Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  “I know. They start by giving a horse thief stripes.”

  Behind the black and bruised lids where Troost ministered to his torn flesh swam the scenes of those he had seen lashed to the posts: their wrists bound together, pulled up high with a rope looped through a large iron ring at the top of those ten-foot posts buried firmly in the ground. Barely able to stand on their toes, the guilty were given an old-fashioned flaying with all those horrid strands of a knotted cat-o’-nine-tails.

  That done, a special penalty was exacted by the town constables. First the criminal was held down while he was branded: an H on one cheek, T on the other. With his skin still sizzling, still screeching in pain, the thief was hauled out of the dirt and dragged over to one of the pillories, where a constable locked the top bar of the pillory over his neck, then nailed the thief’s two ears to the wooden yoke. There the criminal remained, nailed in place and unable to move much at all for the next twenty-four hours. Only then was he freed, after the nails were cut free, ears and all, with a huge knife, just before the yoke was removed. The bleeding, branded criminal was then allowed to run, to flee, certain to carry the severity of his punishment with him the rest of his life, a marked man with a most uncertain future.

  No matter what crimes of passion he had committed in his young life, Bass had never knowingly stolen anything of consequence. A few eggs, maybe a pullet here and there, but nothing that really mattered nor gave his conscience the fits at night. He’d never started out to hurt anyone, no matter how badly he ended up hurting himself.

  “Damn you,” Hysham Troost muttered softly as he leaned back, studying Titus side to side. “That’s ’bout all I can do for you now with that horse liniment. Smells to hell, don’t it? Well, you just lay there an’ suffer, goddammit. I got work to do: mine and yours too now. Ain’t the first time, is it? Here you lay back all bunged up again, and I gotta take up your slack—”

  Titus tried to hoist himself up onto an elbow, but he hurt too much to get very far before that elbow gave out beneath him and he collapsed into the hay atop his pallet of blankets.

  “Lay there, goddammit,” Troost ordered gruffly. “About the worst beating I seen you get, so you’ll just have to sleep this’un off. Worst I ever see’d. Damn. It just don’t pay to care about you, does it?”

  “Glad … glad you care.”

  “I ain’t one to,” Troost snapped angrily. “I don’t wanna care for no man who don’t care for his own self. And it sure is plain as sunshine that Titus Bass don’t care for his own self. Just look at you.”

  “When I … I get better, you bring me a mirror,” he croaked dry as sand, trying out half a puffy-lipped grin. “I’ll look at my own self then.”

  Wagging his head with a weak smile, the blacksmith replied, “Damn you, Titus Bass. Here you are all cut up, your muscles knotted tighter’n new harness—and you still can make me laugh. You are a caution, son. A real, honest-to-goodness caution.”

  He felt the older man pat his shoulder lightly, listened as Troost rose from his side and moved out of the stall where Titus made his home in the older man’s livery. Nearby sat a small iron stove radiating welcome heat as he shivered from time to time in his clothes soaked by winter’s last sleety snow. Maybe it was even spring’s first freezing rain that had battered St. Louis last night. No matter. Spring or winter now—they were just as cold, either one. He needed to get out of the clothes but knew he didn’t have the strength and sighed.

  Looking back now, Bass couldn’t remember much after he had plopped himself down near the great stone fireplace at one of the grogshops and begun drinking the thick, heady stuff that burned all the way down his gullet. More and more he drank, slowly numbing his despair at ever finding what he had been seeking for so long. Just another night of punishing the whiskey and that sweet lemon-flavored rum brought upriver from New Orleans. Painkiller carried there to the mouth of the Mississippi by ship from some islands down in the great seas of the south. Another night no different from all the others gone before, he had counted on drinking his fill before stumbling out back of the saloon to one of the tiny, stinking knocking shops where women of all hues and shapes serviced the frontiersmen and riverboat crews coming and going like bees to this veritable hive at the edge of the wilderness.

  For the moment there were snatches of memory, scenes that flitted behind his eyelids whether he wanted them to or not—it simply hurt to work his brain so. There in the mud and the cold rain outside the low door … the smoky light within … finding his whore and another man. Titus had shoved away. The mocking laughter. Then that stranger’s friends, two—maybe three—more had come up when the argument had started.

  Why he ever argued over a whore? Hadn’t he learned his lesson? Whores had nearly killed him twice now. Annie Christmas’s gunboat girls all the way downriver to Natchez when he was barely gone from home. And now this crooked-nosed woman he hungered for bad—a woman busy with a bull-headed, nasty sort of customer with even meaner friends.

  Maybe he was lucky he had been turning, like Troost said. Whoever used those claws on him might well have killed him there by the whore’s doorway. Or he might never have come to … if the blacksmith hadn’t come hunting for him at first light. Vaguely he remembered someone rolling him over, feeling the cold bite of rain lancing against his wounds, sputtering at who took hold of him as Titus tried to get his eyes open to see, working his mushy mouth to say something to the bastard hurting him so in dragging him up and out of the icy mud and puddles of bloody water.

  Just leave me be! his mind had screamed every bit as loud as his body had screamed in pain.

  Then he’d been draped over someone’s shoulder and hauled down the street when he’d passed out again. Had to be the blacksmith, Titus had figured just before he’d sunk again into the deep and welcome blackness of that hole he was digging for himself more and more every week, every month, every one of these last few years as he grew more and more bitter, more hopeless of ever knowing what it was his grandpap had sought, what men like Levi Gamble came west to find.

  For Titus Bass there was simply nothing left to seek. Long ago when he’d begun his drinking, trying to kill himself slowly night by night an inch at a time, he had decided that his life was better short, better that than lived without hope. Better short than a life lived without that same sort of dream that had brought his grandpap to a new land.

  Undeniably it was a hole he was digging for himself, a little deeper every day. For damned sure no man had yet dug the grave that could hold Titus Bass—but already he had a good start on the one he was digging for himself.

  Goddamned whore.

  Even the women had lost their allure for him. So why did he still seek them out? And make such an ass of himself in the process?

  Titus tried to roll to the side carefully. It hurt too much, so he stayed there on his back, sensing the warmth from the tiny stove on one side, his other side still chilled and damp.

  That first week he had begun work for the blacksmith years before, he and Troost had boarded up one of the stalls in a far corner of the livery. He had never made himself a door, not ever really needing one to his way of thinking. No reason to bolt things down or lock them up. He had long ago wrapped up his grandpap’s rifle in an old sheet of oiled canvas and stuffed it up high in the rafters of the livery above his stall—having decided he would never have call to use the rifle again. That curly-maple stock carried so very, very many miles in that hope of reaching the place his grandpap’s spirit had sought. Where the great and shaggy creatures ruled. Wherever they had disappeared, his grandpap’s spirit was likely at peace there, for all time.

  This was something Titus realized he would never share. That sense of peace, contentment, fulfilled of his quest.

  What few possessions he owned hung above him from pegs and nails driven into the walls of his tiny cell: his grandpap’s shooting pouch, odds and ends of extra clothing, a colorful bandanna, even a French-silk scarf given him by one of the dusky-skinned
whores he favored in one of those knocking shops where a man degraded himself much, much more than the women he sought out in such places. Not a hell of a lot to show for his thirty years.

  On the other hand, by the time his grandpap was his age, the man had brought his family into the canebrakes, fought off the French and their Indian allies, and through it all carved himself out a little place in the wilderness.

  By the time Thaddeus had seen his thirtieth winter, he had cleared twice as much land as most men, raised more crops out of that rich soil than any other in Boone County, and sunk his roots down deep, deep.

  Now, Titus? He had nothing to show for his years but his scars, and his miles, and the crow-foot beginnings of some wrinkles. He figured the graying would not be long in coming.

  In no way was he living up to the Bass family name. He had failed in all respects, sinking lower and lower in despair and self-pity with the turn of the seasons. Failed in his attempts to accomplish anything near what the other men of his family had accomplished in their years walking the face of the earth. He had failed to make something of himself—no ground, no stock, no crops, no wife, no children. And no dream.

  Nothing but his scars.

  Long ago he had even considered going back home. Eventually deciding he could never return to Rabbit Hash, Boone County, Kentucky. Never to go back as Thaddeus’s prodigal son. Nay, the old wounds were still too deep for him to lick, and return with his tail tucked between his legs. No home left for him back there where his brothers and sister had likely started families of their own long ago, every one of them working to clear all the more forest with Thaddeus, to push back the wilderness just that much more for the next generation to come.

  “Titus,” the blacksmith’s voice whispered close to his ear. “If you’re awake, want you to know I laid some victuals close by. Here at your left hand. It’s within reach, son. I’ll cover it with one of the missus’s towels so the bugs don’t come crawl in it right away. But you’ll have to keep the mice out of it.”

  “Thank … thanks be to you, Hysham.”

  He patted Bass’s arm gently, then rose again. “You sleep. Eat when you want. I’ll get more if’n you want. Come see to you later in a while.”

  How lonely he felt hearing the footsteps shuffle off across the dried hay spread over the pounded clay floor of his little stall, footsteps fading down the row of stalls. In a moment he made out the distant hiss of the bellows exciting the fire, imagining the sparks sent spewing into the air like darting fireflies. Then Troost began pounding on the anvil, sure, solid, clocklike strikes with his leather-wrapped hammer.

  Titus had no home.

  Not Rabbit Hash. And St. Louis wasn’t any more of a home to him either—even as much as Hysham Troost had taken him under his wing and shown him what a man could do with his hands when coupling fire and iron.

  “Almost like a man and woman, ain’t it?” Hysham had declared one day when they were fashioning rifle barrels: huge, heavy octagonal shafts of steel they would eventually cut with rifling and brown to a dull sheen. “A man and woman come together with such fire, softening their hardness in that coupling. Brought together in such a way they eventually become something new, different from ’em both by themselves. Same as what we’ve been doing here, Titus. It’s a good life you’ve chose for yourself. A good life for a man, this work.”

  True enough. At Hysham Troost’s elbow Bass had taken what rude skills he had learned from Able Guthrie and perfected them—learning to make nails, sharpen plowshares, mend wagon tires, fashion beaver traps and lock parts for rifles, as well as repair all the many mishaps befalling ironware of the day, for much of that iron was poorly made, impure in grade, and more often than not very brittle. While all farmers in the St. Louis region, like Guthrie, possessed the rudimentary skills it took to crudely fashion a horseshoe or repair a grub hoe, practically none of them had the skills and tools to accomplish anything more sophisticated in the way of repair, much less manufacture.

  There in that warm corner of Troost’s livery beside Hysham’s forge, Titus became a part of the process—no more than a tool like the other tools he used—the huge bellows, a bench vise, a half-dozen hammers, a sledge, a shoeing hammer, a horseshoe punch, a handful of tongs, two hand vises, at least seven files and a pair of rasps, a wedge and cold chisel, along with an ax-eye punch. The whole of it could be carried by one pack animal if need be, with weight to spare … yet with such an outfit and an anvil—a blacksmith could forge miracles, if not repair dreams.

  The frontier blacksmith was truly an important member of any community. Especially for the frontier rifle makers.

  Many times over the years Hysham had given Titus a perfectly round steel rod of a certain size and a long rectangular piece of iron he was to shape, welding it inch by inch around the long rod, withdrawing the rod after each weld to cool it, reheating the iron while he did so, making weld by weld until he had his octagonal rifle barrel shaped around that rod.

  A craftsman like Troost even showed Titus how to fashion his own rifling tool completely out of wood, save for the small cutting edge of fire-hardened steel. With this Titus would be given the next task of inserting the tool with its small cutting button, twisting and drawing, twisting and drawing, removing tiny curls of the barrel, making lands and grooves of a particular caliber’s twist as specified by the growing rifle trade in the city.

  “You need a hot fire, Titus,” Troost had explained early on. “Don’t know what all you’ve learned so far—so you pay heed what I got to teach you. Man can use seasoned hickory, or even oak bark—but I prefer to use my own charcoal. Made right out there in my own kiln.”

  Charcoal meant cutting and splitting wood. Across the years of sweating summer and winter, Titus came to appreciate a good, sharp, narrow—or felling—ax. With its handle or helve at two feet six inches in length, carved of shell-bark hickory and set into a head weighing no more than four and a half pounds, it was a tool no man on the frontier could do without. Many times had Titus spent a portion of a day selecting a proper piece of seasoned hickory, whittling it into rough shape for an ax handle, then smoothing it with a piece of broken glass, eventually to wedge it into the ax eye so that it would stay despite hard use.

  Pity that men did not treat their axes more tenderly, Titus discovered, making sure to warm them on frosty mornings to lessen the danger of breakage to that honed edge. And woe to the boy who allowed his father’s ax to bounce from wood to rocky ground, or the wife who used her husband’s ax to cut the bone from a gammon of bacon.

  But without just such flaws in human nature, Hysham Troost preached, “There simply wouldn’t be enough work for a good blacksmith hereabouts.”

  Long, long after Titus heard the last ring of the old man’s hammer on anvil fade from the sodden, cold air of the livery, he felt himself nudged, awakened rudely.

  “Shit—you damn well don’t look like you’re in no shape to do no work for a man.”

  At the strange voice he tried to turn his face, tried easing open his puffy, crusted eyelids. Clearly this wasn’t Troost kneeling nearby. A different voice. A different smell.

  “Don’t try to talk right now,” the stranger continued. “I punched your fire up there in that leetle stove ye got yourself thar’. The warm sure does take the bite off this’r night.”

  Bass listened as the man shuffled about in the hay nearby like a dog making its bed, then settled back with a grunt and a sigh. The stranger was eating something, his lips smacking as he continued talking.

  “Come in hyar lookin’ fer a blacksmith. Ye be the blacksmith? Shit-fire. I be needin’ a blacksmith in the wust way. Traps is what I got need of. Strong-assed traps, mind you. Them criks and rivers in that thar’ kentry take ’em a toll of meanness on a man’s beaver traps. This’r nigger cain’t be takin’ off fer the far lonesome ’thout a smithy like you fixin’ on ’em.”

  This was a … a Negra!

  But … the man didn’t talk like no Negra Titus had ever met,
sure as hell sounded nothing like the one he had known the best—Hezekiah Christmas. But, Lord and behold! The man had just called himself a nigger.

  Painfully he cracked one eye open, his heart thumping with a generous mix of both fear and anticipation. In the dull glow of that squat-bellied toad of an iron stove Titus made out the dim, shadowy figure hunched in the corner of his tiny cell, chewing at what meat remained on a huge bone. Slowly he raked his sore eyes over the man, his nose suddenly pricked with the fragrance of what the man ate.

  No, what Titus smelled could not be that bone the stranger tossed aside carelessly before wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It had to be the clothing he wore.

  In shadows that rose and fell down the man’s arms and legs long fringes danced in the muted rose of the fire’s dim light. Strips of dull color laced their patterns down each sleeve, over each shoulder, a round patch emblazoned at the center of the man’s chest, partially covered by a long, unkempt beard he wiped his greasy hands upon, then stroked aside. From somewhere beneath the tangle of his chin whiskers he produced a small clay pipe.

  Straining his eyes through the murky, smoky firelight kicked out by that small, cast-iron stove, Bass tried to make out the man’s features. Sure as hell didn’t look like no Negra. Not like no Negra Titus Bass had ever laid eyes on—drunk or sober. No broad nose there … but it was damned hard to tell for sure in this light, what with all that matted beard.

  As the stranger loaded the pipe from a pouch at his side, Titus worked to tear his eyes open wider, the better to make out the man’s hoary head—a mass of hair sprouting every which way in wild and greasy sprigs once he yanked off his low-crowned, wide-brimmed beaver-felt hat and carefully laid that wind-battered, rain-soaked old veteran aside. Evidently a prized possession, Bass made note.