Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  “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.”
<
br />   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.