Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Not yet,” Washburn always said, drunk or sober, when Bass prodded him to be about leaving. “Not yet we go.”

  So they drank and whored, and they fought—back to back many times. Fists up in those ear-biting, eye-gouging contests to which Titus was no stranger. A healthy letting of blood, he always figured. A good row only made them all the thirstier for the whiskey and apple beer, hungrier for a skinny one of an evening, perhaps a big and fleshy one the next night. Over the weeks Washburn had even developed his own favorites, and of them—one in particular.

  “A young one,” he called her, “barely old ’nough out of her schooldays.”

  Titus knew better, for the whore had been working one brothel or another for better than ten years now. But what mattered was that Isaac was content with her, happy to consider her but a slip of a child—no matter that she weighed that much more than Washburn himself.

  “I like havin’ all that sweet, slick hide on a woman to grab on to when I’m ruttin’,” he would explain to Bass. “When she gets to goin’ under me, less’n I got some of that hide to grab on to, an’ a lot of it too—that damn li’l girl’s bound to heave me off!”

  Isaac wasn’t alone in finding a favorite. For Titus she was a recent arrival: a quadroon imported upriver from New Orleans, her skin the palest brown, almost the color of that silky mud sheen to the lower Mississippi itself.

  First time Titus saw her sipping at her Lisbon wine, she wore tall and gracefully carved ivory combs in her hair dark as a moonless midnight, a velvet choker with a whalebone brooch clasped so tight at her throat that the brooch trembled with every one of her quickened pulses. Her lips full enough to more than hint at her African ancestry, it was no wonder Titus came away from her so many nights wearing the tiny blue bruises and teeth marks she left behind as she worked him over with her mouth, from shoulder on down to the flat of his belly. After swearing she was his favorite early one morning as Washburn pounded on the door and hollered that he was ready to head back to the livery, she reached up to pull a scarf down from a peg in the wall beside her narrow, shortposted muley-bed.

  “You take this,” she commanded as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.

  He knew not what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”

  “My scarf,” she said, taking it from him to unknot. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”

  “Where are your people?” he had asked her over the noise of Washburn’s hammering on the doorway, his bellowing that he was about to come crashing in.

  “I don’t have no people no more,” she said. “But I want you to be somebody special to me.”

  “I will be, always be,” he vowed, and let her tie the scarf around his neck before they parted in the gray of that dawn.

  He wore it knotted there at his neck every time he returned to see her, when he could afford her, even when he could not afford her and had to content himself with gazing at her from across the smoky room where she went about her business, talking and laughing with other customers, glancing at him once in a while, only her eyes asking why it was not he who was raising her skirts and rubbing her legs then and there in the tavern, panting to take her back to her little room.

  More and more he and Isaac had other things to do with some of Titus’s money.

  There were blankets and trade goods, vermilion and beads, mirrors and hawks-bells, coffee and sugar and flour they were laying by as the time to go drew nigh.

  “We have to leave afore June,” Washburn warned. “Time we get across’t the prerra, it’ll be fall. An’ winter don’t wait long to come down on that kentry. Be ready to turn yer back on all of this come June.”

  So Bass worked on more traps when he could get away with it, sneaking in that time over the forge among the other jobs Troost had for him to do. What with all that he owed the blacksmith, Titus dared not fail to give full measure to Hysham Troost. Bit by bit, week by week, the livery owner gave over the coins he had been saving for Titus through all the years gone by. And with each week’s payday Hysham warned that the money was disappearing far faster than Bass was earning it. Pretty soon, Hysham warned, Bass would be back to nothing but waiting on his next pay.

  Far too much whiskey, and the women, for him and Washburn. Sweating the alcohol out of his pores every day over the forge while the trapper sat and talked endlessly about this piece of country, or that stream, this beaver valley, or that pass—all the landmarks Titus struggled to keep straight in his head each time Isaac drew a crude map on the clay floor there beneath the bellows, there beside the anvil where Titus sweated out the whiskey he had paid such good money for the night before.

  Hour after hour Isaac told his stories of the animals and the sky. How the land went on and on for as far as a man’s eye could ever hope to see—right into tomorrow, if you really tried.

  They needed extra locks for their rifles, at least one spare for their pistols. Then too, a small, coarse sack of lock springs and screws, lock hammers, and several pounds of fine French amber flints. Slowly that tiny cell Titus had called home for so many winters grew even more cramped as the partners acquired everything they would need to winter up come the time they struck out for the far mountains.

  “You’ll need a saddle soon,” Isaac said one afternoon. “An’ a horse too.”

  Titus hadn’t thought about that, but he supposed Washburn was right. “What about you? We ought’n get you something better’n that pony.”

  “That Injun pony do me jest fine, Titus. Ye’ll see—what when we get to Injun kentry. Injun pony best, mark my word on it.”

  The day’s work complete—counting what Troost expected him to do and what time he could squeeze in forging traps and rifle parts, harness and bits for their horses—Washburn led them upriver from the wharf a ways. There they smeared pennyroyal on their exposed flesh at ankles and wrists and necks to keep off the seed ticks, then took a belt ax to blaze a blond mark on a tree, no bigger than the width of Titus’s hand, before pacing off the proper distance and toeing a line in the soft earth coming alive with the thick green springtime carpet.

  Bass fired with Washburn’s rifle as much as he shot that mark with his grandpap’s old weapon. Slowly, every few days, week by week, Washburn moved the mark back farther and farther still. Teaching the younger man what he could about holding, breathing, letting the heavy barrel on the trapper’s weapon weave across the target rather than fighting to hold the sights perfectly still before he touched off the rifle.

  “Yer gettin’ good thar’, coon,” Washburn had said one evening. “Not nowhere near good as me yet. But it’s comin’. Time’s come fer us go wet down our gullets an’ see ’bout pokin’ our stingers in a honey-pot.”

  Days of work, evenings at shooting, and on into the nights with the women and the whiskey, then Troost nudging him awake to start it all over again.

  “When’r you going to learn me how to throw a knife?” Bass had inquired one evening they headed back toward the livery after target practice, there to pack everything away before hurrying off to one of the watering holes. “Always wanted to know how to throw a knife proper.”

  “I’ll show you, soon enough.”

  “It ain’t long afore June’s coming.”

  Isaac gazed at the sky deepening in twilight. “Yep. An’ afore then I’ll have you throwin’ a tomeehawk too.”

  That first evening he had hefted the weapon at the end of his arm, the memory of sights and sounds of Rabbit Hash in Boone County flooded in upon him. Struggling to soothe his mind from those haunts of youth, he drank in the smells of considerable redbud in that damp grove where the two of them made their daily pilgrimage down by the river, where the strong, acrid stench hung heavy on the air at twilight.

  Nearby a half-dozen women kept a trio of huge, bubbling, steaming kettles suspended over fires they tended as they boiled down lye from wood ashes and straw kept close at hand in more than a do
zen brass tubs and barrel halves.

  That odor always rankled his nose, even with the merest of memory. That night and ever since he had thought on home. Thought on his mam, and how she had made her soap outside on those cool spring and autumn days, never of a hot summer’s day. Always at hog-killing time. The feel of those slimy intestines slithering out of his hands as he’d spilled them into the brass kettle his mam had set to a boil until a thick grease had coated the white-oak paddle she’d used to stir the whole blamed concoction. Cooked and simmered all through the day, then cooled enough before the nastiest of the work had required them to plunge their hands into the semisoft mass, bringing out gobs of it to smear into blocks, where it would harden enough to be cut into cakes of the proper size.

  From the earliest he could remember, it had been his job alone to keep the fire going beneath his mam’s lye kettle. After all, Titus was the oldest of the children, the only one capable of splitting the wood, carrying armloads of it out back of the kitchen shanty built apart from their first small cabin on the ground Thaddeus was helping grandpap clear. The kitchen and that little cabin were connected by a narrow dogtrot, where Titus had got himself out of the sun on those soap-making days every spring, then again every autumn. Out of the sun and upwind from the stench of that boiling lye.

  No, neither his mam nor those women down by the clearing where he and Washburn went of an evening were making a fine Windsor shaving soap, much less a fine castile. It was only the crudest sort of cleaning agent, the sort that all but made a man prefer staying dirty, caked with sweat and grime in every crevice of his fingers, a deep, brooding crescent of old labors mired back of every fingernail rather than face a hard scrubbing with lye soap.

  How Thaddeus had stayed as far from bathing as he could had always made his mother livid with anger as she’d sweated over those stinking kettles, or scrubbed their children at least once a week out in that big hardwood tub they’d kept hung from a nail hammered into a side of the three-sided bathing shed attached to the kitchen.

  Regular bathing bordered on pure lunacy, Thaddeus would argue. The cause of agues and croups, tick-sicks and who knew what-all fevers! A body bathed was a body defenseless against all manner of assault.

  But Titus took after his mother on that account. Sitting down in a warm, sudsy tub of water every two weeks or so these days was worth the few pennies it cost him at one of the few bathhouses in the city. Letting the old women pour that water over his head as he sputtered and gasped, to be scalded and scrubbed raw, as pink as a newborn before he set off for another wildsome frolic. Outside those bathing houses a lackey kept the water boiling, the sort of slow-witted man who could find no better work—much like those who made their rounds at twilight, firing up what lamps adorned the streets of St. Louis, lamps all too often badly in need of a good scrubbing themselves: the isinglass flecked and marred with the singed and blackened bodies of so many moths and other insects that nothing more than a pale and feeble yellow light flickered down upon passersby.

  Here in the dark of this early morning as he listened, the trapper began to snore. At long last Titus sensed the arms of sleep embrace him.

  Contentment come.

  More often than he cared to admit, Titus sorely missed the smells that had filled his senses back in that Kentucky country hard by the Ohio River: green oak stumps smoldering at the far edges of the moist, newly cleared fields; green fodder beans simmering on the fire while sweet johnnycakes toasted in the Dutch oven; his mother’s white-as-snow hominy coming to a boil; his grandmami sweet potatoes, each roasting in its own mound of warm ash heaped on the brick hearth; his pap’s own corn whiskey poured steaming, fresh, potent, and with a hint of amber from the bung spout on the doubler.

  In place of those memories he now savored the steamy earthiness of fresh dung from the horses he shoed or hitched to the carriages Troost hired out; the sweet lilac and gardenia perfume of the proper French ladies flouncing past in their layers of starched crinoline as they swirled by him with parasols a’twirl upon bare shoulders, devilment in their eyes; the heated closeness of the animals he brushed and curried, rank with cold sweat after the gentlemen of St. Louis returned their hire; the heavy scent of brimstone issuing from the forge; grown so accustomed to the aroma of the hardwood fire he kept glowing in that tiny stove of his cell; and the sweet elixir that was the quadroon’s body calling out to his.

  What a man went and got himself used to as the years passed by.

  “I ain’t goin’ with you tonight, Isaac,” Bass declared emphatically. “I ain’t got no more money to buy us whiskey.”

  Washburn reared back, appraised the younger man, then snorted a loud guffaw. “The hell you say? You ain’t bald-facin’ me, are ye?”

  “Bald-face?”

  “Lyin to me, Titus!”

  “No,” he answered quietly. “It’s all … all gone. Ever’thing Troost saved for me across the y’ars. All drunk up–”

  “—an’ whored away,” Isaac sighed. “Ain’t that allays the way it be? Man works too damn long for what money comes his way, an’ it slips right through his hands a helluva lot faster’n he can make more money.”

  Bass wagged his head. “We ain’t even got all you said we’re gonna need when we go.”

  “Never you mind. We’ll get it,” Washburn replied, looking away, his eyes squinting as if he were fitting together the pieces of a child’s block puzzle in his mind. Then he suddenly looked back at Titus, a big grin on his face, the upper lip pulling back from that lone fang of a tooth in the middle of his face. “An’ don’t ye go frettin’ yerself ’bout drinkin’ money tonight neither.”

  “We ain’t got no money to go—”

  “Don’t need none,” he broke in. “Why, I’ll bet thar’s lots of fellers buy the both of us drinks in ever’ place we care to walk into this fine evenin’.”

  “Who the hell’s gonna buy us drinks?”

  “Ever’ man what loses his gamble with Isaac Washburn.”

  “Gamble?” Bass asked suspiciously. “Just what you got in mind?”

  “Nothin’ but a li’l game o’ chance,” he replied, turning to kneel at his blankets, dragging his possibles pouch over to begin rummaging through it. “There!” he exclaimed with genuine excitement, standing before Bass to slowly open his hand.

  In Washburn’s dirty palm lay two small pieces of what looked like quartz stone, perhaps ivory, both of them carved and painted with strange hieroglyphic symbols totally foreign to Titus.

  “What’s them?”

  “Bones.”

  “You gonna gamble with them?”

  He nodded matter-of-factly, his Adam’s apple bobbing appropriately. “Ol’ Injun game of hand. I find us a place on the floor to play, singin’ out that the loser buys the drinks.”

  “Then what?”

  “We wait till we got us someone to play.”

  “How you play?”

  “I go an’ hide one of ’em in my hand, and the unlucky son of a coon can guess till tomorry which hand’s got it the bone—he ain’t got a chance of winnin’. Or ’nother way the Injuns play is to bet how many of these here scratches gonna come up when I throw the both of ’em on the floor.”

  “But you ain’t got no money to buy a fella his drink when you lose.”

  Washburn’s face went blank with righteous indignation. “I don’t ever lose at the bones, Titus. Never, ever lose.”

  He looked down at those two small objects, like some foreign, sacred totems they were. And his gut rumbled in warning. “I … I ain’t goin’ with you, Isaac.”

  “I don’t never, ever lose!” he repeated. “C’mon—don’t ye hear the whiskey callin’ out yer name?” He slung an arm over Bass’s shoulder, clacking the two bones together in his hand with the clatter of ivory dominoes on a hardwood table. “Cain’t ye jest feeeeel that Negra gal’s poon yest wrapped right around ye, squeezin’ yer pecker an’ makin’ ye wanna go off with a roar?”

  He swallowed hard. Damn, but it sounded
like it could work. Washburn knew what he spoke of—on everything from Indians to the courses of the far rivers, from the valleys and passes and mountain ranges, to the ways of whiskey and the whys of women. Tempting, seductive, so damned luring was his scheme for the night—

  “No, I can’t go out gaming with you tonight ’thout no money,” Bass answered resolutely.

  “Don’t be no yella-livered fool, now, Titus.”

  “I ain’t yella!” he growled with a mighty shrug, flinging Washburn’s arm off his shoulder and stepping away.

  “Then c’mon with me an’ have some fun.”

  With a shake of his head Titus said, “Better us go down to the grove where we can shoot some more. Maybeso you can show me better how to throw that belt ’hawk of your’n.”

  “Nope,” he replied succinctly, turning to sweep up his possibles pouch, draping it over his shoulder, then pulled up the flap to drop the bones within. “Ye can find me, Titus. If’n yer of a mind to have yerself a spree with Isaac Washburn.”

  “You’re gonna go and get yourself in ’nother fight.”

  He whirled on Bass. “Don’t tell me ye gone and got squeamish ’bout a li’l fightin’ when yer drinkin’! Why, you an’ me been mixin’ the fightin’ an’ drinkin’ for better’n a hull damned moon now.”

  “And we gone through everything I had, ’cept what I’ll make tomorry.”

  “What’s it all track anyway, Titus? If yer money buyed us a bunch of whiskey an’ a hull bunch of daubin’ our stingers—then it were worth it! Yest money, an’ a man allays can get him some more for the next spree he plans to have fer hisself.”

  Now it was Bass who turned aside, brushing past the trapper as he stepped out of his cell. “I got ’nother trap to finish.”

  “It’ll be thar’ tomorry, Titus.”

  “There’s more lock parts I gots to file down an’ polish for our guns—”

  “They’ll be there too,” Washburn interrupted, following Bass into the livery as Titus headed for the forge. “It can all wait. It allays has.”