Buffalo Palace (9 page)

Lancaster legged back the bench he had been sitting on and rose with the pewter platter he had piled high with mush cakes. “You’re gonna stay long ’nough to eat, ain’cha, Bass?”

Drawing in another deep breath of that room no longer rank with the smell of rain and men living too close to one another—but now filled with the strong, corn-tinged fragrance of memories, Titus said, “Yes. Them pone cakes do sound good this morning.”

“Pone?” Clayton repeated. “You from somewhere south, mister?”

“Kentucky. Hard by the Ohio.”

At the fire Lancaster slipped a fourth cake into the heated oil in the skillet. “Ain’t heard these’r called pone in a spell.”

“My …” And he struggled to get the rest out without his voice cracking in remembrance. “My mam most times made all us young’uns pone cakes of a cold autumn morning.”

“I growed up calling ’em hoecakes,” Culpepper declared as he jabbed at the frying mush with a long iron fork.

“Maybeso they’re nothing more’n johnnycakes,” Clayton said, turning away from Bass as if he appeared to recognize something familiar in the look on the older man’s face.

Titus was grateful the young sergeant had turned away as his eyes began to mist up and he troubled his Adam’s apple up and down repeatedly, trying to swallow the sour gob of sentiment that threatened to choke him.

His damp leather britches and wool coat began to steam there in the heat of the mess hall—arousing a long-ago memory all of its own. The smells of frying oil, the
crackling of the wood beneath the heady fragrance of the crisping corn. He remembered those long years gone by: how his grandmother always used conte in baking some sweet treats—that spice made from powdered China briar she would mix into her corn fritters fried in bear’s oil, then sweetened with honey.

At the side of the fire the steaming coffeepot began to boil, and as quickly Sergeant Clayton tossed in two hand-fuis of the coarse coffee grounds, then tugged on the bail to move the pot off the dancing flames and onto the coals at the stone hearth.

Blinking his eyes with those tears of remembrance, Titus savored the earthy perfume of that frying pan bread. Corn. His father’s crop. What his grandpap before him had grown in that rich bottomland of the canebrakes they cleared of every stone and tree, season after season slowly enlarging their fields. Corn. It not only fed Thaddeus Bass’s family, but the stalks and tops of the harvested crop fed their horses and milch cows. Corn had fattened their hogs—which meant lard for their lamps during those long winter nights there near the frozen Ohio in Boone County. And what corn was left over after the family and the stock were properly cared for, after some had been sold and shipped south to New Orleans on the flatboats, then Thaddeus, like his father before him, would boil down into whiskey mash for proper occasions like birthing, marrying, or funerals: time when a man was planted back in that very ground where he had spent his life in toil.

“Don’t ever let me catch you spitting in my fireplace again!”
his mam had scolded him that first time Titus so proudly attempted to show off his new skill at the ripe old age of five and a half.

“Your mama uses them ashes,”
his pap had explained, sharply yanking the youngster to his knee.
“Uses ’em to make her prized hominy, Titus. So don’t ever let either of us catch you spitting in the fireplace. G’won outside with that sort of thing.”

How he fondly recalled her frumenty, their wooden bowls heaped with boiled grains of wheat served with a topping of hot milk and sugar. Not at all like the rye mush a working man had to settle for in the tippling houses along the banks of the Ohio, back there in St. Louis.
Nothing more than meal, salt, and water brought to a boil before it was set before him—nothing more than animal fodder to fill his belly until a midday meal.

And, oh: his mam’s crackling bread. How his mouth began to water with the remembrance as he settled on a half-log bench across from Lancaster, right beside the fireplace where Culpepper tended to the hoecakes. Crackling read: made tasty with a crisp crust, flavored with generous handfuls of leaf-hard hog cracklings turned into the batter just before baking in the Dutch oven.

On his tongue this cold, wet morning rested the remembered taste of those meals he had not recalled in far too many years since leaving home that autumn of 1810. Only sixteen back then, but certain sure he was man enough to make out on his own. And so he had for nearly fifteen years now. Yet the memories came all the more into focus on mornings like this when he missed most the johnnycakes smeared with butter and dripping with his mam’s preserves. Or all those evenings spent remembering how as a skinny child he had climbed up to sit astraddle the top rail of the snakeline fence his pap had thrown up around their fields—patiently watching the western fall of the sun and wondering on those yonder places his grandpap spoke so dearly of, munching on the crackling, earthy taste of parched corn there at the end of the day. How the coming quiet of each evening allowed him to listen to familiar sounds of the forest softly roll across the dark, plowed ground to reach his ears: the mournful toodle of the whippoorwill calling out to its sweetheart, often interrupted by the abusive cry of a strident catbird.

Homespun memories were all he was left with now—especially now that he had chosen a’purpose to be without a home of his own.

“The Missouri makes her bend to the north little more’n ten leagues upriver from here,” Sergeant Clayton reminded him later when the time had come.

He had shaken hands with Culpepper and Lancaster there that drizzly morning as the rain became more insistent, and now Titus grasped the young sergeant’s. “You’ve made me welcome … and for that I am in your debt.”

“Think nothing by it,” Clayton said. “Those tales you spun of your whoring back to St. Louis, and them wild
windies that ol’ feller Washburn told you of the far wilderness—why, they made your layover with us a genuine pleasure, Mr. Bass.”

“Next time you hap to come by—maybe on your way back to St. Louie,” Lancaster added, “I’ll wager you’ll have some wild windies of your own to tell us.”

Turning away, Titus rose to the saddle and tugged on the mare’s lead rope. “Thanks all the same for the invite, soldiers—but I don’t plan to be back this way a’tall. Have to be something damned important—nothing less’n life and death … to bring me back to St. Lou.”

As the river meandered, Titus had to cross more than thirty more miles before he reached the big bend of the Missouri, its roiling surface seeming to grow muddier with every hour he put behind him that first long day after leaving Fort Osage. Before the sun had climbed all that high that following morning, Titus realized the river had changed directions for good and no longer flowed out of the west. Now he would follow the Missouri north. Mile after mile he watched how it was becoming even more the color of unsweetened chocolate, frothing and bobbing with snags and clutter, tumbling with drift and refuse carried down from far upriver.

A river become the color of the quadroon’s skin. That warm-fleshed whore who abandoned her tiny crib down on Wharf Street where she had to belong for an hour at a time to any man with a guinea or pistole in his pocket, choosing to have herself put up in a fancy house where she would belong thereafter to only one wealthy Frenchman who could afford to provide himself the sweet delights his frigid wife would no longer pleasure him with.

That color of unsweetened chocolate she was, all over. How the turbulent, brown Missouri reminded him now of their tempestuous coupling.

As the pony picked its way along, several yards out from the brushy riverbank, and they pointed their noses north to the mouth of the Platte, Bass dug into the blanket pouch he wore slung over his shoulder. Dragging out the lue scarf the coffee-skinned quadroon gave him not all that long ago, he drank deeply of its fragrance. Disappointed to find that her scent no longer filled the cloth.
Her smell was as gone as she herself was. Crumpling the scarf in his hand, angry to learn that some memories were far too fragile to last out the miles and the years, he stuffed it back into the pouch—no more did he want to think upon her and the joy she brought to his body.

Still, far easier was the chocolate-skinned whore to remember than was … Marissa.

There beneath the breaking clouds Titus squeezed down hard to expel the sudden appearance of Able Guthrie’s daughter at the horizon of his memories. The soft, sweaty, sticky feel of her heated flesh against his as they lay that summer in her father’s barn. The dusty fragrance of hay and the pungent scent of the animals rising from the stalls below them. Oh, for so long, how he had done his best to hold her image at bay, to prevent it from nibbling away at the edges of his certainty that he had done the right thing by leaving.

Opening his eyes to the spring sun, Bass scratched at the back of his neck, there beneath the brown curls at the collar of the warm shirt he had put on that morning at Fort Osage: square-armholed, drop-shouldered, sewn from flax and wool … hoping he had not taken on tiny varmints during his brief layover among the soldiers. He should have known better, he scolded himself—such places had the reputation of sharing lice, mites, and fleas with all visitors. All it took was but one man to bring them in.

As it had been on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky flatboat. By the time Hames Kingsbury got the dead pilot’s load of hemp, ironmongery, flour, and tobacco down to New Orleans, even Titus found himself cursed with what the boatmen affectionately called the “Scotch-Irish itch.” Few, if any, of those men who made the rivers their life ever bathed in the waters of the Ohio or the Mississippi. Much less did they patronize the public baths in New Orleans’s “Swamp” at journey’s end. Simply put, most Kentucky boatmen of the era shunned anything that remotely resembled soap and water.

Pretty sure of it he was, what with the way such vermin bit and burrowed, that he might well have himself a case of them already. At least one tormentor back there, and maybe as many as a handful. With a fingertip he tried
to find one there at his collar, remembering how many a boatman would remove his colorful crimson bandanna to expose his neck made raw and red itself from a row of lice all lined up on the irritated flesh like a string of pearlish beads.

He brought his hand up before his eyes, staring at the louse he had captured between thumb and forefinger—then crushed it between his nails and flung it aside as the recognizable border of trees came in sight. Reining up among the brush on the bank minutes later, Bass peered across the river flowing in from the west, dumping its clear flow into the muddy Missouri.

“What the hell you figure that be?” he asked almost in a whisper as he patted the Indian pony on the side of the neck.

Bass straightened, peering to the north and west, stretching some saddle kinks out of his back. Eventually he admitted to the two horses, “I s’pose it don’t matter. This here’s the Missouri—and to follow it, a man’s gotta cross this’un. Giddap.”

With his heels he urged the pony into motion, moving along the brush, tugging on the lead rope to the mare. In no more than a half mile Bass found what he figured was a suitable place to make his crossing. Down the grassy bank and into the sparkling water, loosening up on the reins to give the pony its head—allowing it to find its own footing as it slowly took its rider deeper, step by step toward the middle of the river. Cold wicked up his boots, flowed over the top to bite at his calves, then billowed over his knees. Spring runoff soaked his thighs, saddle, and blanket by the time the pony began swimming at midstream. With every yard the horse carried him, Titus was compelled to raise his rifle all the higher until he held it high overhead.

Just as Bass began to heave himself off the back of the saddle onto the pony’s haunches, ready to swim alongside the animal, the pony instead recovered its footing with a sudden start that almost jerked him free of his hold on a thick strip of latigo woven into the back of the saddle pad.

Titus came out of the water, sputtering, his right arm still held aloft with the rifle—cursing the river and the pony, cursing the soft-bottomed crossing.

On the north side the pony and mare lurched up the muddy, grassy bank as he slid off the wet saddle—ultimately cursing himself for not yanking off his shucks before plunging into the river. He slogged over to the brush, water sluicing from his clothes as he stood tying off the two horses. Their flesh quivered as Titus quickly collapsed to the grass, yanking at the waterlogged boots. Standing again to tug at the wet leather britches, he struggled to pull them off one leg at a time, and finally yanking free of the wool and flax shirt.

For those first moments he was cold, chilled to his marrow as he suffered the breeze left in the wake of last night’s thunderstorm. But it wasn’t long before the climbing sun began to work its eternal magic, caressing his goose-pimpled skin with its warmth. Every bead of water dippling his arms or clustered at the base of each tiny hair on his chest, across the top of his bare thighs—all of them shimmered like tiny, iridescent rainbows as the sun began to dry every one.

Raising his face toward the sky, eyes closed, “Thank you,” he said quietly.

Surprised that he had. Not knowing what had come over him of that moment, causing him to offer his gratitude right out loud. Out of the corner of one eye, Titus glanced quickly at the sky, self-consciously regarding that great tumble of white-and-gray clouds dabbed against the pale-blue dome. With the rustle of the wind through newly leafed brush, he suddenly felt the presence of something greater than himself, something so immense here across the wide Missouri that it was almost impossible to comprehend.

At that moment he looked around him, certain that he was standing shamelessly naked within the sight of someone. But try as he might, he could not see, nor did he hear, another being, save for the two horses gently tearing off the green shoots at their feet as they dripped and dried in the sun, now spearing bright shafts through the breaking clouds.

This was as good a place as any, he decided. A fine spot, indeed. So from his shooting pouch he retrieved a small tin the size of his palm, then laid it among some stones where he figured he would build his fire. Titus began
to scrounge among the brush for dry kindling. After the showers of the last two days, it was not all that easy to find dry wood, but eventually he had all in readiness.