“Trapping beaver.”
“So you’re for sure a fur man, are you?” Clayton inquired. “We hear most of them fur men what go upriver don’t ever come back down, leastwise with their hair still on. Them I hear what does come back got ’em lots of ghosty stories to tell of that country and the Injuns running things out there.”
Rising to his feet again, Titus bristled at the challenge. He boasted, “I ain’t scared of them mountains, not the Injuns neither. And I damn well don’t believe in no man’s ghosty stories. I’ve heard my share of windbags and Sunday-blowers to know what to lay stock in and what not. Can’t think of a damned thing gonna turn me aside from what I’ve been fixing on doing for a long time now.”
“Where you headed?” Clayton inquired as the civilian turned away from the trio.
Grumpily he said, “Off to my blankets.”
“But the night’s still early, Bass!” Culpepper cheered.
Titus stopped and turned to explain, “Not when I’ve got more miles to put under me tomorrow. If it’s all the same to you fellas, I’ll make me my bed right over here where I dropped my truck.”
“Anywhere you lay your head be fine by me,” Clayton declared. “Just as long as you don’t settle down on the spot there in the corner where you see I laid me my tick and blankets.”
No matter that there were only four of them in that whole fort—Titus Bass still felt cramped.
By the time the sky grayed, he was already wide-eyed and awake, anxious to be gone from this place. To go at last where he would be troubled by no man, rubbed against, and questioned. Maybeso to leave white folks behind wouldn’t be all that bad for a while.
Then Bass worked hard to think back on the last time he had been truly on his own. More than a decade it had been since the Mississippi flatboat crew had set him afoot on the west bank of the river, where he had taken off north to St. Louis—alone until he came across Able Guthrie’s barn and that warm, inviting hay where he lay his weary self down. Even longer still since he had run off from home and spent those first nights in the woods on his own. Alone and growing all the hungrier until he presented himself at Ebenezer Zane’s night fire, joining the pilot’s Kentucky boatmen.
Two of the soldiers snored close by in the thinning darkness. Each of them grumbling, gurgling, snorting at times. This fort room smelled damp with the seepage from last night’s rain. The timbers grown sodden and dank. How well he knew places like this took on a rank smell after man had been there too long.
Titus sat up quietly and pulled aside his blankets. After dragging on his old boots he slipped from the door, leaving it partially open rather than make more noise in closing it. From side to side he dodged the patchwork of puddles in the open compound left by last night’s rain, then passed by the tall, forlorn fur-press when he saw the Indian pony turn at the sound of his approach. The mare raised her head and stomped a hoof expectantly as well.
Aswirl with moisture, the air felt heavy to breathe here in the moments just before dawn. Light drops fell to prick the surface of each puddle and rut as he untied both orses from their hitching rings and moved off toward the gate. There he dragged aside the heavy wooden hasp and heaved back on one side of the gate until it swung open wide enough to let him slip out with the animals.
The goatsuckers were still out in the graying light, winging this way and that over the tall grass that stretched endlessly toward the timber on three sides of the stockade: several different species of birds that fed on moths and gnats—whippoorwills and nighthawks mostly, all swooping, diving, and feeding here in the cold, damp dawn.
Following a well-worn footpath, Titus led the two horses away from the walls toward the timber south of the fort. After two hundred yards he found the spring Lancaster had described. He released the animals and went to his knees, rocking forward over the surface of the water, where he could lap its cold with his tongue. Renewed, and anxious to be done with his leaving, Titus stood and waited for the horses to finish.
Sergeant Clayton had Lancaster working corn mush into cakes by the time Bass returned. Culpepper sat by the fireplace, feeding the flames and heating a skillet in which he was melting bear lard to fry their breakfast.
“You wasn’t about to run off without something in your belly, was you?” Lancaster asked, dragging his fingers down into a wooden bowl and emerging with more of the soggy cornmeal he began to pat between his palms.
“What’s for breakfast?”
The sergeant looked at Bass with astonishment, saying, “Here I thought you told us you wasn’t a breakfast man.”
Drinking in the fragrances with a deep breath for a moment, he found the three of them looking expectantly at him. “S’pose I’ll take time this morning,” Titus replied. “Seeing how this be the last morning I figger to be eating with white folks for some time to come.”
“A apple tart with hot buttered rum sauce,” Culpepper spoke right out of the blue.
“What the hell you talking about?” Lancaster grumbled at the rounder man.
With a shrug, the big-bellied soldier said, “Just sitting here thinking of what I’d like to have me a taste of.”
Clayton set the piggin of water on the plank table with a clatter. The small pail was made with stave wood: that hardwood used to make thin-shaped strips set edge to edge to form a small bucket or barrel. He asked, “A apple tart, is it?”
“Back to home in Nashville—that’s what was my favored thing to sink my teeth into.”
“Your mama made it?” Lancaster asked.
Nodding, Culpepper continued, “She made the best tarts—and always used some of my da’s rum to pour on ’em just before we sunk our teeth into ’em.” He smacked his lips noisily, then peered down at the skillet to find his lard had melted. “Hey, ol’ soldier—you best get them cakes over here in a shuffle-quick. I’m ready to cook!”
Lancaster legged back the bench he had been sitting on and rose with the pewter platter he had piled high with mush cakes. “You’re gonna stay long ’nough to eat, ain’cha, Bass?”
Drawing in another deep breath of that room no longer rank with the smell of rain and men living too close to one another—but now filled with the strong, corn-tinged fragrance of memories, Titus said, “Yes. Them pone cakes do sound good this morning.”
“Pone?” Clayton repeated. “You from somewhere south, mister?”
“Kentucky. Hard by the Ohio.”
At the fire Lancaster slipped a fourth cake into the heated oil in the skillet. “Ain’t heard these’r called pone in a spell.”
“My …” And he struggled to get the rest out without his voice cracking in remembrance. “My mam most times made all us young’uns pone cakes of a cold autumn morning.”
“I growed up calling ’em hoecakes,” Culpepper declared as he jabbed at the frying mush with a long iron fork.
“Maybeso they’re nothing more’n johnnycakes,” Clayton said, turning away from Bass as if he appeared to recognize something familiar in the look on the older man’s face.
Titus was grateful the young sergeant had turned away as his eyes began to mist up and he troubled his Adam’s apple up and down repeatedly, trying to swallow the sour gob of sentiment that threatened to choke him.
His damp leather britches and wool coat began to steam there in the heat of the mess hall—arousing a long-ago memory all of its own. The smells of frying oil, the crackling of the wood beneath the heady fragrance of the crisping corn. He remembered those long years gone by: how his grandmother always used conte in baking some sweet treats—that spice made from powdered China briar she would mix into her corn fritters fried in bear’s oil, then sweetened with honey.
At the side of the fire the steaming coffeepot began to boil, and as quickly Sergeant Clayton tossed in two hand-fuis of the coarse coffee grounds, then tugged on the bail to move the pot off the dancing flames and onto the coals at the stone hearth.
Blinking his eyes with those tears of remembrance, Titus savored the earthy perfume of that frying pan bread. Corn. His father’s crop. What his grandpap before him had grown in that rich bottomland of the canebrakes they cleared of every stone and tree, season after season slowly enlarging their fields. Corn. It not only fed Thaddeus Bass’s family, but the stalks and tops of the harvested crop fed their horses and milch cows. Corn had fattened their hogs—which meant lard for their lamps during those long winter nights there near the frozen Ohio in
