The Legend of Bass Reeves (3 page)

Bass ran off for the woodpile by the pump house, shaking a stick to scare out any snakes. Then he ate the corn bread, so hot that the honey melted like butter and soaked into it. They didn’t have a cow to get milk for butter, but Mammy saved all the bacon and pork drippings in a jar, and she had smeared the drippings on the hot corn bread to mix with the honey.

“Your cooking”—Bass stood in the kitchen door, grease on his hands and face, honey in his mouth—“it must come from heaven.”

“I bet you want another piece.” Mammy smiled. “And maybe a slice of pork belly.”

She handed him another chunk of bread and a slab of pork, mostly rubbery hot fat, the way he liked it. He went to the shade side of the hut to squat and eat.

When he was done he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, wiped his hands on his pants and went to the pump house for a drink of cool water.

It was evening and he had sundown chores. There were hogs to feed, wood to gather for coffee and breakfast in the morning, water to carry for the Roman nose and the
mules. He worked steadily, using the large wooden bucket to carry water to the troughs. He did this every night and every morning, and he didn’t need to think about it while he worked, so his mind wandered back to the day with the cow and the coyotes.

Things will change.

It was there the minute he stopped thinking about anything else. He muttered to himself, “Of course things will change.” Nothing stood still. But he knew the coyote’s words meant more than that and when he was done with chores and had eaten again, he told his mother, “Coyote talked to me today.”

They were sitting at the front of the slave quarters and she was sipping a cup of water with just a touch of the master’s whiskey in it (“For my bones,” she said) while they watched the sun go down. If the mister was there, they had to keep working until full dark when he went in to sleep. He didn’t like to see them resting. But when he was gone, they’d sit like this and talk until it was time for bed.

“Coyotes talk all the time,” Mammy said.“We hear them every night yakking and cakking down by the bottoms. They don’t mean nothing by it.”

“No. It’s not like that. I was waiting on the cow and there was two of them and one of them kept looking into my eyes. I don’t know how but his lips moved and I heard what he said inside, in my head.”

Mammy believed in God and Moses on the Mountain and God’s Dearly Loved Son, Jesus, with all her heart and soul but, at the same time, she knew the value and truth of signs and omens.

“What did he say to you?” She put her cup down and
held his face in her hands. “What were his words, his ’zact words?”

“ ‘Things will change.’ ”

“For the better? For the worse? Did he say?”

Bass shook his head. “No more. The words came into my head just like that, not up or down, good or bad. ‘Things will change.’ Then he went back to watching the cow. He didn’t say more.”

Mammy thought for a time. “He’s talking about a good change. You’re young, very young, to be talking to witch dogs, and they don’t never say bad things, bad omens, to the young. It’s always about something good when they talk to babies.”

“I ain’t no baby.”

“You’ll always be my baby.” The sun dropped the last bit below the horizon and they were in warm, soft spring darkness. She hugged him tightly. “You live to be ninety, you’ll still be my baby.”

“No baby can tangle them cows, ride that Roman nose.”

“Hush, boy. Don’t sass your mammy.”

“I’m not sassing. I’m just saying, no baby can tangle cows, ride that old jerk-gaited Roman nose the way I can.”

“I know. I know. Tomorrow morning I’ll make a pot of some of that Chinee tea the mister got in a silver tin box and look at the leaves. They might tell me what the omen means.”

“It means a thing is going to change.”

“Omens are funny and sometimes talk sideways and don’t always mean what they say.” Mammy stood, slowly easing her back straight, stretching the pain out. Flowers came out of the darkness and walked past them into the
quarters without speaking, holding a piece of harness he had been working on. He slept back in the rear corner in a small room made by stretching two pieces of canvas out from the walls. Bass and Mammy’s rope cots were at the other end of the building. Flowers went to bed with the sun, got up with the sun. Bass had never heard him utter a sound except to grunt once when a mule stepped on his bare foot. He didn’t even dream, it seemed, or make sounds in his sleep. Not even snoring.

“How come Flowers don’t talk, Mammy?”

“Nobody knows,” she said. “All I know about him is that he came from a very hard place back in Georgia where he was whipped and beaten, and it made the thinking part of his brain shut down. The mister traded six goats for him just to have him split wood and work leather.”

“Were you ever whipped?”

“Not whipped. Tapped a couple of times when I was a young one like you for not knowing my manners. But not whipped, thank God.”

“I ain’t going to be whipped either.” No one, he thought, no man will ever lay a whip to me, no man will ever turn me into something like Flowers.

“Lord, I hope not. Whipping and branding are like bad dogs coming after you.” She pulled him to his feet. “Come in to bed now. It ain’t good to go to sleep with bad thoughts in your head. Think on pretty things like the sunset, like corn bread and honey and cool springwater on a hot day. The days are getting longer and the sleeping time is shorter, and you need rest to grow.” She said the last sentence the way she used to sing to him when he was a baby going to sleep.

She made up songs, letting her voice, deep and soft, move around the words. He stood and followed her inside. He crawled into his bed, but sleep didn’t come for a long time.

Somewhere outside, far off, a coyote sang. Another answered closer, and then eight or ten of them started yipping. He tried to listen to see if his witch dog was there with a message. But all he heard was a bunch of coyotes.

Silly old witch dog saying dumb words.

Things will change.

And his own sleep song came into his thoughts, round words rolling through his mind:

How could things not change?

Then sleep.

SPRING 1836
Eagle Flying Free

He was twelve years old. Coming on to be a man. Time to think and do in man’s ways. That was why he went farther than usual from the homestead looking for rabbits.

There was a creek that went past the edge of the buildings and meandered south. It was never more than a couple of feet across, more a trickle than a creek, but the damp soil along the edges made for thick willow and mesquite growth.

The brush was much wider than the creek itself, fifty to sixty yards on each side of the wet mud, and so thick it was almost impossible to move a horse through it. A boy on foot was another matter, and Bass viewed the thick green world as his own. The mister never came into the mesquite and willow because, being the only good cover
in the vast expanse of the prairie, it not only attracted hordes of game—rabbits, sage hens, wild little javelina pigs—but snakes as well. Water moccasins and rattlers. The mister was mortally terrified of them.

“That creek bottom is full of devil serpents!” he’d say when he was drunk. Now that the widow Plunkett had taken up and married another man who did not drink, the mister only went to Paris to replenish his whiskey supply. He bought barrels and poured it from the barrels into a clay jug that he sipped from. As he drank more, he did less, until Mammy just about ran the homestead. She depended on Bass more each day. The mister did not allow the slaves to eat beef, and only gave them the belly fat and none of the good cuts when he slaughtered pigs, so Mammy had Bass hunt for game along the bottom. She put in a green garden down where the creek passed the horse pens and they got vegetables there, but the meat came from Bass.

Bass wasn’t allowed to have a gun. The mister was as afraid as anybody of having armed slaves, so Bass had to snare rabbits and sage hens, or kill them with a Jesus stick, which was two sharpened hard willow throwing sticks tied together in the middle with rawhide to make a cross.

Bass learned to use a sidearm motion to spin-flick the Jesus stick out so hard that sometimes when he hit a rabbit, he drove it sideways and pinned it to the ground. He became good enough to hit the sage hens on the fly. Usually they were stupid and sat there and waited for him to hit them, but if they flew and he got one, it would be dead when it fell to the ground.

The rabbits nearly always screamed when they were
hit or snared, almost like a baby crying, his mammy said. The screams brought in other predators—coyotes, snakes or bobcats, and, strangely, the javelina pigs. The pigs were short-coupled, gray, covered with bristly hair, and could run very fast. They didn’t seem afraid or concerned when they came upon Bass. They were also very good to eat.

The pigs were too big to be killed with the throwing stick, so Bass made a spear, or killing lance. He fire-hardened the point, and after several attempts finally managed to pin a pig to the ground, not by throwing the lance but by lunging at the pig as it ran by. Mammy cut little chops and roasts and then cooked the bits and bones with beans, and they could eat that pig with corn bread for a week and a half. Even Flowers grunted with pleasure.

But a rabbit only lasted one meal, and three prairie chickens were also a meal, and it was hard to get a javelina without a gun. Soon Bass had hunted the nearby bottoms until all the game he could get was gone. He took snakes, finally, hunting them with a stick and a hoe to cut their heads off. He stripped the skin like he was peeling fruit, cut the guts out, and Mammy cooked the meat in bean stew with peppers from the garden.

It was good meat, but the mister didn’t eat it. Any good beef, any good pork, he kept for himself, and he gave the necks and feet and backs of chickens to the slaves and ate the rest. He ate white bread made with flour he bought in town. He got fat, so fat he had to use the wagon and hardly ever rode the bay or the Roman nose.

As Bass searched for game he had to move further away, until on some hunts he was five or six miles down- or upstream from the homestead.

The mister wouldn’t let him take anything to ride, not even one of the stove-up mules. Thick as the mesquite was, Bass wouldn’t have been able to ride the mule in the brush anyway. But he could have used it to get down to where he was going to hunt, and when he got something, he could have had the mule to carry it home for him. The day he got a javelina, he had to carry it draped across his back nearly six miles and didn’t get home until midnight.

Mammy was terrified. “I thought you ran.”

“What do you mean, ‘ran’?”

“Ran to freedom.”

He thought about that. “Where is that, freedom?”

“There are places where they don’t have slaves.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure. They say follow the Drinking Gourd, which the mister calls the Big Dipper, and that’s north, so it must be up north. I guess you go north till they don’t have people owning other people.”

“I wouldn’t leave you, Mammy.” He couldn’t imagine living without her. “You know I couldn’t do that.”

“I know, little boy. I know. But sometimes things happen, and like that witch dog told you, things change. You remember I looked in the Chinee tea leaves and they said that same thing too.”

“Well, I wish the change could be Mister giving me a gun and a mule to ride. Even a little shooter. I could get one of those spring deer if I had me a gun.”

But in a way it was just as well he didn’t have a mule.

If he’d been riding, the Comanche would have seen him and he’d be dead.

They nearly got him anyway.

It was a hot day and he’d gone nearly seven miles
downstream hunting. The mister no longer had Bass tangling the wild cows because he was too fat to ride out and drag them in, so there were plenty of cows along the banks in the mud and mesquite.

Bass had thought of spearing a good-sized calf, but the danger of actually trying to do battle with a longhorn’s calf, when the mother could pick up a horse on her horns and gut it, made him reconsider. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to get the meat home.

So he had kept moving along the creek, threading his way through the mesquite until he was in new territory and he started to see more game. He’d missed two throws with the Jesus stick when he suddenly came into an opening, a trail that crossed the creek.

It wasn’t over ten feet at the widest. It came from the north and crossed to the south and seemed like a wellused trail. Bass had heard tales of buffalo migrating, so at first he thought it might have been a place where they came through. How hard would it be to kill one of them without a gun? Probably at least as hard as killing a longhorn. He had thought of somehow making a bow and arrows. But he never could find the right wood for a bow and they always broke. He was thinking about this when he noticed two things.