Crack in the Sky

“Reading?” Hatcher repeated.

“I gone over and sat for a while myself,” Graham continued. “Listened to a story he was reading for them others.”

“He had a book he was reading from?” Bass inquired, his interest suddenly pricked.

Rufus nodded, spreading out his hands across his lap to show the tome’s size. “A big damn book.”

“What sort of story was it?” Titus asked, his interest piqued.

“That feller Green said it was Shakes … Shakes … ah, shit! I can’t remember—”

McAfferty interrupted, “Shakespeare?”

“That’s it!” Rufus cheered with a snap of his fingers. “Shakespeare. Some story of a king.”

“Richard?” Asa inquired.

“Naw,” Graham replied.

McAfferty brushed the long white hair off his shoulder. “Must’ve been Macbeth.”

Rufus shook his head in amazement. “That’s it! Macbeth!

Green was reading that story to a bunch of ’em. Why, he even had him a Bible laying by his side. Told me he read to any fellers what would listen ever’ day—winter or summer, on the trail or not. Said that big ol’ Shakespeare book of his had more’n one story in it, and his Bible was crammed full of tales to read round a camphre.”

“The Lord’s truth that is,” McAfferty agreed. “‘Fraise ye the Lord. Fraise God in His sanctuary: praise Him in the firmament of His power!’”

“So, McAfferty?” Hatcher asked. “Ye ever read any of that Shakespeare?”

Asa said, “Some I have. Not much. But enough to know that when I set off time to read, I’ll read the stories in my Bible. God’s own word.”

“You ever read that Macbeth story?” Titus inquired.

“Not much of it,” McAfferty admitted. “Only far enough to know that one man hankered to be king enough to think he just might murder the real king. Now, the Bible has a story about the first Asa.”

“The first Asa?” Solomon echoed.

“He was a king back in Bible day,” McAfferty said. “‘Abijah slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead. In his days the land was quiet ten years. And Asa did that which was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God: for he took away the altars of the strange gods, and the high places, and brake down the images, and cut down the groves.’”

Jack asked, “So if you was named after an old king, why didn’t ye finish yer reading that Macbeth story Rufus told us about?”

“I give up on that tale when Shakespeare kept on writing about witches and their evil spells,” Asa confessed.

Scratch shifted, anxious to hear more. “Witches? Real witches in that Shakespeare story?”

“Evil creatures,” Asa confirmed with a shudder as he looked up at the night sky. “Abominations and she- bitches what call forth familiar spirits and demons from the other side, Mr. Bass. ’A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.’”

“She-bitches,” Titus repeated the word, thinking of the bear. “Like that sow what tore through my hide?”

McAfferty looked him in the eye long, his brow futrowing. “Perhaps. A man never knows what form evil will take when it tempts him. Maybeso a grizzly. Or a Injun warrior. Mayhaps a whore what gets a man hot to poke her. The fornicating slut—”

“Whooeee!” Solomon hooted from the far side of the fire.

“Hurraw for she-bitches, witches, and whores!” Hatcher whooped, slapping the tops of both thighs exuberantly.

Visibly perturbed at their lighthearted response to his dire warning, McAfferty turned back to Titus. “The devil puts all sorts of temptations down before a man. If he turns away from one, the devil will come up with another. Sooner or later the devil will find a temptation every man will fall to, Mr. Bass.”

“Now, tell me what all temptations you gone and fall to, Asa.” Hatcher demanded.

He thought a moment, then answered, “Damn near all of them. Whiskey, pride, avarice … and the lure of a false woman. ? God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from Thee!’ I committed near all of them, Mr. Hatcher. Oh—and I’ve been one to stub my toe and stumble on the temptation of following the lead of other men … instead of letting the Lord guide my steps.”

Damn, if Asa McAfferty didn’t have a surefire way of putting an end to conversation around the dancing flames of their campfire, dashing cold water the way he did on their last night together.

“Sure ye don’t wanna throw in with us come morning, Scratch?” Hatcher asked later in the inky darkness as he crouched to slide beneath his blankets. “We’re fixing on riding south to the Bayou for fall hunt.”

“Like I told you the first time—you make me proud when you ask me to throw in with you fellas again,” Bass explained in a whisper as the others shifted and settled in their robes to drift off to sleep all around them. “But I’ve come to rigger this is my calling, Jack. I ain’t never truly been on my own hook afore.”

“Ye learn’t yourself just how dangerous it was too.”

“Hell if I ain’t learned what danger is,” he echoed. Then a moment later he said, “But there comes a time when I figger a man should grab for what he dreams. And if he goes under for it—then I don’t reckon he’s really failed, Jack.”

“How ye figger that?”

“Way I see it,” Titus explained, “only feller what truly fails is a man what has him a dream … but don’t have the guts to go make a grab for it.”

For a long time after that Hatcher remained quiet, so long that Bass figured Jack had fallen asleep. So it surprised him when the brigade leader finally spoke in a hushed whisper again, just as Titus was drifting off.

“I figger you and McAfferty got that same sort of itch in ye both.”

“What sort of itch is that?” he asked sleepily.

“Ye’re riding off to look for something I figger you’ll come upon soon enough,” Jack explained in the dark. “And Asa—he’s chasing after something he ain’t never gonna find.”

“But that don’t sound like we really got the same kind of itch to scratch.”

For a moment Hatcher was quiet; then he explained, “S’pose you’re right, Scratch. One sort of itch just drives a man on. Like yers. And Asa’s … why, his be the sort of itch what just drives a man crazy.”

At its best, this was squaws’ work. The sort of work fit only for a farmer, for a man who loved grubbing in the soil, caking the moist, rain-softened earth under his nails. The sort of man back east who didn’t mind at all sweating even though this autumn air was cold and those clouds gathering overhead presaged another storm.

A trapper wasn’t cut out for grubbing in the ground the way his father had forced him to back in Kentucky— pulling out stumps and laying aside row after row of deep, damp furrows where Thaddeus Bass came along to drop his seed each spring. A trapper come to the mountains was simply above this sweaty, dirty groundhog and badger clawing sort of demeaning chore.

But for the life of him Titus Bass hadn’t figured out any other way for a man to dig himself a cache.

Gulping another long drink from the kettle he kept nearby, Scratch dragged a dirty hand across his mouth, then spit, finding he had turned the dirt on the back of his hand to a nasty mud, rubbing it onto his lips. Grabbing the tail of his long blanket capote, he swiped his face clear of sweat and dirt and that muddy paste. Then he sighed and leaped down into the narrow hole, dragging the short-handled, iron-toothed shovel behind him as he squatted, went to his knees, and crawled forward into the short neck of his cache.

Emerging on the other side after some three feet of tunnel, Titus crabbed a few feet to the far wall and flung the shovel against the earth. Down here where the autumn breeze couldn’t reach his flesh, he was sweating again in minutes. Out there the air chilled his skin. Down here it was the sort of work he detested more than just about anything. Why, he was the sort of man made for sitting high atop lofty places, able to look out upon hundreds of miles of untouched country. Down here in this hole he found his breathing growing short, his heart thumping anxiously, his very soul yearning to burst free of this earth-bound grave he had dug himself.

Even the fluttering light thrown off by that big wax candle he had set into a notch he’d scraped in the wall of the cache wasn’t enough to ease the dank otherworldly feel of this hole. As if by wriggling through the narrow neck, he had instead pushed himself through to another existence.