Buffalo Palace tb-2

by Terry C. Johnston

  Sometime later when the sky to the east was graying, Bass awoke, his bladder full and aching. The best he could do was throw off the blanket, push himself onto his knees, then pull his breechclout aside as he made water there and then. With that exquisite relief washing over him, Titus collapsed within his thick red cocoon and quickly fell back to sleep.

  There were times during that first day when he grew aware of things around him. Not coming fully awake, not really opening his eyes at all—only occasions when he was slowly brought to realizing the sun was up at one position or another in the sky. Instead of opening his eyes here in the cool of his copse of willow, Bass would smell, his nose telling him that Hannah remained close by. One time he awoke to smell the earthy scent of her dung, another time when she made a puddle of strong, pungent urine nearby.

  Late that afternoon he awoke again—and for the longest time he kept his eyes closed, listening to the mule crop at the grass, tearing it off between her teeth, listened to the breeze and the birds and the winged insects droning somewhere close. With no sun on the willow grove now, he figured it to be evening and eventually opened his eyes. Rubbing the grit from them once more, Scratch sat up a little at a time, his belly as hungry as he could remember it had ever been.

  For a long time his belly rumbled while he stared down at the front of his right shoulder, slowly volving it to see how much he could move it now, more than a day after the bullet wound. Sore and tender—but he could urge it this way and that more widely than before. Soon, maybe, he would have to see about patching it up, putting some sort of bandage over one or both of the holes. Carefully he tugged at the buckskin shirt with his fingers and was surprised to find that the shirt wasn’t crusted to the front wound again. The hole was coagulating all on its own.

  After whistling softly to Hannah, Bass pulled himself up against her, propping himself there to loosen knots on rope and rawhide. After retrieving that tight bundle of buckskin scraps, he blindly dug around in a second rawhide parfleche until his fingers felt the beaver fur. Knowing the glossy hides would do nicely, Scratch pulled out the small wrap of fur. What he saw was not just the dark sheen of the thick scraps of beaver, but tangled in it across his hand lay the blue bandanna.

  Slowly sinking again with the buckskin and beaver scraps in his lap, he stared a long time at the blue silk scarf before finally bringing it to his nose. He inhaled deep and long, his eyes barely closing—conjuring up that remembrance of her through the potent power or scent.

  As he rubbed the cloth gently across his bare cheek, down the bridge of his nose, over his eyelids—just to feel the caress of the fabric was enough to make him want desperately to remember the feel of her … that silky flesh with its tiny hairs, flesh that goose-pimpled each time it became cold in her tiny room and he flung back the blankets to look at all of her at once, to gaze upon her coffee-colored body. That big blue scarf took him back many, many miles and what seemed like a good man’s lifetime—took him back to those last months in St. Louis.

  To that time when he lost Isaac Washburn, and along with the old trapper—Bass lost his long-held dream. Across those seasons of despair he had nothing more to look forward to than the earthy necessities of a man’s life. Spending most of his money to buy himself a drink now and then, along with the feral pleasure of a good meal upon special occasions, as well as the company of a succession of women who each one helped Titus hold at bay the numbness slowly eking in to penetrate to his very marrow.

  It had been a time when, unlike before, there were no more of those raucous days ruled by whiskey-fever and whoring until he passed out. But for a time there—he no longer dreamed on the buffalo.

  Across that last autumn and winter he’d imprisoned himself in St. Louis, Bass routinely had pleasured himself one evening a week with the coffee-skinned quadroon he’d grown fond of. At times they’d shared a bottle of West Indian sweet rum brought upriver on a paddle-wheel steamboat, both of them drinking and laughing until she was ready to hike up her nettlebark petticoat and climb astride him.

  He smelted of the blue scarf again as he sat there in the willow. Only in his imagination did it still smell of her. So very long now had he carried it among skins and hides—on that packmare, then among Hannah’s baggage.

  Oh, how he believed he smelled her still on this corner or that. Remembering how he visited once a week, every payday when he could afford a bottle of that brown-sugar rum and the sweet sin of that cross-breed whore. There every week … at least until that Saturday night he came to call, fresh from the bathhouse and a warm meal taken in the tippling house just down the narrow avenue, ready to have that cream-colored beauty work her magic on his flesh so he could swallow down what troubled him so.

  As Scratch brought the scarf from his nose and laid it across his lap, spreading it out fully, he recalled how the old woman who watched over the knocking girls informed him that his favorite no longer boarded there—having left suddenly to take up residence in a private place farther up the hill, close to where the rich and very French families dwelled in old St. Lou. Bass remembered how, as the woman had told him the news, in disappointment he had touched that blue scarf he’d always tied around his neck every one of those special Saturday nights.

  No, Isaac Washburn hadn’t been alone in finding a favorite trollop there in St. Louis. For Titus, his favorite became the gal with skin the color of a pale milk chocolate. A recent arrival, the quadroon had been imported upriver from New Orleans by a successful madam. Ah, how her brown skin was almost the color of that silky mud sheen to the Lower Mississippi itself.

  As he hacked off two pieces of the beaver hide big enough to lay over his wounds and tied together long strips of buckskin, Titus recalled the first time he saw her sipping at her Lisbon wine. She was wearing those tall and gracefully carved ivory combs in her hair every bit as dark as a moonless midnight. At the base of her neck was wrapped a velvet choker pinned with a whalebone brooch, the ribbon clasped so tight at her throat that the brooch trembled with every one of her rising pulses. Her lips full enough to more than hint at her African ancestry, Bass found it little wonder that he came away from her so many nights bearing the tiny blue bruises and curves of teeth marks she left behind as she worked him over with her mouth, starting at the shoulder and working on down to the flat of his belly.

  While he clumsily secured the scraps of beaver over the wounds with two long strands of buckskin thong, he stared at the blue scarf—squeezing hard to remember her every gliding movement, to remember the silky feel of her, to recall her potent smell.

  It had been early one wintry morning after swearing she was his favorite that they heard Washburn hammering a fist on her door, announcing that he was ready to head back to the livery. Without saying a word at first, she reached up to pull down one of her scarves from a peg hammered into the wall beside her narrow, short-posted muley-bed.

  “You take this,” she instructed in a hoarse whisper as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.

  At that moment he didn’t know what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”

  “My scarf,” she said in that thick Mississippi-bottom dialect of hers, taking the fabric from him to unknot it. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”

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

  “I don’t have no people no more,” she explained, sadness filling her eyes. “But I want you always to be somebody special to me.”

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

  How he recalled wearing the scarf knotted there at his neck every time he returned to see her of those Saturday nights when he could afford the price of both a bottle of rum and to sleep till morning with someone warm beside him. Hell, even when he could not affor
d her and had to content himself with gazing at the whore from across the smoky room in the tippling house where she went about her business, talking and laughing with other customers, glancing at him once in a while—those eyes of hers asking why it was not he who was pushing his hand up her skirts and hungrily rubbing her legs then and there, panting to drag her back to her little room.

  After struggling to get the buckskin shirt down over his head and arms once more, Bass concluded he would wear the scarf as she had intended him to. Working at the two resistant knots, he eventually freed the head bandage as the sky became greasy with twilight. Tucking the scarf under his belt, Bass slowly crabbed over to the trickling freshet, then slipped the buckskin and moss from his head.

  As he set the moss scrapings aside atop a small rock, Bass grew curious—just how would the bare bone feel to his touch, how would his touch feel to the bare bone? Before he could talk himself out of it, Scratch reached up to lay his fingertips on the wound. One by one his fingers tiptoed across the exposed bone, gingerly feeling their way around the circumference of the lacerated flesh. There at the bottom of the wound he felt the thin, stiffened strip of flesh. Tugging on it gently, Scratch figured he could not pull it—that shriveled curl of skin must still be attached to some living flesh.

  Drawing the worn skinning knife from its old scabbard at the back of his belt, Scratch bent forward so that he could use his right arm—the right hand grasping the long flap of skin so he could lay the blade against his skull and saw the knife through it.

  Bringing the curled flesh down to stare at it, at the same time Bass also rubbed a finger along the wound where he had cut the scrap free, reassured that he hadn’t stirred up any more bleeding.

  A curious object it was—this long, narrow strip of his own flesh, no more than three inches in length now that it had shriveled. Attached to its entire length was some of his very own hair. As careful as the Arapaho had been in scraping the scalp itself clean before stuffing it into his belt, it appeared the warrior had made himself two cuts to free the cherished topknot, both of those cuts ending at the bottom, where they overlapped. That narrow thong of overlap had been left to dangle when the warrior had yanked off the topknot, the flesh drying, dying, shrinking into a long, twisted curl.

  He knew immediately what should be done with it. After untying the narrow thong that closed the top of the small medicine pouch, Scratch stuffed the small scrap of his own scalp in among the few other objects of special significance he had been gathering since that spring parting from Fawn. Here he would keep the strip, dangling around his neck in the medicine pouch, worn beneath his shirt, next to his heart.

  With the moss dampened in the trickle of water and replaced over the bare bone of his exposed skull, Titus smelled deeply of the scarf one last time. From now on the fabric would no longer even remotely carry the fragrance of the quadroon—lo, after all these many miles and bygone seasons. Remembering painfully how the whore had abandoned him and what little they had shared together.

  “I’ll go see her there,” he recalled declaring to the madam that night she had told him the quadroon would not be back. “See her where she’s working now. What’s the place so I’ll know it?”

  “You can’t see her up there,” the woman tried to explain, the wounded look in her eyes showing how she tried to understand this poor man’s desire for just one woman.

  “She ain’t coming back?”

  Wagging her head, the woman explained, “Rich man bought her, took her off to the place where he’s gonna keep her for himself, for now on and always. Buy her all the soft clothes she’d ever wanna wear. She told me when she left, there’s a tree outside her window—where she’ll sit and watch the birds sing come the end of this goddamned winter.”

  “H-he married her?”

  The woman had laughed at that. “Sakes no! He’s already got him a wife—but one likely cold as ice. Land o’ Goshen, but he don’t ever intend to marry the girl. Just keep her in that fancy place he bought her—just so she’ll be there whenever he shows up so she can pleasure only him.”

  “Maybeso I can see her still. Sneak up there when he ain’t around.”

  Again the woman wagged her head sadly. “Don’t you see? She went there on her own. That means she wasn’t thinking ’bout being with no one else here on out. The girl, she left everything behind. And that means she left you too. Best you forget her now.”

  Now, as he folded the large square of heavy silk into a triangle, Bass recalled how he had stared at the crude puncheon planks beneath his muddy boots, realizing how the quadroon’s leaving was merely another piece of him chipped away, like a flake of plaster from one of those painted saints down at the cathedral on Rue d’Eglise. Then Titus had looked into the woman’s eyes, vowing he would not let her leaving hurt him. Then of a sudden he had remembered Isaac’s favorite.

  “What about that one with the brown hair down to the middle of her back? Think she was called Jenny.”

  “You’re two days late, son,” the woman declared morosely. “A mean bastard cut her up good just last night. Up to the pauper’s cemetery they buried Jenny in a shallow hole only this morning.”

  Swallowing, perhaps feeling a bit desperate that so much of what he took solace in was crumbling around him, Bass said, “Any other’n. Any one a’tall.”

  Squinting her eyes up at him, the woman rested her hands on her fleshy hips and asked, “You ain’t so choosy no more?”

  His eyes flicked to the left down the corridor, then right. Back to the woman. “Not choosy at all.”

  Here in the willow as the light quickly oozed out of the sky, Titus remembered that from that painful night on he had rutted with the fleshy ones, the pocked ones, the ones who hadn’t cared to bathe in a month or more—it made little matter to him that the quality and color of whores in that city always depended upon the size of a man’s purse. No, it wasn’t the money that was determining his choice of solace for Bass. No good reason at all could he come up with to be particular just where he took his pleasure. And for the longest time it seemed to be that he was seeking only that particular salve of a warm and willing woman to rub into all those hidden wounds he kept covered so well.

  No, he hadn’t been choosy at all—until he chose to seize his dream.

  When he brought the blue triangle to his head and began to knot it at the base of his skull to hold down the damp moss, Bass remembered those days when he figured it was simply too cruel to fool himself any more into believing in hope. How he had vowed never again would he cling to any dream.

  Those dreary seasons passed slowly by while he choked down his despair at never hoping again, daring never again to dream—pounding out his rage on that anvil in Troost’s Livery. Of every Saturday night he found himself a new whore to stab with his anger as he rutted above her. Until he had worked his way through them all and by the time a cold winter was waning, Titus started pleasuring his way back through what poor women he could still afford. As he did, Bass had grown more frightened that with each visit to their wharfside cribs, it was taking just a little more of that balm to soothe his deepest wounds. Scared they might never heal.

  And when he found himself weakest, Titus had always brooded on this then faraway land—still mythical as it was to him back then. He had been weakest in those moments when the whiskey could no longer stiffen his backbone, when he found himself drained and done with the sweating torment of driving his rage into a woman and he lay beside her, gone limp and soft deep within himself as well as out.

  Now with the moss protecting his skull, with the bandanna secured around his head, he knew with certainty that it hadn’t been a cruel hoax his grandpap and Isaac Washburn had played on him: there was indeed a magical, mystical place where the horizon ran black with buffalo. Just as they had promised, those huge, shaggy, powerful beasts indisputably ruled their domain and were servient to none.

  Like that rare breed of man who had come to test himself against these mountains. The few who indisput
ably ruled this wild, untamed domain.

  That twilight Bass used some of the last of his strength to draw back the Russian sheeting, and desperately scrounged through what baggage was left on Hannah’s back in search of something to eat. All that he found besides some green coffee beans he could suck on was a small linen sack of flour. With his blanket clutched around his shoulders, Scratch collapsed wearily to the grass, watching the sun settle far away beyond the Uintah Mountains.

  He moistened the fingers on his left hand, then stuffed them into the flour. Pulling his hand out of the sack, he sucked on the fingers, repeating the movement over and over until his stomach no longer rumbled, until he could no longer tolerate the pasty, bland taste of the flour.

  Bass realized he needed meat. It was the only thing that would replenish his strength—keep him from steadily becoming weaker and weaker, until he could only curl up and wait to die. He dreamed on buffalo—big, shaggy, hump-backed buffalo. All that red meat and blood up to his elbows … but he’d take elk or deer now, a prairie goat if he had to.

  Hell, Scratch thought mournfully as he looked down at the flour sack in his lap, he’d even take a rabbit or a ground squirrel right now if he had to—close his eyes and make believe it was buffalo as he was eating it.

  When he had retied the top of the sack with its strand of hemp twine, Titus keeled over onto his side, dragged the rifle between his legs, and tugged the blanket back over himself.

  Twilight had faded and night had arrived the next time he awoke. After putting the flour, buckskin, and beaver scraps away among the few belongings still left him, Scratch stuffed the rifle under the loops of rope. Now he was ready for the ordeal of getting himself aboard the mule.

  Again he folded the blanket over her withers in front of her packs, but this time he had something different in mind for the night’s ride. Back over to the freshet, then across its narrow path he led the patient Hannah a hobbling step at a time. It was there on the far side he had seen the deadfall where he now headed.