beneath the breeze while sunlight and shadow chased one another across the meadow … until at last the day grew late. Twilight’s last golden kiss soon to brush the cheek of the land.
The sweat from his efforts had long ago dried by the time he pulled on his shirt, tugging it down over the black streaks of grime from that special ground. Taking up the pony’s hackamore and laying the shovel over his shoulder, Titus trudged back across the belly of that glade. Miles to go before dark. Miles to go before he returned to what was, and was never to be again.
At the far line of trees rustling above him, Bass stopped. Turning, he gazed back, struck that no longer did the long black grave look so much like a dark scar in that meadow of green.
Wildflowers danced like so many bursts of color in the breeze that whispered past Isaac Washburn’s final rest.
Titus had buried more than the trapper in that shady spot last spring.
He had buried his hopes as well.
Then returned to town, and the livery that was all he had.
“Where’s that fur man?” Hysham Troost had asked, eyeing the pony, the blankets gone from its back, when Bass had shown up late that afternoon.
“Dead.”
The blacksmith stiffened. “You … you didn’t have anything to do with it?”
Turning to look at Troost in the long shadows piercing the west doorway of that livery, Bass shook his head. “Kill’t his own self.”
“How?”
“Likely drunk hisself to death.”
Chewing on his lower lip a minute, Troost finally volunteered, “I’m sorry, Titus.”
“Not nowhere near as sorry as I am, Hysham,” he replied, starting away with the pony, moving toward the paddock outside the rear door. “Damn shame Isaac Washburn died like he did. Been more fitting he died out yonder.”
“You still set on going out there your own self?”
He stopped in his tracks, his back still to Troost, and wagged his head, it suddenly feeling very, very heavy upon his shoulders. “No. I ain’t fixing to do nothing but go back to what I been doing all along, Hysham.”
And he did.
Through that summer, on into the fall and winter’s cold squeeze upon the lower Missouri, Titus threw himself back into his work. Each week Troost paid him for the last six days, Bass buried a little of it beneath a stone laid behind the small stove in his cell. The rest he used to buy himself a drink now and then, the feral pleasure of a good meal, and the company of a succession of women who each one helped Bass hold at bay the numbness slowly creeping to penetrate to his very marrow. Gone for good were the days of whiskey fever and whoring until he passed out. Gone were those days of dreaming on the buffalo.
For months there he routinely had pleasured himself one evening a week with that coffee-skinned quadroon, of times sharing a bottle of West Indian sweet rum with her before she hiked up her nettle-bark petticoat and climbed astride him. At least until the Saturday night he came to call, fresh from the bathhouse and a warm meal, ready to have that beauty work her magic on his flesh so he could swallow down what troubled him so.
The old woman who watched over the girls told Titus that his favorite was no longer there—having taken up residence in a private place farther up the hill, closer to where the rich and very French families dwelled. Bass touched the blue scarf he tied around his neck every Saturday night.
“I’ll go see her there. What’s the place so I’ll know it?”
“You can’t see her up there,” she tried to explain, the wounded look in her eyes showing how she tried to understand.
“She ain’t coming back?”
“Rich man bought her, took her off to the place where he’s gonna keep her for himself, now on and always. Buy her all the soft clothes she’d ever wanna wear. There’s a tree outside her window, she told me when she left —where she’ll sit and watch the birds sing come the end of this goddamned winter.”
“He married her?”
The woman had laughed at that. “Sakes, no! He’s already got him a wife—likely one cold as ice. He don’t ever intend to marry the girl. Just keep her in that fancy place he bought her—to be there whenever he shows up so she can pleasure only him.”
“Maybeso I can see her still. Sneak up there.”
The woman wagged her head sadly. “She went there on her own. That means she wasn’t thinking ’bout no one else. The girl left everything behind. And that means you too. Best you forget her now.”
For a moment he stared at the planks beneath their feet. Another piece of him chipped away, like a flake of plaster from one of those painted saints down at the cathedral on Rue d’Eglise. Then Titus looked into the woman’s eyes, vowing he would not let it hurt. And remembered Isaac’s favorite.
“What about that one with the brown hair down to the middle of her back? Think she was called Jenny.”
“You’re two days late, son,” the woman replied morosely. “A mean bastard cut her up good. Up to the pauper’s cemetery they buried Jenny in a shallow hole just this morning.”
Swallowing, Bass said, “Any other’n. Any one a t’ali.”
“You ain’t so choosy no more?”
His eyes went left down the corridor, then right. Back to the woman. “Not choosy at all.”
Far from it.
From that night on Titus rutted with the fleshy ones, the pocked ones, the ones who hadn’t cared to bathe in a month or more—the quality and color of whores in that city always depended upon the size of a man’s purse. But it wasn’t money that was determining his choice of solace for Bass. For no reason at all he simply wasn’t particular where he took his pleasure, seeking only that salve to rub into all those hidden wounds he kept covered so well.
It was simply too cruel to fool himself anymore into believing in hope. Never again would he cling to any dream.
For six days a week he choked down his despair at never hoping again, daring never to dream again— pounding out his rage on that anvil, sweating on into that early spring. Of each Saturday night he found himself a new whore to stab with his anger as he rutted above her. Until he had gone through them all and by those cold days as winter waned, Titus started pleasuring his way back through what women he could afford. Frightened that each week it took just a little more of that balm to soothe his deepest wounds. Scared they never would heal.
When he found himself weakest, Titus would brood on that faraway land—mythical as it was, the stuff of children’s bedtime stories. He was weakest in those moments when the whiskey could no longer stiffen his backbone, when he was drained, done with the sweating torment of driving his rage into a woman, and he lay beside her, gone limp and soft inside as well as out.
A cruel hoax his grandpap and Washburn had played on him: this stuff of longing for that place where the horizon ran black with buffalo.
Bitterness became a feast for him as he held those last days of winter’s retreat at bay.
With the melting drip of that last snow slowly disappearing from the shakes on the livery roof, Titus stood gazing at the sun as it settled atop the trees from the western door of the livery. It glowed so yellow, as golden as those wildflowers he had rooted down into that black mound where he’d planted Isaac Washburn’s remains. As golden as that prairie the trapper had said was the faraway kingdom of the buffalo.
Every bit as yellow as the candle faintly flickering within Titus Bass’s soul.
Perhaps it was that late-winter sun. Perhaps it was the remembrance of those flowers planted for a burial shroud. Then again, maybe it was the sudden and inescapable remembrance of that distant land, admitting that some part of him still clung to hope … whatever it was, Bass stood there at that western door sensing for the first time that the candle of his dream was there and then being rekindled. No longer did he wish to drown its warmth in the tears of self-pity and the wrenching agony of his despair.
Before that yellow sun had settled any farther into the land beyond those trees outside Troost’s livery, Titus had snatched up Washburn’s old rifle and hurried with it over to Main Street, where a year before, he had his eye coveting some of the fine workmanship on display in the small shop of a local riflesmith.
