Buffalo Palace (63 page)

At the center of him he made a vow to watch each and every sunset, each and every one of those days given him from here on out. Promising to be thankful for each one he had been granted by whatever great force had spared him this day.

Surely it had to be the same, unnamed power that created the beauty of every sunset, painting each day’s with a different hue as the earth slowly turned beneath that radiant, blazing horizon.

As the sun sank lower, out of sight behind the cottonwoods and Hannah carried him up the long slope from the river, Bass vowed with all his heart that he would not fail to watch them all. Given that gift of each day.

Realizing he was not just given his life this day, but given new eyes to see all those sunsets yet to come.

By the time he pushed himself over and off the mule’s back late that first night, it felt like every inch of him had been scalded raw.

Scratch wasn’t sure how much ground they had covered after fleeing the riverbank at sundown: he had passed out. But when he finally became aware that the mule had stopped, the moon itself was resting on the far western edge of that black dome overhead. Slowly coming awake, he realized he had been asleep, maybe more so he had
passed out with fatigue, his mind and body giving up the fight against such terrible pain. And he shivered with cold. As warm as the days had been, the nights had been gradually growing colder.

Evidently, she had been standing there patiently waiting for him to awaken, unable or unwilling to take him any farther that night. The only sounds he heard as he came to were the mule’s weary breathing, and the faint trickle of water seeping along its bed, somewhere out there.

As the seconds passed and his heartbeat began to hammer at his ears once more, Bass became all too painfully aware of his body. From head to toe, it felt as if he had been brutalized—not a part of him that did not cry out. While not as horrifying an ordeal as had been climbing on, this pushing himself off the mule’s bare back was nothing short of excruciating torment.

Even the muscles in his good arm and the two strong legs cried out with complaint. Every part of him in agony, Bass heaved himself off his perch, dropping to his legs only to have them give out beneath him so he landed in a heap.

Groaning, Scratch rolled over onto his left shoulder and drew his legs up fetally—fixing to let himself cry as the pain washed over him in a diminishing flood. Sometime later, when he was prepared for what it would take, Bass told himself he had the strength to get back on his feet. Better that than lying on the cold, bare ground at the edge of this stand of trees.

First he struggled to his knees, then rose there beside Hannah, resting against her as his breath slowed until he again heard the faint trickle. With his legs stiff and unused, he gripped on to the mule and stumbled around to the far side of her to drag his rifle free. With that crutch Titus started away, following the faint sound.

The tiny freshet proved to be less than five yards away: a narrow creek fed by a high-country snowfield as yet unmelted by summer’s harsh glare and heat. There he went to his knees again, and with the rifle close at hand, Bass dipped his face into the icy flow. Colder than he had imagined it would be—much colder than the river had
been—he pulled back, gasping with surprise, his face and beard dripping with black pearls in the darkness.

“Come, girl,” he coaxed the mule behind him. “Get you some.”

When she didn’t move, he tried convincing her again, but instead she only hung her head in exhaustion.

“I know,” Scratch said quietly. “Me too.”

Then, after he slowly dragged his tongue over his parched lips, Bass whistled the best he could.

Her ears perked and her head came up. Wide-eyed, she came over close enough for him to stroke her as he sat up beside the freshet to rub a hand down a foreleg, sensing the powerful muscle that had rescued him from destruction, carried him far from the riverbank attack.

“Drink, girl. You’re gonna need it.”

Gently tugging down on her lead, Titus finally got her to understand. She lapped at the water briefly, then raised her head and backed away.

“C’mere,” he demanded … then whistled.

When she returned to his side, Scratch reached up and snatched hold of the end of the big, thick wool blanket. He wasn’t about to move any farther tonight. Right here would do.

Gazing into the sky for a moment to figure where the sun would come up in the morning, he shuffled over a few yards on his knees to a soft patch of grass within a brushy crescent of tall willow. She followed him, stopped, and hung her head as he painfully, slowly, laid his body down on the double fold of blanket, slid the long rifle between his knees and arms, then brought the other half of the blanket over himself.

It took a few minutes, but much of the pain of moving eventually dissipated, and he was left with nothing but the constant, nagging throb of his wounds, and the deepening of the cold that night.

Sometime later when the sky to the east was graying, Bass awoke, his bladder full and aching. The best he could do was throw off the blanket, push himself onto his knees, then pull his breechclout aside as he made water there and then. With that exquisite relief washing over him, Titus collapsed within his thick red cocoon and quickly fell back to sleep.

There were times during that first day when he grew aware of things around him. Not coming fully awake, not really opening his eyes at all—only occasions when he was slowly brought to realizing the sun was up at one position or another in the sky. Instead of opening his eyes here in the cool of his copse of willow, Bass would smell, his nose telling him that Hannah remained close by. One time he awoke to smell the earthy scent of her dung, another time when she made a puddle of strong, pungent urine nearby.

Late that afternoon he awoke again—and for the longest time he kept his eyes closed, listening to the mule crop at the grass, tearing it off between her teeth, listened to the breeze and the birds and the winged insects droning somewhere close. With no sun on the willow grove now, he figured it to be evening and eventually opened his eyes. Rubbing the grit from them once more, Scratch sat up a little at a time, his belly as hungry as he could remember it had ever been.

For a long time his belly rumbled while he stared down at the front of his right shoulder, slowly volving it to see how much he could move it now, more than a day after the bullet wound. Sore and tender—but he could urge it this way and that more widely than before. Soon, maybe, he would have to see about patching it up, putting some sort of bandage over one or both of the holes. Carefully he tugged at the buckskin shirt with his fingers and was surprised to find that the shirt wasn’t crusted to the front wound again. The hole was coagulating all on its own.

After whistling softly to Hannah, Bass pulled himself up against her, propping himself there to loosen knots on rope and rawhide. After retrieving that tight bundle of buckskin scraps, he blindly dug around in a second rawhide parfleche until his fingers felt the beaver fur. Knowing the glossy hides would do nicely, Scratch pulled out the small wrap of fur. What he saw was not just the dark sheen of the thick scraps of beaver, but tangled in it across his hand lay the blue bandanna.

Slowly sinking again with the buckskin and beaver scraps in his lap, he stared a long time at the blue silk scarf before finally bringing it to his nose. He inhaled deep
and long, his eyes barely closing—conjuring up that remembrance of her through the potent power or scent.

As he rubbed the cloth gently across his bare cheek, down the bridge of his nose, over his eyelids—just to feel the caress of the fabric was enough to make him want desperately to remember the feel of her … that silky flesh with its tiny hairs, flesh that goose-pimpled each time it became cold in her tiny room and he flung back the blankets to look at all of her at once, to gaze upon her coffee-colored body. That big blue scarf took him back many, many miles and what seemed like a good man’s lifetime—took him back to those last months in St. Louis.

To that time when he lost Isaac Washburn, and along with the old trapper—Bass lost his long-held dream. Across those seasons of despair he had nothing more to look forward to than the earthy necessities of a man’s life. Spending most of his money to buy himself a drink now and then, along with the feral pleasure of a good meal upon special occasions, as well as the company of a succession of women who each one helped Titus hold at bay the numbness slowly eking in to penetrate to his very marrow.

It had been a time when, unlike before, there were no more of those raucous days ruled by whiskey-fever and whoring until he passed out. But for a time there—he no longer dreamed on the buffalo.

Across that last autumn and winter he’d imprisoned himself in St. Louis, Bass routinely had pleasured himself one evening a week with the coffee-skinned quadroon he’d grown fond of. At times they’d shared a bottle of West Indian sweet rum brought upriver on a paddle-wheel steamboat, both of them drinking and laughing until she was ready to hike up her nettlebark petticoat and climb astride him.

He smelted of the blue scarf again as he sat there in the willow. Only in his imagination did it still smell of her. So very long now had he carried it among skins and hides—on that packmare, then among Hannah’s baggage.

Oh, how he believed he smelled her still on this corner or that. Remembering how he visited once a week, every payday when he could afford a bottle of that brown-sugar rum and the sweet sin of that cross-breed whore. There
every week … at least until that Saturday night he came to call, fresh from the bathhouse and a warm meal taken in the tippling house just down the narrow avenue, ready to have that cream-colored beauty work her magic on his flesh so he could swallow down what troubled him so.

As Scratch brought the scarf from his nose and laid it across his lap, spreading it out fully, he recalled how the old woman who watched over the knocking girls informed him that his favorite no longer boarded there—having left suddenly to take up residence in a private place farther up the hill, close to where the rich and very French families dwelled in old St. Lou. Bass remembered how, as the woman had told him the news, in disappointment he had touched that blue scarf he’d always tied around his neck every one of those special Saturday nights.

No, Isaac Washburn hadn’t been alone in finding a favorite trollop there in St. Louis. For Titus, his favorite became the gal with skin the color of a pale milk chocolate. A recent arrival, the quadroon had been imported upriver from New Orleans by a successful madam. Ah, how her brown skin was almost the color of that silky mud sheen to the Lower Mississippi itself.

As he hacked off two pieces of the beaver hide big enough to lay over his wounds and tied together long strips of buckskin, Titus recalled the first time he saw her sipping at her Lisbon wine. She was wearing those tall and gracefully carved ivory combs in her hair every bit as dark as a moonless midnight. At the base of her neck was wrapped a velvet choker pinned with a whalebone brooch, the ribbon clasped so tight at her throat that the brooch trembled with every one of her rising pulses. Her lips full enough to more than hint at her African ancestry, Bass found it little wonder that he came away from her so many nights bearing the tiny blue bruises and curves of teeth marks she left behind as she worked him over with her mouth, starting at the shoulder and working on down to the flat of his belly.

While he clumsily secured the scraps of beaver over the wounds with two long strands of buckskin thong, he stared at the blue scarf—squeezing hard to remember her
every gliding movement, to remember the silky feel of her, to recall her potent smell.

It had been early one wintry morning after swearing she was his favorite that they heard Washburn hammering a fist on her door, announcing that he was ready to head back to the livery. Without saying a word at first, she reached up to pull down one of her scarves from a peg hammered into the wall beside her narrow, short-posted muley-bed.

“You take this,” she instructed in a hoarse whisper as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.

At that moment he didn’t know what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”

“My scarf,” she said in that thick Mississippi-bottom dialect of hers, taking the fabric from him to unknot it. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”

“W-where are your people?” he had asked her over the noise of Washburn’s insistent thumping on the doorway, his bellowing that he was about to come crashing in.

“I don’t have no people no more,” she explained, sadness filling her eyes. “But I want you always to be somebody special to me.”

“I will be, always,” he vowed, and let her tie the scarf around his neck before they parted in the gray of that dawn.

How he recalled wearing the scarf knotted there at his neck every time he returned to see her of those Saturday nights when he could afford the price of both a bottle of rum and to sleep till morning with someone warm beside him. Hell, even when he could not afford her and had to content himself with gazing at the whore from across the smoky room in the tippling house where she went about her business, talking and laughing with other customers, glancing at him once in a while—those eyes of hers asking why it was not he who was pushing his hand up her skirts and hungrily rubbing her legs then and there, panting to drag her back to her little room.

After struggling to get the buckskin shirt down over his head and arms once more, Bass concluded he would wear the scarf as she had intended him to. Working at the
two resistant knots, he eventually freed the head bandage as the sky became greasy with twilight. Tucking the scarf under his belt, Bass slowly crabbed over to the trickling freshet, then slipped the buckskin and moss from his head.

As he set the moss scrapings aside atop a small rock, Bass grew curious—just how would the bare bone feel to his touch, how would his touch feel to the bare bone? Before he could talk himself out of it, Scratch reached up to lay his fingertips on the wound. One by one his fingers tiptoed across the exposed bone, gingerly feeling their way around the circumference of the lacerated flesh. There at the bottom of the wound he felt the thin, stiffened strip of flesh. Tugging on it gently, Scratch figured he could not pull it—that shriveled curl of skin must still be attached to some living flesh.