Owensboro. Girdled trees strained for the sky as others were felled, then quickly dragged off by grunting teams of oxen while knots of men poured oil atop the fresh stumps and set them afire until the sky was corduroyed with black streamers. Still more laborers laid log upon log, raising the walls of cabins that would hold at bay the last of winter’s chill from these hardy pioneering folk pushing west with the migrating frontier. Below Titus the air hung ripe with fresh sweat and steaming dung, burning hardwood and lye soap coming to a boil, those open fires attended by women who slowly worked great paddles round and round in the pungent brew, fingering sprigs of hair back from their rosy faces as the trail-weary pair pushed through their midst toward the cluster of shacks and lean- tos and cabins gathered close by the river’s edge.
There in the cold shadows of that late afternoon he found her in the makeshift watering hole not any bigger than his folks cabin back in Boone County. Mincemeat had one stockinged leg kicked up on a crude bench hacked from half a length of a tree trunk supported by four wobbly pegs, her arm draped over the shoulder of an old man whose five-day stubble showed more gray than it did the same mousy brown of what little hair still remained atop his sunburnt head.
“Mathilda told me I’d find you downriver,” he began in a happy gush.
At first she only turned her head, squinted at him through the musty haze of that poorly drafted fireplace and the smoke of more than a dozen pipes, candles flutting the air with their dancing fingers of light. The room fell to a hush; all the customers turned to study not only Bass, but the big Negro behind him.
“Mathilda?” Then the woman dropped her skinny leg in its worn stocking to the pounded clay floor and turned on him wearily. “Do I know you?”
“Sure you know me, Mincemeat,” he replied with sudden alarm. “We knowed each other up to the Kangaroo.”
“I just come from Louisville,” she said sourly, her bleary, bloodshot eyes peering over his shoulder at the tall, bald man behind him. “It’s a good place to be from. He’ll have to go—his kind ain’t ’llowed in here.”
“He’s with me.”
“Looks to be you’ll both have to leave too,” she replied a bit acidly, almost too wearily. “C’mon back when you’re by your own self and ready to have some fun with Mincemeat.”
His heart was sinking. Titus felt himself beginning to tremble. “You … you don’t know me?”
“I supposed to?”
“I come all this way to find you.”
“Find me?” And she laughed a bit too forced and shrill. “Must be you’re wanting a roll.” Mincemeat put out her hand. “As you can see, I’m still a working woman, mister. That means a roll will cost you a shilling—an’ that’s good till you’re satisfied. Half-shilling for each time you’re satisfied after that till the night’s done.” She began to turn back to the small group of hardened, dirty men she had been regaling at the moment Titus walked in. “You come back when you ain’t got him along and you fix to spend some money on Mincemeat.”
Smarting in anger, Bass quickly glanced at the other two bawdy women looking on with amused attention, their arms draped over their customers. Shreds of memory placed them as Mathilda’s girls too.
“Abigail—” Then he watched as she smarted with the name. Flinching as if struck with a flat hand, slowly turning back to gaze at him with a studious squint.
“I’m Titus,” he continued softly as the noise in that grogshop started to swell once more, like a deer’s bladder he would fill with tiny pebbles from river gravel, to stretch it out while it dried to make himself a pouch. “Titus Bass. Don’t you remember me?”
Shoving a long strand of unruly hair back from her cheek, she whirled away from the others, stepping his way with one red-rimmed eye clenched. “By damn, you don’t say! It for certain is the boy what come to the Kangaroo not long back—all ready to become a man, this’un was.”
At the table behind her some of the others snorted. Bass sensed the first burn of embarrassment. But as suddenly her face became open and lit up with undisguised glee. Mincemeat lunged against him, her bony arms wrapped around his waist.
“Course I remember you,” she exclaimed, then whirled to explain to the room, “I’m sure you older fellas understand if I spend some time here with the young’un.” She sniggered, saying, “You all ought’n remember what it was like when you had you a peeder what stayed hard all night long. Lemme tell you when this girl gets a chance to slip one of them atween her legs—she does it!”
The rest of the men laughed and hooted, as crude and foul a bunch of flatboaters and wood-raftsmen as he had ever seen clear down to New Orleans. He could still hear some of those poor, sick, womanless drunkards plain as anything when she took him out the low front door of that cabin and pointed to some tarps stretched between some nearby trees.
“Tell your Negra he can bed down there. You an’ me going over yonder way.”
When Hezekiah moved off to spread his blankets beneath the sections of oiled canvas lashed above a fire pit where sat a three-legged stool and cooking pot suspended on a chain from a tall tripod, the woman yanked Titus away, leading him through the folds of a canvas door into her small log lean-to. No sooner had he tried to stand inside than he banged his head on the rough-barked logs of the low ceiling. Bass dragged off his crumpled hat and rubbed his scalp.
“Get down here with me,” she instructed as she pulled back the pile of blankets from a thin pallet of bear and deer hides before she began yanking off her own grimy, smoke-stained garments. “C’mere an’ gimme what you gimme before at the Kangaroo. Dangerous up there, ain’t it, Titus?” She quickly pulled her long dress up and over her head. “Banging your head on that roof ’stead of being down here banging on me.”
When he collapsed beside her on the pallet, Bass found she smelled of stale whiskey, old meals, a day’s suffocation of tobacco smoke, and the rancid stench of other men—but, God! how he found himself ignited by the mere sight of her naked flesh, the feel of the generous curves to her as he hurried out of his shucks and slid beneath those icy blankets atop her. It didn’t stay cold in there for long.
That first time the woman didn’t fall back on ceremony or any of the preliminaries; instead she stroked him so savagely that he had no choice but to rise to the occasion before she placed him home and thrust her bony hips upward against him. Within moments Titus spent himself in great waves of relief, then slept against her, awakening in the darkness of that winter’s night to find himself hungry once more.
“You can take me all you want, when you want,” she vowed with a whisper in the dark. “Long as you promise you’ll never call me Mincemeat again.”
“I … I promise … Ab-abigail.”
Back again with her body now, the way she flung herself at him with such fiery abandon in the dark and the cold of that shanty, he came to realize how he had yearned for her.
Only with the coming of predawn’s dim, gray light did he remember Hezekiah. As cold as it was in that log and canvas shanty, Titus grew ashamed—rock-certain it must surely be much, much colder for the freedman who had joined him on this journey downriver to Owensboro. Tugging on his clothes as he ground at the sleep crusting both eyes, the youth hobbled through the low doorway, past the canvas flaps, surprised to find Hezekiah squatting on a nearby stump, waiting for him.
“Dis morning I gotta go,” the tall man explained softly, gesturing downriver with a slight bob of his head.
Bass glanced over his shoulder to the shanty at his back. “I … I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t make no big matter of it. I got me a good night’s sleep in them blankets you give me. Et me on some meat left over in that fire pot. Time now to do my business getting on ’way from here.”
Titus stuffed in his shirt, shivering with the cold, sunless chill, and pulled his belt tight in the buckle. “You wasn’t going ’thout saying nothing, was you?”
“You see’d I was waiting for you, Titus Bass. Tell you my fare-thees right to your face. Tell you my thanks for making me a free man.”
He stood looking at the big man, that bald head covered with a bright red bandanna Titus had bought him in Louisville. “You need find you a hat.” Then he impetuously pulled his own shapeless felt from his head and set it atop Hezekiah’s. “There, now. How’s that fit you?”
A big smile illuminated his face like a Christmas bonfire, his eyes rolling upward to regard the floppy brim. “Like it was made for me.”
“It’s your’n now.”
“I’ll pay you back someday, Titus Bass.”
