Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  Lo, that second time he forced himself to flee from the prison he was sure his affection for Marissa would make for him, chaining him down to what he feared most.

  In those brawling back ways and along the waterfront shanties of St. Louis, young Bass discovered no settlers’ daughters to threaten his freedom—only a procession of faceless whores who took no more than he was ready to give … until the night he ventured back to a tiny crib with a coffee-skinned quadroon just come up the river from New Orleans. In the candlelight of that tiny hovel, he found her skin to have the same sheen and color of damp mud along the banks where the Mississippi lapped.

  Each time he visited the mulatto, Titus reluctantly promised himself that he couldn’t love a whore who lay with other men. But when he wasn’t with her, he was forced to admit that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, nor that pleasure she brought him. How good she made him feel about himself.

  Yet in the end she too had deserted him—leaving for a man wealthy enough to buy her pleasures all for himself, just as a person would put something away on a shelf for no one else to enjoy. All Titus had left were the memories of the quadroon, and the blue silk bandanna she had tied around his neck.

  During those dark and drunken days that followed, Bass had brooded only long enough to decide that it all proved beyond a doubt that he would never be anything more than a bone-headed idiot when it came to the fair sex. The women who wanted him surely wanted him only for security—something that scared him enough that he fled.

  But what of those women he wanted so desperately? Why, they just up and disappeared on him—without so much as a fare-thee-well or an explanation of why they abandoned him. Each time it happened, his not knowing why served only to crust another thin layer of scar over his heart, like the layers of an onion, every new crust protecting the others below it.

  That’s probably why the Indian women had come like a breath of mountain breeze on a still, airless day. Fawn had asked so little from him that winter he had spent with the Ute in Park Kyack. And Pretty Water had wanted only to nurse him back to health that long autumn he had healed among the Shoshone at the foot of the Wind River Mountains. Even the procession of robe-warmers who had come to him in turn across each of the three winters he had spent among the Crow in Absaroka had demanded nothing more than to feel his body pressed against theirs in the darkness of their lodges.

  Maybe it was better that he think of them as meaning nothing more to him than those whores like Conchita down in Taos: women who walked into his life and stayed for but a moment only to take away a little of that constant agony of his loneliness. They had come for nothing more than stolen moments, flickers of time a person snatched here and there the way he had snatched at fireflies as a boy.

  Truth was, as a young man, that’s all he had really cared for: a woman of the moment to soothe an immediate need until he got itchy moccasins and moved on. A woman to stay only until he had rubbed his horns and the fever of the rut was gone.

  So why was it not the same this winter? Why was he no longer able to curl up with a warm brown body, take his pleasure and give the woman hers, then sleep the rest of the night away without remorse? Why the hell had he begun to feel as if something was missing?

  Hell, he had all he wanted to eat, and a warm shelter out of the wind. He had him a good mule and horses and a darn fine rifle and traps. And when it came to friends, why—Scratch figured no man could go any finer than the men Titus Bass called friend, both white and red. Besides, he didn’t answer to no booshway, and he sure didn’t bow and scrape to no gussied-up, apron-stringed eastern gal with her should-do-this and shouldn’t-do-that!

  So why the hell was he lying here in the dark next to this warm, pretty, naked woman … and grappling with something a man of his spare talents had no damned business grappling with?

  There had never been any doubt that he was the sort who stumbled through anything dealing with women, stubbing his toe and stumbling, yet somehow managing on in his own bumbling way—somehow just getting by when it came to the fairer sex. After all, right from day one back at that swimming hole in Boone County, Kentucky, when he had crawled atop his first woman, Titus Bass had been in way over his head. And the best he ever figured he could do was tread water till …

  Till … maybeso he found himself a full-time night-woman who would keep his lodge warm and his pots boiling when he came back from seeing to his traps every evening. A woman who would listen when he wanted her to listen to what he had to say, a woman who would talk when he wanted to hear that gentle sound of a female’s voice—so appealing after so many seasons of nothing but deep, bass-toned, bullock voices there at his ear. The sort of gal who’d be there knowing when he wanted to scream and when he wanted to cry. The sort of woman what’d know the difference.

  Were these feelings troubling him this winter after so many winters gone before it … simply because he had turned thirty-eight?

  Did a man start thinking of so weighty a matter as that of finding a full-time night-woman for himself when he had added a certain tally of rings and his hair had started to gray? Could that be the reason he was dwelling on why he hadn’t already found himself one good woman, wondering when he’d stop making the rounds of one roll in the robes after another? Was this brooding late at night on such things just one more sign of his getting on in his years?

  In the late winter darkness, his skin slightly moist where it lay right against hers, he strained to remember the faces of those gone before this one. Most names he could recall—but strained to conjure up the eyes and nose and mouth of Amy … Abigail Thresher … Marissa Guthrie … even the quadroon and those women who had taken him into their lodges and allowed him between their legs season after season after season.

  If he tried hard enough, staring long enough at that place where the poles were bound one to the other, he figured he just might come up with a composite of their faces—putting them all together in some murky memory puddle the way rain made earth colors run. The best eyes and nose, the warmest lips and the rounded breasts … all of them thrown in and stirred up in his remembrance the way his mam would stir up her stew of so many ingredients.

  Unable to remember any one of them alone any longer now, Scratch had to satisfy himself that he could recall just enough to put them together into a watery, filmy, half-focused face, all mouth and breasts, hips and legs.

  But because he failed to draw up a clear image of any one of them from the past, lately Scratch had become certain he would never be worthy of having just one for the rest of his days. He had no right to want just one woman to last him all the seasons yet to come in his life. If he could not pay homage to all that the many had given him from the past, then Titus figured he was certain he had no right to hope for finding that one woman who would stand at his side through those seasons yet unborn.

  Perhaps, he decided, he had been blessed enough … so maybe it was enough to accept what he did of each new day, thanking that which was larger than all of them, there at the end of each day granted him. With all that he had been given already, to want a full-time night-woman for the last of his years was simply more than he had the right to ask.

  And so Titus consoled himself that dark morning as he had been consoling himself for many nights this winter now grown old. Doing his best to push the loneliness back, to push away the emptiness that cried out within him, its voice become louder and louder while spring loomed on the far horizon.

  Oh, how he hungered for white faces as he floated adrift in this sea of copperskins. Like a dry man not knowing when he would next have a drink of water—Scratch thirsted for white voices and white laughter and the soul-healing potion of strong, saddle-varnish liquor.

  If he did not have a woman come to fill those empty places in his soul, at least he knew there would always be friends and voices, laughter and whiskey, to soothe those raw and oozing places in his life.

  Perhaps he would have enough of all the rest … so that one day he would eventually forget
this deepest, most secret need of all.

  *Near present-day Cove, Utah. Although one of the contemporary sources intimates that Jim Bridger, Milt Sublette, and Henry Fraeb met with their combined brigades in what is today called Cache Valley, what the mountain men of the era called Willow Valley, the majority of fur-trade historians appear to agree that the preponderance of the remaining contemporary sources show conclusively that the Rocky Mountain Fur Company outfits actually united on the Green River that July of 1831.

  26

  More and more with every turn of the seasons, Titus Bass came to know that no matter how long or hard the winters of his life, spring was always sure to come.

  Sure enough, a little earlier than normal last autumn, Hannah and his horses had furred up just like the creatures of the wild. And they kept their heavy coats longer into the spring too. Although the skies domed a brilliant blue overhead as the air began to warm, large fields of snow lasted long on the north-facing slopes. The thaw came late to the Yellowstone country that eighth spring of his come out of St. Louis.

  By the time he made ready to leave Arapooesh’s band, Titus Bass was packing two more large bundles of beaver hung from the elk-horn packsaddle on Hannah’s back. He had kept himself busy through the long months of short days.

  When she brayed at him in protest at the load, he said, “Don’t know if that means you’re ready for the trail, or you’re squawking at me for packing you after you ain’t had much of nothing on your back all winter.”

  He stepped up to her muzzle and grasped it between both hands and cocked her head so she could gaze at him with one eye. “Now, you know I ain’t no damned Ned. Ain’t never been one what plants his nose under a robe all winter—no matter how warm the womens might be. Never has Titus Bass been a child to lay around camp all through a robe season.”

  She rolled that near eye and brayed at him again. “I s’pose that means you and me both ’bout ready for the trail, ol’ girl. But first we best pay our respects.”

  As Scratch slowly approached Rotten Belly leading his three animals, the chief emerged from his door, stretched lazily, then stepped around to the side of the lodge where the morning sun would warm him with its full glory. He sat, leaned back in his warmest buffalo robe, and closed his eyes. And didn’t even open them as the trapper came to a stop at his elbow.

  “I hear the sound of heavy horses,” the chief said without looking up.

  “We are ready to go, my friend.”

  “You were happy this winter?”

  Scratch thought a moment, glancing over at the lodge where he had spent many a night with the widow. “I had all I needed—yes, Arapooesh.”

  “So you’ll come back our way soon?”

  “I want to hunt the waters north of the Yellowstone next fall,” Bass replied. “Yes, I think it will be a good thing to come find your camp when the winter winds begin to blow.”

  With a long sigh the chief finally looked up into the bright morning light and shaded his eyes with a flat hand. “You will stay safe, won’t you, Pote Ani?”

  “I will.”

  “Because I cannot talk you out of riding west from Absaroka, you must promise me that you will stay safe so that my eyes can look upon my old friend again come next winter.”

  Kneeling beside the chief, Bass pulled off his mitten and laid the hand on Rotten Belly’s arm under that buffalo robe. The chief looked up at him, and Titus said, “I’ll be back soon. You know how short the seasons are up this far north, when winter lasts so long.”

  Arapooesh knifed his hand through the flap in his robe and laid it on Bass’s arm, saying, “My prayers go west with you. When you leave Absaroka in that direction, there is so much danger that can find a man alone.”

  Standing, Scratch said with a smile, “I’m not looking to die just yet. I’ll watch behind me.”

  Closing his eyes again, Rotten Belly said, “See you in the winter.”

  “See you then, my friend.”

  It took better than four days to ride down the Yellowstone to his cache, what with all the drifted snow and the boggy bottom ground, having to double back here and there. But eventually he dug at the icy, frozen snow that lay crusted over the earthen circle that plugged the neck of his small underground vault. For the next two days he busied himself with pulling out each bundle of beaver in turn, dusting every individual plew with Hannah’s currycomb, then closely inspecting each hide for sign of vermin that might burrow into the beaver felt and destroy the value of a hide. Once the plews were ready for their long spring journey toward rendezvous, Bass tied them back into bundles, then pushed the buffalo-hide shelter down into the cache. Positioning it high upon some freshly cut willow saplings, Bass left it at the center of the floor and backed out of the hole. Reweaving a network of narrow limbs, he finished his labors by muscling the round earthen lid back over the hole.

  That night he built a fire atop his cache and the next morning scattered the ashes before he took up Hannah’s lead rope and rose into the saddle. Turning toward the Yellowstone, Bass headed west until he reached the crossing used for years without count by the massive herds blanketing these northern plains.

  “Man knows what to look for, he can always find a buffalo crossing,” he said to Hannah, having taken to talking to her more and more with every day of his enforced separation from other humankind. “Don’t you know a man can’t hardly go wrong if he lays his nose along a buffalo trail.”

  On the opposite bank of the river he pointed their noses west. Creek by creek, beaver stream by beaver stream, he trapped as he went those days of early spring, shivering through the wintry cold of each night, savoring the brief hours of sunny warmth as the earth’s rising heat formed puffy clouds across the deep spring blue like the snowflash feathers of ducks upended and fishing in a spring pond.

  At times he came across sign of hunters out from one band or another of the River or Mountain Crow, but Scratch never saw another person in those first few weeks as he took his time marching for that cleft through the mountains west of the big bend of the Yellowstone, a crossing he had made years before with Silas Cooper. Bass turned in the saddle and gazed back at the large packs of beaver both Hannah and the packhorse carried. Hard to believe what he had done in the past year: he hadn’t trapped this many pelts since the seasons he had traveled with those three who had taken him under their wings his first seasons in the mountains. But that learning had cost him—first in what share Silas split off for himself, and then to lose all the rest of his plews when the trio floated off downriver with his fur.

  “Likely gone to the bottom of the goddamned Yellowstone,” he grumbled.

  Likely where their three carcasses are right now, he brooded. All them plews and all that work—

  Then he scolded himself. “No sense in thinking on what was and can’t do nothing about now.”

  Titus turned around, putting his face into the cold slash of wind and tucked the long flaps of the capote back around his legs. As Scratch rocked gently in the Spanish saddle, his horse steadily carried him higher up the winding switchbacks that took him in and out of patches of timber and across broad, open, grassy meadows where he flushed up small herds of elk, spooking the creatures back into the shadows where they warily watched the three strange animals slowly climb out of sight as the sun sank lower against the far curve of the earth.

  Across that last saddle before he reached the pass, Scratch discovered so much snow still crusted in the open places that it stretched all the way to the far line of mountain and sky. He reined up, cautious. For a few moments he calculated how much light he still had himself in the day, then turned and looked behind at the beckoning timber where he could get out of the constant, cutting wind.

  Better to try sloughing his way across that deep snowfield come morning when the animals were fresh and they had more hours of daylight to work the ground. Besides, the cold temperatures would refreeze the top layer of the snow and make it far better going right after dawn than it would be now a
fter the high sun had mushed the icy crust.

  “C’mon, girl,” he crooned to Hannah as he reined the horse around sharply and clucked to the mule to follow.

  That night he lay awake by the dying fire listening to the wind moaning above him in the pines, remembering how the wind called to him at times as if in warning. Stirred by something he couldn’t reach out and touch, Bass kicked free of his robes and went over to Hannah. He led her closer to the saddle horse and tied the mule’s long lead rope in a loose loop around the horse’s neck. Then he played out the long rawhide rope knotted around the horse’s neck and trudged back to his bedding. There he wrapped the end of the rope beneath his capote belt and stuffed himself back between the robes.

  Closing his eyes once more, Bass laid the long flintlock between his knees, tucking the pistol against his chest as he made a warm place for his cheek against the dark, curly hump fur.

  The robber jays awoke him the next morning, cackling at him and the animals from the branches overhead, their shrill protests making him start with surprise. Blinking into the new light just then warming the eastern plains below him, Titus threw back the robes and blankets, then glanced up the slopes toward the snowy saddle where the first rosy rays of light angled up from beyond the east, striking the snowfields and turning them a pale, blood-tinged pink.

  He’d slept longer than he had wanted—angry at himself because he had planned to be at the edge of the frozen pass just as soon as it was light enough to make their crossing.

  Promising himself some coffee on the far side, Scratch tied up his bedding, then stepped out into the open, where he dampened the ground. After pulling up some thick branches of the gray sage, he went to the animals. He dragged off the dirty, greasy, trail-sweated chunks of canvas he laid over their backs on those coldest of nights, the better to help those creatures preserve some of their own body heat. One by one, he rubbed them down with those clusters of sage, warming himself in the process with the exertion. Then in turn the three were padded, saddled, cinched, and loaded with his few possessions and the fruits of his labor.