Death Rattle (36 page)

Christmas turned, finding Scratch coming, and smiled in that ebony face. “Titus Bass. These white men you come here with, they ain’t going back by the Ammoochabees?”

“The booshway figgers on us tracking farther north. It’s high summer now. Water’s drying up even more this far south. We’re gonna lose a bunch of these horses no matter—”

“We can tell you where you’ll find the springs,”
Hezekiah interrupted, extending his arm to point off to the northeast.

“S-springs,” Scratch echoed. “You can tell us?”

Bass hurried Hezekiah over to Williams and announced what information the freedman could provide.

“Why don’t you come and show us?” Titus asked, hopeful.

Peering over the other trappers for a moment, the tall Negro could not help but see how that invitation nettled some of the white men. He wagged his head and sighed, “I belong with my men—”

“Bring them too.” Titus interrupted. “The Bent brothers got ’em a Negress for a cook over to their fort. Her husband’s the blacksmith—a Neegra too. You damn well ain’t the only black-skinned son of a bitch in the mountains—”

“No, it’s better I show you where you’ll find them springs are—let you go on with your own kind, Titus Bass.”

And before Scratch could protest any further, Hezekiah dropped to one knee there before them, motioning Williams and Bass to crouch with him. A handful of others came up to stand over the three. First, Christmas shoved some sandy dirt into a footlong mound. Here and there he placed some pebbles, other places he used the tip of one index finger to burrow some tiny, shallow indentions in his crude map.

“Watch the rocks, Titus. Count the rocks,” Hezekiah instructed gravely. “Here. Here. And here too—no matter how hot it gets, you’ll still find water. But less’n you count the rocks, I fear you’ll miss the springs. Water comes out up again’ the rocks. But mind you—not all them rocks got water by ’em. Count the rocks as you go an’ you’ll be sure which ones.”

The white men closely studied the map the Negro scratched on the ground. Then one by one Williams, then Bass stood and dusted the knees of their leggings.

“Why’n’t you come ’long with me?” Titus pleaded.

“My people are back there.” And Christmas pointed. “In those mountains.”

“Go fetch your family, catch up to us. We’ll damn well go slow with this herd so you can find us. We get over the mountains we figger to sell the horses and you’ll get your share of them wild ones—”

“Better I stay where there ain’t no question that I’m a free man,” Christmas cut off Bass’s argument, looking into the faces of the other white men not all ready to turn over any of their horses to a Neegra gone to the blanket. “Right here’s where I found some li’l peace for the first time in my life, Titus Bass. It’s plain on the faces of these others that back in that land where you’re headed with your horses … they won’t never look at me like a free man.”

“Things don’t have to be that way up high enough, back far enough you won’t likely see ’nother white face but mine for a long time to come,” Scratch explained, hopelessness starting to sink in. “Why, there’s even a ol’ friend of mine—a Neegra named Beckwith—was a war chief for the Crow, my wife’s people. This Beckwith was—”

“After what you done to help me all them years ago—it’s enough for Hezekiah Christmas that my friends helped save your life, Titus Bass,” he interrupted. “ ’Long with the lives of your friends too.”

Titus looked his old friend in the eye. “Damn if you ain’t as good a man as ever come to the mountains, Hezekiah Christmas. Which way your stick float now?”

He sighed thoughtfully, then said, “We’ll go back by way of the ground where we kill’t the Mexicans. Gather our arrows out of the dirt, pull ’em from the dead bodies too, afore goin’ on back to our wives and chimin.”

“Your grandchildren too, Hezekiah.” He had felt this same sentiment welling up in him before. Nonetheless, after all those last and final farewells he had endured, the partings never got any easier. “Damn if you ain’t gone and discombobulated things all over for me.”

“Why you say that?”

“I set you free back on the Natchez Trace long ago … and here you gone and not just saved my ol’ hide once, but twice’t in two days?”

“We’re square, Titus Bass. Never you make no mistake of that.”

“But you pulled my hash outta the fire twice—”

“Don’t you see,” Hezekiah snorted, “if’n you’d never set me free from that slaver’s cage, never pertected me when them slavers come after us, I’d never been out here to save your poor white hide two times for good measure!”

Scratch stepped close to the Negro, held out his hand, and they clasped as Bass said, “You give me back my life, twice, Hezekiah.”

“An’ I’d save your worthless white ass again if’n it come down to it, Titus,” Christmas promised as he gripped Scratch’s wrist in his big, black hand, the veins prominent on its back like an oiled, knotted Kentucky riverboatman’s rope. “No matter how many times God His own self puts it in my hands to save you … I’ll do it again without question—’cause I’d never had this life with these good Injun people less’n you set me free and took me north to the Ohio.”

Scratch felt the instant sting of tears burn his eyes. “You’re as good a man as ever there was, Hezekiah Christmas.”

The Negro grinned as daylight limned across the desert spread at their feet. “You give me back my life years ago. ’Bout time I done something to repay you. Now we are square.”

“Just ’bout as square as any two men could ever be.”

All around him the others were mounting up and Williams was barking orders for the march, sending men out to sweep in the sides of their monstrous herd of California horses. Titus finally released his old friend’s forearm.

“You ever come to the northern mountains, you best ask for me, hear?”

Hezekiah nodded with a smile. “Count on that. I ask for Titus Bass.”

“It’s for damn sure most folks gonna point you the right way you ask for me.”

“If ever I turn my back on this world here, I find you, Titus Bass. I find you no matter what.”

He had watched the Negro turn without another word and gesture for his men to mount upon their half-wild California horses, shooing a small herd before them as they wheeled about and started back up the long, grassy slopes dotted with scrub cedar and the last of the lean Joshua trees, heading for their homeland and their families.

Once the others were on their way, Hezekiah stopped his horse and reined around to have himself a look down the slope, long black legs dangling down from the rounded belly of his short, California pony. Bass held his arm high, outstretched, with his big-brimmed hat in his hand. Side to side he waved it in one long arc, and when he saw Hezekiah hold his bow aloft, Bass swallowed down the bitter clog of regret that lay thick in his throat. He turned his horse around and pulled his hat down over the sweat-stained bandanna.

All he had to do now was get back to the mountain country, cross over, and sell off his share of those horses that would survive the deadly crossing. Spring to spring. From one clump of rocks to another … until he could gaze into her eyes again. Just to see her and the little ones again, he would cross this fiery furnace of a desert, he would crawl all the way over those high and terrible places. To hold them once again, and promise never, never to ride away to California again.

Family. The feelings he had for his own kin often made him think back on those two gentile Indians the Franciscan friars had baptized with names symbolizing their new Catholic status. It made perfect sense for Frederico and Celita to turn back to the mountains with Hezekiah’s fighting men now. They belonged to that growing band of runaways more than they would ever belong to any cluster of cowed and brutalized neophyte slaves at the Mission San Gabriel. They were free again, just as Christmas had been given his freedom near the banks of the Mississippi three decades before.

Many times across the next weeks Scratch had vowed
he’d drink that whole muddy river by himself … if only they could find more water.

They found that first spring—right where Hezekiah said it would be. Nestled in among the rocks where the horses fought to get at the pools formed as the warm, underground water bubbled to the surface. Williams had them lay over a long day and night at the spring before continuing the next leg of their crossing.

That hot, dry, late-summer air sucked every drop of moisture right out of the men and the animals with a relentless brutality as they moved east-northeast, transcribing a path between each intervening landmark until they reached the second spring three days later. There they found a little less of the warm water bubbling out of the ground. Summer was torturing the desert, drying up what narrow ribbons of rivers had briefly flowed weeks ago, relentlessly sucking the seasonal life out of the underground springs a drop at a time as their subterranean moisture evaporated into air heated by a long-riding, merciless sun that refused to go down while it baked a man’s skin the way a narrow strip of gristle would sizzle in an iron skillet.

By then they had begun to lose horses—a few at first—the weakest, the youngest perhaps. Williams and the others made sure the six Ute broodmares they had driven all the way to and back out of California were the first to drink at every stop, and the first to be allowed what skimpy grass they came across when it came time to rest the herd. The mares were vital to them all—man and beast alike—dragging the herd and the raiders all back to the mountains by a primal lure compelling them to return to their young.

Titus was beginning to think he knew how both life and death now clung to those mares.

Every time Titus would shade his eyes and turn in the sweaty saddle to gaze upon their back trail, he would spot those dark forms wavering with a waterlike quality out there on the pale horizon. Poor, played-out horses that could no longer go on—both those that somehow still managed to stand weaving with their heads hung in
defeat, and those that had already accepted defeat, their legs crumpling in sheer exhaustion and dehydration, lying sprawled, heaving on the sunbaked hardpan of the desert to breathe their last: waiting, waiting, waiting as the skies above them slowly filled with the patient, high-soaring, black-winged birds of death sinking lower and lower toward their exhausted prey.

Never before had the buzzards and vultures had it so good in this land void of most everything but a slow, agonizing death. An emptiness filled with little more than arid heat, a limitless expanse that not only sucked the moisture right out of a man but also leached his hope and will to go on, drop by relentless drop.

He dreamed of Absaroka through those days on the precipice of hell—his mind’s eye yearning on the high, lofty snowfields mantling the mountains, the green of grasses tall enough to brush a horse’s belly, the blues and teals of streams or ponds lying beneath a never-ending sky. He dreamed of her still as the bottom went out from under him and his horse sank beneath him, tumbling into the sand.

Bass lay there exhausted, totally unmoving too, aware only on some nonmobile plane of urgency—listening to the horse grunting helpless as it attempted to get up, whimpering low in its throat because the animal realized in its own primitive way that it would never get back on its legs.

He closed his eyes, feeling how the sun stabbed right on through his thin cloth shirt, pierced the buckskin leggings—wondering if he would ever get back up. Titus tried to dream of the cool of Absaroka again one last time before it would be too late and he could remember no more.

“Bass.”

He blinked, looking up, finding the outline of a face hovering right over his—totally in shadow because the man’s head completely blocked out the sun. Squinting, he blinked again as the man’s salty, stinging sweat trickled into his eyes. The sweat in his own made everything
swim, but Titus finally made sense out of the features, that pale, blond hair turning gray.

“Ros … Roscoe.”

“Brung a horse for you,” Coltrane said sparingly as he pulled on Scratch’s arms, slowly dragging Bass to his feet.

His mouth pasty, tongue thick and slow, Titus asked, “How come you—”

“Ain’t leaving a one of us to die,” Coltrane explained, likely stringing more words together than he had in a month of Sundays. “You’re steady enough here, I’ll get your outfit.”

Roscoe dragged Bass’s saddle from beneath the dying horse, then cinched it onto another of the spare animals he brought over, its legs plodding, big hooves scuffing furrows in the hard sand.

Without a word, Coltrane made a stirrup by weaving his fingers together and hoisted Titus into the saddle.

Just staring down at the short, squat man made him feel more clearheaded, less woozy, despite the compelling heat. As he watched the hundreds of horses continue to plod by, recognizing one lone trapper after another strung out there at the edge of the dwindling herd, Titus was suddenly struck with the realization that Roscoe had just spoken more words than the man had ever uttered to him before.

“W-why?” he asked when Coltrane remounted and their horses lumbered into a shuffling gait once more.

“I know you’d do the same for me.”