Death Rattle

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Mare what are nursing foals?” Bass still could not comprehend. “Them li’l’ foals only gonna slow you down.”

  “We ain’t taking the foals,” Williams announced. “Gonna leave ’em behind.”

  He started to glimpse the masterful plan of it slowly materializing, just the way he would gently adjust the sections of his telescope to bring a distant object into focus.

  “So you’ll take them wet mares along to hurry the stole horses back from Californy,” Scratch said, slapping Williams on the back exuberantly. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t some!”

  “I come up with that plan my own self,” Williams boasted, his chest swelling. “Ever since we come back from California, I been waiting to put all the other pieces to it. Now I wish’t we had more riders.”

  “Bet Peg-Leg’s signing up a few more down at Robidoux’s post right now,” Craig advised.

  “Where’s Sinclair?” Bass inquired.

  Craig pointed at the mud-and-log hut at the back of the three-sided stockade. The river served as the fourth wall of the enclosure. “He’s inside, dusting and combing out some robes he traded off a band of Yutas last week.”

  “So tell me, niggers—is there any whiskey in this piss-hole of a post?” Titus asked, grabbing Williams by the back of his neck. “I don’t know about you boys, but Bill and me here are near half froze for a hard drink after all our cold camps and too goddamned many saddle sores.”

  “Let’s go swab our gullets, Scratch!” Williams roared. “And have us a drink to Peg-Leg signing on some more riders.”

  One of those problems with getting older was that the hangovers hurt more than they used to.

  That next day when he awoke pasty-mouthed, cuddled within his buffalo robe and blanket, curled up back to back with Bill Williams beneath that sheet of oiled canvas, Bass hurt all over—just the way he would if he had been pummeled in a St. Louis riverfront brawl. He wasn’t even certain how they’d ended up back at their camp outside the stockade. Under their own power? Maybe not.

  He sat up slowly, pulling the robe back from his face, greeted with a bright dawn, the cottonwoods still dripping rain from last night’s storm, the air cool and vibrant with a tang of moisture to it. The bright light hurt his head more than it should until he found his wide-brimmed hat and pulled it down low over his eyes. But it was the side of his face that hurt more than anything.

  Perhaps he’d fallen and didn’t remember. Maybe one of the other trappers had flailed his fists around when he got into the cups—with one of the blows slamming against his cheek.

  “Bill,” he whispered. Even the sound of it hurt between his temples. So when Williams did not respond to some gentle nudging, Titus decided not to awaken the trapper.

  Gingerly laying his fingers against the side of his own face, Titus found his cheek swollen. Nothing more than that gentle touch made him wince: in an instant his jaw was in utter torment, so extreme a poker-hot pain exploded in his head, taking his breath away.

  Slowly the heat subsided in his jaw and he could open his eyes again. Careful to hold his head just so, Titus dragged back the blanket and robe from his legs. He had to pee in the worst way.

  Standing in the brush a few yards away from their shelter, Bass wondered how much he owed Prewett Sinclair for all they drank the night before.

  “You wasn’t the hard punisher, Scratch,” the fort proprietor explained later that day when Bass plodded back through the post’s gate and found Sinclair at work unfolding, then refolding, a few bolts of calicos and other coarse cloth on a narrow counter set up in the trade room.

  Billy Craig sat in the corner on his pallet, scratching his belly with one hand, his wild hair with the other. “Ol’ Solitaire was the punisher.”

  “He get me back to camp?” Titus asked, eyeing one of the small kegs on the counter.

  “Looked to be that way.” Levin Mitchell stirred in his bedroll. “Bill was shining on till it come time he figgered he should get you back to your bedroll.”

  “But that’s when Solitaire went soft at the knees and spilled right down on his face,” Craig snorted with a giggle. “He was out and there was no raising the dead!”

  “I need me a cup of that barleycorn, Sinclair,” Bass mumbled huskily, doing his best to talk without moving his jaw.

  “Couldn’t understand you too good. Something wrong with your mouth, Scratch?” asked the trader as he noisily slid a tin cup down the counter to the small keg where he began to pour out the cheap whiskey.

  “Ain’t anywhere I don’t hurt,” he confessed, rubbing a gritty eye. “My head thunders like a herd of loose ponies with ever’ little noise. But I just crawled out with my jaw on fire this morning.”

  Sinclair pushed the cup at him across the narrow counter. “Lemme look.”

  In a moment the trader nodded to the others. “He’s swolled up.” Then he tapped the trapper’s cheek as gently as he could. Again Bass winced and jerked his head away. “It’s hot, Scratch.”

  “Bet it’s a tooth,” Mitchell advised. “Had me a bad one last year.”

  “Tooth?” Titus echoed.

  “C’mere,” Sinclair said and gestured him over. When Bass wasn’t quick about leaning over the counter, the trader promised, “Listen, I won’t touch you again. Just wanna look. C’mere now and open your mouth. Have me a look inside.”

  Titus looked down his nose as Prewett Sinclair leaned close, holding a candle between their faces as he peered into the trapper’s open mouth.

  “Wider,” the trader demanded.

  “Aggggg,” Bass growled, his mouth opening as wide as he dared, the hot pain flaring as he did.

  Sinclair leaned back and rubbed his nose. “Smells to me like you got a rotten tooth in there, Bass.”

  “Sm-smells?”

  “Like meat going bad,” Craig added, with a nod of his head.

  “M-meat goin’—”

  “You look all swolled up in there, what I can see,” Sinclair continued. “There”—and he pushed the cup a little closer to the trapper—“you g’won ahead and drink your whiskey.”

  “Sinclair’s rotgut hooch gonna take the edge off your hurt,” Mitchell explained.

  With an unsure, reluctant nod, Titus took up the cup and sipped. Slowly at first to see how the whiskey would burn his inflamed jaw. If he kept the potent liquid off to the left side of his mouth, it wasn’t near so bad. But his head hurt so damned much that he had trouble swallowing. Nevertheless, Scratch succeeded in getting some of the whiskey down, eventually warming a stomach that had wanted to revolt at the first swallow.

  “Maybeso this is gonna help some,” he told the others as two more of the trappers pushed through the door to join them in the low-roofed trader’s cabin.

  “Go on and drink up,” Craig said as he stepped to the counter to have himself a look at Bass’s jaw. “You’re gonna want to drown as much of that pain as you can afore we yank that tooth outta there—”

  “Y-yank?” Scratch sputtered, some whiskey dribbling off his lower lip.

  “Gotta come out,” Mitchell agreed. “Just like I pulled my own tooth last year.”

  “P-pulled your own tooth?” Titus echoed, his eyes growing larger.

  “Drink up, Bass,” Sinclair declared. “It’s on the prairie.”

  Both of the trappers who had just arrived lunged toward the counter, as one of them hooted and slapped a flat hand onto the wood planks. “On the prerra! Hurraw! Let’s drink, Sinclair!”

  “Not for the likes of you,” Sinclair snarled as the trapper jerked back in surprise. “We’re gonna get Bass drunk here, then pull a tooth out of his head.”

  The entire room watched as Scratch slowly poured the stinging whiskey past his lips, letting it slide down his tongue, past the back of his throat and on to his warming belly. In their eyes was a look of unabashed envy. A free drunk, compliments of the Fort Davy Crockett trader.

  When he pulled the cup away from his mouth and licked some drops hanging from his shaggy mu
stache, Sinclair took the cup from him. When it was refilled, Bass took another long sip of the whiskey that tasted even smoother than that first cup.

  “Awright,” Titus mumbled, feeling his tongue thickening, “so if Ol’ Bill fell on his face and wasn’t moving a muscle … I figger you boys joined in to help get him and me back to our trees?”

  “None of us figgered you needed any damn help,” Mitchell explained. “Because you started dragging him out the door.”

  Craig sniggered some now. “You wasn’t pulling him out into the rain and mud by his collar like this!” And he pantomimed by seizing the back of his own shirt and raising it until his arm flapped.

  “?-how?” Bass stammered.

  Sinclair explained, “It was a pretty sight. Watching you weaving back and forth, leaning over to grab Bill by his ankles, dragging him around right over where Mitchell’s standing now, you good as falling yourself while you’re fighting to get Ol’ Solitaire out the door and into storm.”

  Titus wiped the back of his hand across his wet lips. Then he licked the back of his hand, tasting the faint sting of the peppers, the all-but-hidden sweet molasses. “I dragged him by his leg all the way back to our camp?”

  Mitchell shrugged. “Dunno, Scratch. We throwed the door shut after you got him dragged out the gate!”

  Already his head was growing a little fuzzy, that whole strip of skin above his eyes gone numb. Doing his best to concentrate, Scratch said, “Bill was beside me while ago when I come awake.”

  “Did you check to see he was breathing?” Craig roared, stirring up a storm of renewed laughter.

  “Maybeso Scratch drowned Ol’ Bill in a rain puddle on the way back to camp!” Mitchell hoo-hooed.

  “Yeah!” Sinclair jumped in. “Can’t you just see poor Scratch dragging Solitaire back to his robes—so drunk Bill can’t close his own mouth so he drowns?” The trader threw back his head and flopped his upper body back onto the counter, his arms flung akimbo as his mouth went slack, jaw dropped open.

  “Shit, Prewett!” Craig hollered. “With his mouth open like that, only natural that Ol’ Bill drownded out there in the rain!”

  “Poor Scratch.” Mitchell pounded a hand on Titus’s back. “You was so drunk you didn’t know any better—drownding our friend the way you done.”

  They had him worried. Especially now that his head had grown so fuzzy. “M-maybe I ought’n go see to him just so I can be—”

  Bass had taken a handful of steps before Craig snagged Scratch’s arm and spun him around. “Hold on there. Way you’re walking—you ain’t fit to go off to check on no one.”

  “Someone ought’n go see—”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Sinclair agreed. “Mitchell, you or one of the others—go see to Ol’ Bill. See if he’s breathing yet.”

  Mitchell turned and nodded to one of the other trappers, a half-breed Frenchie named Toussaint Marechal, and together they stepped through the low doorway into the bright sun, disappearing across the fort compound.

  Suddenly Craig leaped to the open door and shouted after them, “If’n you wake Solitaire—be sure you tell him we’re fixing to pull Scratch’s tooth. I’ll bet that ol’ preacher’d wanna be here to see this!”

  “Ain’t none of you gonna pull my tooth!” Bass protested. “Gonna do just fine by my own self.”

  “Maybeso,” Craig replied. “We’ll see how steady your own hands are … ’cause it’s for sure you’re ol’ legs ain’t!”

  “What you figger’m I gonna use to pull it?” Scratch asked, giving Craig a playful shove as he turned back to Sinclair.

  “Dunno for sure. Mitchell’s the one said he pulled his own tooth,” the trader declared, then looked at Craig. “What’d he use?”

  “Had him some pinchers in his shooting pouch,” Craig explained helping steady Bass. “What he uses to pull his ramrod out when he’s pulling a dry ball or an old load.”

  “M-makes sense.” And Scratch nodded, inching away from Craig. “I got me my own ball puller I can go get.”

  A suspicious Craig quickly scooted over to block his way. “You wasn’t thinking of running off, was you?”

  Bass leaned back against the counter noisily, sensing for the first time just how thick his tongue had grown. “Naw. Need to get my ball puller so I can be a tooth puller, s’all.”

  “Thought you was sneaking off—”

  Lunging out, Bass seized Craig by the front of his greasy cloth shirt with his right hand. “You figger me for being feared of pulling my own tooth, don’cha?”

  “Dunno if you are or not—”

  Shaking the younger trapper, Bass growled, “How ’bout we let you start this here fandango by yanking out one of your own goddamn teeth.”

  Seizing Bass’s wrist in both his hands, Craig attempted to wrench the older man’s grip from his shirt. “Y-you gone stupid on whiskey!”

  “Don’t you ever again let me hear you say to my face or behind my back that you think I’m feared of something,” Scratch bellowed inches from Craig’s face. “Maybeso, you was a braver man than me a few years ago when we was cornered inside Robidoux’s post by Thompson’s bunch.”

  The trapper ruminated on that a moment, then released his hold on Bass’s wrist. “Yeah, I remember. You talked down them Yutas had us surrounded.” With a sigh, Craig grudgingly admitted, “Likely you saved our hair that day.”

  Dropping his hand from Craig’s shirt, Titus mumbled, “You really ain’t a bad sort, Billy. Only want you to stay away from my damn mouth.”

  Mitchell and Marechal shuffled back in the door, the cool of the rain-cleansed morning wafting into the trading room with them.

  “Bill’s gonna be sleeping for some time to come,” Mitchell announced.

  Pulling the cup of whiskey from his lips, Bass slurred, “He ain’t drowned, is he?”

  “Not by rain, he ain’t,” Mitchell replied. “But he’s been damn near drowned with whiskey that he ain’t gonna be here to watch you pull your tooth neither.” The younger man yanked up the flap to his shooting pouch and pulled out the small tool. “Here you go, Scratch. Have at your tooth.”

  “When you’re ready,” Sinclair prodded, sliding a round mirror in a heavy oak frame across the top of the counter planks.

  Scratch reached up and pulled off his hat, flopping it on the counter. “Gimme that ball puller.”

  “What ’bout the blood, Prewett?” Mitchell asked as he handed Bass the tool.

  Titus swallowed hard. “W-what blood?”

  Craig said, “You’re gonna have a big hole in your jaw where that tooth come out. Maybe ’bout the size of a lead ball.”

  Nodding, Mitchell assured, “I bit down on a piece of leather till the bleeding stopped. Your jaw looks more swolled up than mine was—so I reckon you’re gonna bleed some—”

  “Nawww, I heal fast,” Bass boasted, then turned to gaze into the mirror Sinclair was raising to eye level.

  For a moment he stopped and did nothing more than stare at his image, unmoving. Gazing first at the swollen jaw, then at all the gray in his beard and mustache, amazed at just how gray had become all that hair emerging from the bottom of the faded black bandanna. Even his eyebrows were turning a stark white against the oak-brown of his skin. Since the last time he had looked in a mirror, Bass had seen his reflection only in the placid surface of a high-country pond, maybe the dark, shimmering reflection staring back at him from a cup of coffee. Nothing as clear as this … inspecting all the little lines and tiny wrinkles, the deep furrows between his eyes and those carved from the outside of his nose down to the corners of his mouth. A face that was damn well marked with most everything in his life, for good or for bad.

  “Awright,” he relented. “Let’s pull this goddamned tooth.”

  Slowly opening his jaw, wider and wider still, Titus was surprised at how little that stretching of his hide and muscles hurt now. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. No matter how tender that whole jaw was. Yet it continued to throb, despi
te the whiskey that had effectively numbed everything else from the shoulders up.

  Prying apart the handles of the small tool so that he widened the two small jaws just so, Titus turned his head to the side slightly and inserted the ball puller inside his mouth. Sliding it back across his tongue toward the tooth that had a blackened crown, he took a slow, deep breath … then let it out.

  While he positioned the tool’s jaws on either side of the offending tooth. He had no more than gently closed the jaws on it than it immediately felt as if the tooth had become his whole head—completely empty and hollow, filled only with an unbelievably hot pain.

  Yanking the tool from his mouth, he gasped and gasped again, struggling to catch his breath, hoping to somehow put an end to the throbbing heat in his head. His hand trembling, he dropped the tool and swept up the whiskey cup between both of them, bringing it unsteadily to his lips. Slowly he guzzled everything left in the cup, then let out a moist sigh as the pain slowly became bearable once more.

  “God-damn” he murmured with his thick tongue. “I got bullet holes in me, and scars where red niggers poked me with arrers. But never have I hurt like that afore!”

  “Ever you broke a bone?” Craig asked.

  “Nary a one, this child ain’t,” Bass confided.

  “You gonna try again?” Mitchell inquired, staring at Scratch’s mouth.

  He brooded on it, then said, “Maybeso that last drink of whiskey has done it, boys.”

  Clanking the tin cup onto the narrow counter, Scratch swept up the ball puller as Sinclair repositioned the mirror. Again he slowly opened the tender jaw and once more he inched the tool toward the rotten tooth. Sucking in a breath, Bass opened the metal jaws and did his best to position them on either side of the inflamed tooth. The instant the tool brushed its surface, with no more than a whisper of contact—it was as if a small charge of powder went off in that jaw.

  He flung the tool down. As it skidded across the counter and tumbled onto the clay floor, Scratch spun round and round trying his best to cup that excruciating side of his face, an elbow knocking the mirror out of Sinclair’s hands. It clattered onto the counter where the trader managed to keep it from tumbling to the floor.