Ride the Moon Down (6 page)

Solomon asked, “Got time for some whiskey?”

Titus looked at the five slowly, his eyes narrowing. “You figger this here nigger got stupid in the last year? Course I got time for some whiskey and some stories. Then I ought’n be on my way to find Wyeth.”

“But Billy Sublette’s got his trade tents just past the bend in the creek,” Caleb said. “Hell, he’s so close I could throw a rock and likely hit one of his whiskey kegs!”

“No thanks,” Bass said as he turned around and took up both the reins to the horse and Samantha’s lead rope. “From what I heard ’bout the underhanded jigger-pokey Sublette pulled on Wyeth—I don’t care to have nothing more to do with Billy Sublette.”

“So I s’pose you’ve heard there ain’t no more Rocky Mountain Fur?” Isaac asked.

“But we’re still working for Bridger’s company,” Rufus explained.

“From the sounds of things,” Bass said, “Fitzpatrick and Bridger can call their company what they want … but Billy Sublette still owns ’em and calls their tune.”

Elbridge suddenly placed the flat of his hand against Bass’s chest to bring Scratch to a halt. “Then I take it you’re a nigger what won’t drink none of Billy Sublette’s whiskey.”

Titus thought on it a moment, careful that his face remained gravely pensive. “Is Sublette’s whiskey as good an’ powerful as it ever was?”

“Damn right it is!” Caleb roared.

“Then I ain’t above accepting a free drink of that low-down thieving Sublette’s whiskey,” Bass declared boldly, “not when I get me the chance to drink that whiskey with the likes of you boys!”

As the sun had eased down on rendezvous that day of revel and reunion, Bass had crawled atop the bare back of the buffalo-runner, looped Samantha’s lead rope around his hand, and groggily pointed them north. It was twilight before he reached their tiny camp where Waits-by-the-Water had a fire going and thick slabs of antelope tenderloin sizzling in his old iron skillet.

“You find the trader you went in search of?”

“No,” he said to her voice at his back as he loosened knots securing those packs he had tied to the back of the mule. Crow words came hard with his thick, swollen tongue that wasn’t near as nimble as it had been when he left camp hours ago, so he settled for English. “Ran onto some old friends.”

She stepped up to him, their daughter straddling one of Waits’s hips, clinging like a possum kit to her mother. For a moment she only stared at her husband’s eyes, then leaned in close, inches from his face, and sniffed.

Bass jerked his head back. “What you doing?”

With a tinkle of laughter Waits replied, “You’ve been
drinking the white man’s bi’li’ka’wii’taa’le, the real bad water!”

“Just because you don’t like whiskey don’t mean I cain’t enjoy having some ever’ now and then!” he protested slowly, struggling to keep his tongue from getting as tangled as were the knots his fingers fought.

“Here,” she said, taking his hand and turning him, starting toward their fire. Waits convinced him to settle upon their blanket-and-robe bedding. “Take our daughter,” and she passed the infant down to him. “I’ll see to the animals.”

“Y-you’re a good woman,” he said to her back as she yanked free the first of the ropes and pulled off one of the beaver packs.

It was a few moments before he grew aware of his daughter’s chatter. There on his lap she played with her fingers, popped them into her mouth, licked them, then pulled them out and played with them again as she babbled constantly. Struck dumb, he listened with rapt attention, concentrating on the infant as she played and talked, talked and played, her skin turned the color of copper by the fire there at twilight.

Why had he never really listened to her until now? Was it the whiskey that had numbed most of his other senses, dulling them so that her chatter somehow pricked his attention? He laughed—and the baby stopped her babble, gazing up at him with widening eyes.

In English he said, “For weeks now I been wondering what we was gonna name you, little one.”

The moment he finished she gurgled happily again, which made him laugh once more, causing her in turn to stare at him in wonder.

“You and me can have us a talk, cain’t we?” he asked, bouncing her on a thigh. “I talk and laugh, just like you, pretty one. So you understand me. And you’re gonna grow up talking your pap’s tongue, ’long with your mama’s tongue too. Gonna talk happy in both!”

As soon as his voice drifted off, the infant set right in with her cheery babble. “So when your mama gets mad at me and don’t wanna talk, or when she don’t wanna have
nothing to do with speaking the white man’s tongue I’m trying to teach her—why, you and me can have us all the talk we want!”

“Talk?” Waits repeated the word in English as she stepped up, then knelt beside him on the blankets.

“Yes,” he replied in English, and slowly continued in his own language, “we’re gonna see which one of you learns my tongue first. Mama, or daughter.”

“You will teach her to talk the white man’s words the way you are teaching me?”

He nodded, feeling the fuzziness creep across his forehead there by the warmth of the fire. “I’m hoping she’ll want to talk to me when you’re angry at something I’ve done or said.”

“Do I hurt your feelings when I won’t talk to you?”

The girl reached out for her mother, so he settled the baby in Waits-by-the-Water’s lap. “I don’t like letting things go,” he confessed. “I want to get things settled quick. Get shed of those bad feelings soon as we can. Only way to do that is to talk.”

She brushed the babe’s short hair with a palm as she considered that. “Yes,” Waits agreed. “When you make me angry with you, I don’t want to hurt your feelings because I am so mad I don’t know what to say. Now I know that you want me to talk.”

“That’s the only way to … to …” But he lost track of what he had wanted to say.

“The white man’s real bad water made you forget, husband,” she said, then leaned in to kiss his hairy cheek.

“No, the whiskey just makes me stupid,” he admitted in English. “Better I sleep now.”

“Sleep,” she echoed the English word, and reached down to stuff a blanket under his head as he settled back onto the robes.

“Like I said, you’re a good woman,” Bass whispered in English as he closed his eyes.

“You … good man,” she said the words quietly, haltingly, in her husband’s tongue.

He smiled and sighed, and listened to the baby softly chatter as he sank into sweet oblivion.

It was late of the next morning when he awoke, his head tender as a raw wound, his temples thumping louder and louder still as he fought to sit up without his brain sloshing around inside his skull.

But at the fire where she was carefully cutting pieces of winter moccasins from a section of smoked buffalo hide, she heard him moving, groaning. In her cradleboard their daughter was asleep, propped against a bale of beaver hides. Without a word Waits laid her work aside and kneed up to the fire, pouring coffee into a dented tin cup.

“Drink this,” she said to him in Crow, holding the cup out between them. Then, as he peered up at her with grateful eyes, Waits spoke in English. “Coffee … for husband’s s-sick head.”

He tapped his puckered lips with a fingertip. After she leaned over to kiss him, Bass whispered, “What’d this ol’ bonehead ever do to deserve such a good woman like you?”

After swilling down several pint cups of coffee and gnawing on some flank steak from the antelope carcass they had hanging in a nearby tree, Titus started to feel halfway human again. By early afternoon the roll of thunder had eased at his temples, and that greasy pitch and heave to his belly had departed.

“Do you want my help?” she asked when he brought the mule into camp and dragged over the two small bales of beaver he had to trade.

“You’re a pure delight,” he said in English.

“Dee-light?” she repeated.

Grinning, “Do you know the word smile?”

“Smile, yes,” and her whole face lit up.

“You make me smile in here,” he said using her tongue, tapping his chest. “A big, big smile in here.”

“Too, me,” she attempted in English as she pulled up the thick, woolly packsaddle pad made from a mountain sheep and lapped it over the mule’s back.

Minutes later beneath the painful glare of a summer sun he encountered a pack train on the move that afternoon, migrating toward him, moving up Ham’s Fork.

“This here Wyeth’s outfit?” he asked as he brought his pony alongside three of the horsemen who were wrangling less than a dozen horned cows at the far side of the march.

“It is,” one answered.

“Where’s Wyeth?”

“At the head, yonder,” and that second man gestured toward the front of the cavalcade stirring dust from every hoof into the still, hot air.

“Thankee,” Bass replied as he kicked heels into the pony and they bolted into a lope, crossing the narrow bottomland that meandered between bare bluffs and the twisting stream.

In no time he was standing in the wide cottonwood stirrups, hollering, “Wyeth! Wyeth!”

One of the figures ahead turned in the saddle, bringing a hand to his brow as he peered from beneath the brim of his hat. “I’m Wyeth.”

Slowing his pony to match the pack train’s pace, Bass found himself suddenly grown anxious that his afternoon of reunion and celebration had put him one day late in trading for what the three of them would need through the coming year. The Yank’s brigade was clearly on its way.

“You pulling out?” he asked of the leader. “Leaving ronnyvoo?”

“Not yet,” the man answered. His small eyes in that overly narrow face squinted in the shade beneath his hat brim. “That time will come soon,” and he sighed with resignation. “But for now, we’re only migrating upstream to find more grass for our stock.”

“Them cows I see’d over there?”

Wyeth grinned. “That’s what’s left of the herd we started with.”

“You gonna open for trading?”

That question plainly startled Wyeth. His eyes blinked in surprise as he appeared to consider his response. “W-why, there hasn’t been anyone wanting to … not a soul’s come to me, our tents to trade. Suppose I would be willing to trade. Uh, yes—well, we do have near everything we brought west with us from Missouri to supply Rocky
Mountain Fur.” Wyeth grinned. “Yes, mister—I’ll be open for business tomorrow morning after breakfast.”

With great relief Bass inquired, “You eat early or late of a morning, Wyeth?”

The trader smiled even bigger, the sharply chiseled edges to his lean face easing somewhat with mirth. “I’m one to eat early.”

Bass held out his hand and shook with the Yankee before he loped away. “I’ll see you after breakfast.”

“I said it last year, and I’ve said it more than once this summer already,” Wyeth declared to Bass that following morning, “but most of these men out here in the mountains are nothing less than a low breed of scoundrel.”

“You countin’ me in that bunch?”

Wyeth slung his head back and laughed heartily. “Not by a long shot, Mr. Bass.”

Titus thumbed through some more of the lighter amber-colored flints. “If’n you had yourself whiskey to trade, I’d be one to give you all my business.”

“Looking to give yourself a celebration, are you?” Wyeth asked. “And a good-sized headache when you’re done too?”

“Maybe a good carouse, but the days are past when Titus Bass gets so far down in his cups he can’t crawl back out till a morning or two later. Gimme a dozen of them wiping sticks,” and he shoved a double handful of flints across the top of a wooden box at Wyeth’s clerk.

“How many winters you been out here, Bass?”

“Twenty-five were my first summer.”

“An Ashley man.”

“No,” and he wagged his head emphatically. “Come west on my own hook and paid dearly for it, I s’pose. Lost some hair to some red niggers down to Bayou Salade, but I ain’t gone under yet.”

Wyeth clucked sadly, then said, “Appears the only ones making any real money out of the mountain fur trade was Ashley and now Sublette. Damn him, damn him.”

“Heard how he finagled the Rocky Mountain Fur boys to break their agreement with you.”

“Sublette overtook my supply train not far out of the western settlements,” Wyeth declared, “and he stayed ahead of me the rest of the way.”