Just as Bass began to heave himself off the back of the saddle onto the pony’s haunches, ready to swim alongside the animal, the pony instead recovered its footing with a sudden start that almost jerked him free of his hold on a thick strip of latigo woven into the back of the saddle pad.
Titus came out of the water, sputtering, his right arm still held aloft with the rifle—cursing the river and the pony, cursing the soft-bottomed crossing.
On the north side the pony and mare lurched up the muddy, grassy bank as he slid off the wet saddle— ultimately cursing himself for not yanking off his shucks before plunging into the river. He slogged over to the brush, water sluicing from his clothes as he stood tying off the two horses. Their flesh quivered as Titus quickly collapsed to the grass, yanking at the waterlogged boots. Standing again to tug at the wet leather britches, he struggled to pull them off one leg at a time, and finally yanking free of the wool and flax shirt.
For those first moments he was cold, chilled to his marrow as he suffered the breeze left in the wake of last night’s thunderstorm. But it wasn’t long before the climbing sun began to work its eternal magic, caressing his goose-pimpled skin with its warmth. Every bead of water dippling his arms or clustered at the base of each tiny hair on his chest, across the top of his bare thighs—all of them shimmered like tiny, iridescent rainbows as the sun began to dry every one.
Raising his face toward the sky, eyes closed, “Thank you,” he said quietly.
Surprised that he had. Not knowing what had come over him of that moment, causing him to offer his gratitude right out loud. Out of the corner of one eye, Titus glanced quickly at the sky, self-consciously regarding that great tumble of white-and-gray clouds dabbed against the pale-blue dome. With the rustle of the wind through newly leafed brush, he suddenly felt the presence of something greater than himself, something so immense here across the wide Missouri that it was almost impossible to comprehend.
At that moment he looked around him, certain that he was standing shamelessly naked within the sight of someone. But try as he might, he could not see, nor did he hear, another being, save for the two horses gently tearing off the green shoots at their feet as they dripped and dried in the sun, now spearing bright shafts through the breaking clouds.
This was as good a place as any, he decided. A fine spot, indeed. So from his shooting pouch he retrieved a small tin the size of his palm, then laid it among some stones where he figured he would build his fire. Titus began to scrounge among the brush for dry kindling. After the showers of the last two days, it was not all that easy to find dry wood, but eventually he had all in readiness.
From the German silver tin he removed the firesteel curved in a large and elegant C big enough to fit over the four fingers of his right hand. In his left he gathered some charred cloth, a bit of dried cotton boll, and the large gray chunk of flint. Striking downward on the sharp-edged stone with the firesteel, he began creating sparks, a few of which soon caught hold on the cloth, smoldering there within the boll’s loose fibers. Very softly he blew on the reddish coal he had created until it burned bright enough for him to slip the char beneath the tiny cone of kindling he had stacked up right at his knees.
One by one he set bigger and bigger twigs, then broke thicker branches to lay upon the flames until he had no fear of the fire sputtering out. Quickly rubbing his hands together over the rising heat, and at long last beginning to sense the fledgling fire’s warmth radiating on his chest and belly, Bass stepped over to the mare and threw back the dirty oiled Russian sheeting lashed on the off side of her packs, removing the blackened coffeepot. With the pot half-filled from the river he had just crossed, Titus set the water to boil while he went in search of some coffee among the supplies purchased back in Franklin.
With it and one of his dented cups set near his cheery fire, Bass finally draped his britches and shirt over clumps of nearby brush so the sun’s rays would strike them as he waited for the water to come to a boil. Then he stretched out on the grass, flat on his back, lacing his fingers behind his head to stare up at the spring sky, savoring the crackle of the fire close by, relishing the way the gentle warmth washed down from the sky to caress his skin.
As he closed his eyes, he remembered how good it had been to slip off into the forests of Boone County, Kentucky—his grandpap’s old fullstock flinter at the end of his arm, with the family’s old hound, Tink, loping ahead through the dapple of sunlight and shadow as Titus sought out rabbit or squirrel, turkey, or even some venison.
Like most boys growing up there at the edge of the frontier that stretched to the west a little farther with every new year, Titus spent every moment his pap allowed him immersing himself in the woods. School and church and work behind the plow: those were the had-to’s. But for most young fellas like Titus, time was never sweeter than when it was spent hunting or setting snares and deadfall traps, learning the herbs and fruits and nuts one could gather from the forest’s bounty.
Most children learned early what it took to read game trails or the moss on the trees, the whorl of certain flowering plants or the caliber of the wind—all those things they must remember so they would never become lost or put themselves in danger of being hurt, alone and far from the family ground. When he and the other boys his age gathered at one farm or another, there would of course always be a tall tree to shinny up, there to lie along its wide branches and gaze down on the world below. Or the boys plunged deep into that band of thick timber and limestone bordering the Ohio River itself, where they explored sinkholes, caves, and rockhouses—imagining themselves to be river pirates or the flatboatmen who would repel any such bloody and vicious attack.
Of course, there was always the swimming hole. He smiled, remembering how he and the others had knotted an old rope to a high limb so they could swing out over the surface of the water shaded by that same tree, flinging themselves naked out through the summer air crackling with the buzz and drone of flies and mosquitoes, letting go of that rope at just the right moment so they could sail for those deliciously brief seconds totally free before they hurled downward into the cold green swimming hole.
Come a time in a young man’s life—it was only the boys who went to the pool they had dammed up for swimming. As a girl’s body began to change and bloom, she would no longer join her brothers and their friends.
Through his reverie Titus could hear the faint tumble of the water’s first turn to a boil. And likewise felt the tingle of his own flesh stir with the memory of Amy Whistler.
How fully had she bloomed in those weeks and months before they had consummated their young passion there on a summer night beside the moonlit swimming pond. So full and soft were the curves of her, the roundness to the feel of her gliding up to him in the water … there beneath him where he laid her back on the grass beside the great boulders. But with that aching physical memory of the exquisite pleasure Amy brought him came also a flash point of anger at the coquette in her that had attempted to possess and corral him before he was ready to have his wings clipped, ready to be put in the wire cage the way a woman had done to his grandpap … the way his very own mother had imprisoned his pap.
Amy. Or Marissa. Oh, the wiles women used to snare men from the beginning of time. Roping them down with pleasures of the flesh, then later with the coming of children, and finally snaring them to stay on the land— plowed land. Land where a man walked behind an ox or mule, lashed and laboring as surely as did his beasts.
The boiling water hissed and tumbled, calling him from his reverie.
From the small pouch of pounded coffee beans Titus took a handful and flung the grounds into the pot, then carefully hooked a finger within the wire bail and dragged the pot from the edge of his fire. As the water continued to turn, Bass stood and moved off to test his wet clothing.
Dry enough they were. Into the still-damp britches he stuffed his legs, then slipped his arms into the warmth of his shirt. Around his waist he finally drew the wide belt and tightened it before kneeling at the fire, pouring himself a cup, then rocking back on his haunches to first draw in the savory fragrance of the coffee. Only then did he sip at the steaming brew.
Because the wool shirt itched when it became damp, he thought he might change back to the linen shirt. He smiled, recalling how riyerboatmen like Hames Kingsbury and the rest were really no different from other men on the razor’s edge of the frontier: they would wear one set of clothes until it fairly rotted off, then they promptly rooted around for something new to wear out completely in its time.
Not so very different was that from his own childhood, he mused as he sipped on the coffee there in the sun’s spring light. Most young’uns had no more than one change of clothing: their everyday wear, along with those clothes saved for Sunday-morning meeting as well as those rare special celebrations of life. The marryings, birthings, and the funerals of friends and family … those cords of remembrance he felt still binding him to that past and that place had begun to grow thin and weak—very much like spider’s silk stretched to
