Dance on the Wind

gleeful celebration the men tormented some of the last snakes before those too were dispatched. One of them, a yellow monster more than six feet in length, the men had teased and taunted with their hoe handles for more than an hour before the snake viciously clamped down on one of the hickory poles, therein releasing its deadly venom. Before their eyes those astonished men watched the poison rise through the grain of the wood a full twenty-two inches before the rattler’s head was severed with a blow from a belt ax.

Despite what frontier folk had long claimed and Titus himself had come to believe, wanted to believe, needed to believe—that unlike those yellow Kentucky rattlers hunted to extinction, the buffalo had merely moved west to escape the encroachments of man—Titus finally decided he had been fooling himself.

Now he knew there simply were no buffalo left.

As his sense of loss deepened, so he came to drink more with each passing year, despairing of ever finding a new dream to replace that great and shaggy one he had carried inside him so long, the dream that had lured him away from his father’s place, seduced him down the great rivers and eventually enticed him here to the gateway of the frontier.

At the first of those blurred, grog-sotted days, more than anything Titus sought a new dream to hang his fading hopes on, something to fix his future squarely on besides those long-gone buffalo.

But as the seasons rolled past, even that no longer mattered. Not dreams, not hopes, nothing that faintly rattled of the future. With a little more numbing alcohol to deaden his pain come payday each week, he found himself caring just that much less that he no longer had a reason to hope. Eventually it no longer mattered that he had ceased to dream.

How Titus came to enjoy that contented reverie he sensed with the first sip of each mug of metheglin brewed from the fermented honey found in the pods of the honey-locust tree and mixed with water; or mead, a potent brew of metheglin fermented with yeast and spices—later on fighting down the panic that swept over him when he reached the bottom of each cup and grew desperate for more. What liquid amnesia burned its way down his gullet made it easier to forget all that he had left behind to get here and seize his dream at last … for now he realized his dream was nothing more than that—a wisp of fantasy, hope without substance.

Drink he did these days, haunting the stinking watering holes nearly every night when he had money in his pockets. After all, Titus had little else to spend his wages on. There in his corner of Troost’s livery he had enough blankets to hold winter’s bite at bay, them and a chamber pot Bass would empty when he got around to it. Beyond those simple requirements all Titus needed to provide himself were his infrequent meals, taking them out and about the town whenever and wherever he chose, then returning to darken the tavern doorways that dotted the gloomy streets and narrow alleyways near the wharf, there to drink himself into another numbing stupor. More and more of those mornings-after he discovered that instead of having stumbled his way back to the livery, he more often than not woke up beside some less-than-comely wench who occasionally smelled even worse than he.

Then there were the all too frequent fights—most of them nothing more than good-natured eye-gouging romps with his fists. Nothing more than raucous brawls wherein rowdy men wore off their pent-up energies or burned off their cheap but stupefying liquor. Yet through the years Titus could recall standing in one of the wharfside grog-shops or beer-sties when a fight turned poisonous, downright deadly: the combatants no longer wrestled and pummeled, no longer bit and gouged in some degree of good backwoods sportsmanship with it all. Most times it stunned him just how quickly those tests of stamina and bloodied good humor would turn murderous, knives drawn or pistols pulled—one man to stand victorious over the other who lay dying, his life oozing onto some mud-soaked, slushy floor.

Bass lost all but a handful of his fights, usually ending up as the one dragged out into the snow or the rain, there to be left unconscious for what roaming curs might happen by, drawn by the scent of blood to lick at his wounds, some to raise a leg and mark him territorially with the true measure of their disdain. No, Titus Bass wasn’t really all that good with his fists, nor was he really nimble enough on his feet to dodge the hard and hammering blows, much less quick enough to make good a speedy retreat. But until that March of 1824 he could be thankful of one thing: at least he hadn’t run into a man who had pulled out a gun, or a knife, or some other weapon every bit as deadly.

“Lucky you were,” Hysham Troost growled at him early that cold morning. His words frosted about his head like a wreath of steam as he cradled his young apprentice’s head across one arm.

Titus came to slowly, eventually blinking up at the blacksmith through one swollen eye, the other crusted shut. His puffy, bruised lips tore apart their seam of bloody crust. “L-lucky?” His tongue felt swollen to twice its size, likely bitten. And old coagulate clogged the back of his throat. “This … don’t feel like lucky.”

“From the looks of it I’d say the bastards used devil’s claws on you.” Troost dipped the rag back into his cherrywood piggin and wrung it out before squeezing drops into the dark and crusting tracks matted in the thick brown hair behind Titus’s ear, lacerations extending on down the back of his neck, ending only at the shoulder. “You musta been turning when the feller what wore them claws smacked you. Damned lucky them cruel things didn’t connect square on your face. It’d tore your eye plumb outta the skull if’n they had.”

“Devil’s claws,” Titus groaned as the term sank into his groggy, hungover, brawl-hammered brain. He closed his eyes again to the shards of icy pain with this cleaning of those wounds. That inky blackness helped but a little. “W-what’re devil’s …”

“Just like iron knuckles, wore by them mean bastards what you’ll find in them hellholes where Titus Bass goes to drink himself onto his face. In my time I’ve see’d just such a thing used once or twice myself.” Troost pantomimed as if pulling something on his right hand, then made a fist with it, the fingers of his left hand serving as the curved claws protruding from the knuckles. “Like iron nails they are. Slip their fingers into a set of ’em. Use ’em to rake a man’s face, tear up his chest, down his arms, or across his belly—opening him up like a slaughtered hog. With a swipe or two them claws can butcher you good.” He wagged his head, and then with a voice grown thick with sentiment, he said quietly, “Damn, but you’re lucky, Titus.”

“My head … don’t feel that way.”

“The day you walked in here years ago, I had you figured for better sense. But over time you’ve got yourself stupid. Real stupid. Damn, but I just know you’re gonna make me sad one of these days—me going to look for you and find you dead. Why you gotta go looking for trouble the way you do?”

“I don’t … don’t look.” He squeezed his matted eye shut as Troost dribbled water across them both to loosen the crust before rubbing more of the coagulate free.

“Well, then—maybe you are just what you say you are: one unlucky son of a bitch. Trouble must come looking for you … because for about as long as I’ve knowed you—trouble’s had it no problem finding Titus Bass.”

“I ain’t never gone to prison.”

“Maybe that’s a matter of time,” Troost said. “Prison, or a grave.”

“Prison? I never stole no man’s purse, nary a horse neither. And there ain’t a grave been dug what can hold me!” He lamely tried to chuckle at that, laugh at his predicament and hopelessness. But the self-deprecation did not last long for the physical hurt he caused himself.

“You know what they do to horse thieves hereabouts, don’t you?” Troost asked.

Of course he knew. Over the years Bass had seen many a thief caught and brought to swift and primitive justice in old St. Louis. Down on First Street was where they dealt with such criminals at a small, dusty patch of ground where stood three pillories and a pair of flogging posts.

“I know. They start by giving a horse thief stripes.”

Behind the black and bruised lids where Troost ministered to his torn flesh swam the scenes of those he had seen lashed to the posts: their wrists bound together, pulled up high with a rope looped through a large iron ring at the top of those ten-foot posts buried firmly in the ground. Barely able to stand on their toes, the guilty were given an old-fashioned flaying with all those horrid strands of a knotted cat-o’-nine-tails.

That done, a special penalty was exacted by the town constables. First the criminal was held down while he was branded: an H on one cheek, T on the other. With his skin still sizzling, still screeching in pain, the thief was hauled out of the dirt and dragged over to one of the pillories, where a constable locked the top bar of the pillory over his neck, then nailed the thief’s two ears to the wooden yoke. There the criminal remained, nailed in place and unable to move much at all for the next twenty-four hours. Only then was he freed, after the nails were cut free, ears and all, with a huge knife, just before the yoke was removed. The bleeding, branded criminal was then allowed to run, to flee, certain to carry the severity of his punishment with him the rest