posted muley-bed.
“You take this,” she instructed in a hoarse whisper as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.
At that moment he didn’t know what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”
“My scarf,” she said in that thick Mississippi-bottom dialect of hers, taking the fabric from him to unknot it. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”
“W-where are your people?” he had asked her over the noise of Washburn’s insistent thumping on the doorway, his bellowing that he was about to come crashing in.
“I don’t have no people no more,” she explained, sadness filling her eyes. “But I want you always to be somebody special to me.”
“I will be, always,” he vowed, and let her tie the scarf around his neck before they parted in the gray of that dawn.
How he recalled wearing the scarf knotted there at his neck every time he returned to see her of those Saturday nights when he could afford the price of both a bottle of rum and to sleep till morning with someone warm beside him. Hell, even when he could not afford her and had to content himself with gazing at the whore from across the smoky room in the tippling house where she went about her business, talking and laughing with other customers, glancing at him once in a while—those eyes of hers asking why it was not he who was pushing his hand up her skirts and hungrily rubbing her legs then and there, panting to drag her back to her little room.
After struggling to get the buckskin shirt down over his head and arms once more, Bass concluded he would wear the scarf as she had intended him to. Working at the two resistant knots, he eventually freed the head bandage as the sky became greasy with twilight. Tucking the scarf under his belt, Bass slowly crabbed over to the trickling freshet, then slipped the buckskin and moss from his head.
As he set the moss scrapings aside atop a small rock, Bass grew curious—just how would the bare bone feel to his touch, how would his touch feel to the bare bone? Before he could talk himself out of it, Scratch reached up to lay his fingertips on the wound. One by one his fingers tiptoed across the exposed bone, gingerly feeling their way around the circumference of the lacerated flesh. There at the bottom of the wound he felt the thin, stiffened strip of flesh. Tugging on it gently, Scratch figured he could not pull it—that shriveled curl of skin must still be attached to some living flesh.
Drawing the worn skinning knife from its old scabbard at the back of his belt, Scratch bent forward so that he could use his right arm—the right hand grasping the long flap of skin so he could lay the blade against his skull and saw the knife through it.
Bringing the curled flesh down to stare at it, at the same time Bass also rubbed a finger along the wound where he had cut the scrap free, reassured that he hadn’t stirred up any more bleeding.
A curious object it was—this long, narrow strip of his own flesh, no more than three inches in length now that it had shriveled. Attached to its entire length was some of his very own hair. As careful as the Arapaho had been in scraping the scalp itself clean before stuffing it into his belt, it appeared the warrior had made himself two cuts to free the cherished topknot, both of those cuts ending at the bottom, where they overlapped. That narrow thong of overlap had been left to dangle when the warrior had yanked off the topknot, the flesh drying, dying, shrinking into a long, twisted curl.
He knew immediately what should be done with it. After untying the narrow thong that closed the top of the small medicine pouch, Scratch stuffed the small scrap of his own scalp in among the few other objects of special significance he had been gathering since that spring parting from Fawn. Here he would keep the strip, dangling around his neck in the medicine pouch, worn beneath his shirt, next to his heart.
With the moss dampened in the trickle of water and replaced over the bare bone of his exposed skull, Titus smelled deeply of the scarf one last time. From now on the fabric would no longer even remotely carry the fragrance of the quadroon—lo, after all these many miles and bygone seasons. Remembering painfully how the whore had abandoned him and what little they had shared together.
“I’ll go see her there,” he recalled declaring to the madam that night she had told him the quadroon would not be back. “See her where she’s working now. What’s the place so I’ll know it?”
“You can’t see her up there,” the woman tried to explain, the wounded look in her eyes showing how she tried to understand this poor man’s desire for just one woman.
“She ain’t coming back?”
Wagging her head, the woman explained, “Rich man bought her, took her off to the place where he’s gonna keep her for himself, for now on and always. Buy her all the soft clothes she’d ever wanna wear. She told me when she left, there’s a tree outside her window—where she’ll sit and watch the birds sing come the end of this goddamned winter.”
“H-he married her?”
The woman had laughed at that. “Sakes no! He’s already got him a wife—but one likely cold as ice. Land o’ Goshen, but he don’t ever intend to marry the girl. Just keep her in that fancy place he bought her—just so she’ll be there whenever he shows up so she can pleasure only him.”
“Maybeso I can see her still. Sneak up there when he ain’t around.”
Again the woman wagged her head sadly. “Don’t you see? She went there on her own. That means she wasn’t thinking ’bout being with no one else here on out. The girl, she left everything behind. And that means she left you too. Best you forget her now.”
Now, as he folded the large square of heavy silk into a triangle, Bass recalled how he had stared at the crude puncheon planks beneath his muddy boots, realizing how the quadroon’s leaving was merely 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 had looked into the woman’s eyes, vowing he would not let her leaving hurt him. Then of a sudden he had 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 declared morosely. “A mean bastard cut her up good just last night. Up to the pauper’s cemetery they buried Jenny in a shallow hole only this morning.”
Swallowing, perhaps feeling a bit desperate that so much of what he took solace in was crumbling around him, Bass said, “Any other’n. Any one a’tall.”
Squinting her eyes up at him, the woman rested her hands on her fleshy hips and asked, “You ain’t so choosy no more?”
His eyes flicked to the left down the corridor, then right. Back to the woman. “Not choosy at all.”
Here in the willow as the light quickly oozed out of the sky, Titus remembered that from that painful night on he had rutted with the fleshy ones, the pocked ones, the ones who hadn’t cared to bathe in a month or more—it made little matter to him that the quality and color of whores in that city always depended upon the size of a man’s purse. No, it wasn’t the money that was determining his choice of solace for Bass. No good reason at all could he come up with to be particular just where he took his pleasure. And for the longest time it seemed to be that he was seeking only that particular salve of a warm and willing woman to rub into all those hidden wounds he kept covered so well.
No, he hadn’t been choosy at all—until he chose to seize his dream.
When he brought the blue triangle to his head and began to knot it at the base of his skull to hold down the damp moss, Bass remembered those days when he figured it was simply too cruel to fool himself any more into believing in hope. How he had vowed never again would he cling to any dream.
Those dreary seasons passed slowly by while he choked down his despair at never hoping again, daring never again to dream—pounding out his rage on that anvil in Troost’s Livery. Of every Saturday night he found himself a new whore to stab with his anger as he rutted above her. Until he had worked his way through them all and by the time a cold winter was waning, Titus started pleasuring his way back through what poor women he could still afford. As he did, Bass had grown more frightened that with each visit to their wharfside cribs, it was taking just a little more of that balm to soothe his deepest wounds. Scared they might never heal.
And when he found himself weakest, Titus had always brooded on this then faraway land—still mythical as it was to him back then. He had been weakest in those moments when the whiskey could no longer stiffen his backbone, when he found himself drained and done with the sweating torment of driving his rage into a woman and he lay beside her, gone limp and soft deep within himself as well as out.
