Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  “You’re too damn dark for any of these here Injuns,” Tom Smith demanded as he hobbled up. “Just who the hell are you?”

  “He know me,” the warrior leader said, looking again at Titus.

  “I-I know you?”

  “You knowed me long ago, Titus Bass,” the tall man explained. “I am the man you set free from a slaver’s cage. The man you set free at Owensboro on Ohio River.”

  Scratch’s eyes widened.

  A huge, warm smile cracked that black face as he continued, “I am the man Annie Christmas called Hezekiah.”

  It was the Negro he had busted from the barred cage on the back of that wagon outside a Natchez tippling house as the Kentucky-bound boatmen were doing their best to slip through that riverbank settlement without being recognized. Back then sixteen-year-old Titus Bass had looked into that cage behind the Kings Tavern, recognizing the tall, bald-headed Negro who had tended bar in Annie Christmas’s gunboat brothel tied against the river-bank as Ebenezer Zane’s men were floating down the Mississippi for the ocean port of New Orleans.*

  Because Hezekiah had failed to stop the brawl that had killed one of her prized whores and a couple of her bodyguards, Annie promptly sold off her bartender to a wealthy landowner who would squeeze his money’s worth out of the big, muscular slave. But before they pushed north from Natchez, the slavers had to stop for that autumn night, have themselves some supper and a few drinks, then perhaps a fleshy whore to wrap her legs around them until dawn when they would venture out to the wagon yard to discover one of their slaves busted free.

  Much to the misgivings of the other boatmen, Titus Bass brought Hezekiah Christmas with him on that long walk back along the Natchez Trace, eventually reaching the country of the Muscle Shoals as they pushed north for French Lick, the end of that wilderness road. It was just past a travelers’ stand and a rainy river crossing that the slavers caught up with the boatmen. In a quick and bloody scrap, young Titus Bass hung his life out for the Negro.

  Scratch explained the story in detail, down to their parting at Owensboro on the Ohio, weeks later.

  “Y-you give this here Neegra a paper what said he was a freedman?” Philip Thompson asked in scorn and disbelief.

  “He was a man, and I freed him,” Bass replied. “I figgered he ought’n go west where a man might stand on his own legs ’stead of being accounted for by the color of his skin.”

  “You sure as hell are one chuckle-headed fool!” Thompson roared. “Lookit him! Cain’t you figger how much this Neegra would bring one of us on the slave block?”

  Hezekiah glared down at the white trapper. “You wanna take me back to your slave market, white man?” He held up his hands, wrists pressed together. “Go right ahead on—put me in your irons.”

  For a moment Thompson’s eyes flicked about anxiously, then he smiled. “Maybeso we can take you on back with us to Missouri with these here horses. Sell your black ass to some slaver. It’s for damn certain I’ll get more for you’n I’d get for a dozen Mexican horses!”

  A handful of Thompson’s compatriots guffawed at that.

  “If’n you try taking Hezekiah,” Bass warned, “you’re more soft-brained than I ever give you credit for.”

  Thompson’s jaw jutted and his brow knitted in fury as he demanded, “What the hell you mean I’m soft-brained?”

  “Shit,” Titus scoffed. “You’d be one dumb idjit to lay a hand on Hezekiah here.”

  “W-why?” the white man blustered with a roar of laughter. “You gonna stop me?”

  “Me,” he answered, then dramatically swept his arm in a wide arc, “’long with all Hezekiah’s Injuns. You make a play for him, you wouldn’t last more time’n it’d take you to eat horsemeat for breakfast.”

  That instantly drowned all of Thompson’s plans in very cold water, and the man sheepishly shrank to the back of the Americans as Williams and Smith stepped forward to discuss their immediate fortunes with Hezekiah Christmas.

  Within minutes the warriors went about burying their own dead in the rocks while the white men buried their two dead comrades in the dry, flinty ground. By mid-morning they constructed travois for what wounded could not continue east on horseback.

  And just before midday, the trappers and Hezekiah’s Indians finally started the day’s march, gradually gathering up small bunches of stray horses as they pushed the herd on down the slopes for the desert wastes. On that journey, the travel-weary Negro and the young Kentucky boy now grown old rode knee to knee while they both attempted to hack their way through so many intervening years.

  “I got me gran’chirrun now,” Hezekiah explained, more and more of his English returning to his nimble tongue. “Me—a gran’pap, Titus Bass! Gloreee be! To think of it: never would’ve had me no wife hadn’t been for you.”

  “You’d got yourself a gal somewhere, I’m sure. Two of you raised up some young’uns—”

  “Nawww, them slavers’d kill’t me first,” Hezekiah growled, the muscles in his jaws tensing. “That’d been fine by me too. No life for this here Neegra, being no slave.”

  Titus cleared his throat, trying out a smile to foster a grin on his long-ago friend’s face. “I can’t believe you’re a gran’pap. How old a man are you?”

  “I never learn’t much ciphering, Titus Bass. But I do know Miss Christmas tol’t me my last summer with her I was twenty-four years. And I kept me a count ever since, from that time I was made a freedman by you. Thirty-two winters it’s been.”

  Slowly he calculated it himself. “Damn if that makes you fifty-six, Hezekiah.”

  “How ol’t are you now, Titus Bass?”

  Scratch wagged his head, figuring. “Why, I’ll be forty-nine come this winter. Back when we run onto one another—how could anyone ever figger we’d ever get this old?”

  “I’d never’d been old at all, wasn’t for you.”

  Bass felt his eyes brimming, his heart seized with a sharp stab of warm sentiment. “Then we’re even, Hezekiah Christmas.”

  “Even?”

  “Less’n you brung your Injuns down on them Mexicans,” Scratch declared, “me and the rest of these here horse stealers all be dead right now.”

  Christmas’s eyes narrowed in a serpentine fashion. “My people hate Mexicans. Kill all them Mexicans we can kill ever’ time they ride into our mountains.”

  The impact of just how close he had come to going under was hitting Titus. He declared, “You didn’t come along with your Injuns when you did, I’d be hash right about now. So how’d you know to come save me?”

  With a gust of soft, contagious laughter, Christmas said, “Didn’t know it was you, Titus Bass! Didn’t really matter it was you neither. Like I said, all we was gonna do was kill ever’ Mexican we could get in our hands. But you being there was just something meant to be, Titus Bass.”

  “Maybeso us crossing paths again after all these years was meant to be, Hezekiah,” Scratch declared with a toothy smile. “Way things was lookin’ with them Mexican soldiers ’bout to rub us out—your ol’ bare head was the sweetest sight I see’d in a long, long time!”

  “Many’s the night I laid on my blanket, trying to fall asleep,” Christmas admitted, the look in his eyes gone soft again, “doing my best to figger out a way I’d ever thank you for setting me free from them slavers. An’ the farther I come—sailin’ way out to California—the harder it was gonna be to find me a way to square things between us. After while, I got to figgerin’ I’d live out the last of my days owing you for my life—”

  “Great Jehoshaphat! If you didn’t square things back there in a big way, Hezekiah!” he interrupted as he laid his hand on the Negro’s bare, muscular forearm. “No more talk ’bout it, ever again … what I wanna know is when the devil you gonna tell me how you come to be out here so far away from where I last saw you on the banks of the Ohio?”

  * Dance on the Wind

  15

  “Just like you said for me to do, I gone west, down the Ohio,” Hezekiah Christmas expla
ined. “But that country didn’t suit me so much. Folks there … they didn’t take to no freedman so good.”

  “What’d you do?” Scratch asked. “Where’d you go when you found things weren’t so hospitable for you west of Owensboro?”

  Hezekiah told how he crossed the Ohio, turning his nose east, pushing farther and farther north. He made a few pennies when and where people would pay him for his work. And when he no longer had any money to pay for his keep, or no white man would offer him his keep in exchange for a little work, Hezekiah slept out in the forest, or here and there stole a chicken and other victuals to fill his gnawing belly as he kept on searching for that place where folks would no longer regard him as nothing more than an ex-slave, not even so much as a freedman … a land where they would regard him only as a man.

  “Never heard of New London,” Bass said after Hezekiah had explained how he made his way all the way to that seaside town in Connecticut. “What’s a man with a strong back like yours to do in such a place?”

  “I went to sea,” Christmas said with a chest-swelling pride. “Cap’n Philbert. A good man, that one.”

  On the Lady Jane, Philbert’s sleek, low-slung coastal packet, the crew made swift runs up and down the Atlantic seaboard. With their hold crammed full of goods from New England, they plied the coastal waters to those southern ports where they off-loaded, then filled up the belly of the Lady Jane once more with bales of cotton, tobacco, and even rum from the West Indies.

  “For six years I learned every bump and dimple on the seaboard,” Hezekiah stated. “Then Cap’n Philbert, he was give the chance to sail a big, big ship out on the ocean.”

  Philbert was offered more pay to command a massive, three-masted schooner that would make regular runs around the Cape Horn to California, beginning with that first season of 1819.

  Titus watched the way a wistful look came over Hezekiah’s face as he talked about that maiden voyage of the Yankee Pride, plying the coast of South America and eventually tacking into the bay at San Diego, then sailing north to their next port where they put in at Pueblo de los Angeles. It was in that coastal village that Hezekiah fell in love with the Spanish ladies, and they with him.

  “Valgame Dios! Way them wimmens stared at me with their big eyes, why—I don’t figger any of ’em ever see’d a Neegra afore!” Hezekiah confessed with a grin. “Truth be, I had eyes for one of them ladies my own self. But she was the wife of a soldier. He bought her fancy clothes and drove her around in a big carriage all the time. I’m sure he didn’t think much of his wife making eyes at no poor seafarin’ Neegra from America faraway. Malditos Americanos.”

  He had decided California had to be the land of milk and honey—brimming with women, wine, and all manner of earthly pleasures. The freedman set his sights on putting down roots in California.

  “I asked Cap’n Philbert for my leave—an’ he let me stay behind when the Yankee Pride turned south for the Cape and her home port. Even spoke for me at the Mission San Gabriel where one of them padres spoke a little American talk. They was to give me a home there, an’ a place to work for my keep too. The good father tol’t me how I’d have to work in the fields with the Injuns, sleep with ’em too. None of us got much food neither.”

  Less than a year later, life in Spanish California changed forever. No longer were they a colony. Now they were part of an independent country. And nothing in Mexico would ever be the same again.

  “After ’while, things wasn’t so good no more. I didn’t know where to turn for help,” Hezekiah continued. “A stranger in that land—no better off’n I was back in the South.”

  The new Mexican governor heard of this strange black American and came to visit Christmas at the mission. From the very start it was plain that the governor was suspicious of the stranger. Here in the first days following their revolution, the Mexicans were afraid of their own shadows.

  “But he said I could stay on at the mission for one year with the mansitos.”

  “Mansitos?” “These here.” And Hezekiah gestured at the young men around him. “It’s what the Mexicans called the tame Indians.”

  “After the year, what were you s’pose to do?”

  Christmas wagged his head. “I was s’posed to be gone on a ship to America afore my year was up.”

  Until the next ship arrived in the bay, the governor and the Franciscan friars declared the American would have to find gainful employment in the mission fields and vineyards with the rest of the poor mansos. But that ultimately meant he was slaving from dawn till dusk for two meager meals each day and a roof over his head in the Indian quarters every night.

  “They was bound to do their best to turn me into a slave again,” he declared with a fury boiling just beneath the surface. “Un Americano, pero de mas cristiano de la santa fe católica. I was American, but they was gonna do all they could to make me a good Catholic, like they was making all the mansitos into good Christians too.”

  Then the first of the slaves decided to run off.

  “But they was brung back the next day,” Christmas said. “And beat to an inch of their lives for it.”

  The cruel whippings delivered by the army officers in collusion with the padres did not deter those Indians brave enough to attempt escape again.

  “That second time they paid with their lives, and most of the rest got a bad beating just to show ’em who was the boss.”

  Christmas tried his best to explain how he was coming to see these short, brown-skinned Indians as no different than his own people back in America. How the sadistic Mexican officers and those self-righteous Catholic friars were no different than the brutal slave masters back in the southern states. A bond had been formed.

  Over time, Hezekiah helped one after another of the slaves escape for the hills. Some were caught and brought back alive. Others were returned to the mission tied over the back of a horse.

  “The dead ones was hung up on posts to rot, have the birds peck at their eyes—to be a lesson for the rest of ’em,” Hezekiah explained.

  Ultimately, a very cruel priest and an ambitious army officer formed a powerful alliance, and the beatings at the mission increased. Still, when he could in the weeks that followed, Christmas did what he could to help the Indian slaves escape … until one night he was rousted from his bed and dragged from the cramped room where he slept with more than two dozen Indian men, carried off to confront the padre and the colonel. There in the friar’s office a pair of soldiers emerged from the shadows, a severely beaten Indian slung unconscious between them.

  “The Injun was one you helped run off?”

  Christmas nodded. “Válgame purísima María—dear Virgin Mary … I didn’t blame the fella for telling ’em who it was helped him and others get away.”

  Now the priests and the Mexican soldiers knew who was to blame for inciting their peace-loving slaves into revolt. Come morning, he would be tied to a post in front of the mission’s Indian population and beaten, not only until he bled—but, explained the friar, until he died. A lesson to cower all the Indians at Mission San Gabriel.

  “How’d you come to get away, Hezekiah?”

  The freedman told how he had immediately flung his handlers from him, seizing a knife from a soldier’s belt, then grabbing the closest man—the friar himself. With his sacred hostage, Christmas backed from the mission, making for the soldiers’ horses they had tied outside the walls. It was there a scuffle took place, with the Mexican colonel giving his soldiers orders to shoot at Hezekiah despite his clutching the priest against him.

  “Dios mio! More’n one bullet hit that mean ol’ padre,” Christmas admitted. “Many’s the time I thort about it since, but I figger that soldier chief meant to kill the padre. Malditos sean! Curse them.”

  Hezekiah wheeled and leaped atop one of the horses, dragging away a second one to ride when the first grew too tired to push on into the mountains.

  Three days later, he encountered a handful of runaways he helped to survive on nuts and r
abbit meat until they could begin hunting larger game. And ever since Hezekiah had been in the mountains—getting word to the California missions that if the slaves would only try to escape, most could make it to freedom. Up here, far from the soldiers, he and the others had provided a refuge for runaway slaves, living out what he felt were the finest years of his life with his Indian wife and their children.

  “Time to time, we watched white men come out of the east, climb out of the desert and cross over to the California missions—y caballos quieren, por es vienen tan legitos—for the horses they wanted they come all this way,” Hezekiah explained. “Later on it was when one of the runaways told us these was Americans, come to steal Mexican horses and mules, take them Mexican animals—quizas muchas—many horses, back toward the States.”

  But Hezekiah Christmas never had any desire to make himself known to the Americans. No urge to return east himself. As he explained it to Titus, he did not see himself as an American. Back there in the States, he would either be a slave in the South, or nothing more than a poor, second-class citizen in the North.

  “An’ back there to the west,” Hezekiah said as he pointed over their shoulders at Mexican California, “I’d be no better off than the rest of these here poor mansos the Mexicans made their slaves.”

  “You been up here a long, long time,” Bass said, “and never wanted to go back east?”

  With a shrug, Christmas said, “I can’t ’spect you to unnerstand.”

  “You’re wrong, Hezekiah. I figger I know just how you feel.”

  “Y-you do unnerstand why I won’t ever go back?” the Negro asked.

  “Maybe I know ’cause I got me the same feelings as you at times.” And Titus nodded. “Better you stay a man in between, here in this no-man’s-land between California and them proper white folks in the states of America. Right here you’re as free a man as any fella ever there was. Able to look any man in the eye.”

  “Qui milagro es este! What a miracle this is!” and Hezekiah grinned. “You unnerstand—just like you unnerstood when you busted me out’n that cage on the Mississap.”