the trappers stood staring slack-jawed at the chief, the rest of the white men turning to peer at Titus in disbelief.
“He say B-bass?” Williams repeated, astonishment carved on his lined and wrinkled face.
“Tituss,” the leader repeated as he turned to stare at Williams inquisitively, breaking the word into a pair of distinct syllables once again, a long and pronounced s on the end. “You Tituss Bass … yes?”
“H-him,” Tom Smith said, pointing.
The leader turned slightly, took three steps toward Scratch, halting within an arm’s length of Bass where he cocked his head, studying the white man’s face, his eyes squinting as if mentally reckoning on something of great breadth and weight.
Bill Williams slid up to stand close, not quite between them. He asked the tall leader, “You k-know him?”
“Tituss?”
Stunned into speechlessness for so long, Scratch could finally admit, “Yes.”
“Tituss Bass!” the tall one repeated, the name sounding more clear with repetition. “Excuse, please. No English for long, long time. You—Tituss Bass? Tituss from Ohio River?”
Scratch’s brow furrowed, his head swam in confusion. “I … I come from the Ohio—yeah. Long, long ago.”
For a long moment the leader closed his eyes, raising his face to the sky as his lips moved silently. Then he lowered his chin and stared into Bass’s eyes once more. “Long ago. Been a long time I don’t speak the white words, long time now. You—me … at the Owens … Owensboro—farewell a long, long ago.”
Swallowing hard, struggling to make sense, examining those eyes that did not belong to this time and place, knowing those black eyes belonged instead to somewhere in the past—
Holding out his big, rawboned hand, the tall man said, “Thirty-two years now we come here. In your world, it is thirty-two years.”
Bass stared down at the offered hand in utter disbelief. Where was he thirty-two years ago? So he asked, “On the Ohio?”
Again the tall leader struggled for the words, then he said, “It so long ago—I remember the place and the time … better than I remember English. But English coming back now. Forgive, but I trouble with the words to say.”
“You’re too damn dark for any of these here Injuns,” Tom Smith demanded as he hobbled up. “Just who the hell are you?”
“He know me,” the warrior leader said, looking again at Titus.
“I-I know you?”
“You knowed me long ago, Titus Bass,” the tall man explained. “I am the man you set free from a slaver’s cage. The man you set free at Owensboro on Ohio River.”
Scratch’s eyes widened.
A huge, warm smile cracked that black face as he continued, “I am the man Annie Christmas called Hezekiah.”
It was the Negro he had busted from the barred cage on the back of that wagon outside a Natchez tippling house as the Kentucky-bound boatmen were doing their best to slip through that riverbank settlement without being recognized. Back then sixteen-year-old Titus Bass had looked into that cage behind the Kings Tavern, recognizing the tall, bald-headed Negro who had tended bar in Annie Christmas’s gunboat brothel tied against the river-bank as Ebenezer Zane’s men were floating down the Mississippi for the ocean port of New Orleans.*
Because Hezekiah had failed to stop the brawl that had killed one of her prized whores and a couple of her bodyguards, Annie promptly sold off her bartender to a wealthy landowner who would squeeze his money’s worth out of the big, muscular slave. But before they pushed north from Natchez, the slavers had to stop for that autumn night, have themselves some supper and a few drinks, then perhaps a fleshy whore to wrap her legs around them until dawn when they would venture out to the wagon yard to discover one of their slaves busted free.
Much to the misgivings of the other boatmen, Titus Bass brought Hezekiah Christmas with him on that long walk back along the Natchez Trace, eventually reaching the country of the Muscle Shoals as they pushed north for French Lick, the end of that wilderness road. It was just past a travelers’ stand and a rainy river crossing that the slavers caught up with the boatmen. In a quick and bloody scrap, young Titus Bass hung his life out for the Negro.
Scratch explained the story in detail, down to their parting at Owensboro on the Ohio, weeks later.
“Y-you give this here Neegra a paper what said he was a freedman?” Philip Thompson asked in scorn and disbelief.
“He was a man, and I freed him,” Bass replied. “I figgered he ought’n go west where a man might stand on his own legs ’stead of being accounted for by the color of his skin.”
“You sure as hell are one chuckle-headed fool!” Thompson roared. “Lookit him! Cain’t you figger how much this Neegra would bring one of us on the slave block?”
Hezekiah glared down at the white trapper. “You wanna take me back to your slave market, white man?” He held up his hands, wrists pressed together. “Go right ahead on—put me in your irons.”
For a moment Thompson’s eyes flicked about anxiously, then he smiled. “Maybeso we can take you on back with us to Missouri with these here horses. Sell your black ass to some slaver. It’s for damn certain I’ll get more for you’n I’d get for a dozen Mexican horses!”
A handful of Thompson’s compatriots guffawed at that.
“If’n you try taking Hezekiah,” Bass warned, “you’re more soft-brained than I ever give you credit for.”
Thompson’s jaw jutted and his brow knitted in fury as he demanded, “What the hell you mean I’m soft- brained?”
“Shit,” Titus scoffed. “You’d be one dumb idjit to lay a hand on Hezekiah here.”
“W-why?” the white man blustered with a roar of laughter. “You gonna stop me?”
“Me,” he answered, then dramatically swept his arm in a wide arc, “’long with all Hezekiah’s Injuns. You make a play for him, you wouldn’t last more time’n it’d take you to eat horsemeat for breakfast.”
That instantly drowned all of Thompson’s plans in very cold water, and the man sheepishly shrank to the back of the Americans as Williams and Smith stepped forward to discuss their immediate fortunes with Hezekiah Christmas.
Within minutes the warriors went about burying their own dead in the rocks while the white men buried their two dead comrades in the dry, flinty ground. By mid-morning they constructed travois for what wounded could not continue east on horseback.
And just before midday, the trappers and Hezekiah’s Indians finally started the day’s march, gradually gathering up small bunches of stray horses as they pushed the herd on down the slopes for the desert wastes. On that journey, the travel-weary Negro and the young Kentucky boy now grown old rode knee to knee while they both attempted to hack their way through so many intervening years.
“I got me gran’chirrun now,” Hezekiah explained, more and more of his English returning to his nimble tongue. “Me—a gran’pap, Titus Bass! Gloreee be! To think of it: never would’ve had me no wife hadn’t been for you.”
“You’d got yourself a gal somewhere, I’m sure. Two of you raised up some young’uns—”
“Nawww, them slavers’d kill’t me first,” Hezekiah growled, the muscles in his jaws tensing. “That’d been fine by me too. No life for this here Neegra, being no slave.”
Titus cleared his throat, trying out a smile to foster a grin on his long-ago friend’s face. “I can’t believe you’re a gran’pap. How old a man are you?”
“I never learn’t much ciphering, Titus Bass. But I do know Miss Christmas tol’t me my last summer with her I was twenty-four years. And I kept me a count ever since, from that time I was made a freedman by you. Thirty-two winters it’s been.”
Slowly he calculated it himself. “Damn if that makes you fifty-six, Hezekiah.”
“How ol’t are you now, Titus Bass?”
Scratch wagged his head, figuring. “Why, I’ll be forty-nine come this winter. Back when we run onto one another—how could anyone ever figger we’d ever get this old?”
