Wind Walker tb-9

by Terry C. Johnston

  Twice he’d almost lost her.

  Bass dropped the hammer on the anvil again and stepped to the fire hopper, stirring the glowing coals with the tongs, digging out the hottest of the short strips of repair metal he was fabricating. He plopped it down on the anvil and took up the hole punch in his left hand, the hammer in his right.

  The first time, he had believed she was taken from him by Josiah Paddock, that winter after he and Josiah returned from lifting the scalp From an old white-headed friend. Finding the pair of them together beneath the robes, Waits as naked as she got when she lay with him, Titus tore off to the west, plunging into the dead of winter and danger, spitting in the eye of death as he undertook a mission so risky that only it could come close to easing the pain of losing her to his best friend. Losing them both at once was almost more than a mortal could bear. …

  With the punch crafted from a solid spike of oil-tempered iron positioned a few inches from the end of the strip of band iron, Titus slammed the hammer down on top of it, jarring both of his forearms. If nothing else, he had mused nearly every day of this hot summer, his hands and arms, shoulders and back, were all the stronger for this smithy’s toil.

  Years later the Blackfoot had ripped her from him and the Crow. Warriors already grown sickly with the smallpox that ate up their flesh as it sucked away their life with an unquenchable fever. That deadly illness had consumed her brother, but Titus dared his damnedest to keep her alive. The scars it left on her face could never diminish the beauty she remained on the inside, although it took long seasons for her spirit to heal after that lonely walk she had taken with the ghosts along the edge of the sky.

  It took more than two dozen strikes with that hammer against the flared top of the punch before he finally pierced a half-inch hole through the strap iron. He laid the punch aside and picked up the tongs, returning the strap to the fire for reheating before pulling another strap of iron from the glowing coals. With a series of holes punched in these short strips of iron, most every repair could be made to a cracked yoke, tree, or running gear, even hold together a wagon box itself. He could bind up what was broken with iron strap and coarse bolts, work everything down tight with the muscles in his back so the emigrant could move on to Fort Hall beside the Snake River. Follow the twists of the Snake all the way to the Columbia … and the sojourners found themselves in Oregon country.

  With a repair to this or an exchange for that, Titus Bass would get those farmers a little farther on their epic journey. Fix up a busted axle, trade for a proper-sized wheel. Maybe even refit a tire to the wood shrinking in this high, desert climate … if the farmer relented and gave Titus enough time to do a proper repair during a brief layover at Fort Bridger, heart of the Rocky Mountains.

  The sweat beaded down the bridge of his nose, hung there pendant for only an instant, then landed on the glowing iron with a faint hiss.

  Twice before he thought he’d lost her. Old as he was now, Titus didn’t figure he could live through losing her again.

  “Titus Bass?”

  He quickly turned at the unexpected sound of a woman’s voice. She stood framed in a splash of bright sunshine, her fingers knitted together before her. A poke bonnet shaded her sunburned, weathered face as she peered at him standing in the shade of that brushy arbor, where he was plunging a new iron tire into a narrow trough of water with a resounding sizzle.

  “That’s me,” he replied after a cursory glance—these settlement women all ended up looking pretty much the same—then turned back to his hoop of iron. With his empty left hand he scooped up a dribble of water and smeared it down his face grimy with cinders and smoke, streaked with rivulets of sweat. “You’re from the train camped over west what come in yestiddy?”

  “Yes. Just before noon yesterday.”

  “The store’s off that way,” and he pointed.

  “I was just there,” she confessed. “That’s where I happed to overhear your name.”

  Squint-eyed, he turned his head to peer at her again. “Oh?”

  “Major Bridger was speaking of you to some of our leaders,” she explained, inching a step closer, but stopped again, her hands still clenched in front of her apron. “One of the men, he’s needing some blacksmithing work done. That’s when I heard your name.”

  “You said that awready, ma’am.” Sensing some impatience with the woman, he dragged the heavy iron tire he had fitted for a front wheel out of the trough and carried it to the outside wall of the Bridger cabin, where he hung it from a wooden peg.

  Quietly she explained, “I suppose there are far fewer chances of bumping into a Titus Bass out here in the Rocky Mountains than there are chances finding a Titus Bass along the Mississippi, or running onto him back in St. Louis.”

  He slowly turned toward her and snatched up that small scrap of burlap. He wiped it down his sweaty neck and across his bare chest, smearing more of the blackened cinders across his reddened skin. “St. Louie?”

  “Where you and I first met,” she said after another step that brought her right to the edge of the shade.

  “W-where was that?”

  “Emily Truesdale’s sporting house.”

  A memory long submerged beneath the layers of seasons, miles, and a thousand other faces. But not near forgotten.

  His heart misstepped as he searched for words his dry tongue could speak. “Did you … work for the woman?”

  “Of a time, I did.” She stepped beneath the awning, her hands kneading one another now, anxiously. “If you’re the Titus Bass I later saw at Amos Tharp’s livery back in the late winter of thirty-four, then I am … your daughter, Amanda.”

  Instantly he felt a twinge of shame—for his sweated body, smeared with dust and blacksmith grime, stinking no less than a horse would at the end of a long day’s ride. “You’re Amanda?” He quickly turned for the wall of the cabin, where his cotton shirt hung on a wooden peg. As he got it over his head and began to smooth it over his sticky frame, Titus asked, “Marissa’s daughter?”

  “Your daughter,” she said, finally moving toward him without stopping. As he flung open his arms she pushed back her bonnet, letting it fall to hang suspended from her neck with her long, ash-hued curls. “Father—”

  Scratch folded her into his arms, unable to utter a sound, feeling his legs going as weak as they had when she had declared her existence to him back in Tharp’s St. Louis barn. Every bit as quickly he brought her away from him to gaze down into her face. No longer did she possess the pudgy, childlike face of her mother the way she had when she confronted him so many winters ago.

  “H-how long’s that make it?”

  Shaking her head slightly, she made a tally. “More than thirteen years, Father.”

  “F-Father,” he repeated. “Sounds so … starchy an’ high-backed to me.” He rubbed the top of her shoulders. “How ’bout you callin’ me Pa.”

  She grinned, and it lit her whole face. “Pa. Yes, yes, I can call you that, Pa.” Then the light in her face was gone, replaced with one of concern as she stared at him intently. “Your eye. What’s become of it?”

  “Don’t know,” he admitted with a shrug. “Happened that same spring I rode back to St. Louie. After I come back west. At Bents’ big lodge on the Arkansas River. Ain’t see’d wuth a damn from the eye ever since.”

  “It’s gone cloudy,” she said, inspecting it closely. “I’ve known some folks that’s happened to.”

  Hopeful, he asked her, “They ever get better of it?”

  “No, Pa,” and she shook her head. “Wish I could tell you different. But I never knew of a person, their eyes got better after they got cloudy such a way. Yours no better since?”

  “Can’t say it’s got worse neither,” he admitted. “Allays made do with the one.”

  Leaning close, she studied his one good eye. “I didn’t remember till just now—but your eyes are green. Like mine. They’re green like mine.”

  With a self-conscious swallow he realized his tongue was so dry it nearly
clung to the roof of his mouth. “Talkin’ is dusty work—lemme get a drink.”

  Releasing her, Scratch leaped over to his drinking bucket and pulled an iron dipper from it. A lot of it sloshed on his dusty moccasins as he brought it to his lips and slurped what he hadn’t managed to spill. Then he suddenly thought of genteel manners. “You want some?”

  “Yes, I would like that,” she answered, coming over and taking the ladle from him after he had dipped her a drink. “I never knew there could be heat like this.”

  “You think it’s hotter here’n it gets hot back to St. Louie?”

  Wiping the back of her hand across her lips, Amanda said, “A different heat. Back there is so heavy, sticky with misery. But the farther west we’ve come, the drier it got. Like the sun’s been sucking every drop right outta me … Pa.”

  He smiled at that, hearing her use that special word. “You come west with that wagon train?”

  “Yes, all the way from Westport.”

  “That’s a long way for a gal … for a woman on her own.”

  She laughed easily at that. “I ain’t alone, Pa. I’ve had a family for some time.”

  “A-a family?”

  Leaning toward him, she asked, “Lookit me, real close. I ain’t the young gal you met back to St. Louie all them summers ago. Lookit these lines I see when I look in my mirror every night. Can’t stand to look in it the mornings when I rise, what for all the aging I see. It’s better to see my tired ol’ wrinkles by candlelight when the children are put to bed and I have a few minutes—”

  “Children? Y-you got young’uns?”

  “Land sakes, Pa! I said I come west with my family—children and a husband too.”

  “You married and started your family,” he said, on the verge of wanting to believe it. “Wh-where are they?”

  “Back at the wagon camp,” she confided. “After I heard your name early this morning in the store, and looked outside the door to find you pounding on that anvil—I bided my time.”

  “Didn’t come right over an’ make yourself knowed to me?”

  With a wag of her head, Amanda confessed, “I wanted to be alone when I came to talk. So I walked back to the camp with Roman and the children. Told him I was coming back to wrangle a deal for some calicos at the store from Major Bridger’s wife. He’d have to watch the children while I came back to the post.”

  “Gabe … Jim Bridger don’t have a wife no more,” he explained. “She got took givin’ birth to their last child.”

  Her eyes filled with consternation. “But … it was an Indian woman.”

  “Which’un you talk with?” he asked. “Which Injun woman?”

  “She was a taller one. Had a long face, not the round-faced woman—”

  “You met my wife!”

  “The … same one you were … with when you came back to St. Louis in thirty-four?”

  “I got back to her down in Taos just afore she birthed our first child, a daughter.”

  Amanda’s eyes widened. “She’s here too? Your daughter … your other daughter?”

  “Magpie,” he said. “My boy—he come with Bridger to lead your train down to the south meadow to camp. You see him yesterday, spy him with Bridger?”

  “Our wagon was so far back in the train,” she explained. “The dust and all—we never saw anything happened up front.”

  Bubbling with enthusiasm, he said, “He’s a great boy, more’n ten years old now.”

  Amanda dabbed a fingertip at a bead of sweat that was collecting in the hollow under her lower lip. “So you have two children?”

  “Actual’, there’s three. ’Nother boy. Four summers old now. An’ there’s one on its way this comin’ winter.”

  “Your fourth?” Then she caught herself. “I mean, that would be your fifth, counting me—of course. I was your first!”

  “That’s some, for a ol’ fella like me.”

  “Pa, I’ve got four of my own,” she declared, glowing with pride. “My oldest, a boy, he isn’t as old as your … Magpie.”

  He took a step back and regarded her with a big grin. “Your whole family’s here? Goin’ west?”

  “Yes, Pa.”

  “Where away—California or Oregon?”

  “Oregon.” She said it with a special reverence. “Roman’s been wanting to come west for almost three years now. They been hard years.” The softness in her eyes melted away with what he took to be a sour-tinged remembrance. “Roman, he was gonna get to Oregon, or kill himself back there in Missouri.”

  “Kill hisself?”

  She wagged her head dolefully. “First years of our life together, things went good for us. We lived on his daddy’s farm, worked it together, one big family. Then his pa died, took by the lung sickness, coughing up blood till he got so weak he couldn’t fight off the fever anymore. Next year Roman’s ma was taken by cholera. They kept her in to town, in an old chicken coop an’ away from folks so she wouldn’t make no others sick. It near tore Roman apart. But, everyone said it was the best for our children. We had two who could walk by then, and one just born too.”

  “Losing your family ain’t good on a body’s heart,” he said. “Your mother, Marissa, how’s she now?”

  “I haven’t seen her in over five years,” Amanda confessed. “Wanted to see her one last time before we started to Oregon, but by then she was married to a river man and moved east to Owensboro. On the Ohio. I pray she’s been well—there’s so much sickness back there. I hope we can keep on going to Oregon without losing any more folks.”

  “You ain’t lost some of your own young’uns?”

  “Mercy, no,” and she shook her head. “Others. People we came to know as the train was forming up outside of Westport. Lost friends on the way here. All along the Platte, they took sick, one after another. A child here. A mother there. A father on down the trail a few more miles. Seemed like every Sunday morning we had another person already ailing so bad for us to pray over them. By the time the week was out, we’d have us a funeral. Wasn’t till we got to Chimney Rock that we wasn’t burying folks along the way.”

  “Air got drier,” he explained quietly. “Maybe some of that ague an’ tick-sicks got dried up.”

  “Yes, it does seem we’re all healthier now,” she agreed. “Thank God for His blessings.”

  “Yes, Amanda,” he agreed as he pulled his daughter against him again. “Thank God for all His great an’ many blessings.”

  She raised herself on the toes of her dusty, cracked boots and planted a kiss on his grimy cheek. The black soot she came away with around her mouth made him laugh. Dipping the cuff of a sleeve on his shirt into the water bucket, he dabbed it around her cracked lips.

  “You ought’n keep some tallow on your mouth,” he advised. “Won’t get so sore like it is.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she claimed. “We’ll all be fine once we get to Oregon. Everything Roman’s read says it rains plenty there. Crops grow nearly by themselves, all the papers say.”

  “It’s a good place for to raise crops, Amanda,” he confirmed. “Raise up your family too.”

  “C’mon, Pa,” she prodded him, pulling on an elbow toward the edge of the brush awning. “I want you to introduce me to your wife, to all your children.”

  He stopped in his tracks. “How’m I gonna meet your family?”

  “I don’t think the company’s moving on for two, maybe three, more days,” she declared. “I thought I’d see if you wanted to meet them tomorrow.”

  “Want to meet ’em?” he exclaimed. “Hell, I want you go fetch ’em right now and bring the hull clan back here a hour or so afore suppertime.”

  “T-today?”

  “So we got some time to talk afore an’ after supper both!”

  That seemed to strike her speechless for a moment. “Is this an invite to supper with your family, Pa?”

  “Damn right—er, ’scuse me, Amanda,” he apologized. “Bring that husband of your’n, and those four young’uns over for supper. I’ll te
ll Waits-by-the-Water to put another hindquarter to roast over the fire for supper—”

  “Waits-by-the-Water,” she repeated. “Ever since St. Louis, I’ve punished myself for not remembering her name. All these years, I wished I could have remembered your wife’s name.”

  “S’all right now,” he said. “I hope you two take to each other.”

  “When I was walking back here from camp alone to see you, I kept thinking that she must surely be used to white women, since you two live here at Major Bridger’s fort where so many white folks come through all summer long. But I was afraid too that she’d look down her nose at me for being a silly young white woman.”

  “I don’t think Waits-by-the-Water could look down her nose at anyone,” he stated. “She’s the kindest, most gentle an’ loving person I met in my whole blamed life, Amanda.”

  “Wouldn’t want her thinking any less of me because I’m younger than her, white and all.”

  “How old are you now?” he asked her, failing to recall.

  “I turned thirty-two on the trail, Pa. Back in June, along the North Platte.”

  His face screwed up a minute as he did his best ciphering right there in his head. “Thirty-two? Why, you ain’t much younger’n Waits is. She’s in her thirty-second summer.”

  “Sh-she’s the same age as me?”

  He nodded. “Can’t be more’n a few months older’n you, at the most. Why, that alone’ll give you two so much to talk about.”

  “She speaks English?”

  “Waits talks real good American. Magpie and Flea too. Jackrabbit, now he’s getting the hang of it as he gets older.”

  She smiled. “Supper here sounds grand, Pa. If you don’t think we’ll be imposing on her, Waits-by-the-Water.”

  “I don’t think there’s a chance of that, Amanda,” he explained. “Soon as I came back to Taos to fetch her north to her home country, I started telling her all about you, ’bout your mother and grandpa too. We even talked about me takin’ her back to St. Louie some time, to look you up and spend some time. But … St. Louie and all them folks, all them farms an’ houses an’ crowded towns back there—just never seemed like a good enough idea for me to do.”