Slowly clambering to his feet, he saw that she’d been fed. The bucket hung from a peg inside her stall where the mule could reach it, feeding herself from the grain provided her every night. His pap had done that too. Likely brushed her down good. Like Titus was supposed to each night after he worked over the stumps on the far edge of the ground they were clearing for next season’s planting. Not time enough this year—what with the good ground already turned and the seed already covered, more than a dozen good, soaking rains already.
He but his hand in the canvas bucket and brought out a handful of the grain. Holding it beneath his nose, he drank in their faint sweetness of oats, the fragrance of molasses. Then he extended his hand to her. She came to the stall door, curled her lips back, and lapped at the offering as he patted the solid bone between her eyes.
When she finished, Titus swiped his damp palm across his worn britches and took up the rifle. It was time he had something to eat himself. Careful not to let the small door slam against the side of the barn as he eased it back into place, the youngster crept amongst the shadows toward the cabin. As he had done so many times before, he would eat his supper, then wait until all the lights were out before he would climb the roof and steal in through the window to find his bed in the dark.
After setting the longrifle against the side of the porch, Titus heaved himself up without using the steps. They were creaky with age and use, and more often than not apt to make more noise than one of the rooting pigs down in the pen behind the barn. Kneeling at the side of the woodbox, he reached around to the spot where his mother always left the cheesecloth bundle for him. He felt a little farther. Still nothing. Leaning all the way over the hinged flap atop the woodbox, he put both hands to work, stuffing both arms clear under the box. Nothing. No cheesecloth bundle. No supper.
At that moment his stomach growled so loud, he was sure they heard it inside the cabin.
Quickly hunching over and wrapping both arms over his belly, Titus limped away from the woodbox to the edge of the porch, where he sat dangling his bare feet while he stared up at the half-moon. It had climbed to near midsky, and the breeze was coming up. Damp, rich, rife with the smell of rain by morning despite the cloudless sky overhead.
In the starshine the edge of the hog pen stood out on the far side of the barn. Closer still, the small corral where his pap kept their wagon team. Titus had straddled the wide backs of those old, gentle horses ever since he could remember. As much excitement as it had been when he was a pup, these days he yearned to climb atop a real horse. Not one of those working draft animals. A lean, slim-haunched horse that would carry him across the fields and down the wooded trails with the speed of quicksilver. A real horse like those he saw from time to time in Belleview. And the once-a-year trip upriver to Cincinnati, only some twenty miles if a person took the overland route that dispensed with most of the meandering course of the Ohio.
Yes, sir. A real horse like fine folks rode. He deserved that, Titus decided. Here in his seventeenth summer, on the verge of manhood, a hunter like himself deserved a fine horse. After all, times were good. The Englishers were gone, thrown out for good, and when the men got together, they cheered one another with talk of times being good now for their young country as America slowly spread her arms to the west. Four summers back Lewis and Clark had returned from the far ocean, with unbelievable tales of tall mountains and icy streams teeming with fur-bearing animals. Stories and rumors and legends of fiercely painted Indians who attempted to block their journey every step of the way.
The only Indians Titus had seen were a few of the old ones he saw from time to time, come to Belleview or Rabbit Hash, civilized and docile Indians who no longer hunted scalps but tilled the land like white men. They came to the towns for supplies but for the most part kept to themselves when they did. Wouldn’t even look the white folks in the eye.
“They’re a beaten people,” Grandpap had told young Titus. “We whupped ’em good when we whupped the lobsterbacks.”
At first Titus had been scared whenever he saw one of those farmer Indians. Then, he grew afraid he never would see a real, honest-to-God Injun for himself, ever.
About as much chance of that as him ever forking his legs over a strong, graceful horse.
He sat in the darkness until the last lamp went out. Everything was quiet down below, quiet up in the loft where his two brothers and sister slept. Waiting while the moon moved a few more degrees off to the west to be sure all were asleep, just as he always did, the youngster crept back to the door, took hold of the iron latch, and carefully raised it, easing forward on it to crack open the door just wide enough to—
Damn!
He tried again, thinking perhaps he hadn’t raised the iron latch high enough to clear the hasp. Titus pushed gently against the door again—
Goddamn!
It couldn’t be stuck. He tried harder, noisier, as iron scraped against iron.
The door was barred from the inside. He was locked out.
This had never happened before. Always the door was left unlocked for him when he went hunting of a night, or off to gig frogs, or maybe only to wander down the road to Amy’s place, hoping she would sit and talk with him about mostly nothing at all. But that door was never locked.
And his mam always had supper waiting under the woodbox in that piece of cheesecloth.
He leaned his forehead against the door, suddenly wanting to cry. So hungry he couldn’t think what to do next. So tired from fighting the mule and the stump and his pap that day that he wanted only to lie down upon his tick, pull the covers over his head, and go to sleep despite his noisy, snoring brother.
With a sigh Titus turned from the locked door. Mayhaps he could pull himself up onto the porch roof and make his way across the cabin roof and lower himself onto the sill where a lone window opened into the sleeping loft. Maybe his old man wasn’t as smart as he made out to be.
After hiding the rifle behind the woodbox, Titus shinnied up the pole and clawed his way onto the roof. As quietly as he could move across the creaking timbers and shakes, the youngster crept to the cabin roof itself and hoisted himself up. Keeping to the sides where the support beams had more strength and were therefore less likely to groan and protest his weight, Titus leaned over the edge and found the window. Lying on his belly, he scooted out as far as he dared and reached for the mullioned windowpanes. Nudging. Then pushing. Straining. Neither side would budge.
Frustrated, he tried again, and again. It acted as if it were nailed shut. It was always easy to open that window, he thought. Both sides flung open for summer breezes. Never before had it been so hard. He tried once more. Unable to budge it.
A nail or two could do that, he thought. Wouldn’t take much to keep him from sneaking in that way.
As he dropped barefoot to the ground at the side of the porch, he boiled with indignation. Wrenching up the rifle from its hiding place behind the woodbox, Titus seethed to have it out with his pap. But as tired as he was, it could wait until morning.
Back across the damp shadows of the yard, he could already smell rain coming. Into the barn he crept once more and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. To his right stood the faint hump of a hayrick. After leaning the rifle against a nearby post, Titus kicked at the soft hay with his bare feet until he had a pile long enough, and some four feet deep. On it he lay down and began pulling hay over him for warmth.
Curling an arm under his head, the youngster closed his eyes, his breathing slowing as the anger and disappointment and hunger drained from him. All he wanted now was some sleep. In the morning he would have words with his father about locking his son out of the cabin.
Even if he had gone off without tending to the stump and the old mule, nothing was so serious that he should be locked out of his own home.
Titus felt the warmth of the hay envelop him the way the cool of the swimming hole would wrap him on those hot summer days yet to come.
No matter how important any thing wa
s to his pap, nothing should be more important than family.
Bringing the old girl home, feeding her, putting her up for the night in her stall. No two ways about it—that mule was getting better treatment from his pap than Thaddeus was giving his own son right now.
With the hay’s heady fragrance filling his nostrils, the quiet lowing of the animals droning about him, and his dreams of riding one of those fast horses the woodsmen owned, Titus drifted off to sleep.
He shivered once and pulled more hay over him. Growing warm once again. Not to stir for what was left him of that short night.
“Get up, boy. You’ve got some righting of a wrong to be at.”
He blinked into the gray light, then rubbed at his gritty eyes, staring up sidelong at his father, who stood over his bed of hay. Thaddeus had the collar to his wool coat turned up against the morning dew, a shallow-crowned, wide-brimmed hat of wool or castor felt pulled down on his hair.
It was cold in here, he thought. Damp too. Must have gone and rained.
“I said get up!” Thaddeus Bass repeated more urgently. And this time he added his own boot toe for emphasis.
Titus pulled back his bare foot. “I know I done wrong—”
“Get up! Afore I pull you up by your ears!”
The youngster stood, shedding hay as he clambered to his feet, shivering slightly, hunch-shouldered in dawn’s dampness. His breath huffed before his face in wispy vapors. Outside a mockingbird called. “Jest lemme explain, Pap.”
“Nothing to explain, Titus. You left off work to go traipsing the woods. Left off the mule too. No telling what’d become of her I didn’t come back to see to your work at that stump.”
The look in his father’s eyes frightened him. He could remember seeing that fire in those eyes before, yet no more in all of Titus’s sixteen years than the fingers on one of his hands. “It was getting on late in the day anyhows—”
With a sudden shove his father pushed him down the path between the two rows of stalls in that log barn. “Grab that harness.”
“Yes, sir,” he said with a pasty mouth, too scared not to be dutiful and obedient.
A rain crow cawed on the beam above him. He shuddered as his bare feet moved along the cold, pounded clay of the barn floor. But he wasn’t all that sure he trembled from the morning chill. Not knowing what would come next from his father’s hand was all it took to make the youth quake. Alone Titus had faced most everything nature could throw at this gangly youth—out there in the woods and wilderness. But he had never been as frightened of anything wild as he was of his father when Thaddeus Bass grew truly angry.
As Titus took the old mule’s harness down, his father said, “G’won, hitch her up.”
The boy pushed through the stall door and moved into the corona of warmth that surrounded the big animal. She raised her head from a small stack of hay to eye him, frost venting from her great nostrils, then went back to her meal as he came alongside her neck and slipped the bridle and harness over her.
“Bring her out to me.”
“Here, Pap,” he said, almost like whimpering. “I … I’m sorry. Never run off on the work again, I swear—”
“I don’t figure you ever will run off again, Titus,” his father snapped. “Not after I’ve learned you your lesson about work and responsibility.” He pointed to a nearby post. “Get you that harness.”
“What for? I got the mule set—”
“Jest you get it and follow me.”
He trudged after his father, out the barn door and into the muddy yard, where a faint drift of woodsmoke and frying pork greeted him as warmly as the dawn air did in cold fashion. How it did make his stomach grumble.
“Can I quick go and fetch me something to eat while we’re off to the field, Pap?”
In the gray light shed by that overcast sky the man whirled on his son. “No. You ain’t earned your breakfast yet.”
“But—I didn’t have no supper last night.”
“Didn’t earn that neither. Off lollygagging the way you was.”
He swallowed and walked on behind his father, bearing south toward the new field they were clearing. Suddenly appearing out of the low, gray sky, the bright crimson blood-flash of a cardinal flapped overhead and cried out. In the distance Titus heard the faint call of a flatboat’s horn rise out of the Ohio’s gorge. Was it one of those new keels with a dozen polemen? Or was it one of those broadhorns nailed together of white oak planks the boatmen would soon be selling by the board-foot on the levee at far-off New Orleans?
“Here, girl,” Thaddeus said as he put the mule ahead of the harnesstree and himself at her head, beginning to coax her back a step at a time. “Titus, hitch her up.”
Titus hoisted the oiled hardwood and locked both harness traces in place. Then he straightened, watching his father pat the mule between the eyes.
Gesturing toward the tangle of leather and chain his son had dropped onto the ground, Thaddeus said, “Now you hook up that harness to the tree.”
Maybe he didn’t want to know any more than he already could guess. Maybe he refused to believe his father would really make him do it. No matter—Titus didn’t ask, didn’t say a thing as he bent over his work. His cold hands trembling, he found it was a tight fit lining up all the metal clasps into the harnesstree’s lone eye, but he got it done and stood again. Shivering in the cold air as a breeze rustled the green leaves of the nearby elms.
“We gonna pull the stump out and then we go to breakfast?”
His father slapped the mule one time on the rump as he moved back to take up the reins. “We gonna pull out the stump, that’s right. We’ll see for ourselves what comes next, Titus. Now, step in that harness and cinch yourself up.”
“M-me?”
“You heard me, son.”
“Y-yes, Pap.”
For a moment longer he stood there, gazing at his father. Thaddeus had taken the long, wide leather reins into his weathered hands, shifted it all to his left, then took one long double length into his right and began to wave it over the mule’s wide back.
“You seen what your pap has to do if’n an animule ain’t obeying, ain’t you, Titus?”
Quickly, he turned and stepped into the harness. “Yes, Pap.”
“Buckle yourself in and take up the slack,” the man ordered, then ever so gently laid the long strap of leather onto the mule’s back. Obediently she leaned into her harness and raised the harnesstree off the damp ground, then stopped, awaiting the next command.
“Aside her, I’m just gonna be in the way—”
“Lean into it, boy!”
“You ain’t really gonna make me pull this stump out—”
“I’m gonna make a farmer outta you, Titus—or I’ll kill you trying. Now, lean into it, goddammit!”
“Pap!”
“There’s work you left afore it was finished, son.” Thaddeus’s eyes glowed like all-night coals.
“Lemme pull the stump out by my own self with the mule. I’ll get it done—”
“Damn right, you’ll pull it out with the mule,” his father growled, savagely bringing the leather strap down on the animal’s back.
FROM THE AUTHOR
I was born on the first day of 1947 in a small town on the plains of Kansas. That great rolling homeland of the nomadic buffalo has remained in my marrow across the years of my wandering.
From Nebraska, to Kansas and on to Oklahoma, I’ve spent a full third of my life on those Great Plains. Another third growing up in the desert southwest an arrow’s-shot from the wild Apache domain of Cochise and Victorio. The most recent third of my life has passed among the majestic splendor of the Rocky Mountains—from Colorado to Montana and on to Washington state. In less than a year, I am back in Montana, here in the valley of the great Yellowstone River, in the veritable heart of the historic West. The plains and prairies at my feet, the great Rockies as my backrest.
The Great Plains runs in my blood and always will. More than merely growing up there, my roots g
o deep in the land that over the last hundred-odd years soaked up about as much blood and sweat as it did rain.
My maternal grandfather came from working-class stock in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he first became a carriage-riding sawbones doctor who as a young man moved to Oklahoma Territory, finding it necessary to pack two small .36-caliber pistols for his own protection while practicing his medical arts from his horse-drawn buggy. In later years he would be proud to say he never stepped foot in a motorized vehicle.
It wasn’t long before Dr. David Yates met and fell in love with the school-marm teaching there in Osage country, Pearl Hinkle. My grandmother had bounced into The Strip, formerly called “Indian Territory” or “The Nations”, in her parents’ wagon in June of 1889 during the great land-rush that settled what is now the state of Oklahoma. With immense pride I tell you I go back five generations homesteading on the plains of Kansas—Hinkles, simple folk with rigid backbone and a belief in the Almighty, folk who witnessed the coming of the Kansas Pacific Railroad along with the terrifying raids of Cheyenne and Kiowa as the Plains tribes found themselves shoved south and west by the slow-moving tide of white migration.
My father’s father wandered over to The Territory from the vicinity of Batesville, Arkansas when he first learned of the riches to be found in what would one day become south-central Oklahoma. It was an era of the “boomers”—when oil money ran local governments and bought law-enforcement officers both. Yet in that violent and lawless epoch, Oklahoma history notes a few brave men who stood the test of that time. I’m very proud to have coursing in my veins the blood of a grandfather who had the itchy feet of a homesteader turned Justice of the Peace in that oft-times rowdy, violent and unsettled frontier.
Still, it was more than what Scotch-Irish heritage ran in their veins that both my parents passed on to me—more so the character of those sturdy, austere folk who settled the Great Plains. From my father I believe I inherited the virtue of hard work and perseverance. And from my mother, besides her abiding love and reverence for the land, I have inherited a stamina to endure all the travesty that life can throw at simple folk. Those traits she has given me, along with a belief in the Almighty—the self-same belief that helped those hardy settlers endure through hailstorms and locust plagues, drought and barrel-bottom crop prices.
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