“Reuben’s right,” Ovatt said when Kingsbury halted and turned around. He glanced back at Titus and Hezekiah before continuing, “I say we make fine targets, all of us bunched up the way we is.”
For a brief moment the bony pilot appeared to heft that around as he stared at the wet leaves and dead grass beneath his feet. “Awright. Maybeso you’re right. Beulah, you wanna stay on with me?”
“Told you I was,” she replied with a sharp edge, her tone a bit haughty in her confusion.
“Then you and me’ll go on down the road first,” he said, then turned to Root and Ovatt. “Give us a short bit —just when you see us get to the far shadows, then you two move out. Titus, you wait and do the same after these fellas go, then bring that Negra with you.”
Bass glanced quickly at Hezekiah, fear pricking the small of his back. “We’re breaking up?”
“Maybe they won’t do no good in catching us all if’n we ain’t all together,” Root explained.
No longer was it fear. Now his anger rose in him like a case of hives: sudden, and hot. “I know what this is,” Bass snapped. “You’re just getting rid of me an’ him ’cause I won’t let you get rid of him.”
Kingsbury took a step forward, offering his hand in the misty rain. “We ain’t leaving you behin’t.”
Swinging an arm, he pushed the pilot’s hand aside. “G’won, then—if it’s gonna be this way. Git. All of you.”
Beulah moved up beside Bass. The lightning filled the sky overhead with a yellowish phosphorescence. “You’ll be right behind us.”
A clap of thunder raised the hair on the back of Titus’s neck. He felt the small hairs on his arms rise as the odor of riven ozone burst through the canopy of trees while the rumble died off in the distance.
“We can’t run off from you,” Ovatt declared.
“I know you can’t,” Titus snarled. “You might try, but I can still catch up—”
“No,” Ovatt interrupted. “We can’t run off from you, ’cause you’re one of us, Titus.”
Kingsbury came closer to the angry youth. “You proved you was one of us ever since you said you’d ride through the chutes with us back to Louisville. You didn’t have to, young’un—but you did. Right then and there Ebenezer figured you was part of his crew. And now … well—you been a part of us through it all. You say so, we’ll all stay close together. Just to prove we ain’t running out on you.”
In the teeth of that raging storm he looked from one face to another, all three of those boatmen. Of a moment he felt ashamed. With no call to judge these men who had watched over him like uncles, protected him like older brothers, and scolded him like fathers. But even more, he again experienced that deep regret he had swallowed down ever since losing Ebenezer Zane, that shame that told him he was to blame for the riverman’s death.
Skin prickling, Bass waited for the next peal of thunder to rock the ground where they stood, causing all of them to shudder with its nearness, knowing he owed these Kentucky men more than he could ever repay—simply because it was his fault Ebenezer was taken from them.
“The rest of you, g’won now,” Titus said quietly. “Me an’ Hezekiah, we’ll bring up the rear.”
Bass watched Kingsbury and Beulah, then Root and Ovatt slip from view up the footpath, really nothing more than a game trail beneath the skeletal overhang of beech-nut and pin oak, black ash and chinkapin. When the next muzzle flash of lightning came, Titus could no longer see them. He nudged the slave into motion. It seemed colder now. The rain falling somehow harder, more insistently. Perhaps it only seemed that way because he felt all the more lonely. Down to just him and a big, black Negra who Annie Christmas paid for down at the slave pens in New Orleans and brought north, teaching him to speak a little of the white folks’ tongue so he could serve liquor and throw any unruly customers off her gunboat.
But at that moment Titus put one moccasin in front of the other, listening to the rain hammer the forest around them, the thunder voice coming in a mighty roar before it slipped off in a whimper, only then able to hear the slog of the Negra’s old, worn boots on last autumn’s dead leaves lying in a black mat of decay on that ancient buffalo trail.
But the buffalo were no more. How well he had learned that from his grandpap. Big critters like the buffalo were all but gone when the first settlers had moved over the mountains from Virginia into the canebrakes of the land they would one day call Kentucky. Farmers—driving the Indian, like the buffalo, before them.
Anymore, most all that was left for a man to hunt in Kentucky were a few deer, and the smaller game: turkey, squirrels, rabbits, coon, and the like. Not like the olden times his grandpap used to talk on and on about. Time was when a man had nothing more to feed his family but wild game.
In that rainy forest, where it seemed the sun refused to rise of a dark and deadly purpose, Titus remembered how his grandpap seemed caught between what had been and what was. The old man used to say that now it was a good thing the settlers could provide for their families with all that they could grow, along with raising those domesticated farm animals a man could slaughter when times grew lean and desperate—simply because the big animals had all moved on.
This hunger to see what lay beyond the Mississippi was like a nettle poked into the seam of his moccasin— working its tiny barb into his flesh so that he was always shy of being comfortable when he set that foot down. Too, it was a remembrance that again released a great remorse in him, just like an oozy boil festering around that nettle worked down into his flesh. How dearly he missed that old man who had seemed to understand his grandson far, far better than did Thaddeus.
Titus did not have long to dwell on his loss.
Hezekiah clamped Bass’s arm in one of his great hands, pressing a finger to his lips. The rain poured mercilessly from the black man’s smooth head as he blinked. Then he motioned Titus to follow. They left the footpath, twisting through the broom pine and dogwood trees as the lightning flared, igniting the whole of the sky above them like midday every few moments. Then the slave stopped him and pointed.
Out there in the sodden darkness left behind by a retreating peal of thunder, a familiar voice growled, “Where’s that boy?”
He could not remember ever feeling cold like that: the sudden chill splash down his backbone like January snow-melt spilling off the cabin roof.
“He didn’t come with us,” Kingsbury answered, staring up into that ring of slavers.
One of the horses moved, sidestepping with fright, jostling another at a new clap of thunder. Nearly all of the animals fought their bits. Titus could see them wide-eyed in the excruciating flare of each tongue of lightning as the maw of the storm settled over them.
The slave hunters had his four friends surrounded. Clearly outgunned and caught dead-footed. Like the pilot and Beulah, Ovatt and Root had their hands raised as they stood at the center of that wide circle of horsemen.
“You’re telling me he’s back at Colbert’s Stand?”
“We left him sleeping,” Kingsbury lied. “He … he didn’t wanna sell that goddamned useless Negra to you, so the rest of us up and figured to leave him behind for good. Son of a bitch has been too much trouble to us already.”
The leader named James rocked back in his saddle as if he was considering something. Then he looked down the backtrail. “He still have that slave with him?”
“They was cuddled up back to back, like bedbugs,” Ovatt declared.
“Yep,” Root added, his voice edgy. “Didn’t wanna get up and move out when we did—so we left ’em.”
“Goddammit,” James growled. He waved one of his pistols down the trail. “You—Harrison—take McCarthy with you. Get back there and hold those two. I don’t want them going nowhere.”
“You coming on later?” Harrison asked.
“Yeah. Soon as I figure out what to do with the rest of these.”
The two horsemen peeled away from the rest, parting a pair of led-horses as they set off back to the ford. At first the eight hooves clopped away on the soggy ground and fallen leaves, but that leaving was quickly swallowed by another loud rumble of thunder that followed the next lightning hurled from the low clouds suspended like black coal right over their heads. He watched the pair of horsemen disappear in the dark, then turned back to study the four who remained.
“The Trace has it quite a reputation,” James was saying. “Murderers and thieves. All sorts of vermin been known to haunt this road. And they all share one thing in common: every last one of them leaves their victims speechless.”
“That’s what we’ll do with ’em, right?” one of the others asked.
“Yes,” James said, an edge of resignation in his voice. “I suppose we have no other choice.”
