anyhows—”
With a sudden shove his father pushed him down the path between the two rows of stalls in that log barn. “Grab that harness.”
“Yes, sir,” he said with a pasty mouth, too scared not to be dutiful and obedient.
A rain crow cawed on the beam above him. He shuddered as his bare feet moved along the cold, pounded clay of the barn floor. But he wasn’t all that sure he trembled from the morning chill. Not knowing what would come next from his father’s hand was all it took to make the youth quake. Alone Titus had faced most everything nature could throw at this gangly youth—out there in the woods and wilderness. But he had never been as frightened of anything wild as he was of his father when Thaddeus Bass grew truly angry.
As Titus took the old mule’s harness down, his father said, “G’won, hitch her up.”
The boy pushed through the stall door and moved into the corona of warmth that surrounded the big animal. She raised her head from a small stack of hay to eye him, frost venting from her great nostrils, then went back to her meal as he came alongside her neck and slipped the bridle and harness over her.
“Bring her out to me.”
“Here, Pap,” he said, almost like whimpering. “I … I’m sorry. Never run off on the work again, I swear —”
“I don’t figure you ever will run off again, Titus,” his father snapped. “Not after I’ve learned you your lesson about work and responsibility.” He pointed to a nearby post. “Get you that harness.”
“What for? I got the mule set—”
“Jest you get it and follow me.”
He trudged after his father, out the barn door and into the muddy yard, where a faint drift of woodsmoke and frying pork greeted him as warmly as the dawn air did in cold fashion. How it did make his stomach grumble.
“Can I quick go and fetch me something to eat while we’re off to the field, Pap?”
In the gray light shed by that overcast sky the man whirled on his son. “No. You ain’t earned your breakfast yet.”
“But—I didn’t have no supper last night.”
“Didn’t earn that neither. Off lollygagging the way you was.”
He swallowed and walked on behind his father, bearing south toward the new field they were clearing. Suddenly appearing out of the low, gray sky, the bright crimson blood-flash of a cardinal flapped overhead and cried out. In the distance Titus heard the faint call of a flatboat’s horn rise out of the Ohio’s gorge. Was it one of those new keels with a dozen polemen? Or was it one of those broadhorns nailed together of white oak planks the boatmen would soon be selling by the board-foot on the levee at far-off New Orleans?
“Here, girl,” Thaddeus said as he put the mule ahead of the harnesstree and himself at her head, beginning to coax her back a step at a time. “Titus, hitch her up.”
Titus hoisted the oiled hardwood and locked both harness traces in place. Then he straightened, watching his father pat the mule between the eyes.
Gesturing toward the tangle of leather and chain his son had dropped onto the ground, Thaddeus said, “Now you hook up that harness to the tree.”
Maybe he didn’t want to know any more than he already could guess. Maybe he refused to believe his father would really make him do it. No matter—Titus didn’t ask, didn’t say a thing as he bent over his work. His cold hands trembling, he found it was a tight fit lining up all the metal clasps into the harnesstree’s lone eye, but he got it done and stood again. Shivering in the cold air as a breeze rustled the green leaves of the nearby elms.
“We gonna pull the stump out and then we go to breakfast?”
His father slapped the mule one time on the rump as he moved back to take up the reins. “We gonna pull out the stump, that’s right. We’ll see for ourselves what comes next, Titus. Now, step in that harness and cinch yourself up.”
“M-me?”
“You heard me, son.”
“Y-yes, Pap.”
For a moment longer he stood there, gazing at his father. Thaddeus had taken the long, wide leather reins into his weathered hands, shifted it all to his left, then took one long double length into his right and began to wave it over the mule’s wide back.
“You seen what your pap has to do if’n an animule ain’t obeying, ain’t you, Titus?”
Quickly, he turned and stepped into the harness. “Yes, Pap.”
“Buckle yourself in and take up the slack,” the man ordered, then ever so gently laid the long strap of leather onto the mule’s back. Obediently she leaned into her harness and raised the harnesstree off the damp ground, then stopped, awaiting the next command.
“Aside her, I’m just gonna be in the way—”
“Lean into it, boy!”
“You ain’t really gonna make me pull this stump out—”
“I’m gonna make a farmer outta you, Titus—or I’ll kill you trying. Now, lean into it, goddammit!”
“Pap!”
“There’s work you left afore it was finished, son.” Thaddeus’s eyes glowed like all-night coals.
“Lemme pull the stump out by my own self with the mule. I’ll get it done—”
“Damn right, you’ll pull it out with the mule,” his father growled, savagely bringing the leather strap down on the animal’s back.
FROM THE AUTHOR
I was born on the first day of 1947 in a small town on the plains of Kansas. That great rolling homeland of the nomadic buffalo has remained in my marrow across the years of my wandering.
From Nebraska, to Kansas and on to Oklahoma, I’ve spent a full third of my life on those Great Plains. Another third growing up in the desert southwest an arrow’s-shot from the wild Apache domain of Cochise and Victorio. The most recent third of my life has passed among the majestic splendor of the Rocky Mountains—from Colorado to Montana and on to Washington state. In less than a year, I am back in Montana, here in the valley of the great Yellowstone River, in the veritable heart of the historic West. The plains and prairies at my feet, the great Rockies as my backrest.
The Great Plains runs in my blood and always will. More than merely growing up there, my roots go deep in the land that over the last hundred-odd years soaked up about as much blood and sweat as it did rain.
My maternal grandfather came from working-class stock in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he first became a carriage-riding sawbones doctor who as a young man moved to Oklahoma Territory, finding it necessary to pack two small .36-caliber pistols for his own protection while practicing his medical arts from his horse-drawn buggy. In later years he would be proud to say he never stepped foot in a motorized vehicle.
It wasn’t long before Dr. David Yates met and fell in love with the school-marm teaching there in Osage country, Pearl Hinkle. My grandmother had bounced into The Strip, formerly called “Indian Territory” or “The Nations”, in her parents’ wagon in June of 1889 during the great land-rush that settled what is now the state of Oklahoma. With immense pride I tell you I go back five generations homesteading on the plains of Kansas—Hinkles, simple folk with rigid backbone and a belief in the Almighty, folk who witnessed the coming of the Kansas Pacific Railroad along with the terrifying raids of Cheyenne and Kiowa as the Plains tribes found themselves shoved south and west by the slow-moving tide of white migration.
My father’s father wandered over to The Territory from the vicinity of Batesville, Arkansas when he first learned of the riches to be found in what would one day become south-central Oklahoma. It was an era of the “boomers”—when oil money ran local governments and bought law-enforcement officers both. Yet in that violent and lawless epoch, Oklahoma history notes a few brave men who stood the test of that time. I’m very proud to have coursing in my veins the blood of a grandfather who had the itchy feet of a homesteader turned Justice of the Peace in that oft-times rowdy, violent and unsettled frontier.
Still, it was more than what Scotch-Irish heritage ran in their veins that both my parents passed on to me—
