“No need. It ain’t much.”
“Said I’d pay you back.”
Titus nodded. “All right. I know I can count on you to do just that.”
“Saying my fare-thees is a hard thing.”
“Harder thing for me was to leave you standing there in that cage—bound away for some man’s fields,” Titus answered. Then he shook his head, remembering Boone County, and said, “Working the ground is hard enough for a man what wants such a life … I just can’t imagine what possesses a man to buy another to do his work for him.”
For a long moment they both stood all but toe to toe, perhaps both in wonder at what to say next as wisps of thick ground fog swirled at their feet and the cold breeze nudged at Titus’s hair across his shoulders.
“That woman in there,” Hezekiah began, “she good poon?”
“Poon?”
“Poon-tang,” he explained in a dumbfounded sort of way, and shrugged. “What men come to Annie Christmas’s place told me was what they wanted from a hoah.”
“Poon-tang,” Titus repeated, and glanced back at the shanty. “Yes,” he answered. “Maybe good enough for me to stay on here for a while.”
The freedman shuffled his feet for a bit, then finally blurted out, “We come ’cross’t each t’other one day?”
That stunned him for a moment. Then Bass brought his eyes back up to look at those yellowed ones of Hezekiah’s. “I hope so, my friend. Cain’t say as it’s likely, even possible to count on. I hear there’s so much country west of here—man can get lost out there if he’s a mind to.”
Titus watched some of the brightness drain from the freedman’s features.
“I was hoping …”
“Why don’t you count on it, then, Hezekiah?”
Some of the smile came back as the big man’s eyes pooled. He swept the youth’s hand up in his, shaking it tightly between both of his. “I count on that, Titus Bass. I pay you back for all you done one day. Pay you back in spades.”
“I know you will,” he answered, choking on the words when he saw Hezekiah’s eyes begin to spill.
“Gotta go,” the freedman said clumsily, half turning away with great reluctance.
“Man’s gotta leave when a man’s gotta leave,” Titus replied, holding his hand out again.
“No, like this,” Hezekiah said softly, pushing the hand aside and pulling the youth against him. “Is the best way to say my fare-thees.”
“A damn good way,” Bass whimpered against the Negro’s chest.
Eventually Hezekiah released him, whirled on his heel, and sprinted off all before Titus realized. He raised his hand to wave at the freedman’s back, not saying a word, and stood still as stone, feeling the loss of that last, fierce embrace, sensing that great emptiness come with the going of that friend after the farewells of so many friends. Now Bass was alone again. Except for the woman.
The slithering gray fingers of ground fog and the sharp, black, skeletal fingers of winter-bare trees swallowed Hezekiah as the man pushed west, away from the coming sun.
Titus felt the cold of a sudden. He stood there, barely seventeen. No home to speak of but a tarp and log shanty that belonged to a whore. No friends left in this settlement but Abigail. He had killed some Indians, a white man, and saved the lives of others. Bass wasn’t sure if growing up to be a man was all that great a thing or not anymore.
Turning slightly, he gazed at the shanty. Figured he could likely find work in a new place like Owensboro—an infant settlement sorely in need of strong backs and iron constitutions. As far as it was downriver from Louisville, chances were a man would make a go of it down at the landing, unloading goods from far upriver one day, loading timber and other staples for downriver the next. He felt certain he would find work and just might venture out to do so that very afternoon.
Just about the time the sun was sucked into the dark gut of the clouds overhead, the first icy snowflake struck his cheek, sharp as a patch knife and cold as the belly of the earth itself in these last weeks before spring. A time of year when it seemed spring would never come. When it seemed he had said good-bye to just about everything he had ever known, everyone he had ever come to care about.
Quit miserating, he scolded himself. At least here he would find work. At least here he had her. No matter that he would have to share her with others day and night. Titus figured there just might be enough warmth left over for him when Mincemeat quit for the night and dragged herself back to that pallet of bear hides and dirty wool blankets where he had banged his head before he had banged her.
Turning east, he looked upriver. Not sure where Kingsbury and the others might have put in for the night. Suddenly wondering how his mother had passed his seventeenth birthday. For the first time caring that his brothers should be giving their father a hand in the fields.
Then he looked to the west as it began to snow with a surprising ferocity. Hezekiah was gone into the teeth of that storm, alone. Truly alone now.
Already Titus had struggled against just about everything else and come out all right. Yet there remained one final struggle to pit himself against.
One day soon, when he was finally ready, he would move on as Hezekiah had done: by himself. Knowing he could not until the day when he could finally hack up this great pain of loneliness like a man hacked up something choking him, damn near suffocating him.
Hack himself free of it. And move on.
When that first great quiver of the earth’s crust rocked the lower Ohio River valley, Titus was on the cleated plank leading him across the icy water from a flatboat’s gunnel to the Owensboro wharf, where another two dozen broadhorns were tied up.
All that December morning long he and others had been hiring themselves out to merchants from distant points overland, and to upriver boat captains, taking cargo off the flats to begin its cross-country journey by horseback or wagon, perhaps hoisting bales and kegs and barrels onto what rivercraft were bound for Natchez and New Orleans. The icy air clung about a man, hoarfrost wreathed about his face, a sharp chill in every one of those wispy strands of fog that danced like greasy gauze clear across the river to the north bank of the Ohio. A pewter- pale, buttermilk-colored sun sulled in the sky overhead, every bit as cold and devoid of warmth as were the cast- iron hoppers squatting here and there along the dock where the stevedores kept fires going, over which they warmed their hands, rubbed their frozen fingers, even turned and kneaded their numbed asses over the feeble warmth that itself seemed to shrink beneath the mighty onslaught of this most recent cold snap gripping the lower Ohio.
Ice coated everything: tree branches and trunks, thick sheets of it whirling out of the northwest over the past three days to plaster the sides of cabins and shops, to slick the wharf itself. If the sun had ever chosen to put in a grand and bright appearance, it would have made for a dazzling show. But, instead, the sun hid behind the thick layer of icy frost blanketing the earth.
At dawn that morning Titus and some of the others had dragged in handcarts filled with mounds of sandy earth scraped from the bank east of town. This they scattered with their shovels over the crude, wide planks of the wharf, even spreading the sand up the length of those cleated planks that stretched from dock to flatboat like bands of thick and mortified connective tissue.
So it was that one moment he was plodding toward the wharf, planting each thick-soled, fur-lined pac moccasin deliberately along the sanded plank, glancing inquisitively at the ice riming the river below him around every trunklike stanchion supporting the dock … when the next heartbeat found him freed of the ninety-pound keg of ironmongery bound south for the settlement at Bowling Green. Like a dog flinging water from its hide—the keg flew one way, Bass the other. Just before he hit the water, the oak cask crashed against the side of the wharf with a great metallic clatter, splintering and splashing … but by then he was beneath the surface of the Ohio, numbed immediately, shocked by the cold immersion, his mind slow to react—until he realized he damn well might drown.
Not that he really hated water. It was something he might admit to drinking every now and then. And water enjoyed a fair enough reputation on those rare occasions when a man wanted himself a bath. But, by and large, if
