bitch is busy killing the rest of us.”
“But soon enough them two gone back ’cross’t the river gonna find Titus and the Negra ain’t there no more. They’ll be on their way back here,” Kingsbury said.
“That’s why I say we ought’n be leaving here fast,” Beulah suggested more forcefully, pulling Kingsbury’s collar aside to inspect his bullet wound.
“What ’bout them?” Ovatt asked, holding a thumb over his shoulder. “This’un too.”
“You boys’re rivermen,” Beulah chided them. “Drag the lot of ’em off into the brush yonder. Away from the trail.”
“And them horses?” Root asked.
“I say we ride back to Kentucky, folks,” Ovatt suggested.
“Damn fine idea,” Kingsbury agreed. “Titus, you think you and Hezekiah catch up them horses afore they get too far away?”
He glanced at the slave, then nodded. “Don’t see why we can’t. I never had much to do with horses—”
“None the rest of us never did neither,” Kingsbury explained. “Figure you two can catch ’em up so we can get out of here.”
Self-consciously he licked his lips, still stinging with the sour taste of bile as the rain began to slacken. Nodding to the slave, Titus led out, heading first for that horse ridden by the dead leader of the slave hunters.
“You … you really kill them two other’ns?” Bass whispered after he had the reins in hand and they had started back toward the scene of the ambush.
Hezekiah nodded.
“Just like that?”
The slave shrugged. “I kill men afore. Annie Christmas tell me—I kill. Allays kill for her. Never before I kill for friends. These peoples here—makes no matter now. You, for first time to kill, it feel bad in here.” He tapped a long black finger against his chest. “Maybe it get better sometime for you, like it done for me. No hurt no more in here.”
“Yeah,” Bass replied as he handed the slave the reins to the horse and moved away to inch up slowly on one of the other animals.
In minutes the slave took the second set of reins to stand there gripping both horses. “Don’t think on it too hard, Titus. It could hurt.”
Titus stopped, recalling that vivid memory of his first rabbit, considering its import this day in light of all the game he had tracked, hunted, killed.
“I s’pose you’re right. Maybeso killing does get easier with time.”
Titus never did run across the sixth horse, which meant he and Hezekiah ended up riding double. Natural enough—seeing how Bass was not only the youngest among them all, but the lightest as well.
On out of that far northwestern corner of Alabama they hurried. Putting the Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee at their backs, they set off atop those horses at a punishing pace, hurrying north for the Duck River. At the end of that first long day after leaving Colbert’s Landing and the slavers far behind, Titus found half of the horses weary with exhaustion. Inside his head he heard the scolding voice of his father—prompting him to remember Thaddeus’s admonishments that a man must always pay proper heed to the care of his animals.
That night at the fire he instructed the others that from then on out they should take care not to drive the horses so hard.
“You … you’re serious! You want us just to walk ’em?” Root demanded in a scornful tone.
Titus nodded. “Don’t think we should push ’em much faster’n we’d cover ground our own selves,” he said, “walking on our own two legs, that is.”
Root wagged his head as if confused by the logic. “What good is them horses, if’n we cain’t get upland faster’n we can walk without ’em?”
Ovatt reminded, “Best we all paid heed: we got two of them sons of bitches still behin’t us.”
“Them two don’t matter now,” Kingsbury said, gazing at the two worried boatmen. “Way I see it, the two behind us, they’ll keep on coming, no matter how slow or fast we get north for Nashville.” Turning to the youth, Hames said, “’Bout them horses—we all thank you for teaching us such a lesson, Titus Bass.”
How his heart felt all the bigger, touched with the warmth in the pilot’s words, when he had felt his heart slowly growing so icy throughout that long winter’s day. Cold and dying inside was just what he had feared hejiad become after killing another man. Maybeso the others had been right after all in how they’d talked it over in those frantic, hurried minutes while they’d gathered up what little they had been carrying north, climbing unsteadily aboard the slave hunters’ mounts. Maybe their wisdom was true: to kill a Injun or a Negra wasn’t of much consequence at all, like Ovatt said. But to kill a white man … now, that was something. Bass even saw it in their eyes, the subtle change in how they looked at him after that terrible instant of decision when he had squeezed the trigger and took another’s life.
As the hours had crawled past, he had slowly come to realize that Hezekiah knew the difference, perhaps even could feel the same confusion Bass suffered—maybe because of the physical contact between them throughout the day, the slave sitting directly behind him on that horse’s back the way he was.
So he was damned grateful for Kingsbury’s kindness that night at their fire holding winter’s cold at bay. Titus thought back on the way he had suffered the terrifying fear that Hames Kingsbury would slip away from him, what with how Beulah had said that rib was poking a hole through his lights … and that come right on the heels of mourning the loss of Ebenezer Zane.
As they sat at their fire and wrapped themselves in the steaming, soggy wool blankets, Titus reflected back on his sixteen winters, thought on friends who had crossed his trail. Try as he might, the only person he could recall ever truly wanting to spend time with him had been Amy. Even with all the confusion and disappointment she had caused in him, with all the shattered expectations between them, here now in these cold woods he nonetheless sensed some strong regret that things hadn’t worked out differently between them. Looking back, he realized she must surely have been his first true friend.
So terribly painful was it that in the end even Amy had turned out not to be what she professed to be.
Maybe—he brooded as he stared at the mesmerizing flames while the others talked in hushed tones and picked venison from their teeth with slivers peeled from a beech-nut tree—just maybe these crude, unlettered Kentucky boatmen were the first
And of their number Ebenezer Zane had been the first to step up and offer his hand to Titus. After the river pilot’s death Hames Kingsbury had been the one to take up the slack in Titus’s rope. But not just him, the woman too: Beulah. Eventually even Ovatt and Root, both of whom came to stand by him as only friends would, no matter their rough and less than polished ways of expressing their affection and loyalty.
Still all in all, it wasn’t only the four of them. Titus looked now across the dancing flames at Hezekiah, suddenly reminded in this fire’s bright flare that the man was nearly as black as charred oak.
True enough, back home in Kentucky, Bass had known a few simple farming folk who owned a slave, maybe even a pair of them—purchased off a slave block somewhere farther to the south, then carted over the hundreds of miles to their new owners’ small farms, there to work out the long days of their miserable lives beneath a terrible yoke. This night such a tragedy was brought home to him with a metallic ache as he stared at the weary, worldly, yellowed eyes of the one an angry Annie Christmas had sold away as retribution. As he looked at that black face, Bass filled with a flush of sadness for Hezekiah, the many, many more like him: for all Negras he imagined would never know what it was to revel in the freedom one felt in simply walking into another valley for the first time, that unfettered luxury of setting off to go where one wanted to go.
All and still—Titus admitted to himself—it seemed there damned well weren’t that many white men who ever really hungered to experience that feeling of true freedom. How very few in number were those who set out, not knowing where their journey would take them, not knowing what they would learn along the way, what they would find if and when they got to the end of their quest.
Men who lived as if it did not really matter, reaching the end of the trail. Their lives measured only in the journey. Spirits cast upon the winds, like a feather dancing, dancing.
Better that his spirit were chanced to dance on the wind, than to be mired in a plot of upturned ground back in Boone County.
Here at that fire in the deep of those woods blanketing southern Tennessee, Titus was once again rock-
