Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Get ready to get yourselves honey-fuggled by them company booshways!” Caleb Wood cried as he pounded a hand on Porter’s back, both of them laughing easily.

  But the second man was clearly uncomfortable as Hatcher’s men guffawed along with many of the company men. “Mountain prices is what we all take in exchange. Ain’t no man better’n any other.”

  “No, I savvy you’re right there,” Scratch said as he stepped up before the tall trapper. “But just as long as we get what’s fair for our plew here in the mountains, a man don’t mind paying mountain prices for his necessaries.”

  “Hold on!” Rowland jumped forward, his face drawn and gray with concern. “Y-you mean … if’n there ain’t gonna be no trader come out—there ain’t gonna be no whiskey?”

  “No whiskey!” shrieked Rufus Graham.

  Now it was Porter’s turn to roar with laughter. “Ain’t got enough to float a bullboat back to St. Louie, boys … but we have us enough to wash the dust out’n your gullet!”

  “Whooo-haw!” Bass shouted with glee, sidling up to fling an arm over Porter’s shoulder. “How smooth it be? Like a Natchez whore’s baby-haired bum?”

  Nathan Porter turned and looked at Bass in alarm. “Smooth? Hell, it ain’t smooth!”

  A new trapper stepped forward. “Ain’t no such a thing as smooth likker in these here mountains, friend. Ever’ drink’ll cut’cha going down and land like a bar of Galena lead when it hits bottom.”

  “I wanna know if it can take the shine off my traps,” Hatcher said.

  “An’ can it peel the varnish off my saddle tree?” Bass inquired.

  “Hell if it can’t!” the man replied with a near toothless grin.

  Bass looked over at Hatcher, and they both smiled so broadly, it nearly cracked their faces in half.

  Scratch screamed, “Then bring on that there likker, fellers—’cause I got me a two-year thirst to rid myself of!”

  Although there was indeed a small supply of crude grain alcohol at the south shore of Sweet Lake, that summer of 1828 there would be no great and boisterous revelry because Sublette and Jackson had already reached the mountains with some twenty thousand dollars in supplies the winter before. Despite the shortage of trade goods and liquor, the air of excitement, camaraderie, and fellowship swelled as the sun began to drop and twilight approached each evening.

  Rendezvous was rendezvous. Make no mistake of that. A man worked a whole year to journey off to some prearranged valley for this reunion with faces and friends he had not seen in all those months of grueling labor in freezing streams, fighting off the numbing cold of the past winter, defending himself against horse-raiders and scalping parties. This July a double handful of the new company’s men would be missing.

  Survivors of one more year in the wilderness, Hatcher’s men joined other free trappers and brigade men at their fires for swapping stories, generously lathered with exaggeration bordering on lies, catching up on any fragment of the stale news brought out from the settlements by the traders last winter—news seemingly as fresh as these men in the wilderness wished to make every report and flat-out rumor.

  As night eased down, black-necked stilts called out softly from the rushes in the nearby marsh bordering the lake.

  “Listen to that, won’t you?” a stranger said to Bass at that cluster of fires in the brigade camp where all of them had gathered.

  “A purty sound,” Titus replied, hearing the birds’ calls fade across the water.

  “If’n you think that’s purty,” Rowland said to the stranger as he strode up, “then you ain’t never heard Jack play his fiddle.”

  The man whirled on Rowland. “One of your men has him a fiddle?”

  “We do,” Bass declared proudly.

  A new stranger with a big red nose leaped up from the ground where he had been lying. “He can play it?”

  “Damn if he can’t,” Rowland declared.

  Bass nodded. “Plays so damned bad, it hurts more’n your ears when you’re nursing a hangover!”

  “Hey, Squeeg!” the man with the big red nose roared across the fire. “One of these here free men plays the fiddle!”

  “Who’s the one with the fiddle?” demanded a tall, barrel-chested man.

  “I am,” Hatcher volunteered, standing from his stump. “Jack Hatcher’s the name.”

  “Mine’s Brody.”

  Then Jack warned, “But I don’t play for free.”

  “That’s right,” Solomon Fish agreed. “None of us play for free.”

  Brody wheeled around on Fish. “What’s it you play?”

  “Gimme a kettle an’ a stick,” Solomon said with a straight face.

  “The hell with you,” and Brody turned back to Hatcher. “You play for a drink, won’cha?”

  “The devil hisself got a tail, don’t he?”

  The tall man took a wide, playful swing at Hatcher. “Go get your fiddle, coon! This bunch is half-froze for sweet music!”

  That twilight as the sky grew dark and meat broiled on the end of sharpened sticks, spitted and sizzling over the leaping flames, Jack Hatcher returned with the scuffed and scratched, journey-weary oak-brown violin case.

  “I’ll be dogged!” some man quietly exclaimed. “He do have him a fiddle!”

  Another voice asked across the fire, “Can he really play it?”

  “Your toes’ll be tapping in less time’n takes to lift a Blackfoot’s hair!” Caleb Wood explained.

  “By doggy! Lookee thar’!” one of them marveled as they all bent over Jack when he knelt beside one of the numerous fires. One at a time he took the narrow straps from their buckles until he slowly folded back the top to expose the violin.

  Gently taking hold of it by the slim neck, Jack retrieved the instrument from the case and with his right hand took out the bow. Several wild strands of worn catgut sprayed in all directions as he stood. Scratch smiled at the sight of Hatcher turning slowly toward the others, his face beaming with crazed anticipation of this moment: rendezvous, his music, and that wild revelry he brought other men at these all-too-short summer gatherings.

  With his bow hand he shoved an unruly shock of black hair from his eyes, then swept the bow around in a wide arc, describing the greater part of a circle.

  “Stand back, boys!” he warned ominously. All of them obeyed, eagerly retreating to give him wide berth. “I gets to playing—Jack Hatcher needs him plenty of room!”

  “Back, you dogs!” Caleb repeated, nudging a couple of men back a bit farther.

  How handsome Hatcher looked at that moment, Scratch thought. He was proud to be here, proud it was this very time in the seasons of man. These borning days in the mountains. Most proud to stand among these iron-mounted men, proud not only of this breed—but most proud to be one of those whom Jack called friend.

  As Hatcher dragged that ragged bow across the strings slowly, tightening a peg here, another there, dragging the bow slowly again and again until he had each string to his liking—then suddenly kicked off with the wild, appealing strains of a high-pitched Kentucky reel … Bass felt a lump grow in his throat. Never could he remember Hatcher looking so happy, so content, so—complete. Not even when the man was well into his cups.

  Scratch had only to gaze around the fire at the others, the greater of them strangers, to see just how true was the expression that music calmed the savage breast. Here were the roughest cut of mankind, every last one of them sitting in rapt attention, struck silent in unabashed awe, their eyes every bit as big as the smiles that creased their hairy faces. Slowly, step by measured step, Hatcher moved through them, in and out of the crowd as he swayed side to side with the tempo of his reel, circumscribing a sunwise circle around this largest of the fires. More figures appeared out of the deepening darkness to stand or kneel at the edge of the light thrown off by the leaping flames.

  How it seemed Jack thrived on this hypnotic sway he could command over groups large and small when he began to caress the crying strings of his fiddle. Then th
at first song was done before any of them realized, and the summer night fell quiet for a matter of heartbeats before any of them stirred, or spoke, leaving it up to Caleb Wood and Titus Bass to slap their hands together.

  In an instant the others were hooting as well, whistling and roaring their approval. They finally fell quiet when Jack jabbed the violin beneath his chin once more.

  “There’s one I’d like to play: a song that makes this child remember where we all come from, where it is we’re all bound,” Jack explained when all had grown completely still.

  “Is it loud?” a man demanded.

  “No,” Solomon Fish roared angrily.

  A new voice declared, “We want something loud we can stomp to!”

  “You want the man to play for you or not?” Wood asked the assembly as Jack lowered the violin from beneath his chin.

  “Play, goddammit!”

  Another bellowed, “Just let ’im play anythin’ he wants!”

  They were shoving and shouldering one another now that he had them expectant. Hatcher knelt, starting to lay his violin back in its case.

  “Hatcher!” cried Brody as he tore away from a knot of others. “I’ve got me likker for your gullet, but only if’n you play that fiddle o’ your’n.”

  “Likker?” Jack asked, holding the violin suspended in midair over the battered case.

  Isaac Simms lunged up a huge step into the merry dance of light. “Real lik … likker?”

  “Traders’ likker?” John Rowland wanted to know.

  “Right here,” Brody said. “Right now. So you gonna play?”

  Standing once more with the violin and bow clutched in one hand, Jack drew a forearm across his mouth. “Fiddle playin’s hard work, coon. Dry work too. What say ye: pour me a tin of that traders’ likker, and I’ll see what I can do to play a while for ye niggers.”

  While the others set to hollering in merriment, Brody turned to wave two men out of the dark at the edge of the grove where they had been waiting offstage with their prize: a small five-gallon keg constructed of pale oak staves clamped together with three dark iron bands. The pair hobbled forward with it slung between them until they reached an open spot near the biggest fire and eased the keg to the grass. Then, as Hatcher stuffed the fiddle beneath his chin, one of the pair stuck his hand into his shooting pouch and pulled out a wooden spout.

  “Punch ’er!” Brody ordered.

  And with that the trapper ripped the camp ax from his belt, using it to drive the spout into the bunghole. The keg was tapped.

  As the notes from Hatcher’s fiddle climbed higher still, and the fires spat sparks into the coal-cotton night, the men clamored to fill their cups with the clear grain alcohol David Jackson and Bill Sublette had freighted west from St. Louis after sealing up a small plug of tobacco and a handful of red peppers inside each diluted keg. While the plug had dissolved to give the potent brew the pale, imitation color of sour-mash whiskey, the peppers lent this Rocky Mountain libation its peculiar bite. Not that the pure grain liquor wouldn’t already have the kick of an unrepentant Missouri mule.

  Squeeg Brody was the first to shove his cup beneath the spout and the first to take a sip of the night’s squeezin’s. Smacking his lips with approval, he turned and parted the rest as he stepped back to the fire, cup held out, and stopped before Hatcher. Jack stopped playing immediately, looped the bow at the end of a finger on his left hand, and accepted the offered cup.

  “Thankee, most kindly!” and he bowed graciously.

  When Hatcher brought the cup to his lips, the rest of his outfit came to stand around him, all of them staring at that magical vessel, some unconsciously licking their lips, most of them gone wild-eyed with whiskey-thirst. Jack sipped in a manner most genteel, then brought the tin from his mouth and savored the taste of it a moment, eyes closed.

  At last he declared, “That’s some!” And with that, Jack threw back his head and went to guzzling the cup dry without drawing a breath.

  Fish, Wood, Simms, and the others joined Bass in screeching like scalded alley cats as they leaped away from Hatcher, lunging for the keg themselves. Among the company men there were suddenly tussles, shoving, and some playful wrestling as they all jockeyed to be the next in line to have their cup filled.

  “Keep on playing, Jack!” Titus hollered as he knelt with his tin beneath the spout that the keg keepers never had to turn off.

  “Get me some more, then, dammit!” Jack flung his empty cup at Scratch, then resumed sawing the bow back and forth across the strings as he dipped and swayed, wriggling his hips, prancing about on his skinny legs, cavorting this way and that like the madman he was.

  As the men had their cups filled and rose to return to fireside, each of them swayed or tapped a foot, some stomping harder than the others as they sipped or guzzled at their pint tin cups of grain. Among them a man plopped to the ground with a beaver skin still stretched tightly inside a willow hoop, crossing his legs before him. Snapping off a short piece of kindling a little bigger than two of his stubby fingers, he set about slapping the stiffened, dried flesh of the beaver hide with his make-do drumstick right in cadence with Hatcher’s merry tune.

  As soon as he heard the loud thumping, Jack himself turned and jigged over, giggling like a child on a lark as his head wobbled from side to side, humming and grunting with the music he was urging from the singing strings. At the drummer’s side Hatcher began stomping one foot dramatically, lifting his leg into the air as high as he could before driving it down into the grass and the dust, over and over and over again.

  Of a sudden a realization came over Titus as he stood with Hatcher’s cup refilled. He knew that song. Hurrying over to Jack, he held the cup in front of the fiddle player’s face. “Where you want me to set it down?”

  “Don’t set the son of a bitch down!” Hatcher snapped as he went right on playing and bobbing without missing a note.

  “I ain’t gonna hold on to it all night—”

  “No ye ain’t, Scratch. Here, pour it in my mouth.”

  “P-pour …”

  “Right here in my mouth, dammit!”

  The tall, skinny Hatcher bent a little at the waist, squatting slightly and contorting himself as he continued to play, lolling out his tongue as Scratch brought the big cup to his lips and slowly began to pour. He was amazed at just how little spilled out, what few drops dribbled down Jack’s chin, off his whiskers, and onto the fiddle.

  When Hatcher began to sputter, Bass pulled the cup back.

  “Now ye set it down on the rocks,” Jack instructed.

  When he had that done, Bass straightened and yelled into Hatcher’s ear over the loud screech of the fiddle, the laughter and hooting of the men, “I know me that song.”

  “Ye know this?” Jack shouted in reply. “Sing it with me.”

  “Cain’t sing—”

  “Sing it!”

  “Told you—I ain’t no good—”

  “Sing, goddammit, Scratch. Ain’t no one listening but me!”

  Titus cleared his throat self-consciously, his eyes darting left, then right, nervous as a bride on her wedding night.

  Hatcher prodded him, “Sing the song with my fiddle notes.”

  Reluctantly, Scratch began.

  Down in the canebrake, close by the mill,

  There lived a yellow girl, her name

  was Nancy Till,

  She knew that I loved her, she knew it long.

  I’m going to serenade her and I’ll sing this song.

  Titus never had thought he had a bad voice. Rather, he was merely shy of using it in the hearing of others. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sung when folks were around. That is, except when his mam took him and his brothers and sister to Sunday meeting and they all were raised singing those songs settlers on the frontier memorized in early childhood. But this tune was something he had heard others sing around campfires those long-ago summer evenings at the Boone County Longhunter Fair, heard again while rocking on Amy Whistler
’s porch of an early autumn evening, heard even at his family’s hearth before a merry fire as the long winter night deepened in the Kentucky forest around their farm.

  This was a song not about church and ancient biblical characters in a time distant and dim, not a song about things religious and mysterious … no, at this moment he was singing a song about a subject most boys came to understand as they grew to manhood. A song about women—a matter even more mysterious than religion.

  Come, love, come—the boat lies low.

  She lies high and dry on the Ohio.

  Come, love, come—won’t you come

  along with me?

  I’ll take you on down to Tennessee.

  “Damn, if ye don’t have ye a fine voice after all, Titus Bass!” Hatcher roared over the cry of his fiddle.

  Now he blushed, made all the more self-conscious as Hatcher kept right on scratching out the melody to the song. He took a drink to hide the flush of embarrassment.

  “Gimme drink,” Jack ordered.

  When Bass took the cup from Hatcher’s lips as the song sailed on, Jack asked, “What else ye know?”

  “Songs?”

  “Any other’ns?”

  “A few I might recall, if’n I heard the tune.”

  “How ’bout this’un?”

  And with that Hatcher immediately slipped into a new melody without lagging a note. After a few moments Bass realized he knew this one too. As he began to sing, Simms and Rowland came over with their cups; then others began to walk up, stopping to listen to Bass’s singing.

  I’m lonesome since I cross’d the hill,

  And o’er the moor and valley;

  Such heavy thoughts my heart do fill,

  Since parting with my Sally.

  How he had come to love this song in that first youthful blush of manhood—if not for the lament expressed by those melancholy words he had come to know by heart so many years ago, then he loved the song because of the delicate way the notes slid up and down the scale, all of them blended this night by the bow Jack Hatcher dragged across those taut gut strings.

  I seek no more the fine and gay,