Dance on the Wind

18

Mincemeat wasn’t there when Titus showed up at Mathilda’s that bittersweet night of parting mingled with homecoming.

“She’s up and left me to work downriver,” the madam said a little huffily.

“Downriver?” Titus asked anxiously. “How far?”

“Place called Owensboro. Gone off on her own—and the trollop took two of my girls with her!” the madam explained. “Said the three of ’em going into business for themselves.”

Turning to Root, Bass hurriedly asked, “Where’s Owensboro?”

“If’n it’s the place I’m thinking it be, wasn’t much there—”

“Where?” Titus interrupted.

“Only a few poor cabins ’long the wharf—”

“Where?” And he grabbed the boatman’s coat flap.

“Downriver a ways,” Reuben explained. “They was just clearing a spot for it on the south bank when we come past few months back.”

“On the Ohio?”

Root nodded. “I’d make it ’bout halfways to the Messessap from here.”

“I took her in, give her a chance to make something of herself,” Mathilda grumbled as she turned away, waving toward one of her Negro lackeys. “I’ll see that the help brings you boys your supper while I go off to fetch my writing things … if you’re still of a mind to free up that skin-headed Negra of yours.”

Titus bobbed his head. “Yes’m. I am.”

Mathilda smiled as she started away, smoothing the chintz cloth that covered only half of her ample bosom. “Anyone who’s got manners enough to call me ma’am gets my attention, fellas.”

When she returned, the madam eloquently worded two copies of the same declaration freeing Hezekiah. One, of course, would go with the freedman, and the second Titus chose to keep for himself, protected inside a small waxed fold of foolscap. Then she had one of her lackeys escort Bass back to her own room, where a steaming kettle of soapy water was soon delivered. With a scrap of cambric cloth he scrubbed himself from the washbasin in the corner of the lamplit room, then found the plush softness of her feather mattress an inviting contrast from the crude grass ticks he had so far encountered.

When at last he was awakened there in Mathilda’s bed, all but one of the oil lamps had been snuffed. Soft, pudgy fingers were at his flesh, arousing him gently. A hot whisper clung to his ear as the madam declared she would give him all the sweet delights she could that night, in fact, whenever he wanted to visit her, seeing how he was going to stay on in Louisville.

As good as it felt, what with her fingers raking up and down the hard, hot length of him, the way she smelled good and sweet from cinnamon and tamarind she had rubbed on her neck and down her heaving cleavage—how he found her fleshy plumpness so startling after Mincemeat’s angular hardness—right then Titus didn’t have the will to tell Mathilda that he had determined to move on.

That hadn’t even come up at all when he’d slipped out to gulp down some coffee and swallow the hot breakfast the Kangaroo’s kitchen served. There among the great boiling kettles and the sweaty, shiny faces of Mathilda’s black-skinned help, Titus retrieved one of the declarations from inside his shirt. As Hezekiah held one corner of the wrinkled paper, Bass held the other, preparing to read it aloud for all in that stunned kitchen where thick aromas swirled up from three fireplaces.

“I cain’t rightly read all these proper words Mathilda put down on this here paper,” he explained to the freed-man with some frustration. “But I do recall what I told her to put down, and she read it over to me when she was done. This says I was your owner. Says I fair and square are setting you free, a slave man no more. This paper tells that you’re free to go where you want from here on out. Then I put my mark down right here. She signed her name to it, and here’s where two other gals she got to come in put their names last evening after watching the both of us put our marks to it. G’won now, as a freedman. That paper you carry is your’n to show any man what don’t believe you be your own man from here on out.”

That dawn the kitchen cradled them in such warmth, downright steamy and fragrant was it. Just like the embrace he suddenly gave to that tall black man.

“You’re free, Hezekiah.”

“I never forget you, Titus Bass.”

“You damn well better not,” he replied, then pulled his blanket roll off his shoulders and handed it to the freedman. “Here, now. Want you to have this.”

“But it’s your’n,” he exclaimed in a harsh half sob of a whisper, his yellowed eyes brimming.

“Your’n now. This morning I seen to it I put some fire-makings in there, my old tin cup and that knife I first brung me from home … ’long with a li’l pouch of coins just in case you need buy yourself some food or a place to stay till you get where you’re wanting to go.”

His big hands trembled as he clutched the thick roll of blankets enclosing the precious gifts to his breast. Hezekiah said, “Going to do like you said—see what’s west, Titus. Maybe even a place for me out there.”

“If’n I stood in your place, Hezekiah—I’d likely be looking for to find me a place where a man can be just a man. Where there ain’t no slave owner. No man made to be a slave. Out yonder there’s bound to be a place for you. Just like there’s bound to be a place for ary man … we look hard enough, long enough.”

“You stay here when I go?” the freedman asked.

“No. Last night I figured I’d just push on,” Titus replied. “Want to see someone I know—now they gone west to a new place downriver. Maybeso we can walk that road west together. Least as far as Owensboro afore we say farewell.”

They took their breakfast together there in the kitchen, squatting in the corner with steaming mugs of coffee, before Titus went out as the town’s shopkeepers were beginning to put out their wares for the day. Slipping more coins from the waistband of his britches, he bought himself a new pair of blankets, a small tin in which to carry his new fire steels and flints, along with a new belt knife in an oiled leather sheath that he proudly hung at his hip. At the side of the river he and Hezekiah bade the rest a farewell as the boatmen and Beulah moved off toward the light of a climbing sun, while the youth and the tall freedman pointed their noses west.

For more than eight short winter days and something on the order of 130 miles, the pair followed the twisting course of the Ohio’s south bank until they reached the timbered hillside overlooking the land being cleared for Owensboro. Girdled trees strained for the sky as others were felled, then quickly dragged off by grunting teams of oxen while knots of men poured oil atop the fresh stumps and set them afire until the sky was corduroyed with black streamers. Still more laborers laid log upon log, raising the walls of cabins that would hold at bay the last of winter’s chill from these hardy pioneering folk pushing west with the migrating frontier. Below Titus the air hung ripe with fresh sweat and steaming dung, burning hardwood and lye soap coming to a boil, those open fires attended by women who slowly worked great paddles round and round in the pungent brew, fingering sprigs of hair back from their rosy faces as the trail-weary pair pushed through their midst toward the cluster of shacks and lean-tos and cabins gathered close by the river’s edge.

There in the cold shadows of that late afternoon he found her in the makeshift watering hole not any bigger than his folks cabin back in Boone County. Mincemeat had one stockinged leg kicked up on a crude bench hacked from half a length of a tree trunk supported by four wobbly pegs, her arm draped over the shoulder of an old man whose five-day stubble showed more gray than it did the same mousy brown of what little hair still remained atop his sunburnt head.

“Mathilda told me I’d find you downriver,” he began in a happy gush.

At first she only turned her head, squinted at him through the musty haze of that poorly drafted fireplace and the smoke of more than a dozen pipes, candles flutting the air with their dancing fingers of light. The room fell to a hush; all the customers turned to study not only Bass, but the big Negro behind him.

“Mathilda?” Then the woman dropped her skinny leg in its worn stocking to the pounded clay floor and turned on him wearily. “Do I know you?”

“Sure you know me, Mincemeat,” he replied with sudden alarm. “We knowed each other up to the Kangaroo.”

“I just come from Louisville,” she said sourly, her bleary, bloodshot eyes peering over his shoulder at the tall, bald man behind him. “It’s a good place to be from. He’ll have to go—his kind ain’t ’llowed in here.”

“He’s with me.”

“Looks to be you’ll both have to leave too,” she replied a bit acidly, almost too wearily. “C’mon back when you’re by your own self and ready to have some fun with Mincemeat.”

His heart was sinking. Titus felt himself beginning to tremble. “You … you don’t know me?”

“I supposed to?”

“I come all this way to find you.”

“Find me?” And she laughed a bit too forced and shrill. “Must be you’re wanting a roll.” Mincemeat put out her hand. “As you can see, I’m still a working woman, mister. That means a roll will cost you a shilling—an’ that’s good till you’re satisfied. Half-shilling for each time you’re satisfied after that till the night’s done.” She began to turn back to the small group of hardened, dirty men she had been regaling at the moment Titus walked in. “You come back when you ain’t got him along and you fix to spend some money on Mincemeat.”

Smarting in anger, Bass quickly glanced at the other two bawdy women looking on with amused attention, their arms draped over their customers. Shreds of memory placed them as Mathilda’s girls too.

“Abigail—” Then he watched as she smarted with the name. Flinching as if struck with a flat hand, slowly turning back to gaze at him with a studious squint.

“I’m Titus,” he continued softly as the noise in that grogshop started to swell once more, like a deer’s bladder he would fill with tiny pebbles from river gravel, to stretch it out while it dried to make himself a pouch. “Titus Bass. Don’t you remember me?”

Shoving a long strand of unruly hair back from her cheek, she whirled away from the others, stepping his way with one red-rimmed eye clenched. “By damn, you don’t say! It for certain is the boy what come to the Kangaroo not long back—all ready to become a man, this’un was.”

At the table behind her some of the others snorted. Bass sensed the first burn of embarrassment. But as suddenly her face became open and lit up with undisguised glee. Mincemeat lunged against him, her bony arms wrapped around his waist.

“Course I remember you,” she exclaimed, then whirled to explain to the room, “I’m sure you older fellas understand if I spend some time here with the young’un.” She sniggered, saying, “You all ought’n remember what it was like when you had you a peeder what stayed hard all night long. Lemme tell you when this girl gets a chance to slip one of them atween her legs—she does it!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I … I promise … Ab-abigail.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s your’n now.”

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

“No need. It ain’t much.”

“Said I’d pay you back.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Poon?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I was hoping …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hack himself free of it. And move on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gimme your hand!”

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

Straining, Mincemeat rocked back with all she had in her frame—succeeding more from a long shudder the wharf itself underwent with the next severe, rolling tremble of the earth’s shell … and dragged him just far enough that Bass could fling an arm over the end of the rough planks, hoist a leg up. She freed his hand and grabbed that leg, yanking desperately on his soggy pants turning to ice in the frigid air, heaving back with all her might. And when she wasn’t grunting with her Herculean efforts, she bawled with the most hair-raising scream Titus had ever heard.

Sprawled on his belly across the roiling, sand-coated dock, Bass gasped for air, sputtering as his belly spewed up river water. From the corner of his eye he watched that monstrous wave thundering down upon him; he scrambled to his feet, pulling her up with him. Beneath them the wharf creaked, groaned, then screamed as it tore itself apart, hurtling them both into the air, thrown a dozen feet toward the bank as the dock wrenched itself free of the southern shore. Down into the last of the sand scattered atop those planks slanting toward the water like jack-straws they both tumbled as that great wooden structure screeched in protest against what long iron spikes still held it together, moaning in protest of the last few moorings imprisoning the wharf against the riverbank that itself was peeling away in great crumbling gobs of what, until moments before, had been solid ground. Sheet after sheet of that dark loam was shredding itself away with each jolting shudder of the earth’s crust. The Ohio was all but back upon them.

That rampart of foam crashed against the two dozen or so flats and keels, raising them like children’s toys on its icy, boiling surface, flinging some high into the top of the leafless trees sheltering the riverbank being shed piece by piece into the Ohio, other craft flung into what remained of the dock with a deafening thunder as wood splintered against wood. Great planks of oak cartwheeled through the air as if they were no more than mere whittling splinters. The force of the river’s collision with the wharf shattered more of the trunk-sized pilings into kindling.

With a great, long groan of agony, the wharf beneath them keened to the side, collapsing at long last toward the fevered river as if the Ohio were a giant, gaping maw swallowing, devouring everything within reach of its monstrous appetite.

“Titus!”

At her shriek he whirled, the fingers of one hand all that held him from sliding toward the black, roiling waters. Just feet above him Mincemeat slipped, slid his way on her belly, her own hands clawing uselessly at the icy planks as she spilled ever downward. Lunging toward her with his free arm, he felt the ground shudder beneath him. Then as suddenly the wharf heaved once again, flinging them both into the air. Spinning, wheeling, he landed in a heap beside her, the air driven from his lungs. Now she had a grip on his leg, and he had a purchase on the end of a plank that teetered precariously sideways as the rest of the wharf’s superstructure slowly creaked to the side, giving way toward the river.

“Keep hol’t on me!” he shouted to her above the screams and bawling of those terrified people on shore: the frightened ones who huddled on higher ground, watching the ground split like overripe pecans below them, those excruciating wails of the wounded and maimed, beaten and broken and crushed by the riverbed’s cruel tremble.

Then he began to claw with his free hand, trying for a grip on another plank before he dared free the first hand, swinging a few feet closer toward the bank and solid ground. One wide plank at a time he slid his bloody hands pierced by splinters as the river heaved and frothed at their feet, like a yapping, monstrous, living thing devouring thick planks of once-great flatboats now nothing more than creaking, groaning timbers hurtled together and flung against the sinking wharf like so much flotsam.

Titus clung to a piling with one arm while he twisted to reach down with the other, and snagged Mincemeat’s wrist, pulling her free of his leg. Whimpering like a small, frightened animal caught with nowhere to run, she clawed her way up his legs to cling at his waist and refused to let go as two men slogged up to their knees in the mud to yank and drag them onto the last fixed portion of the wharf. Together the four clambered to their feet.

When the next shudder of the earth came, Bass lunged forward, one watery leg moving, then the next, the woman clinging to him like a deer tick sucking its fill until they were above the river street, standing in the midst of those who were to survive this great and mysterious quake of the earth.

There on the icy, trampled ground he collapsed onto his hands and knees, his every breath feeling like a handful of painful shards of glass splintering inside his chest. Mincemeat rolled onto her back, gasping as well, her eyes clenched as tight as her mouth was open, tongue lolling like a hound out of breath. Across her forehead and down into one eye ran a nasty, oozy gash. Her hands were dirty, bloodied. His a mass of bleeding wounds. Bass looked down at himself. His pants were torn, both legs cut and plastered with mud. Only then did he feel his whole face begin to throb. Touching his cheek below one eye made the rest of his head ache with a sudden fire. He had broken something in his face on one of those flights he’d taken across the wharf, he decided. But at least they were alive.

Slowly Titus turned, squatting in a heap beside her, there among the many who had been fortunate enough to clamber to higher ground when the first roll had struck Owensboro.

“How … how’d you know?” he asked her in a gasp.

“Know what?” she replied without opening her eyes.

“To come get me.”

“I was already coming down there,” she explained softly, only then opening her eyes. “Bringing you something to have your noon dinner with me.”

“You damn well may’ve saved my hash,” he admitted, staring down at the woman who had warmed his bed through what had been left of last spring, followed by a long and humid summer, then finally into these first cold, sleety weeks of another winter.

It had been something on the order of a year now since Ebenezer Zane had first led him into Mathilda’s Kangaroo tavern. Just shy of a year since he had first experienced her back in that tiny crib. In all that time he could not remember sensing anything beyond an animal need for her. Yet here and now, as the thunder of the earth’s great crumbling shudder died in the distance, great flocks of shrieking birds blackening the sky overhead, Titus realized he truly did care for this bony whore. Not that he believed she might ever love him the way he imagined a woman could love a man and be loved in return.

Yet here he sat, in the flush of that moment of terror—having been saved by Mincemeat—only now beginning to realize what he must mean to her. Perhaps even more important, sensing for the first time that she meant much more to him than a warm place to sleep, more than a moist receptacle for his peeder when it grew hungry for relief, more than a companion at his side to help drive away the long and lonely hours of these seasons while he sorted out what next to do with those years yet to come.

“Hell, I’d done the same for anyone,” she said gruffly, rocking up to one elbow and swiping gently at the eye where the blood oozed.

He seized her by the shoulders. “No, you wouldn’t.”

She glared at him harshly a moment; then her face seemed to crack, softening, her eyes deepening in hue. “You bastard,” she whispered, those eyes pleading. “Don’t you ever, ever take advantage of me … now that you know what I … how I—”

“I swear. Never will I.”

“Can I trust you, Titus?”

He gulped, blinking the tears back as folks flooded past them, heading for what was left of the south riverbank where once had stood a street bustling with frontier commerce, a wharf where riverboats had tied up, and the town’s population helped inch settlement farther and farther west.

“You can trust me with your life, Abigail.”

Her lips moved as if she were trying to say something, then she collapsed against him instead. Wrapping her skinny arms about him tightly, she buried her face in his chest, sobbing. “Don’t care what you say, I know I cain’t ever trust you now. Ain’t never been able to trust no man. Your kind is here today. Gonna be gone off tomorrow. You’ll just go away, tearing yourself off a little piece of my heart when you disappear.”

“Didn’t ever have no intention of leaving you … least like that I won’t.”

“You bastard,” she groaned with a shudder, as if in saying it to Titus Bass, she could lump all men together in him. “You’re no better’n a lying sack of pig’s entrails—all of you!”

And the harder she sobbed, the tighter she clung to his icy coat. All around them stunned people trudged this way and that in shock, as if struck half-dead at what had just befallen them. But there on that’tiny piece of icy, sodden ground, their sodden clothes freezing in the frightfully cold air, the two of them sat. Bass rocked her in his arms.

“I won’t never leave you like that,” he whispered into the wet sprigs of her wild hair that still smelled of too much tobacco smoke and the musty stench of their bedding gone too long without airing, those blankets and hides they retreated under every night she trundled back to him, for a few hours all done with lying on her back in those stinking cribs behind the saloon that once stood at the river’s edge.

“You damn right you won’t leave me, Titus Bass,” she promised harshly. “I’ll leave you first. Afore you leave me hurting. I’ll say my fare-thee-well to you, you bastard. Just like I been wanting to say it to every man I ever come to care for just a little … when he up and leaves me.”

Suddenly she jerked back, snagging the lapels of his dripping coat. “Some of those sons of bitches even had the balls to steal what little money I had at the time. Can you beat that? They’d hit me, made me bleed, then stole’t what little I had hid away for myself—”

“You’re hurt. Bleeding,” he interrupted, suddenly drawn from the tremble of her blue lips to the darkening gash at her brow. “Let’s go see to it.”

As Titus dragged her to her feet, he said, “How’s a fella s’posed to thank you for saving ’im?”

She stood quivering beside him. “Onliest way I know is just don’t ever run off from me like them others done. That’s how. You’ll thank me by waiting until I take off on you.”

Looking down into her frightened eyes, he knew he had no way of ever understanding her terror that she might fall in love with him. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. Ain’t gonna ever hurt no one like that—”

“You just let me go, Titus. Let me leave you behin’t when the time comes.”

Without saying anything more Bass turned Abigail toward the path of girdled trees that would take them west toward the edge of town, where the settlement of Owensboro had stretched itself more and more every week this past summer. There he had raised them a new place, a dugout a little bigger than her shanty had been, with a bit better roof of all one pitch, just like a lean-to. A single door and window in that front facing the river. They hadn’t needed anything more, because he worked by day and she worked by night, and they gave themselves to one another in the moments of passing. For the time being it was enough to share what little they had with one another.

For the time.

The center of that great earthquake struck in Missouri, some seventy miles below the mouth of the Ohio, at a settlement called New Madrid, once a Spanish military post on the west bank of the Mississippi. For more than a hundred miles in every direction the earth convulsed.

Although Owensboro lay 130 miles away as the crow would fly, even that part of the lower Ohio River valley wasn’t spared much of the devastation that eleventh day of December, 1811. Not only the Ohio, but even more so the Mississippi, both rolled back in their beds, flowing north for a short time while the earth heaved beneath them. Hundreds upon countless hundreds of keelboats, Kentucky broadhorns, log rafts of all description were torn apart, dashed against sandbars and riverbanks, the surface of the great rivers strewn for weeks and weeks with the debris of craft and cargo alike.

Five nights later near ten o’clock the crust of the earth trembled once more. Waterfowl clacked and squawked overhead, afraid to put down and roost as they were scattered to the four winds in their fear.

Then again the next day, December 17. Once more the banks caved in, carved away by forces stronger than the rivers that reversed direction in their beds. Great chasms splintered open across forest and field—raw, gaping lacerations in the earth that drew the curious and the frightened and the truly awed in the weeks and months to come—brought there to stare and consider. And when folks returned to the river, they always found it foaming, littered with a tangle of drift timber and uprooted trees. The thick forests were now a maze of sundered stands of maple, elm, oak, and beech. Those caught in more open country had witnessed the earth undulate in regular waves advancing at close to the pace of a trotting horse. In those first few days following the initial quake, there were times when the day became all but dark as the night, times when the sun failed to show its face, hidden behind a yellow pall, a haze wrought of dust and fires and hell on earth.

By Christmas many folks had begun migrating away from that tormented land. Where they were bound for sure, they did not know. But word already had it that the worst of things had devastated the region south and west from the mouth of the Ohio. Best to head back east and north, they figured. If a wagon could be had, settlers loaded it with all they could carry out of that dangerous country some said was condemned by the hand of God Almighty. If nothing else was available, they strapped what they could to the backs of their horses, mules, oxen, and milch cows, setting off to get as far as possible from that land of the devil, often forced in their travels to bridge the great chasms of earth rent in those mighty upheavals.

Even the wildlife migrated for a time, panthers and turkeys, deer and bear, wolves and waterfowl, all huddling in among the frightened fleeing from the maw of hell, taking what comfort they could from humankind in the wake of so great a catastrophe. Just to get out of that damned country.

And damned that country was, they believed. Nothing but the wrath of God could have caused so great a calamity as to make the earth shake as it continued to do from time to time, right on into February of 1812 with no fewer than twenty-seven full-scale quakes. All too many of those pushing east believed this terrible retribution was being visited upon the unclean, the impure, the unholy and unrepentant who had flocked to the lower Mississippi Valley to feast themselves on flesh and whiskey, wine, women, and debauchery, in the devil’s playgrounds of Natchez and New Orleans.

Those who fled often looked back over their shoulders as they left the downriver settlements like Owensboro. Some merely clucked and shook their heads. Others ranted out the last of their sanctimonious warnings. Look to the heavens! Why, a burning star had foretold of catastrophe! That very same comet that had streaked across the heavens back in August and on into September and even October, with each fiery trip warning of God’s hand soon to be unleashed on the land of the sinners. Even the righteous who would not listen, so the warnings went, would be swallowed up with the unclean.

“Go! Go now!” shouted one of the prophets of doom standing there at the edge of what was left of the Owensboro wharf Titus and the others labored to rebuild that cold, icy January.

With a singing of hymns the doomsayer led a curious flock in song and fervent prayer before he unleashed that brimstone tirade castigating those who sinned against the Judgment Day. It took him no time to gather a sizable crowd of those still clinging to Owensboro, women who now huddled beneath shawls or shreds of Russian canvas, a few men who shuddered beneath wool blankets to listen to that dire warning from one who, by the conviction of his powerful words, appeared to have a much greater knowledge about such things both physical and metaphysical than the mere common man.

“The end is coming!” he bellowed, holding up his scuffed and worn text at the end of his arm, a long staff in the other, exhorting his gathering. “In this—His own word—God Himself has ordained the end to arrive in just such a way. Take heed of my pronouncement, for the mouth of that comet unleashed by His great hand has brought nigh the end of man.”

“The comet!” some in the crowd shouted in eager response.

“Yes—the comet!” the anointed one shrieked. “The earth has quaked because of the comet that made its appearance across God’s firmament months ago. A comet with two great horns, like the devil has horns himself!”

“Work of the devil!” one in the crowd roared.

“Two great horns!” the prophet shouted. “And this frail, temporal scrap of earth where man has made his home now quakes because we have rolled over one of those horns on that comet, and now lie lodged betwixt that pair of horns that adorn the devil’s own brow!”

So it was they flooded east in small groups and by droves, all those who feared lying in the lap of the devil when the hand of God returned to smite them again … leaving behind those who did not believe in such superstition, those who relished the depravity of living there in the lap of the devil himself, and even one lone man who had vowed he would not be the first to leave.

After all, enough folks remained behind, or migrated downriver, that Titus still had his job, could go on working through each day, spending each night waiting for her and wondering if the following morning would be the dawn when she failed to return.

Here in Owensboro there were many who celebrated their deliverance from destruction by merrymaking. When the aftershocks rocked their houses and saloons in the following weeks, they clung to one another or the walls until the trembling subsided, and they dared dance once more. It was this indomitable spirit that had brought such hardy souls to this land. Only those who truly belonged at the edge of that new frontier elected to stay on.

They always had.

The French and their Indians hadn’t run them off their holdings sixty years before. A generation later the English and their Indians had failed to scare off their kind. Those of pioneer stock were not about to be deterred by something so insignificant as the trembling of huge plates of rock beneath the surface of the earth. They had the matter of living to be about. And whether it was enemy armies, or skulking Chickamauga and Shawnee, or whether it was capricious skies and stillborn babes, those steadfast pioneers hung on. Some had no choice: they had come to make a stand and dared not return to what lay behind, what they had fled, back over the mountains. If anything, they would move from this ground torn and rent asunder—move on to new land they could clear and make fruitful.

Time and again in those days and weeks and eventually months of tumult within the unsettled earth, Titus thought again of his grandpap. Once more he realized there was no threat big enough to frighten away those who were truly westering, truly moving toward the setting sun, seeking that most fertile of valleys. After all, that breed of folk believed, a man could be buried anywhere. A man had himself a choice: back there where they had come from, where most folks claimed it was one hell of a lot safer to keep his woman and raise his family. Or he could always lay his bones down here in the western extent of the Illinois country, here along the lower Ohio, or those new settlements of Missouri. Just as well a man be buried after making his life count for something, no matter how short.

Better to live their lives full, than long, some of the hardy ones declared. Better to be buried in sod where few men would ever walk than lie a’moldering beneath ground trampled by the boots of thousands.

In late winter word drifted downriver to Owensboro of something folks were calling a steamboat. Talk was that Nicholas Roosevelt’s New Orleans had made it down to Louisville about the time of the first earthquake in early December—all one hundred tons of her, pushed along by a paddle wheel churning at her stern, primitive woodburning fires heating steam that powered an engine mighty enough to push itself against the strongest of river currents.

The bearer of the news shared his report with his wide-eyed, yet skeptical audience there in Owensboro late that March of 1812: “It reached Louisville in the middle of the night, rousting folks from their beds to come scurrying down to the dock to watch it tie up. Didn’t dare take on the Falls—water too low. So the captain turned it about at the harbor and marched that boat right back upriver to Cincinnati.”

“Against the Ohio?” asked an astonished citizen.

“Yep.”

“They had to have ’em a big crew paddling,” Titus scoffed.

Others in the crowd agreed, doubting this outlandish monk’s tale.

“Not a one,” the reporter went on undeterred. “Not an oar in sight. Only that wheel paddling agin the current.”

Less than a week later the New Orleans showed up at Owensboro, having finally braved the Falls of the Ohio, the water rising enough to resume that voyage to its namesake city.

Nothing short of a pure wonderment, that was, Titus thought, standing at the new wharf in awe. Why, to push upriver and down at will, that crude, hissing engine throbbing noisily, black smoke chugging against the winter sky. By some mysterious force able to sail upriver against the Ohio that long ago had borne the downriver fleets of the great prehistoric mound builders, then the birch-bark canoes of French and English explorers, next the dugout pirogues of Indian traders and Kentucky longhunters, followed by the bateaux of George Rogers Clark in his daring conquest of the Old Northwest, not to mention the first flatboats of those westering pioneers come to that new land little seen by white eyes.

What would become of these great, untamed rivers now—Bass wondered with a twinge of painful regret—if man could construct a craft such as this? Why, all the wildness would go out of the rivers, and eventually the land itself. The Ohio would soon be tamed, and the mighty Mississippi no longer feared by rivermen.

Only the Missouri remained.

The same faraway river that had beckoned Levi Gamble to join Manuel Lisa’s fur brigades yearning toward the distant, as yet unseen, spaces. Farther on, those mountains few could speak of having seen, fewer still could claim to have crossed.

The world was changing around him, too damned fast for his comfort. Something on the order of a year and a half had passed since he’d fled those fields tilled by Thaddeus Bass. This second winter on his own, having watched the frightened and weak of heart turn about and take their families back, despite the relentless press of others surging ever westward.

Nothing would stop the killing. The wildness of the land was dying still.

Who was he to expect that it would be any different out here? Generations gone had crossed the mountains and flooded into the canebrakes, streaming down the Cumberland, killing the last of the buffalo not already run off. Now their kind was killing off the great rivers that for so long had been the final barriers holding back those of lesser fiber.

Now with a wet squeal of a whistle, the steamboat announced its coming. True enough, he had seen only one. But Titus knew there would be others, one day soon. Such noisy, belching monsters would put an end not only to the great mysteries of the western rivers, but to the rivermen as well. No more would the Kentucky boatman float and pole, cordelle and warp his way up and down the waterways that had moved America west. No more would there be any room for that breed that had spawned the likes of Ebenezer Zane and Hames Kingsbury.

And when the wild rivers no longer served as a final, immutable barrier, and every last person in the east could come west, then it would be time for him to move on again. If there was no more wildness in that move west—there was no heart in the journey. No spark in the spirit. No dance on the wind.

But move on he must.

For he had come to sense instinctively there in the first months of his eighteenth year that his feet itched perhaps every bit as much as his grandpap’s had. So he prayed there would always be country to see, rivers to ride, those mountains to climb.

And winds to dance upon.