Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (49 page)

Maybeso he could slip off with his old rifle and shoot some supper for himself, bring it back to roast over an open fire—then at least his stomach would be full for the night.

Titus took a step behind the mule, then stopped, staring; down at the reins in his hands.

If he set off on his hunt to fill his grumbling belly, just what in blazes would he do with the mule?

“Hell, she ain’t going nowhere,” he reasoned, looking over the harness that bound her to the stump. “Can’t get that stump out, she sure as the devil ain’t running off from here.”

Quickly he tied off the reins to the harness and leaped around the tangle of upturned roots. The rifle came into his hands like an old friend. More like an accomplice who had helped him in hunts without number in these very woods—ever since he was big enough to hoist his grandpap’s longrifle to his narrow, bony shoulder and stride right out the cabin door to disappear within the forest’s leafy green shadows.

Dusk was settling on the woods in just the way the mist gathered in the low places by the time he stopped at the edge of the narrow stream and listened. Titus jerked at the sudden, shrill call from a shrike as it dived overhead and disappeared in the coming gloom of twilight. The forest fell silent once more.

He figured he was too late to catch any of the whitetail coming here to water before slipping off to their beds for the night. Their tracks pocked the damp earth at the bank near the natural salt lick the deer sought out. No matter anyhow. Titus hadn’t really figured when he’d started out from that stump that he would scare up any critter at these riffles in the stream. More than anything, he had come here just to get away from the mule, and the stump, and the work, and his pap.

On the far bank a warbler set up a song as the spring light disappeared from the sky. Another joined in, then they both fell quiet. Far off he heard the cry of a riverman’s
tin horn on the Ohio. A boat plying the waters—coming down from Cincinnati, which lay a twisting forty-some miles from where he knelt in the damp coolness of that dark forest glen. Perhaps a big flatboat speeding downriver to Louisville, on down, down to the faraway Mississippi with its rolling ride south all the way to New Orleans. Maybe even one of those keelboats that would eventually point its prow north on the old river to St. Lou. Seemed everyone in nearby Rabbit Hash, here on the Kentucky side of the Ohio, was talking about St. Lou these days.

“The place holds promise,” claimed one of the drummers who came to town regular from Belle view, just five miles upriver.

Thaddeus Bass had snorted and wagged his head as if that was the most ridiculous assertion ever made. “Maybeso for shop-folk like yourself. Not for this family. We be farmers. Work the soil. Worked it since my grandpap come into Kain-tuck and staked himself out a piece of ground he and others had to defend from the Injuns. Naw, let others rush on to St. Lou. They been rushing on west, right on by my ground for three generations already.”

“Opportunity enough for any man, I’d imagine.” The drummer smiled benignly, pulling at his leather galusses.

“To hell with opportunity,” Bass retorted. “Opportunity’s the retreat of a weak-spined sort. Hard work is what makes a man’s life worthwhile. Ain’t no better blessing for a man than to feed his family with the fruit of his sweat and toil.”

Breathing lightly, Titus listened to the nightsounds, cradling the old flintlock, and wondered if he could ever forgive his father for keeping him chained to a mule, mired waist-deep in the muddy fields that surrounded their cabin and barn and outbuildings. Could he ever forgive his father for throwing cold water on his dreams?

“You’ll get over it, son. Every boy does when he grows to be a man,” Thaddeus had explained. “That’s
the difference between a whelp like you and a man like your pap here. Feller grows up to do what he has to do for them what counts on him, and he’s a man for
it
. A boy just got him dreams he goes traipsing off after and he don’t ever come to nothing ’cause dreams is something what cain’t take him nowhere.”

In the rising fog over the surface of the Ohio, the cry of the tin horn faded off. Titus closed his eyes, trying to imagine what sort of boat it was. Oh, he’d seen plenty of those flatboats and broadhorns, keels, and even those ungainly rafts of logs lashed together for the trip downriver, every small craft’s wake lapping the surface of the Ohio against Titus’s bare feet year after year. Summers without count had he wanted to hail a boat over and beg its crew to take him on.

But instead he sat there, listening until that horn was no more in the thickening fog that clogged the valley of the Ohio.

In the quiet that settled around him he heard the faintest rustle of brush. Held his breath. And a moment later his ears itched as something moved off into the night. Whatever critter it was had scented him.

Wind wasn’t right, he decided, easing himself to his feet. Time to be moving off to home.

Times like these when he wasn’t back to the cabin for supper, his father warned he’d get none. Still his mother always wrapped up a slice of cold ham and some corn dodgers, maybe even a sliver of dried apple pie, folding it all within a big square of cheesecloth before placing her treasure just back of the woodbox that sat to the left of the door on the front porch. Again tonight he knew he would be sitting in the dark, listening to the muffled voices of his family inside the firelit cabin as he chewed on his supper and washed it down with the cool, sweet water from the well his grandpap had dug generations before.

As much as he was certain he’d likely die early if he stayed on to become a farmer, Titus knew he’d feel like
a rotted stump inside if he disappointed his father. So through the past few years he had walked this narrow line between what his pap expected of him and what he had to do just to keep from dying inside, a day at a time.

Warm, humid starshine streamed down through the leafy branches of the trees as he felt his way barefoot along the game trail that would take him back to the field and the stump and that old mule he realized had likely grown just as hungry as he himself had become. He stopped and listened a minute, leaning his empty hand against the bark of a smooth sumac tree. A frightened chirp overhead startled him. Black squirrel. Something amiss in that warning.

He did not stop again until he reached the edge of the meadow Thaddeus was having cleared for cultivation. Beneath the half-moon and the bright starlight he could make out the stump he had been uprooting across the open ground. But he could see no mule. Titus burst into a trot now. His throat seized with his thundering heart. Skidding to a halt on the turned and troubled ground around the stump, he found the singletree and chain harness still lashed around the wide trunk. But no mule.

Collapsing to his knees, he quickly inspected the leather for some sign that the old girl had snapped her way out of harness. Yet nothing there suggested she had freed herself. Around on his knees he crawled, inspecting the ground for hoofprints, bootprints, anything that might tell him how she got loose. Mayhaps some of grandpap’s thieving Injuns. Or, worse yet, a white man come to steal the mule. But there was nothing untoward about that churned-up soil surrounding the stump.

“Take care of the animals gonna take care of you.”

The voice seemed so real it near made him jump out of his skin. Titus turned this way, then that, just to be certain. Assuring himself he was alone, he settled on his rump, back against the stump, and cradled the rifle into his shoulder. As his head sagged, he struggled with what to do about the mule, about his running off into the woods and leaving her to get stole.

Finally he decided. If she was anywhere, she was chewing on some grass at that very moment. It made his stomach grumble in protest to think the mule was eating, and here he was worrying about her with an empty belly of his own.

In the starlit darkness it took something less than a half hour to reach the glen where the cabin stood, its chimney lifting a gray streamer to the night breeze. The wind was off from the wrong direction, but now and then he could pick up the faintest fragrance of supper. It made his belly growl in anticipation. Behind shutters and sashes drawn against the night outside, narrow ribbons of yellow lamplight squeezed free, a wee patch of light oozing out at the bottom of the door. Across the yard stood the separate kitchen, used from spring into the fall so the cabin wouldn’t grow overly warm in those seasons of baking and cooking. Beside the kitchen stood the small smokehouse. Across the yard, the springhouse and corncrib. Beyond all of them still, the barn—taller even than the cabin with its sleeping loft.

Heading at an angle for the structure that blotted out a piece of that starry night sky, Titus kept to the shadows. Years before, so his father and grandpap had told him many times, the men of the family were required to keep an eye open at night for Injuns. Any shadow seen stealing across the yard was likely an enemy, and subject to be shot.

It had been years since the tribes had last made trouble. Back to the war with the Frenchies, later the revolt against the Englishers. It made his grandpap choke in anger to think that his father’s own countrymen had made life so hard on their fellow English citizens that the colonists had gone and fought to throw King George right back into the sea. But as distasteful as it was to admit, grandpap’s countrymen had turned out to be conniving, vicious lobsterbacks who had set the Injuns on the rebellious settlers. An army and all those Injun tribes come to make war against a few hundred farmers scattered over hundreds of miles of wilderness.

Titus slipped into the barn through the narrow door and held his breath.

His imagination soared as his eyes grew accustomed to the fragrant darkness. Recalling his grandpap’s stories of how a few brave young men had carried word of an uprising or the English army’s advance from settlement to settlement. How the farmers had reluctantly abandoned their fields and gathered families around them, hurrying to the nearby fort erected by a group of settlers for their mutual protection—each individual farmer’s outlots in the fields surrounding that communal stockade. There had been one such stockade near Belleview where the Bass clan had gone in times of emergency. Where nearly everyone in Boone county fled when the British set their Shawnee and Mingoes loose on their own white-skinned countrymen.

Now Titus’s eyes were big enough that he could make out the low walls of each stall, to discern the backs of some of the animals, the spines of a rake or a loop of harness draped over a nail. Enough light crept through tiny openings in the wall chinks that Titus could make his way down to the last stall, past the milk cows. One curious one came up and stuck her wet nose over the gate. He stroked it as he went past, feeling her long, coarse tongue lap over the back of his hand.

As he reached that last stall, he held his breath and hoped. It wouldn’t be right to say he prayed, simply because he never had really prayed for anything. But at this moment he hoped harder than he had ever hoped for something before. And if such hoping was another man’s prayer, so be it.

Daring to turn his head slowly, Titus looked into the stall.

Against the back wall stood the old mule. And on the nearby wall hung the harness.

Turning on his heel, his knees gone to mush, the youngster sank with his back against the stall door, where he leaned the rifle, catching his breath.

Leastwise the old mule was here. She wasn’t took. He swallowed hard, knowing who had come to fetch her. Likely come to fetch him for supper. More likely, come to see how he was doing on that dad-blamed stump.

Titus wondered if his pap would count “dad-blamed” as cursing.

“I don’t give a good goddamn if he does or not,” Titus whispered to the lowing animals. “His damn ol’ mule anyway—so he can take proper care of it hisself.”

He listened as the mule moved closer, right up to the stall door. Looking up, he saw she had laid her bottom jaw atop the door and seemed to be peering down at him with one of those dark, iridescent eyes.

“I’m sorry, Lilly,” he suddenly apologized. “Nothing against you. Shouldn’t’ve left you be there all by yourself. Something might’ve happened to you. Sorry, girl.”

Her head seemed to bob once before the mule retreated back into the stall once more.

Sometimes, he brooded, these animals were downright spooky. Like they understood what you spoke at ’em. Mayhaps—he feared—even able to outright read a person’s mind.

Slowly clambering to his feet, he saw that she’d been fed. The bucket hung from a peg inside her stall where the mule could reach it, feeding herself from the grain provided her every night. His pap had done that too. Likely brushed her down good. Like Titus was supposed to each night after he worked over the stumps on the far edge of the ground they were clearing for next season’s planting. Not time enough this year—what with the good ground already turned and the seed already covered, more than a dozen good, soaking rains already.

He but his hand in the canvas bucket and brought out a handful of the grain. Holding it beneath his nose, he drank in their faint sweetness of oats, the fragrance of molasses. Then he extended his hand to her. She came to the stall door, curled her lips back, and lapped at the offering as he patted the solid bone between her eyes.

When she finished, Titus swiped his damp palm across his worn britches and took up the rifle. It was time he had something to eat himself. Careful not to let the small door slam against the side of the barn as he eased it back into place, the youngster crept amongst the shadows toward the cabin. As he had done so many times before, he would eat his supper, then wait until all the lights were out before he would climb the roof and steal in through the window to find his bed in the dark.

After setting the longrifle against the side of the porch, Titus heaved himself up without using the steps. They were creaky with age and use, and more often than not apt to make more noise than one of the rooting pigs down in the pen behind the barn. Kneeling at the side of the woodbox, he reached around to the spot where his mother always left the cheesecloth bundle for him. He felt a little farther. Still nothing. Leaning all the way over the hinged flap atop the woodbox, he put both hands to work, stuffing both arms clear under the box. Nothing. No cheesecloth bundle. No supper.