Wind Walker (50 page)

“Met him on the Columbia of a time long ago,” Bass declared wistfully. “We rode down that river to Fort Vancouver where I come to meet the doctor.”

“McLoughlin?”

“That’s the one. Tall man—wild white hair like a bald-headed eagle. Eyes like a pair of white stones too.”

“You said you’re American?”

“Was,” Titus admitted. “Ain’t no more.”

It was clear the trader didn’t understand. “I … don’t see—”

“Me and mine, we live in the Rocky Mountains. They ain’t American. Don’t belong to your English either.”

“When was the last time you saw Jarrell?”

Scratch dug at his chin whiskers, sorting through the rendezvous. “Don’t rightly remember the year. Only was told the next summer he’d got took by the ague. Fell sick and died quick.”

“It’s been long enough now I haven’t heard his name for many a year. Not till you walked in here and spoke it out loud.” The trader held out his hand. “I’m Hanratty. Pleased to make your acquaintance … Mister … ?”

“Bass, Titus Bass.”

“Bass, is it?” Hanratty declared with a rising note of interest. “Odd that is, for there’s a colored man, a Negro, who works about the fort, come from the States of America. Has the name of Bass too. Is it a common name where you come from?”

“Never met another soul out here this side of the Missouri River had my name,” Titus declared. “A colored?”

“Yes, what your countrymen call Negroes.”

“Neegras,” he repeated. “Knowed a few good’uns in my time. You say this one’s named Bass?”

The trader nodded. “He came up from the Mexican provinces some years back.”

His chest tightened. “Could it been Taos he come from?”

Hanratty shrugged apologetically. “Never did pay much attention to his wild stories.”

“Where’bouts can I run onto him?”

“This time of the day, hmmm—I might expect to find him still at the cooper’s shop.”

“He a cooper?”

Hanratty smiled. “A damned good one, Negro or not.”

“Where’s that—your cooper’s shop?”

“Straight across the courtyard. Off to the left of that well-house there.”

“Thankee. Awright by you, I’ll leave my wife to look over your goods while I look up this cooper of yours.”

He smiled as he went back to measuring out the bolt cloth. “She can look to her eyes’ content.”

Turning to Waits-by-the-Water, he explained in Crow, “I am going to see if I have found someone from long ago. You can wait here to look over the pretty things you and Magpie will like.”

“You’ll walk by yourself?”

“I have my stick,” he explained in Crow, holding it up. “Not going far. I’ll be fine. Just across a little open ground.”

She studied his right leg a moment, then leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek and whispered in his American, “Come back soon. We go to camp before dark.”

The air didn’t stir near as much in this country as it did back where he called home. It lay heavy and hot, oppressive with the bothersome drone made by a few of the year’s last mosquitoes. That shady overhang above the open door looked inviting, what with the way the setting sun felt as if it had chosen him alone to torture. Step by step he dragged the wounded leg with its babe-tender wound toward the row of small shops where this post’s handymen sweated over iron, wood, and leather, besides some rifle repair thrown in on the side.

He noticed a shadow of movement pass the open door, a man-sized form. Scratch stepped under the eave to the jamb and stopped, peering inside at the figure for a long moment before the cooper felt him there and turned.

His dark eyes narrowed, squinting on the old trapper silhouetted by the last of the sun’s glow. “Help you with something?”

“You sure ’nough got gray-headed over the years,” Titus said softly. “Hell, I s’pose we all got old.”

The black-skinned worker shaded his eyes with one flat hand and peered at the stranger backlit in that doorway. “’Fraid I can’t make you out in this light … we know each other?”

“Your name Bass?”

Laying the small hammer on his cluttered workbench, the cooper did not move across the smooth, swept-clay floor. “That’s my name.”

“Name you took in Taos many a summer ago.”

The Negro inched to the side, where he might have a better look at the stranger without the sun’s glare. “How you know that?”

“Your Christian name—name what was give you by your owner—it’s Esau,” Titus explained. “You still go by Esau Bass?”

His pink tongue came out and licked his lips. “Yes. That’s my name. You say we knowed each other down to Taos years ago?”

“Might say,” he sighed, bubbling with the wash of so many memories flooding over him of a sudden. “Been so long ago, ain’t likely you remember me.”

“Step on inside, here—where I can see you better.” That’s when Esau took three steps away from the bench, bringing him within an arm’s length of the man who stopped just inside the door where the last bright flares of the setting sun no longer blinded the cooper.

Slowly, Esau’s eyes widened as he looked the old trapper up and down, then up again. “T-titus Bass? By the holy of holies—that really you?”

“All what’s left of me, Esau.”

He reached out his strong, black, sinewy hand to touch Scratch’s cheek with his callused fingertips, then withdrew the trembling hand. “By Jehoshaphat’s breath … if it ain’t Titus Bass walked right into my shop!”

“I been out to Fort Vancouver myself … twice’t,” Esau Bass told the three men at the fire later that evening, as the sky deepened and the stars came out.

Their tongues fell silent, all of them stealing looks at one another until Bass trained his eyes on the black tradesman and clarified. “You … been to the Columbia … twice’t?”

He smiled and held up two fingers in a V. “Two times.”

Already Esau had finished explaining to Titus, Shadrach, and Roman Burwell how he put Taos at his back in 1837, while the three families took their supper around a small fire in the wagon camp. He described how he had abandoned the Mexican country when life grew harsh and lonely for a black-skinned man living among the many shades of brown. There were lots of pale folks, Esau had explained. But he was the only one the color of night.

“At first, I must’ve been a pure curiosity to them Mexicans,” he had told the group earlier, his English much improved through the last ten years among the British. “Later on, the hate was easy to see in their eyes.”

Working at Josiah Paddock’s side, they had struggled through three trading seasons in their store, slowly building their wealth and reputation while Esau listened to a litany of the tales about far-off places from daring adventurers. It
wasn’t long before he became enraptured with those stories told by traders from California, who ventured with their caravans into the desert wastes that lay far to the south on the Old Spanish Trail; along with tales told by those who marched out of the Northwest to buy goods, speaking with strange accents so foreign to his ear, men who had hard English money to spend, along with the lure of mighty rivers and forests to boast about.

“I was a curiosity again, at least to these Hudson’s Bay men,” Esau admitted, scratching his head well salted with plenty of gray hair. “When the factor asked if I’d go back with him to the Snake, the Boise, clear to the Willamette too—I took my leave of Josiah. Wasn’t long after we’d moved from our little shop to a big store on the plaza.”

Only weeks before Esau abandoned life in Taos, the daring American entrepreneur Nathaniel Wyeth had sold his Snake River post to the British. The Hudson’s Bay employees had been making things as hard as they could on Wyeth’s American upstarts from their Fort Boise less than three hundred miles downriver from the Portneuf. Now the powerful British presence had consolidated its grip on this side of the mountains just as affairs turned tense on the diplomatic front, both countries laying claim to the fertile and fur-rich Oregon country.

“You’re English now, are you?” Shad asked. Near him lay the two dogs, both of them protectively gnawing on meaty bones Scratch had given them while the women had fussed over supper.

Esau shook his head. “Never thought of turning English. Was never asked neither. Come to ponder your question now, my coming from America didn’t ever make no difference to me—so it made no difference to the company what I was. At Vancouver I stayed that first rainy winter through, where I learned my cooper’s trade.” He smiled with pride. “Fast to pick up too.”

The following spring he was dispatched inland with the supply caravan being sent to outfit those two interior posts
operating on the Snake, assigned to work the cooperage at Fort Boise. By the autumn of 1840 the company had moved Esau on upriver to Fort Hall, where he had remained as the fort’s cooper until four years ago, when his post factor sent him downriver to Vancouver with the fall packet, instructed to return the next spring with the annual caravan and with a new trade: wheelwright. With so many company carts and wagons moving up and down the trade corridor, and with all the more Americans migrating out of the East, it would pay for Hudson’s Bay to have a man handy at fashioning new wheels and repairing old, worn-out, or broken ones. By late in the spring of ’44 Esau was back at Fort Hall from his second journey to the mammoth Fort Vancouver.

“That’s just across the river from the mouth of the Willamette!” Roman Burwell exclaimed, barely containing his excitement as he leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees.

“Quite a show of Americans already in the valley,” Esau agreed.

“So you know the way there?” Sweete asked, a new and deep interest on his face.

Esau looked at the tall man. “I been there twice’t, why?”

In that sudden, heavy silence, Shad set his tin plate aside, stood, and moved off, gesturing for Shell Woman to follow him away from the fire’s light.

Drawing in a deep breath, Bass watched Sweete step away; then his eyes touched Roman’s before he asked, “Esau, how’d you take to the idee o’ leadin’ this bunch of farmers to the Willamette?”

“Go with you?” Esau squeaked.

“I ain’t goin’ along,” Titus confessed. “Not Shadrach neither.”

Wagging his head, the black man asked, “Why’d I ever wanna lead these folks to Oregon City?”

“You know of Oregon City?” Burwell cried, nearly spilling his tin plate of boiled beans as he squirmed atop a small crate.

“Been there a time, once only,” Esau admitted.

Titus leaned close to the black man at his left. “But you damn well know the way.”

“I s’pose,” he replied unsurely, “but that don’t make for a good reason for me to pick up and leave behind everything I worked hard for just to go—”

“Here you only work as a hired man,” Scratch reminded him. “When you put Taos at your back, didn’t you ever wanna be your own man again?”

Esau swallowed thoughtfully. “I been fine,” he responded firmly. “Been a good life for me in this place and with these men.”

“You’re a colored to ’em,” Bass said.

“An’ I’ll always be a Neegra to them Americans I meet coming through to Oregon.”

“How’d it be to stand on your own feet, be your own boss?” Titus tantalized him. “Maybeso to have your own shop in Oregon City?”

Scratch noticed how that sparked a light behind Roman Burwell’s eyes as well.

“He could!” Roman asserted. “By God, he could at that!”

Titus felt his mouth going dry. “So what you think of strikin’ out on your own?”

Esau’s face was grayed with doubt. “That’s a long, long way to go, just for a man to take such a chance. I-I ain’t ever led … folks.” He turned his head and gazed round at the wagon camp spread about the meadow. “To lead all these white folks—”

But Titus interrupted him, “The Esau I ’member knowin’ years back was a man what had the sand to run off from the Pawnee, a man with enough grit to point his nose west ’stead of goin’ back where things might be easy.”

The black man hung his head in recollection, staring down at his unfinished plate of beans. “All things would’ve been hard, I’d gone back where I come from again.”

“You the same fella I knowed years ago, with that same sand and fightin’ tallow?”

Esau’s eyes shone, as if he wanted to believe despite his deep misgivings. Still he resisted, “I got work steady. The pay isn’t much, but it takes care of things, gives me everything I could want.”