigged over, giggling like a child on a lark as his head wobbled from side to side, humming and grunting with the music he was urging from the singing strings. At the drummer’s side Hatcher began stomping one foot dramatically, lifting his leg into the air as high as he could before driving it down into the grass and the dust, over and over and over again.

Of a sudden a realization came over Titus as he stood with Hatcher’s cup refilled. He knew that song. Hurrying over to Jack, he held the cup in front of the fiddle player’s face. “Where you want me to set it down?”

“Don’t set the son of a bitch down!” Hatcher snapped as he went right on playing and bobbing without missing a note.

“I ain’t gonna hold on to it all night—”

“No ye ain’t, Scratch. Here, pour it in my mouth.”

“P-pour …”

“Right here in my mouth, dammit!”

The tall, skinny Hatcher bent a little at the waist, squatting slightly and contorting himself as he continued to play, lolling out his tongue as Scratch brought the big cup to his lips and slowly began to pour. He was amazed at just how little spilled out, what few drops dribbled down Jack’s chin, off his whiskers, and onto the fiddle.

When Hatcher began to sputter, Bass pulled the cup back.

“Now ye set it down on the rocks,” Jack instructed.

When he had that done, Bass straightened and yelled into Hatcher’s ear over the loud screech of the fiddle, the laughter and hooting of the men, “I know me that song.”

“Ye know this?” Jack shouted in reply. “Sing it with me.”

“Cain’t sing—”

“Sing it!”

“Told you—I ain’t no good—”

“Sing, goddammit, Scratch. Ain’t no one listening but me!”

Titus cleared his throat self-consciously, his eyes darting left, then right, nervous as a bride on her wedding night.

Hatcher prodded him, “Sing the song with my fiddle notes.”

Reluctantly, Scratch began.

Down in the canebrake, close by the mill,

There lived a yellow girl, her name

was Nancy Till,

She knew that I loved her, she knew it long.

I’m going to serenade her and I’ll sing this song.

Titus never had thought he had a bad voice. Rather, he was merely shy of using it in the hearing of others. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sung when folks were around. That is, except when his mam took him and his brothers and sister to Sunday meeting and they all were raised singing those songs settlers on the frontier memorized in early childhood. But this tune was something he had heard others sing around campfires those long-ago summer evenings at the Boone County Longhunter Fair, heard again while rocking on Amy Whistler’s porch of an early autumn evening, heard even at his family’s hearth before a merry fire as the long winter night deepened in the Kentucky forest around their farm.

This was a song not about church and ancient biblical characters in a time distant and dim, not a song about things religious and mysterious … no, at this moment he was singing a song about a subject most boys came to understand as they grew to manhood. A song about women—a matter even more mysterious than religion.

Come, love, come—the boat lies low.

She lies high and dry on the Ohio.

Come, love, come—won’t you come

along with me?

I’ll take you on down to Tennessee.

“Damn, if ye don’t have ye a fine voice after all, Titus Bass!” Hatcher roared over the cry of his fiddle.

Now he blushed, made all the more self-conscious as Hatcher kept right on scratching out the melody to the song. He took a drink to hide the flush of embarrassment.

“Gimme drink,” Jack ordered.

When Bass took the cup from Hatcher’s lips as the song sailed on, Jack asked, “What else ye know?”

“Songs?”

“Any other’ns?”

“A few I might recall, if’n I heard the tune.”

“How ’bout this’un?”

And with that Hatcher immediately slipped into a new melody without lagging a note. After a few moments Bass realized he knew this one too. As he began to sing, Simms and Rowland came over with their cups; then others began to walk up, stopping to listen to Bass’s singing.

I’m lonesome since I cross’d the hill,

And o’er the moor and valley;

Such heavy thoughts my heart do fill,

Since parting with my Sally.

How he had come to love this song in that first youthful blush of manhood—if not for the lament expressed by those melancholy words he had come to know by heart so many years ago, then he loved the song because of the delicate way the notes slid up and down the scale, all of them blended this night by the bow Jack Hatcher dragged across those taut gut strings.

I seek no more the fine and gay,

For each does but remind me

How swift the hours did pass away,

With the girl I’ve left behind me.

More company men came up now, falling quiet as they came to a stop in a loose ring around Hatcher and Bass, listening intently. From the looks on their hairy, tanned faces, the glistening in their eyes as the firelight danced across them all, it was plain to read that every last one of these men had someone special left far, far behind. Many miles, and perhaps many years, behind.

Oh, ne’er shall I forget the night,

The stars were bright above me,

And gently lent their sil’vry light,

When first she vow’d she loved me.

Hardened men, all—softened for only a moment as the wistful notes of the fiddle blended with the plaintive words of one who has left behind a loved one oft remembered in quiet moments around a crackling fire here deep in the heart of the mountains, where only a bold breed dared live.

But now I’m bound to Brighton camp,

Kind Heav’n, may favor find me,

And send me safely back again

To the girl I’ve left behind me.

For long moments the last note hung in the still, cool air of that summer eve at the south shore of Sweet Lake, men struck dumb by the sweetness of the song, by its mournful sentiment. Some of the trappers chose to put their cups to their lips, there behind the tins to blink their moist eyes clear; others chose to snort and hack, clearing throats clogged thick with sentiment.

Nathan Porter pierced the ring formed by others to shove a cup at Hatcher. “Drink, friend!” When Jack took the tin, Porter turned to Bass. “That was fine, the way you singed.”

Embarrassed, Titus sipped at his liquor.

Porter asked Hatcher, “You only play the fiddle?”

“I been knowed to strum my hands across nigh anything with strings.” He handed the empty cup back to Porter. “Why, ye got a song ye want me to play?”

“No, not no song,” Porter replied. “But we got us this squeezebox belong’t to one of the boys—”

“Squeezebox?” Hatcher interrupted.

“That’s right,” Porter stated, biting a lip before he went on. “Fella name of Ryman, went under this past spring to some of Bug’s Boys.”

Jack’s eyes lit with a merry fever. “He had him a squeezebox?”

Nathan grinned hugely. “He did.”

“Elbridge!” Jack bellowed over the heads of the others with a childish glee.

In a moment Gray emerged through the cordon of trappers knotted around Hatcher. “What you hail me for?”

“Porter here says he’s got him a squeezebox.”

“That true?” Gray demanded, wheeling on Nathan.

“Never thort to try it out,” Porter explained. “Cain’t none of us play it anyway.”

Gray snagged one hand on Nathan’s collar, fairly screaming in glee, “Get it for me!”

“Grimes! Get that squeezebox you been packing along!” Then Porter turned back to Gray and Hatcher. “You ain’t bald-facing me, now, are you?”

“This nigger can play,” Jack testified.

Porter seemed dubious. “So where’s your own squeezebox if’n it’s the true you can play?”

“Lost it,” Gray began, his face gone morose. “More’n a year ago now. Damn, but it broke my heart.”

“Just up and lost it, did you?”

Hatcher explained, “Didn’t rightly lose it. Elbridge got it crushed a’neath a packhorse when the critter slipped off the trail and took it a slide down the mountainside.”

“Had to shoot my packhorse,” Gray added morosely. “And then I found that squeezebox smashed like fire kindling when I untied my packs to carry ’em back up the slope.”

Hatcher leaned forward and whispered, still loud enough that most men could hear. “The man sat right down, then and there, with what was left of his squeezebox broke all apart in his two hands … and took to bawling like he was a babe.”

“I loved that thing,” Gray defended himself in a squeaky voice, hands fluttering helplessly before him.

“Here!” Grimes shouted as he burst back onto the scene.

“Gimme that!” Gray screeched as he lunged to his feet, reaching for the concertina, ripping it from the other man’s hands. “Oh, J-jack—ain’t she ’bout the purtiest sight you’ve ever see’d?” he gushed, running his fingers over the oiled wood of both octagonal end pieces and the wrinkled leather bellows.

Hatcher turned and winked at Bass. “Damn sight purtier’n that’un ye got smashed under a dead horse what took a tumble long ago.”

“It is purtier, ain’t it? It is for the truth of God!” Gray shouted in glee as he hitched up his leather britches before stuffing both hands inside the wide leather straps tacked to the wooden ends of the concertina.

Scratch whispered into Hatcher’s ear, “He really can play?”

“This boy can play like the devil his own self,” Jack replied. “Eegod! He’s better’n me!”

Nodding in amazement, Bass turned to watch Elbridge Gray’s merry face as the trapper slid up and down some scales, listening intently to the instrument’s tuning. For the moment Scratch was amazed to find himself in the fastness of these mountains—where he had been put afoot, where he had lost three friends to the savages somewhere downriver, where he had been scalped and left for dead, then resurrected by Jack Hatcher and his buffalo-worshiping Shoshone—out here in the great beyond to find not only did Hatcher have along a fiddle he could play tolerable well … but now he discovered that Elbridge Gray could make all sorts of sweet sounds emerge from that hand-me-down concertina.

Here in this intractable wilderness, he had found music. Real music. Not just the dimming memories of tunes he carried inside his head, off-key and little used, whistled or hummed in tattered fragments as he went about his icy labors … but real, heart-stirring music.

“‘Hunters of Kentucky’!” Gray cried above the whooping and clapping of those crowding close.

“Get back, there—give us some room, dammit!” Hatcher demanded from the gathering as he dragged the bow long across the strings in prelude. Turning to Gray with as big a grin as Jack ever had on his face, he roared, “Do it, ’Bridge!”

Elbridge yanked the two ends of the concertina apart and began to stomp about in a tight circle, thumping the grassy ground with his floppy moccasins, his eyes squinted shut, fingers flying in a blur as he wheezed life into that instrument, squeezing sweet music from it, pumping the magic of song into the lonely lives of lonely men in a lonely wilderness.

With the second playing of the chorus, Caleb Wood started to sing at the exact moment Jack Hatcher raised his own croaking voice.

We are a hardy, free-born race,

Each man to fear a stranger;

Whate’er the game we join in chase,

Despoiling time and danger,

And if a daring foe annoys,

Whate’er his strength and forces,

We’ll show him that Kentucky boys

Are alligator horses!

Oh, Kentucky—the hunters of Kentucky!

Oh, Kentucky—the hunters of Kentucky!

By then two of the company trappers had joined in to sing along with Wood and Hatcher. A few of the words Titus could remember, having learned it during his years in St. Louis following the War of 1812—each time recalling that autumn journey down the Ohio and Mississippi with Ebenezer Zane’s riverboatmen. A stirring frontier ditty that recalled the courageous backwoodsmen who had stood with Andrew Jackson against the British at the mouth of the Mississippi.

I s’pose you’ve read it in the prints,

How Packenham attempted

To make old Hickory Jackson wince,

But soon his scheme repented;

For we, with rifles ready cock’d,

Thought such occasion lucky,

And soon around the gen’ral flock’d

The hunters of Kentucky!

Eventually a few more joined in, accompanied by the trapper beating his taut, willow-strung beaver hide.

You’ve heard, I s’pose, how New Orleans

Is fam’d for wealth and beauty,

There’s girls of ev’ry hue it seems,

From snowy white to sooty.

So Packenham he made his brags,

If he in fight was lucky,

He’d have their girls and cotton bags,

In spite of old Kentucky!

Then Hatcher began to prance and bob right around Gray in a quick, whirling jig of a dance, both of them kicking up dust and bits of flying grass as their feet flew.

But Jackson he was wide-awake,

And was not scar’d at trifles,

For well he knew what aim we take

With our Kentucky rifles.

So he led us down to Cypress swamp,

The ground was low and mucky,

There stood John Bull in martial pomp

And here was old Kentucky!

Back to back the two weaved and swayed, then began to do-si-do around and around one another.

They found, at last, ’twas vain to fight,

Where lead was all the booty,

And so they wisely took to flight,

And left us all our beauty.

And now, if danger e’er annoys,

Remember what our trade is,

Just send for us Kentucky boys,

And we’ll protect ye, ladies!

After two more songs one of the company men hollered, “Meat’s cut. Time for the fire!”

Night had deepened while a handful of trappers had butchered loose, bloody slabs of venison and elk. The trappers surged forward now that the supper call was raised, knives in hand, waiting for their portion. Jabbed on the end of long, sharpened sticks, the rich red meat sizzled over the flames, juices dripping into the crackling fire. Men grunted and groaned with immense, feral satisfaction until their bellies could hold no more; then once again their thoughts turned to liquor. With pepper-laced alcohol warming their gullets, many of the men brought out pipes of clay or cob or briar burl, filling them with fragrant Kentucky burley, lighting them with twigs at the fireside before settling back against saddles and packs and bedrolls.

“I ain’t heard a squeezebox played that good since I floated the Mississap,” Scratch declared with pure appreciation as he eased down beside Elbridge Gray, his tin cup in one hand, a second helping of thick tenderloin impaled on the knife he clutched in the other.

Around a big bite of rare meat, Gray replied, “I’m rusty.”

“If’n that’s rusty,” Nathan Porter snorted, “I’d sure as hang wanna hear you when you’re oiled!”

Without benefit of fork, Bass held the slab of meat up, snatched hold of a bite-sized chunk between his teeth, then, holding the meat out from his lips, cut off that bite with the knife. Hardly the best of proper table manners, it was nonetheless an efficient way for a man to wolf down his fill of lean, juicy meat in less time than it would take most men to fill a pipe bowl and light it. While some ate more, and a few ate less, the standard fare in the mountains was two pounds of meat at a sitting.

Eventually Titus grew stuffed and well satisfied, ready at last for the coffee some of the company trappers had set to boil at the edge of the fires. As he wiped his knife off across the thigh of his buckskin legging, Bass turned to Elbridge. “You’ll play some more for us tonight?”

Gray asked, “You’re up to it, Jack?”

Hatcher replied, “Dog, if I ain’t. When ye’re done coffeeing yerself, Elbridge.”

Minutes later the two were at it again, the potent liquor continuing to flow, both company trappers and the free men frolicking with total abandon: dancing, singing, beating on the bottoms of kettles or banging two sticks together in time to the music They whirled in pairs or stomped about in a wild jig, knees pumping so high, they near grazed a man’s own chin.

The night had ripened and the moon had risen before Jack shushed them all.

“Gonna play ye one last song,” he told them as he stood wavering back and forth, clearly feeling his cups.

“It be a foot stomper?”

“No,” Hatcher growled with a snap.

Someone else yelled, “I wanna foot stomper!”

“Shuddup,” Caleb Wood grumped at the complainer.

“I allays play it,” Hatcher explained as the group fell quiet. “Allays …”

Solomon quickly explained to the others, “It’s his song, boys.”

Quietly, Gray asked, “You want me play with you?”

Jack nodded. “Sure do. Sounds purtier with ye siding for me, Elbridge.”

Hatcher led into the tune with a long, melancholy introduction. After a few bars Elbridge joined in, quietly, echoing Jack’s plaintive notes like the answer a man would hear to a jay’s call, the faint reply returning from the distance in those eastern woodlands where they had all been raised.

Closing his eyes as he dragged bow across strings, the tall, homely trapper began to sing to that hushed, respectful, firelit crowd.

I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger,

Traveling through this world of woe.

Yet there’s no sickness, no toil, no danger

In that bright land to which I go.

I’m going there to see my father,

Who’s gone before me, no more to roam.

I’m just going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

For a moment Titus tore his eyes from Hatcher’s expressive, lean, and melancholy face, glancing quickly about at the others, every last one of them spellbound by the sad, mournful strains of the two instruments, by the plaintive, feral call of Hatcher’s voice as he climbed atop each new note.

I know dark clouds will gather round me,

I know my way is rough and steep.

Yet beautiful fields lie just before me,

Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep.

I’m going there to see my mother,

She said she’d meet me when I come.

I’m just going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

One by one the ghostly wisps of people from his past slipped through his mind as Jack and Elbridge weaved their magic spell in that firelit darkness. A father and mother left behind in Kentucky what seemed a lifetime ago. Good men like Ebenezer Zane and Isaac Washburn, dead well before their time. Billy and Silas, and even Bud Tuttle too—those three who had come into Bass’s life, then gone to their downriver deaths.

Death so sudden in this wilderness. A man’s end come so in the blink of an eye on this unspeakable frontier. Every day was to be savored and cherished and fiercely embraced for all it was worth—a fact that every last one of these few gathered at the fire understood, knowing theirs would not be a Christian burial. No, none of these was the sort of man forever to lie at rest beneath some carved stone marker where family and friends could come to visit. Instead, theirs would be anonymous graves, an unheralded passing … their only memorial the glory of their having lived out their roster of days in the utter ecstasy of freedom.

I’ll soon be free of every trial,

My body will sleep in the churchyard.

I’ll drop the cross of self-denial,

And enter on my great reward.

I’m going there to see my brothers,

Who’ve gone before me one by one.

I’m just going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

To die Where the winter snows would lie deep in seasons still in the womb of time, their bones gnawed by predators, scattered to bleach below endless suns … to sleep out eternity where only the wind would come to sing in whisper over this place of final rest.