with my heartfelt appreciation,
I dedicate this triumphant return of
Titus Bass to the
who first took Ol’ Scratch
into their hearts,
then shared him with the world,
nine years ago—
thanks to each and every one of you
for making this the ride
of a lifetime!
The first time I descended the Ohio and Mississippi rivers I left Cincinnati in December 1808 with five flat boats, all loaded with produce. At that time there were but few settlers on the Ohio River, below the present city of Louisville. The cabins on the river below Louisville were few and far between.
—Joseph Hough
I have seen nothing in human form so profligate as [boatmen]. Accomplished in depravity, their habits seem to comprehend every vice. They make few pretensions to moral character; and their swearing is excessive and perfectly disgusting.
—James Flint
1
Slick as quicksilver the boy stepped aside when the mule flung her rump in his direction.
Only problem was, he had forgotten about the root that arched out of the ground in a great bow nearly half as tall as he stood without his Sunday-meeting and school-room boots on. The end of it cruelly snagged his ankle, sure as one of his possum snares.
Spitting out the rich, black loam as fine as flour in this bottomland, Titus Bass pulled his face out of the fresh, warm earth he had been chewing up with a spade, blinking his gritty eyes. And glared over his shoulder at the mule.
Damn, if it didn’t look as if she was smiling at him again. That muzzle of hers pulled back over those big front teeth the way she did at times just like this. Almost as if she was laughing at him when here he had just been thinking he was the one so damned smart.
“Why, you …,” the boy began as he dragged himself up to his knees, then to his bare feet in that moist earth chewed by the mule’s hooves and his work with iron pike and spade.
On impulse he lunged for the fallen spade, swung it behind his shoulder in both hands.
“Put it down, Titus.”
Trembling, the boy froze. Always had at the sound of that man’s voice.
“Said: put it down.”
The youth turned his head slightly, finding his father emerging from the trees at the far edge of the new meadow they were clearing. Titus weighed things, then bitterly flung the spade at that patch of ground between him and his father. The man stopped, stared down at it a moment, then bent to pick it up.
“You’d go and hit that mule with this,” Thaddeus Bass said as he strode up, stopped, and jammed the spade’s bit down into the turned soil, “I’d have call to larrup you good, son.” He leaned back with both strong, muscular hands wrapped around the spade handle like knots on oiled ropes. “Thought I’d teached you better’n that.”
“Better’n what?” the boy replied testily, but was sorry it came out with that much vinegar to it.
Thaddeus sighed. “Better’n to go be mean to your animals.”
Titus stood there, caught without a thing to say, watching his father purse his lips and walk right on past to the old mule. Thaddeus Bass patted the big, powerful rump, stroked a hand down the spine, raising a small, stir of lather near the harness, then scratched along the mare’s neck as he cooed to the animal. She stood patiently in harness, hooked by leather and wood of singletree, the quiet murmur of her jangling chains—the whole of it lashed round a tree stump young Titus Bass had been wrenching out of a piece of ground that seemed too reluctant to leave go its purchase on the stubborn stump.
Titus flushed with indignation. “She was about to kick me, Pap.”
Without looking back at his son, Bass said, “How you know that?”
“She was hitchin’ her rump around to kick me,” Titus retorted. “Know she was.”
“How hard you working her?”
Dusting himself off, he replied in exasperation, “How hard I’m working her? You was the one sent me out here with her to finish the last of these goddamned stumps.”
Thaddeus whirled on his son, yellow fire in his tired eyes. “Thought I told you I didn’t wanna hear no such language come outta your mouth.”
He watched his father turn back to the mule’s harness, emboldened by the man’s back, braver now that he did not have to look into those eyes so deeply ringed with the liver-colored flesh of fatigue. “Why? I ain’t never figured that out, Pap. I hear it come from your mouth. Out’n Uncle Cy’s mouth too. I ain’t no kid no more. Lookit me. I be nearly tall as you—near filled out as you too. Why you tell me I can’t spit out a few bad words like you?”
“You ain’t a man, Titus.”
He felt the burn of embarrassment at his neck. “But I ain’t no boy neither!”
“No, you rightly ain’t. But for the life of me, I don’t know what you are, Titus.” Bass laid his arms over the back of the tall mule and glared at his son. “You ain’t a man yet, that’s for sure. A man takes good care of the animals what take care of him. But you, Titus? I don’t know what you are.”
“I ain’t a man yet?” Titus felt himself seething, fought to control his temper. “If’n I ain’t a man yet—how come you send me out to do a man’s job then!”
“Onliest way I know to make you into a man, son.”
He watched his father turn and survey the stump partly pulled free from the ground, some of its dark roots already splayed into the late-afternoon air like long, dark arthritic fingers caked with mud and clods of rich, black
