bugs don’t come crawl in it right away. But you’ll have to keep the mice out of it.”
“Thank … thanks be to you, Hysham.”
He patted Bass’s arm gently, then rose again. “You sleep. Eat when you want. I’ll get more if’n you want. Come see to you later in a while.”
How lonely he felt hearing the footsteps shuffle off across the dried hay spread over the pounded clay floor of his little stall, footsteps fading down the row of stalls. In a moment he made out the distant hiss of the bellows exciting the fire, imagining the sparks sent spewing into the air like darting fireflies. Then Troost began pounding on the anvil, sure, solid, clocklike strikes with his leather-wrapped hammer.
Titus had no home.
Not Rabbit Hash. And St. Louis wasn’t any more of a home to him either—even as much as Hysham Troost had taken him under his wing and shown him what a man could do with his hands when coupling fire and iron.
“Almost like a man and woman, ain’t it?” Hysham had declared one day when they were fashioning rifle barrels: huge, heavy octagonal shafts of steel they would eventually cut with rifling and brown to a dull sheen. “A man and woman come together with such fire, softening their hardness in that coupling. Brought together in such a way they eventually become something new, different from ’em both by themselves. Same as what we’ve been doing here, Titus. It’s a good life you’ve chose for yourself. A good life for a man, this work.”
True enough. At Hysham Troost’s elbow Bass had taken what rude skills he had learned from Able Guthrie and perfected them—learning to make nails, sharpen plowshares, mend wagon tires, fashion beaver traps and lock parts for rifles, as well as repair all the many mishaps befalling ironware of the day, for much of that iron was poorly made, impure in grade, and more often than not very brittle. While all farmers in the St. Louis region, like Guthrie, possessed the rudimentary skills it took to crudely fashion a horseshoe or repair a grub hoe, practically none of them had the skills and tools to accomplish anything more sophisticated in the way of repair, much less manufacture.
There in that warm corner of Troost’s livery beside Hysham’s forge, Titus became a part of the process—no more than a tool like the other tools he used—the huge bellows, a bench vise, a half-dozen hammers, a sledge, a shoeing hammer, a horseshoe punch, a handful of tongs, two hand vises, at least seven files and a pair of rasps, a wedge and cold chisel, along with an ax-eye punch. The whole of it could be carried by one pack animal if need be, with weight to spare … yet with such an outfit and an anvil—a blacksmith could forge miracles, if not repair dreams.
The frontier blacksmith was truly an important member of any community. Especially for the frontier rifle makers.
Many times over the years Hysham had given Titus a perfectly round steel rod of a certain size and a long rectangular piece of iron he was to shape, welding it inch by inch around the long rod, withdrawing the rod after each weld to cool it, reheating the iron while he did so, making weld by weld until he had his octagonal rifle barrel shaped around that rod.
A craftsman like Troost even showed Titus how to fashion his own rifling tool completely out of wood, save for the small cutting edge of fire-hardened steel. With this Titus would be given the next task of inserting the tool with its small cutting button, twisting and drawing, twisting and drawing, removing tiny curls of the barrel, making lands and grooves of a particular caliber’s twist as specified by the growing rifle trade in the city.
“You need a hot fire, Titus,” Troost had explained early on. “Don’t know what all you’ve learned so far—so you pay heed what I got to teach you. Man can use seasoned hickory, or even oak bark—but I prefer to use my own charcoal. Made right out there in my own kiln.”
Charcoal meant cutting and splitting wood. Across the years of sweating summer and winter, Titus came to appreciate a good, sharp, narrow—or felling—ax. With its handle or helve at two feet six inches in length, carved of shell-bark hickory and set into a head weighing no more than four and a half pounds, it was a tool no man on the frontier could do without. Many times had Titus spent a portion of a day selecting a proper piece of seasoned hickory, whittling it into rough shape for an ax handle, then smoothing it with a piece of broken glass, eventually to wedge it into the ax eye so that it would stay despite hard use.
Pity that men did not treat their axes more tenderly, Titus discovered, making sure to warm them on frosty mornings to lessen the danger of breakage to that honed edge. And woe to the boy who allowed his father’s ax to bounce from wood to rocky ground, or the wife who used her husband’s ax to cut the bone from a gammon of bacon.
But without just such flaws in human nature, Hysham Troost preached, “There simply wouldn’t be enough work for a good blacksmith hereabouts.”
Long, long after Titus heard the last ring of the old man’s hammer on anvil fade from the sodden, cold air of the livery, he felt himself nudged, awakened rudely.
“Shit—you damn well don’t look like you’re in no shape to do no work for a man.”
At the strange voice he tried to turn his face, tried easing open his puffy, crusted eyelids. Clearly this wasn’t Troost kneeling nearby. A different voice. A different smell.
“Don’t try to talk right now,” the stranger continued. “I punched your fire up there in that leetle stove ye got yourself thar’. The warm sure does take the bite off this’r night.”
Bass listened as the man shuffled about in the hay nearby like a dog making its bed, then settled back with a grunt and a sigh. The stranger was eating something, his lips smacking as he continued talking.
“Come in hyar lookin’ fer a blacksmith. Ye be the blacksmith? Shit-fire. I be needin’ a blacksmith in the wust way. Traps is what I got need of. Strong-assed traps, mind you. Them criks and rivers in that thar’ kentry take ’em a toll of meanness on a man’s beaver traps. This’r nigger cain’t be takin’ off fer the far lonesome ’thout a smithy like you fixin’ on ’em.”
This was a … a Negra!
But … the man didn’t talk like no Negra Titus had ever met, sure as hell sounded nothing like the one he had known the best—Hezekiah Christmas. But, Lord and behold! The man had just called himself a nigger.
Painfully he cracked one eye open, his heart thumping with a generous mix of both fear and anticipation. In the dull glow of that squat-bellied toad of an iron stove Titus made out the dim, shadowy figure hunched in the corner of his tiny cell, chewing at what meat remained on a huge bone. Slowly he raked his sore eyes over the man, his nose suddenly pricked with the fragrance of what the man ate.
No, what Titus smelled could not be that bone the stranger tossed aside carelessly before wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It had to be the clothing he wore.
In shadows that rose and fell down the man’s arms and legs long fringes danced in the muted rose of the fire’s dim light. Strips of dull color laced their patterns down each sleeve, over each shoulder, a round patch emblazoned at the center of the man’s chest, partially covered by a long, unkempt beard he wiped his greasy hands upon, then stroked aside. From somewhere beneath the tangle of his chin whiskers he produced a small clay pipe.
Straining his eyes through the murky, smoky firelight kicked out by that small, cast-iron stove, Bass tried to make out the man’s features. Sure as hell didn’t look like no Negra. Not like no Negra Titus Bass had ever laid eyes on—drunk or sober. No broad nose there … but it was damned hard to tell for sure in this light, what with all that matted beard.
As the stranger loaded the pipe from a pouch at his side, Titus worked to tear his eyes open wider, the better to make out the man’s hoary head—a mass of hair sprouting every which way in wild and greasy sprigs once he yanked off his low-crowned, wide-brimmed beaver-felt hat and carefully laid that wind-battered, rain-soaked old veteran aside. Evidently a prized possession, Bass made note.
Agonizingly Titus rolled onto an elbow about the time he cracked the second eye fully open and rocked himself up.
“Ah—thar’s a leetle life left to ye, is thar now?” The stranger leaned forward, his face coming into the stove’s glow as he stuffed a long piece of straw through the grate on the stove’s door.
Bass nearly gasped, low and rumbling, collapsing from his elbow again. “You … you’re a white man.”
“What?” the man asked, then threw his head back and roared in great peals of laughter, rocking back into the smoky confines of the shadows skulking in that corner of Bass’s little cell. “Me, a white man? Sure as sun, coon—I be a white man in sartin comp’ny, mister. But in t’other comp’ny, like these decent, God-fearin’ folks hereabouts, I s’pose I be took for as Injun as Injuns come.”
“I … thought … no. But you … said you was—”
