With his eyes smarting Titus tried to explain. “Thought you was … thought he’d gone and killed you.”
“You done what any man do for his friend,” the pilot replied. “You’re a good man, Titus Bass.”
“I’m glad you was here,” Ovatt declared supportively. “None of us shoot near good as that, drop that son of a bitch off a running horse.”
Beulah glanced down the backtrail, saying, “Maybe we ought’n figure on them other two coming back from Colbert’s soon.”
“She’s right,” Kingsbury said, suddenly stiffening as he peered down the road in the direction of the ford. “Likely they heard the shots.”
“Shit. I ain’t worried about the noise of them guns,” Root argued. “Likely they’ll just figure this here son of a bitch is busy killing the rest of us.”
“But soon enough them two gone back ’cross’t the river gonna find Titus and the Negra ain’t there no more. They’ll be on their way back here,” Kingsbury said.
“That’s why I say we ought’n be leaving here fast,” Beulah suggested more forcefully, pulling Kingsbury’s collar aside to inspect his bullet wound.
“What ’bout them?” Ovatt asked, holding a thumb over his shoulder. “This’un too.”
“You boys’re rivermen,” Beulah chided them. “Drag the lot of ’em off into the brush yonder. Away from the trail.”
“And them horses?” Root asked.
“I say we ride back to Kentucky, folks,” Ovatt suggested.
“Damn fine idea,” Kingsbury agreed. “Titus, you think you and Hezekiah catch up them horses afore they get too far away?”
He glanced at the slave, then nodded. “Don’t see why we can’t. I never had much to do with horses—”
“None the rest of us never did neither,” Kingsbury explained. “Figure you two can catch ’em up so we can get out of here.”
Self-consciously he licked his lips, still stinging with the sour taste of bile as the rain began to slacken. Nodding to the slave, Titus led out, heading first for that horse ridden by the dead leader of the slave hunters.
“You … you really kill them two other’ns?” Bass whispered after he had the reins in hand and they had started back toward the scene of the ambush.
Hezekiah nodded.
“Just like that?”
The slave shrugged. “I kill men afore. Annie Christmas tell me—I kill. Allays kill for her. Never before I kill for friends. These peoples here—makes no matter now. You, for first time to kill, it feel bad in here.” He tapped a long black finger against his chest. “Maybe it get better sometime for you, like it done for me. No hurt no more in here.”
“Yeah,” Bass replied as he handed the slave the reins to the horse and moved away to inch up slowly on one of the other animals.
In minutes the slave took the second set of reins to stand there gripping both horses. “Don’t think on it too hard, Titus. It could hurt.”
Titus stopped, recalling that vivid memory of his first rabbit, considering its import this day in light of all the game he had tracked, hunted, killed.
“I s’pose you’re right. Maybeso killing does get easier with time.”
Titus never did run across the sixth horse, which meant he and Hezekiah ended up riding double. Natural enough—seeing how Bass was not only the youngest among them all, but the lightest as well.
On out of that far northwestern corner of Alabama they hurried. Putting the Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee at their backs, they set off atop those horses at a punishing pace, hurrying north for the Duck River. At the end of that first long day after leaving Colbert’s Landing and the slavers far behind, Titus found half of the horses weary with exhaustion. Inside his head he heard the scolding voice of his father—prompting him to remember Thaddeus’s admonishments that a man must always pay proper heed to the care of his animals.
That night at the fire he instructed the others that from then on out they should take care not to drive the horses so hard.
“You … you’re serious! You want us just to walk ’em?” Root demanded in a scornful tone.
Titus nodded. “Don’t think we should push ’em much faster’n we’d cover ground our own selves,” he said, “walking on our own two legs, that is.”
Root wagged his head as if confused by the logic. “What good is them horses, if’n we cain’t get upland faster’n we can walk without ’em?”
Ovatt reminded, “Best we all paid heed: we got two of them sons of bitches still behin’t us.”
“Them two don’t matter now,” Kingsbury said, gazing at the two worried boatmen. “Way I see it, the two behind us, they’ll keep on coming, no matter how slow or fast we get north for Nashville.” Turning to the youth, Hames said, “’Bout them horses—we all thank you for teaching us such a lesson, Titus Bass.”
How his heart felt all the bigger, touched with the warmth in the pilot’s words, when he had felt his heart slowly growing so icy throughout that long winter’s day. Cold and dying inside was just what he had feared hejiad become after killing another man. Maybeso the others had been right after all in how they’d talked it over in those frantic, hurried minutes while they’d gathered up what little they had been carrying north, climbing unsteadily aboard the slave hunters’ mounts. Maybe their wisdom was true: to kill a Injun or a Negra wasn’t of much consequence at all, like Ovatt said. But to kill a white man … now, that was something. Bass even saw it in their eyes, the subtle change in how they looked at him after that terrible instant of decision when he had squeezed the trigger and took another’s life.
As the hours had crawled past, he had slowly come to realize that Hezekiah knew the difference, perhaps even could feel the same confusion Bass suffered—maybe because of the physical contact between them throughout the day, the slave sitting directly behind him on that horse’s back the way he was.
So he was damned grateful for Kingsbury’s kindness that night at their fire holding winter’s cold at bay. Titus thought back on the way he had suffered the terrifying fear that Hames Kingsbury would slip away from him, what with how Beulah had said that rib was poking a hole through his lights … and that come right on the heels of mourning the loss of Ebenezer Zane.
As they sat at their fire and wrapped themselves in the steaming, soggy wool blankets, Titus reflected back on his sixteen winters, thought on friends who had crossed his trail. Try as he might, the only person he could recall ever truly wanting to spend time with him had been Amy. Even with all the confusion and disappointment she had caused in him, with all the shattered expectations between them, here now in these cold woods he nonetheless sensed some strong regret that things hadn’t worked out differently between them. Looking back, he realized she must surely have been his first true friend.
So terribly painful was it that in the end even Amy had turned out not to be what she professed to be.
Maybe—he brooded as he stared at the mesmerizing flames while the others talked in hushed tones and picked venison from their teeth with slivers peeled from a beech-nut tree—just maybe these crude, unlettered Kentucky boatmen were the first real friends he had ever had.
And of their number Ebenezer Zane had been the first to step up and offer his hand to Titus. After the river pilot’s death Hames Kingsbury had been the one to take up the slack in Titus’s rope. But not just him, the woman too: Beulah. Eventually even Ovatt and Root, both of whom came to stand by him as only friends would, no matter their rough and less than polished ways of expressing their affection and loyalty.
Still all in all, it wasn’t only the four of them. Titus looked now across the dancing flames at Hezekiah, suddenly reminded in this fire’s bright flare that the man was nearly as black as charred oak.
True enough, back home in Kentucky, Bass had known a few simple farming folk who owned a slave, maybe even a pair of them—purchased off a slave block somewhere farther to the south, then carted over the hundreds of miles to their new owners’ small farms, there to work out the long day
s of their miserable lives beneath a terrible yoke. This night such a tragedy was brought home to him with a metallic ache as he stared at the weary, worldly, yellowed eyes of the one an angry Annie Christmas had sold away as retribution. As he looked at that black face, Bass filled with a flush of sadness for Hezekiah, the many, many more like him: for all Negras he imagined would never know what it was to revel in the freedom one felt in simply walking into another valley for the first time, that unfettered luxury of setting off to go where one wanted to go.
All and still—Titus admitted to himself—it seemed there damned well weren’t that many white men who ever really hungered to experience that feeling of true freedom. How very few in number were those who set out, not knowing where their journey would take them, not knowing what they would learn along the way, what they would find if and when they got to the end of their quest.
Men who lived as if it did not really matter, reaching the end of the trail. Their lives measured only in the journey. Spirits cast upon the winds, like a feather dancing, dancing.
Better that his spirit were chanced to dance on the wind, than to be mired in a plot of upturned ground back in Boone County.
Here at that fire in the deep of those woods blanketing southern Tennessee, Titus was once again rock-certain the spirits of those few old wanderers still followed the ancient trails of a bygone time, trails once pounded by the hooves of the long-gone buffalo. Every bit as sure was he that the spirit of his very own grandpap had picked up and moved away from the ground that the man had come and settled upon in his youth, the land where Titus himself had been born and raised, the ground it seemed Thaddeus Bass would farm until the day he was buried beneath its thick, cold, loamy blanket. There at last his father’s soul would be at rest beneath the ground where he had labored his whole life through.
So unlike his grandpap’s own restless spirit cast out to dance on the wind: forever wandering in the wake of the west-seeking buffalo. That spirit never to find its rest until it had journeyed far enough to discover that mystical place where the sun laid its head at night, out there beyond the farthest reach of man’s most westward settlement. That old man’s spirit never to find peace until at long, long last it one day reached the land where the buffalo ruled.
Generations ago new settlers come to the canebrakes and the Cumberland had scared off and driven away what buffalo the Indians hadn’t yet killed. Yet with an unnamed certainty buried there in the core of him, Titus somehow knew the buffalo existed—out there, somewhere still. Undoubtedly it was a realm far enough away from the white settlers and town builders, well beyond all the school benches and church spires and small-town mercantiles, a land far gone, where those great mythical animals could at last wander free, every bit as free as the spirits of those who hunted for that faraway land where the buffalo reigned.
One day, perhaps. One day.
Four more frosty nights and four more grueling days later, as the sky wept a drizzle from low clouds, Bass stood silently staring down at the smooth gray river rock the Grinder family had heaped over an otherwise unmarked grave dug back in the woods no more than a few steps away from their roadside inn. All any of the three boatmen knew was the dead man’s name. Only that—along with how he and another had taken a Corps of Discovery west to the far ocean, crossing the high mountains and fighting raging rivers in the process, returning home in triumph and adulation in 1806. Story was that about a year ago in the fall of 1809 Meriwether Lewis had begun his journey east along the Natchez Trace.
“He come in here on that awful October night,” the elder Grinder loved to regale travelers with the hoary tale, pounding a fist into an open palm, “none of us knowing he ’tended to kill hisself right here and then.”
Here beneath this pile of cold, rain-washed river rock lay the final resting place of that daring young wanderer who had pointed the way west for Thomas Jefferson’s brave young country.
“Ol’ Grinder says the man shot hisself in the head—but didn’t do all that good a job,” Ovatt repeated the story now as they all stood beside the cairn, paying their respects. “So he called out, begging others to finish him ’cause he knew just how hard he was to kill.”
“How’d a man like him ever come to wanna take his own life?” Root asked. “Ever’ time I come up this here road and spend the night at Grinder’s Stand since it happened, it fair gives me the willies. Like I feel the man’s ghost hanging on round here.”
“A troubled soul perhaps,” Beulah replied.
“Maybeso he’d already been across’t them far mountains and out to the great ocean beyond it all,” Kingsbury attempted to explain, “so likely he figured there was nothing left for him to see. Gone and seen it all. I s’pose a man like that figures it’s just as well to snuff out his own candle.”
“Gotta hand him that,” Ovatt replied. “When there ain’t no more to see, maybe you’re right, Hames—no sense in going on, taking up room.”
With the clang of the iron gong suspended from the Grinders’ porch calling them to supper, Titus watched the others turn away from the grave, Kingsbury leading the rest back down the gentle slope to the gathering of squat cabins where they could take refuge from the drizzle and suffer the Grinder woman’s distasteful cooking. In moving off, Hezekiah looked back over his shoulder, stopped, then returned to stand quietly beside Bass at the cairn.
“You g’won now and get yourself something to eat,” he quietly told the slave.
“Folks ain’t gonna feed me with them others,” the slave said, wagging his head. “I’ll stay till you come down. We eat together.”
With a sigh Bass turned slowly. “I’m finished here, done trying to sort out why he done it.”
“Maybeso he was kill’t.”
His face rose as did the realization. Bass stared into Hezekiah’s yellowed eyes.
The slave continued. “Folks like them …”
“The Grinders?”
With a nod Hezekiah went on, “They just might’n figure a feller like this’un be carry him lots of money. ’Portant man like him allays got lots of money.”
While it seemed so far-fetched, Hezekiah’s explanation seemed probable at the same time. Bass replied sullenly, “So they kill’t him for it.”
“Then their kind go an’ bury the man ’fore anyone come round asking questions,” Hezekiah replied.
Wagging his head, Titus slowly shuffled away from that low pile of rock. “I ain’t hungry no more.”
Feeling as if his belly trapped a cold stone, Bass grappled with the greed and avarice of those he had encountered—whether it was pirates on the river or highwaymen haunting the Trace, or even the insatiable greed of stand owners like the Grinders.
Just what was it that made such men hunger after money more than love, more than adventure, more than happiness? Why did most men look for security in a full purse, while but a few searched for contentment beyond themselves in a land yet unseen? He laid his hand across the waistband of his britches as he watched the others take their pewter trenchers from one of the Grinder sons and stand at the stove while the old woman ladled out their supper. Perhaps the meaning of life came down to choosing gold, or the journey.
If need be, he decided, his would be the journey. Like his grandpap before him, he could live without the gold. His spirit must dance on the wind.
The next day they forded the Duck River at Gordon’s Ferry, now come eighty miles from Colbert’s Ford and the ambush by the Tennessee River. Another two nights in the wilderness of the Barrens brought them to the Big Harpeth River, where they slept in crude sheds erected near the house of the last American full-blood white man known to have lived between there and Natchez itself.
“We’re less’n thirty miles from Nashville,” Kingsbury explained as darkness came down like a cold, sodden blanket. “Place folks once called French Lick.”
It was there at Nashville they left the Natchez Trace and pushed on to the northeast, following a trail that left behind the Cumberland River, their f
eet plying a path long ago blazed by boatmen returning to the Ohio River country. From there they pushed into the highlands of Kentucky, fording the Great Barren River, then the Green. At each crossing they stripped off what they could, tying it up into tight bundles they carried over their heads, thereby allowing themselves something warm to pull on once they reached the far shore, where they built a fire and drove off the chill the winter sky was whipping overhead.
Then on to Nolins Creek and Elizabethtown. Beyond there few miles remained before they crossed the icy Salt River, drawing close to Louisville and the mighty Ohio itself. Come nearly a thousand miles through the wilderness by wagon, foot, and horseback.
“More land getting cleared every trip,” Heman Ovatt grumbled as they passed a growing number of settlers’ cabins the closer they drew to the bustling riverfront town.
“Folks cutting down the forest for corn and wheat,” Kingsbury replied.
“There’s more’n enough forest to go around,” Reuben Root argued. He swung his arm in an arc. “Lookit all this! You really figure they’ll ever cut down all of these?”
“Settlers gone and drove off most of the critters,” Bass said acidly. “I figure the trees just might be next to go.”
“Sounds to be you’re still nursing on sour milk over them buffalo,” Kingsbury said.
Root agreed. “Yeah—an’ you ain’t never see’d a buffalo neither.”
“Don’t need to,” Titus said, “to know they been drove off—gone out yonder someplace.”
“That where you’re fixing to take him?” Kingsbury asked, thumbing a gesture at Hezekiah.
“Ain’t taking him nowhere with me,” Bass replied. “He ain’t mine no more.”
“Then you must figure on setting him free?” Root inquired.
“Like I said I was.”
“Ain’cha got no use for a Negra?” Ovatt asked.
For a moment he looked into the slave’s yellowed eyes. Then Bass wagged his head. “I don’t wanna be tied down by him.”
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