The Legend of Bass Reeves (6 page)

In all his twelve years, Bass had known nothing but the homestead. Sometimes people came by and he would hear them talk about the world beyond. Or Mammy would tell him stories of what she called high houses in New Orleans where they had “toney women” with silk dresses and silk skin. She said they were quadroons—women one-quarter black—and octoroons—one-eighth black—and were still slaves even though their skin was as white as clouds and they stayed in fancy apartments on a place called Bourbon Street.

But Bass knew nothing of these places and things except the pictures he made in his head. Wonderful pictures that he sometimes saw in the clouds. But they were imaginary, and he had no real notion of cities or towns or large groups of people.

The town of Paris, Texas, was about twenty miles away, straight east. While the mister went there from time to time, he never took anyone with him. Early one morning a week after they had come back from the Garnetts’, Bass was stunned when the mister said:

“Have your ma fix a bag of vittles. Just for you—I’ll eat in the saloon. We’re going to Paris for supplies and won’t be back until tomorrow. Bring a blanket so’s you can sleep under the wagon. And leave the shooter here. I can’t have people thinking I got slaves that carry guns.”

He had not asked for the little rifle back after the trip to the Garnetts’ and Bass had not offered it.

“Yes sir. Should I harness the mules?”

“Unless you want to pull the wagon yourself.”

Bass went into the quarters for his blanket and a sack of food. Mammy stopped him and made him sit down. “You never been in town before and you got to remember your manners.”

“I got good manners. You’ve been teaching me.”

“I mean the other kind, the slave manners. That town will be white people everywhere and you got to remember how to act or you’ll get in trouble. Don’t walk on the boardwalks.”

“What’s a boardwalk?”

“It’s a plank walk made along the sides of the road for white people to walk on so’s they don’t get their feet dirty.”

“Why can’t we walk on it?”

Mammy closed her eyes and sighed.“It’s just the way of it. Don’t walk on the boardwalks, and if a white man or woman is walking toward you out on the road, you move out of their way. If they talk to you, look at the ground and
say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ or ‘yes ma’am’ or ‘no ma’am’ and don’t ever, ever touch them. The best thing is just stay away from them and only do as you’re told.”

“But—”

“No buts. The mister never taught you all the rules. Out here you don’t need them all. But you’re going to town now and I don’t want you to get in trouble. Be careful. Mind your town manners.”

The last was said to his back as he threw a hurried “yes ma’am” over his shoulder, took the sack and his blanket and ran out to the barn to harness the mules.

He was so excited to be going into town that he could hardly sit still on the wagon seat. The mister drove, the reins held easily in his hands, but the mules seemed to crawl. Bass had never seem them go so slowly and it was lucky he hadn’t brought the rifle. He probably would have shot them.

It took six hours from the homestead to the outskirts of Paris. Six hours that seemed like six days, or six weeks, and the only saving grace was that, as they got closer to town where other roads and trails came in, now and then they began to see other wagons and riders.

The mister had let Bass ride up on the seat with him, but as they approached the town he said, “Get in the back of the wagon and sit down.” For a second Bass was going to ask why, but then he remembered Mammy’s words. He moved back and sat on his rolled-up blanket.

By most standards Paris was a very small town. Eight or ten buildings in a row, five on each side of the center street. The street was plain prairie dirt, and dusty. If it had been raining, it would have been a quagmire of mud.

There were two saloons, a blacksmith’s shop next to a
livery, one dry goods store, a square wooden-frame building with a sign that said HOTEL PARIS, and some nondescript small buildings that held a café, a dressmaker’s shop, a harness and saddle store and a gunsmith’s.

There were people. Everywhere. Bass hadn’t thought there were that many people in the world, let alone only twenty miles from the homestead. Wagons rumbled up and down the street, raising clouds of dust, and axles needing grease screeched so loudly it sounded like screaming.

There were stray dogs chasing and biting mules and horses, barking, yapping. Men were yelling at each other and swearing at the dogs and the mules.

One huge freight wagon met them head-on. It was pulled by a span of ten mules, all held in check by one man. His face was covered with hair, his chin whiskers soaked with dribbled tobacco juice. The man swore foully at the mules in a voice so deep and loud it sounded like thunder.

While Bass watched, a horse kicked a stray dog and killed it and two drunk men came boiling out of a saloon, fighting with knives as big as swords. The knives clinked blade to blade, and then one of the men slashed the arm of the other and the fight was over. Blood was everywhere, but the two drunks went back into the saloon.

The mister pulled up in front of the dry goods store and tied the mules to the hitch rail. “Come in with me to load.”

The mister climbed down and Bass followed. Just inside the door he had to stop.

The smells were overpowering. Coffee, turpentine, tobacco, produce and many, many smells he couldn’t identify because he hadn’t smelled them before.

He’d never seen so much of everything in his whole life, or imagined that such a place existed. On a plank counter were glass jars full of the most wonderful-looking things: strips of oily jerky, hard candy in amazing colors, popcorn balls, twisted papers full of taffy. Bass’s mouth started to water and he looked away from the jars.

“Here.” The mister handed a list to the storekeeper. “Just put the goods on the counter and my boy will take them out. ’Cept the big barrels. We’ll roll them up a plank.”

Two slabs of smoked bacon almost as tall as Bass were wrapped in paper and he carried them out first. Then bags of coffee and sugar and salt and dry corn for horse feed and a bag of sweet dry corn for cornmeal. The corn weighed almost as much as Bass and he struggled but finally got the sacks up into the wagon. There were many other small sacks with odds and ends, spices and tobacco and the like. By the time they rolled the flour barrel out and up a plank into the back of the wagon, the day was on the edge of dark.

The mister got up in the wagon and drove the mules down to the livery stable, parking the wagon out back. Once there, he and Bass unhooked the mules, took them out of harness and put them in the corral. The livery man— a black man so old and thin Bass thought he looked like a skeleton—fed them grain and fresh hay.

Then the mister took Bass out back to the wagon. “Here.” He handed Bass a small paper sack. “Mind you stay with the wagon. You sleep underneath it. I’ll be in the saloon playing cards probably till morning. Somebody comes, messes with any of this, you come get me.”

“Yes sir.”

The mister walked away without looking back, and
Bass looked in the little sack to find it half full of colored hard candies. He hadn’t seen the mister buy them and he smiled as he crawled under the wagon and spread his blanket. He had brought the tow sack with food with him and ate a piece of corn bread and some pork and when he was done put just one piece of candy in his mouth.

He had eaten honey and a couple of times rock sugar his mother gave him when he had the croup and kept coughing, but he had never tasted anything as good as that candy. Soon hard dark would come, and he wanted to be able to hold the candies up to the light and look at the brightness coming through the color before he ate them all, but there wasn’t enough light and he didn’t think he could keep from eating them.

Nearby was the livery barn, and four or five men had a lantern inside and were sitting around on stumps passing a jug and talking. If he tried to listen to them, it might take his mind off the candy.

“Mexico will beat the Texicans,” one man said, and Bass wondered who or what were the Texicans. “They got a real army. Sam Houston ain’t got nothing but a bunch of scallywags and highbinders.”

“Some of them highbinders can shoot you in the eye at two hundred paces.”

“Yeah, but Santa Anna has five thousand sets of eyes. That’s a lot of shooting when they’re shooting back, and them Mexicans got cannon, too. They slaughtered everybody at that Alamo. Took some of them out with that Crockett fellow and shot them in a ditch when they surrendered, and they’ll go through the rest of the so-called Texas Army like wet through a goose.”

“I dunno. …Mexicans didn’t want to come up here and fight, and Santa Anna spends a lot of time in his tent with that half-breed girl of his, the yellow rose, so they say. Could be he’d rather do that than fight.”

The talk droned on and not a lot of it made much sense to Bass. It didn’t matter to him one way or the other who won the war because he’d still be owned by somebody, and the more he thought about that, the more ridiculous it seemed.

How could anybody just up and own somebody else? And why did the law say it was all right for somebody to own a black person who was only one-eighth black—what Mammy called an octoroon—but they couldn’t own a white person? And if it was all right to own a black person, why couldn’t they own somebody else? Like an Indian? Or maybe a Chinee man, who Mammy said made tea?

Bass snorted and gave a tight little smile in the dark. He’d like to see what would happen if somebody tried to own that Comanche who had slapped him with his sticker. It was horrible what they did to the Garnetts, savage—but a part of him still thrilled to how free the Comanche had seemed on his horse.

Even when he came charging at Bass on that war pony and Bass almost messed his pants, even when he slapped Bass with the side of the spear, he was something to marvel at.

And that made him wonder what if black people had done that, had taken a weapon up and slapped some white man who tried to own them on the side of the head. If enough black men had done that, then the white men wouldn’t have been so quick to try and own them.

You hurt somebody, Bass knew from experience, and they quit doing something wrong. Mammy had taught him that when he was a little shaver and played with lucifer stick matches and almost burned the quarters down. She had thumped him good with her knuckles, so hard his ears rang, and he never did it again. He couldn’t pick up a match without remembering those knuckles.

He dozed, came awake when he heard movement. Then he realized that the mules in the corral had come over to stand near the wagon to sleep. The sound of their breathing settled his thoughts, and he rolled in his blanket and was soon sound asleep.

“Come on, dammit, get up!”

Somebody kicked Bass in the backside and he rolled away under the wagon, angry, ready to strike back. It was still dark but just starting false dawn, and it took him a moment to realize that his attacker was the mister, drunk and weaving. “Find a lantern and get the mules harnessed and let’s get out of this dump.… Bunch of damn sharpers and binders … clean a man out of his hard-earned profit … full house my a …” He broke down into mumbling and fell against the corral fence, hung there for a few seconds, then slumped to the ground half unconscious.

It took Bass fifteen minutes to find a lantern in the halflight of dawn and by that time he didn’t need it. He caught the mules with a handful of oats from the livery barrel, strapped their collars on, then hooked the harness around the collars and laid the straps over their backs. In another ten minutes he had them hooked to the wagon and had lifted the wagon tongue to the tongue ring between them
and adjusted all the straps, fed the reins back to the wagon seat and then turned to the mister.

He was still down by the fence, half aware of what was happening.

“Got ’em hooked up, sir. Want to get in the wagon?”

The mister didn’t seem to hear at first, and Bass repeated himself.

“All hooked up, sir. You ready to go?”

With great effort, the mister pulled himself up on the rails of the corral and wobbled, fell, walked to the back of the wagon, leaned over the open rear end and passed out completely as his face hit the wagon bed next to the flour barrel.

He started to slide out and Bass hurried to catch him. With great effort—the mister was close to three hundred pounds—he heaved the man up into the wagon. Bass threw the mister’s old felt hat on top of him, then his own blanket roll, and climbed up into the wagon seat.

Back at the ranch, he had driven the mules to skid logs, so they knew him and settled into the harness when he slapped their rumps with the reins.

The ground was hard, and the wagon rolled easily. Roosters were crowing and dogs barked at the wagon, but little else seemed to be moving in the town. There were horses still tied at hitch rails in front of the saloons, but no other wagons on the road and, except for an old black swamper at a saloon emptying spittoons into the roadway, they were alone.

The mister grumbled and swore but then finally slept, and Bass was alone with the mules and his thoughts. The road led straight west through a treeless plain and it was nearly impossible to get lost since the mules knew the
way. Bass was content to let them walk and find their own speed, clucking his tongue and flipping the reins that crossed their rumps now and then to keep their attention.