where the blood oozed.
He seized her by the shoulders. “No, you wouldn’t.”
She glared at him harshly a moment; then her face seemed to crack, softening, her eyes deepening in hue. “You bastard,” she whispered, those eyes pleading. “Don’t you ever, ever take advantage of me … now that you know what I … how I—”
“I swear. Never will I.”
“Can I trust you, Titus?”
He gulped, blinking the tears back as folks flooded past them, heading for what was left of the south riverbank where once had stood a street bustling with frontier commerce, a wharf where riverboats had tied up, and the town’s population helped inch settlement farther and farther west.
“You can trust me with your life, Abigail.”
Her lips moved as if she were trying to say something, then she collapsed against him instead. Wrapping her skinny arms about him tightly, she buried her face in his chest, sobbing. “Don’t care what you say, I know I cain’t ever trust you now. Ain’t never been able to trust no man. Your kind is here today. Gonna be gone off tomorrow. You’ll just go away, tearing yourself off a little piece of my heart when you disappear.”
“Didn’t ever have no intention of leaving you … least like that I won’t.”
“You bastard,” she groaned with a shudder, as if in saying it to Titus Bass, she could lump all men together in him. “You’re no better’n a lying sack of pig’s entrails—all of you!”
And the harder she sobbed, the tighter she clung to his icy coat. All around them stunned people trudged this way and that in shock, as if struck half-dead at what had just befallen them. But there on that’tiny piece of icy, sodden ground, their sodden clothes freezing in the frightfully cold air, the two of them sat. Bass rocked her in his arms.
“I won’t never leave you like that,” he whispered into the wet sprigs of her wild hair that still smelled of too much tobacco smoke and the musty stench of their bedding gone too long without airing, those blankets and hides they retreated under every night she trundled back to him, for a few hours all done with lying on her back in those stinking cribs behind the saloon that once stood at the river’s edge.
“You damn right you won’t leave me, Titus Bass,” she promised harshly. “I’ll leave you first. Afore you leave me hurting. I’ll say my fare-thee-well to you, you bastard. Just like I been wanting to say it to every man I ever come to care for just a little … when he up and leaves me.”
Suddenly she jerked back, snagging the lapels of his dripping coat. “Some of those sons of bitches even had the balls to steal what little money I had at the time. Can you beat that? They’d hit me, made me bleed, then stole’t what little I had hid away for myself—”
“You’re hurt. Bleeding,” he interrupted, suddenly drawn from the tremble of her blue lips to the darkening gash at her brow. “Let’s go see to it.”
As Titus dragged her to her feet, he said, “How’s a fella s’posed to thank you for saving ’im?”
She stood quivering beside him. “Onliest way I know is just don’t ever run off from me like them others done. That’s how. You’ll thank me by waiting until I take off on you.”
Looking down into her frightened eyes, he knew he had no way of ever understanding her terror that she might fall in love with him. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. Ain’t gonna ever hurt no one like that—”
“You just let me go, Titus. Let me leave you behin’t when the time comes.”
Without saying anything more Bass turned Abigail toward the path of girdled trees that would take them west toward the edge of town, where the settlement of Owensboro had stretched itself more and more every week this past summer. There he had raised them a new place, a dugout a little bigger than her shanty had been, with a bit better roof of all one pitch, just like a lean-to. A single door and window in that front facing the river. They hadn’t needed anything more, because he worked by day and she worked by night, and they gave themselves to one another in the moments of passing. For the time being it was enough to share what little they had with one another.
For the time.
The center of that great earthquake struck in Missouri, some seventy miles below the mouth of the Ohio, at a settlement called New Madrid, once a Spanish military post on the west bank of the Mississippi. For more than a hundred miles in every direction the earth convulsed.
Although Owensboro lay 130 miles away as the crow would fly, even that part of the lower Ohio River valley wasn’t spared much of the devastation that eleventh day of December, 1811. Not only the Ohio, but even more so the Mississippi, both rolled back in their beds, flowing north for a short time while the earth heaved beneath them. Hundreds upon countless hundreds of keelboats, Kentucky broadhorns, log rafts of all description were torn apart, dashed against sandbars and riverbanks, the surface of the great rivers strewn for weeks and weeks with the debris of craft and cargo alike.
Five nights later near ten o’clock the crust of the earth trembled once more. Waterfowl clacked and squawked overhead, afraid to put down and roost as they were scattered to the four winds in their fear.
Then again the next day, December 17. Once more the banks caved in, carved away by forces stronger than the rivers that reversed direction in their beds. Great chasms splintered open across forest and field—raw, gaping lacerations in the earth that drew the curious and the frightened and the truly awed in the weeks and months to come—brought there to stare and consider. And when folks returned to the river, they always found it foaming, littered with a tangle of drift timber and uprooted trees. The thick forests were now a maze of sundered stands of maple, elm, oak, and beech. Those caught in more open country had witnessed the earth undulate in regular waves advancing at close to the pace of a trotting horse. In those first few days following the initial quake, there were times when the day became all but dark as the night, times when the sun failed to show its face, hidden behind a yellow pall, a haze wrought of dust and fires and hell on earth.
By Christmas many folks had begun migrating away from that tormented land. Where they were bound for sure, they did not know. But word already had it that the worst of things had devastated the region south and west from the mouth of the Ohio. Best to head back east and north, they figured. If a wagon could be had, settlers loaded it with all they could carry out of that dangerous country some said was condemned by the hand of God Almighty. If nothing else was available, they strapped what they could to the backs of their horses, mules, oxen, and milch cows, setting off to get as far as possible from that land of the devil, often forced in their travels to bridge the great chasms of earth rent in those mighty upheavals.
Even the wildlife migrated for a time, panthers and turkeys, deer and bear, wolves and waterfowl, all huddling in among the frightened fleeing from the maw of hell, taking what comfort they could from humankind in the wake of so great a catastrophe. Just to get out of that damned country.
And
Those who fled often looked back over their shoulders as they left the downriver settlements like Owensboro. Some merely clucked and shook their heads. Others ranted out the last of their sanctimonious warnings. Look to the heavens! Why, a burning star had foretold of catastrophe! That very same comet that had streaked across the heavens back in August and on into September and even October, with each fiery trip warning of God’s hand soon to be unleashed on the land of the sinners. Even the righteous who would not listen, so the warnings went, would be swallowed up with the unclean.
“Go! Go now!” shouted one of the prophets of doom standing there at the edge of what was left of the Owensboro wharf Titus and the others labored to rebuild that cold, icy January.
With a singing of hymns the doomsayer led a curious flock in song and fervent prayer before he unleashed that brimstone tirade castigating those who sinned against the Judgment Day. It took him no time to gather a sizable crowd of those still clinging to Owensboro, women who now huddled beneath shawls or shreds of Russian canvas, a few men who shuddered beneath wool blankets to listen to that dire warning from one who, by the conviction of his powerful words, appeared to have a much greater knowledge about such things both physical and metaphysical than the mere common man.
