Crack in the Sky (10 page)

As soon as he heard the loud thumping, Jack himself turned and jigged over, giggling like a child on a lark as his head wobbled from side to side, humming and grunting with the music he was urging from the singing strings. At the drummer’s side Hatcher began stomping one foot dramatically, lifting his leg into the air as high as he could before driving it down into the grass and the dust, over and over and over again.

Of a sudden a realization came over Titus as he stood
with Hatcher’s cup refilled. He knew that song. Hurrying over to Jack, he held the cup in front of the fiddle player’s face. “Where you want me to set it down?”

“Don’t set the son of a bitch down!” Hatcher snapped as he went right on playing and bobbing without missing a note.

“I ain’t gonna hold on to it all night—”

“No ye ain’t, Scratch. Here, pour it in my mouth.”

“P-pour …”

“Right here in my mouth, dammit!”

The tall, skinny Hatcher bent a little at the waist, squatting slightly and contorting himself as he continued to play, lolling out his tongue as Scratch brought the big cup to his lips and slowly began to pour. He was amazed at just how little spilled out, what few drops dribbled down Jack’s chin, off his whiskers, and onto the fiddle.

When Hatcher began to sputter, Bass pulled the cup back.

“Now ye set it down on the rocks,” Jack instructed.

When he had that done, Bass straightened and yelled into Hatcher’s ear over the loud screech of the fiddle, the laughter and hooting of the men, “I know me that song.”

“Ye know this?” Jack shouted in reply. “Sing it with me.”

“Cain’t sing—”

“Sing it!”

“Told you—I ain’t no good—”

“Sing, goddammit, Scratch. Ain’t no one listening but me!”

Titus cleared his throat self-consciously, his eyes darting left, then right, nervous as a bride on her wedding night.

Hatcher prodded him, “Sing the song with my fiddle notes.”

Reluctantly, Scratch began.

Titus never had thought he had a bad voice. Rather, he was merely shy of using it in the hearing of others. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sung when folks were around. That is, except when his mam took him and his brothers and sister to Sunday meeting and they all were raised singing those songs settlers on the frontier memorized in early childhood. But this tune was something he had heard others sing around campfires those long-ago summer evenings at the Boone County Longhunter Fair, heard again while rocking on Amy Whistler’s porch of an early autumn evening, heard even at his family’s hearth before a merry fire as the long winter night deepened in the Kentucky forest around their farm.

This was a song not about church and ancient biblical characters in a time distant and dim, not a song about things religious and mysterious … no, at this moment he was singing a song about a subject most boys came to understand as they grew to manhood. A song about women—a matter even more mysterious than religion.

“Damn, if ye don’t have ye a fine voice after all, Titus Bass!” Hatcher roared over the cry of his fiddle.

Now he blushed, made all the more self-conscious as Hatcher kept right on scratching out the melody to the song. He took a drink to hide the flush of embarrassment.

“Gimme drink,” Jack ordered.

When Bass took the cup from Hatcher’s lips as the song sailed on, Jack asked, “What else ye know?”

“Songs?”

“Any other’ns?”

“A few I might recall, if’n I heard the tune.”

“How ’bout this’un?”

And with that Hatcher immediately slipped into a new melody without lagging a note. After a few moments Bass realized he knew this one too. As he began to sing, Simms and Rowland came over with their cups; then others began to walk up, stopping to listen to Bass’s singing.

How he had come to love this song in that first youthful blush of manhood—if not for the lament expressed by those melancholy words he had come to know by heart so many years ago, then he loved the song because of the delicate way the notes slid up and down the scale, all of them blended this night by the bow Jack Hatcher dragged across those taut gut strings.

More company men came up now, falling quiet as they came to a stop in a loose ring around Hatcher and Bass, listening intently. From the looks on their hairy, tanned faces, the glistening in their eyes as the firelight danced across them all, it was plain to read that every last one of these men had someone special left far, far behind. Many miles, and perhaps many years, behind.

Hardened men, all—softened for only a moment as the wistful notes of the fiddle blended with the plaintive
words of one who has left behind a loved one oft remembered in quiet moments around a crackling fire here deep in the heart of the mountains, where only a bold breed dared live.

For long moments the last note hung in the still, cool air of that summer eve at the south shore of Sweet Lake, men struck dumb by the sweetness of the song, by its mournful sentiment. Some of the trappers chose to put their cups to their lips, there behind the tins to blink their moist eyes clear; others chose to snort and hack, clearing throats clogged thick with sentiment.

Nathan Porter pierced the ring formed by others to shove a cup at Hatcher. “Drink, friend!” When Jack took the tin, Porter turned to Bass. “That was fine, the way you singed.”

Embarrassed, Titus sipped at his liquor.

Porter asked Hatcher, “You only play the fiddle?”

“I been knowed to strum my hands across nigh anything with strings.” He handed the empty cup back to Porter. “Why, ye got a song ye want me to play?”

“No, not no song,” Porter replied. “But we got us this squeezebox belong’t to one of the boys—”

“Squeezebox?” Hatcher interrupted.

“That’s right,” Porter stated, biting a lip before he went on. “Fella name of Ryman, went under this past spring to some of Bug’s Boys.”

Jack’s eyes lit with a merry fever. “He had him a squeezebox?”

Nathan grinned hugely. “He did.”

“Elbridge!” Jack bellowed over the heads of the others with a childish glee.

In a moment Gray emerged through the cordon of trappers knotted around Hatcher. “What you hail me for?”

“Porter here says he’s got him a squeezebox.”

“That true?” Gray demanded, wheeling on Nathan.

“Never thort to try it out,” Porter explained. “Cain’t none of us play it anyway.”

Gray snagged one hand on Nathan’s collar, fairly screaming in glee, “Get it for me!”

“Grimes! Get that squeezebox you been packing along!” Then Porter turned back to Gray and Hatcher. “You ain’t bald-facing me, now, are you?”

“This nigger can play,” Jack testified.

Porter seemed dubious. “So where’s your own squeezebox if’n it’s the true you can play?”

“Lost it,” Gray began, his face gone morose. “More’n a year ago now. Damn, but it broke my heart.”

“Just up and lost it, did you?”

Hatcher explained, “Didn’t rightly lose it. Elbridge got it crushed a’neath a packhorse when the critter slipped off the trail and took it a slide down the mountainside.”

“Had to shoot my packhorse,” Gray added morosely. “And then I found that squeezebox smashed like fire kindling when I untied my packs to carry ’em back up the slope.”

Hatcher leaned forward and whispered, still loud enough that most men could hear. “The man sat right down, then and there, with what was left of his squeezebox broke all apart in his two hands … and took to bawling like he was a babe.”

“I loved that thing,” Gray defended himself in a squeaky voice, hands fluttering helplessly before him.

“Here!” Grimes shouted as he burst back onto the scene.

“Gimme that!” Gray screeched as he lunged to his feet, reaching for the concertina, ripping it from the other man’s hands. “Oh, J-jack—ain’t she ’bout the purtiest sight you’ve ever see’d?” he gushed, running his fingers over the oiled wood of both octagonal end pieces and the wrinkled leather bellows.

Hatcher turned and winked at Bass. “Damn sight purtier’n that’un ye got smashed under a dead horse what took a tumble long ago.”

“It is purtier, ain’t it? It is for the truth of God!” Gray shouted in glee as he hitched up his leather britches before stuffing both hands inside the wide leather straps tacked to the wooden ends of the concertina.

Scratch whispered into Hatcher’s ear, “He really can play?”

“This boy can play like the devil his own self,” Jack replied. “Eegod! He’s better’n me!”

Nodding in amazement, Bass turned to watch Elbridge Gray’s merry face as the trapper slid up and down some scales, listening intently to the instrument’s tuning. For the moment Scratch was amazed to find himself in the fastness of these mountains—where he had been put afoot, where he had lost three friends to the savages somewhere downriver, where he had been scalped and left for dead, then resurrected by Jack Hatcher and his buffalo-worshiping Shoshone—out here in the great beyond to find not only did Hatcher have along a fiddle he could play tolerable well … but now he discovered that Elbridge Gray could make all sorts of sweet sounds emerge from that hand-me-down concertina.

Here in this intractable wilderness, he had found music. Real music. Not just the dimming memories of tunes he carried inside his head, off-key and little used, whistled or hummed in tattered fragments as he went about his icy labors … but real, heart-stirring music.

“‘Hunters of Kentucky’!” Gray cried above the whooping and clapping of those crowding close.

“Get back, there—give us some room, dammit!” Hatcher demanded from the gathering as he dragged the bow long across the strings in prelude. Turning to Gray with as big a grin as Jack ever had on his face, he roared, “Do it, ’Bridge!”

Elbridge yanked the two ends of the concertina apart and began to stomp about in a tight circle, thumping the grassy ground with his floppy moccasins, his eyes squinted shut, fingers flying in a blur as he wheezed life into that instrument, squeezing sweet music from it, pumping the magic of song into the lonely lives of lonely men in a lonely wilderness.

With the second playing of the chorus, Caleb Wood started to sing at the exact moment Jack Hatcher raised his own croaking voice.

By then two of the company trappers had joined in to sing along with Wood and Hatcher. A few of the words Titus could remember, having learned it during his years in St. Louis following the War of 1812—each time recalling that autumn journey down the Ohio and Mississippi with Ebenezer Zane’s riverboatmen. A stirring frontier ditty that recalled the courageous backwoodsmen who had stood with Andrew Jackson against the British at the mouth of the Mississippi.

Eventually a few more joined in, accompanied by the trapper beating his taut, willow-strung beaver hide.

Then Hatcher began to prance and bob right around Gray in a quick, whirling jig of a dance, both of them kicking up dust and bits of flying grass as their feet flew.

Back to back the two weaved and swayed, then began to do-si-do around and around one another.