until the strong liquor loosened his tongue and the floodgate of memories came washing back over him in a way he hadn’t allowed since that fateful day at Soda Springs.
“D-dead?” Bridger whispered. “That towhead young’un … your grandson?”
His eyes teared up uncontrollably as he peered at Gabe. “You know what it does to a man when he can’t do a thing to help someone he loves?”
Laying his hard-boned hand on Bass’s shoulder there beside the fire as his wife and Magpie talked, Flea chasing Jackrabbit and Felix about in the cool of the late-summer evening, Jim said, “You ’member how I lost my Cora last year, just after Josie was borned … but, still, I don’t have no way of knowin’ how that’s gotta cut you clear to the backbone, what with losin’ a little’un like that.”
From the beginning Titus had promised himself that he would not get down in the cups with the grief he felt crushing in on him like an inescapable weight. He had resisted the urge to prevail upon Esau for a little of Fort Hall’s hooch, either for some wallowing in misery or for a parting celebration. He had resisted this long—but now the fire of that whiskey pouring down his gullet matched the burn he suffered in that hollow spot that had been growing a bit bigger inside him with each new day. Maybeso he needed to roar and wail, to weep and moan, to release the grief after it had been bottled up for so long. At the very least to get it flushed out of his belly before it ate away at him from the inside like a terrible hydrophobia … like the snake’s own poison had eaten away at Lucas Burwell’s will to fight until there was no more strength left holding on to life.
The flames of that merry fire wavered in a blurry dance the longer he talked. And the longer he talked the more he drank. Magpie sat with her arm around Waits-by-the-Water, the two of them listening intently while Titus spilled his grief like a drunk would puke his belly on the ground—stinking and noxious and loathsome … but this was something that made both the drunk and the griever feel all the better for it.
“Shit, I warned ’em, Gabe,” he had long ago started slurring his words, what words he managed to choke out around the huge lump wedged down in his throat. Something that just wouldn’t budge no matter how he kept washing it down with Bridger’s whiskey. “Told them young’uns stay back from them rocks.”
“But, Ti-tuzz,” Waits reminded in her language, “the snake did not get the boy who died near the rocks.”
He squinted at the fire, trying hard to make the swimming images hold still for just a heartbeat. Struggling too as he attempted to get his grasp around what her words meant.
“Sounds to me there ain’t no reason for you to think you could have done a thing different,” Bridger consoled. “The boy didn’t go to the rocks. He just crossed paths with one of them rattlers out huntin’.”
For a long time he watched the flames with his half-lidded, pooling eyes, sensing so much of the poison leaching out of him, the way on a hot summer day back in Boone County moisture would sweat beads on the outside of his mam’s clay pitcher. Like it was being pulled out of him a drop at a time, one heartbeat at a time. Gradually healing himself from the inside out as he wallowed in this despair so long rising to the surface.
“I tried my best to understand it, Gabe,” he admitted. “All the time me an’ Waits sat by that fire, makin’ a poultice for them bites, or boilin’ down some roots for Lucas to drink so’s his dyin’ wouldn’t hurt so goddamn much.”
“Tried to understand what?” Bridger asked.
He raised his eyes, struggling to focus on his friend’s face as the tears spilled down his cheeks. “Understand why it is that these here Injuns we white fellers got for wives know so much more’n we men do.”
“How you figger?”
“I see it’s because we’re white, Gabe,” he confessed, staring at the dogs working over old bones nearby. “Ever’ time I work so hard to get my mind around something I can’t figger out, my wife tells me I can’t unnerstand because I ain’t meant to unnerstand. She says I ain’t s’posed to work so hard to find a answer. She says I’ll find out soon enough why ever’thing works out the way it does, an’ why any of the rest of it don’t matter none at all.”
Bridger glanced at Waits-by-the-Water, then concentrated again on his friend. “Don’t matter none at all?”
“You been around Injuns near as much as I have, Jim,” he whimpered. “You sure as hell gotta awready know!”
“Know what?”
Licking a drop of whiskey that clung to his mustache, Titus spoke low, “Injuns say this here life of ours—what I’m doin’ sittin’ an’ jawin’ with you by this fire—this here life ain’t real at all.”
“Ain’t real?” Bridger scoffed with a wide grin. “Quit your yankin’ on my leg!”
Titus leaned forward, his elbow clumsily sliding off his knee, then quickly regained his composure. “Just what I said. You an’ me here now … this ain’t real.”
Bridger’s eyes narrowed as he turned to Waits-by-the-Water. “You understand what this here drunk is sayin’?”
Her head bobbed.
“Awright—spill it all for me,” Bridger prodded. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard nothing about any of this dreams an’ such.”
“This here’s hard work,” Scratch declared, then licked his lips. “Workin’ my brain like this makes a man even more thirsty than that trail comin’ down from Fort Hall … so maybe I should loosen my head-hobbles with a li’l more of your whiskey.”
“Just as long as you don’t pickle yourself and pass on out afore you tell me what these here Injuns of ours know that we don’t.”
Promptly Titus pressed one greasy finger up to his lips. “Shshshsh!” he hissed in a coarse whisper. “I ain’t figgered out if we’re really s’posed to know or not, Gabe.” Slowly, with his oversized head swimming unevenly, he turned to gaze at his wife. “Gonna tell my friend here ’bout it.”
“Bridger good man,” she said in understandable American. “He knows dreams good too.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Gabe inquired. “Me knowing dreams good too?”
Scratch took another big swallow, then dragged the back of his hand across his damp mustache. “Your dreams, Gabe. That’s the answer. Injuns I know believe your dreams are your real life … and this here, where we’re talking by this fire? It ain’t real at all.”
With a loud snort, Bridger growled, “Shit, if you ain’t way down in the cups, Scratch. Here you had me believing—”
“Injuns figger their dreams—’specially their medeecin visions—those are their journeys they take back to the real life,” Titus interrupted with an impatient wave of his empty cup. “Them places we see in our dreams … that’s where our spirits come from, where our spirits really belong.”
Wagging his head, Jim confessed, “I don’t think I understand any of this—”
“We ain’t s’posed to!” Titus said with glee. “Don’t you see? That’s the way it is with these here Injuns. They get their minds around what they can understand an’ they don’t let the rest of it fret ’em at all. It’s the way of things out here in these mountains.”
“How’s that?”
Leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, Bass whispered, “Injuns say I just gotta quit worryin’ ’bout ever’thing I don’t understand.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what I ain’t meant to understand … till ever’thing is showed me an’ the answers is given.”
“When’s that gonna happen?”
Titus explained, “Waits told me it’s when a warrior’s spirit takes off from his body.”
“When he dies?”
Nodding, Scratch said, “I s’pose that’s it, dead center, Gabe. When a warrior’s spirit is free of his body … we’ll get all the answers.”
“Answers for things like what happened to heal Shadrach’s arm?” Jim asked. “Answers for why Lucas was took by a rattler?”
He swallowed hard on that lump in his throat. “Makes this here child feel a lot better just knowin’ he’ll unnerstand all the questions one of these days, Gabe. One of these days … eventual’.”
