As he rubbed the cloth gently across his bare cheek, down the bridge of his nose, over his eyelids—just to feel the caress of the fabric was enough to make him want desperately to remember the feel of her … that silky flesh with its tiny hairs, flesh that goose-pimpled each time it became cold in her tiny room and he flung back the blankets to look at all of her at once, to gaze upon her coffee-colored body. That big blue scarf took him back many, many miles and what seemed like a good man’s lifetime—took him back to those last months in St. Louis.
To that time when he lost Isaac Washburn, and along with the old trapper—Bass lost his long-held dream. Across those seasons of despair he had nothing more to look forward to than the earthy necessities of a man’s life. Spending most of his money to buy himself a drink now and then, along with the feral pleasure of a good meal upon special occasions, as well as the company of a succession of women who each one helped Titus hold at bay the numbness slowly eking in to penetrate to his very marrow.
It had been a time when, unlike before, there were no more of those raucous days ruled by whiskey-fever and whoring until he passed out. But for a time there—he no longer dreamed on the buffalo.
Across that last autumn and winter he’d imprisoned himself in St. Louis, Bass routinely had pleasured himself one evening a week with the coffee-skinned quadroon he’d grown fond of. At times they’d shared a bottle of West Indian sweet rum brought upriver on a paddle-wheel steamboat, both of them drinking and laughing until she was ready to hike up her nettlebark petticoat and climb astride him.
He smelted of the blue scarf again as he sat there in the willow. Only in his imagination did it still smell of her. So very long now had he carried it among skins and hides—on that packmare, then among Hannah’s baggage.
Oh, how he believed he smelled her still on this corner or that. Remembering how he visited once a week, every payday when he could afford a bottle of that brown-sugar rum and the sweet sin of that cross-breed whore. There every week … at least until that Saturday night he came to call, fresh from the bathhouse and a warm meal taken in the tippling house just down the narrow avenue, ready to have that cream-colored beauty work her magic on his flesh so he could swallow down what troubled him so.
As Scratch brought the scarf from his nose and laid it across his lap, spreading it out fully, he recalled how the old woman who watched over the knocking girls informed him that his favorite no longer boarded there—having left suddenly to take up residence in a private place farther up the hill, close to where the rich and very French families dwelled in old St. Lou. Bass remembered how, as the woman had told him the news, in disappointment he had touched that blue scarf he’d always tied around his neck every one of those special Saturday nights.
No, Isaac Washburn hadn’t been alone in finding a favorite trollop there in St. Louis. For Titus, his favorite became the gal with skin the color of a pale milk chocolate. A recent arrival, the quadroon had been imported upriver from New Orleans by a successful madam. Ah, how her brown skin was almost the color of that silky mud sheen to the Lower Mississippi itself.
As he hacked off two pieces of the beaver hide big enough to lay over his wounds and tied together long strips of buckskin, Titus recalled the first time he saw her sipping at her Lisbon wine. She was wearing those tall and gracefully carved ivory combs in her hair every bit as dark as a moonless midnight. At the base of her neck was wrapped a velvet choker pinned with a whalebone brooch, the ribbon clasped so tight at her throat that the brooch trembled with every one of her rising pulses. Her lips full enough to more than hint at her African ancestry, Bass found it little wonder that he came away from her so many nights bearing the tiny blue bruises and curves of teeth marks she left behind as she worked him over with her mouth, starting at the shoulder and working on down to the flat of his belly.
While he clumsily secured the scraps of beaver over the wounds with two long strands of buckskin thong, he stared at the blue scarf—squeezing hard to remember her every gliding movement, to remember the silky feel of her, to recall her potent smell.
It had been early one wintry morning after swearing she was his favorite that they heard Washburn hammering a fist on her door, announcing that he was ready to head back to the livery. Without saying a word at first, she reached up to pull down one of her scarves from a peg hammered into the wall beside her narrow, short-posted muley-bed.
“You take this,” she instructed in a hoarse whisper as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.
At that moment he didn’t know what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”
“My scarf,” she said in that thick Mississippi-bottom dialect of hers, taking the fabric from him to unknot it. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”
“W-where are your people?” he had asked her over the noise of Washburn’s insistent thumping on the doorway, his bellowing that he was about to come crashing in.
“I don’t have no people no more,” she explained, sadness filling her eyes. “But I want you always to be somebody special to me.”
“I will be, always,” he vowed, and let her tie the scarf around his neck before they parted in the gray of that dawn.
How he recalled wearing the scarf knotted there at his neck every time he returned to see her of those Saturday nights when he could afford the price of both a bottle of rum and to sleep till morning with someone warm beside him. Hell, even when he could not afford her and had to content himself with gazing at the whore from across the smoky room in the tippling house where she went about her business, talking and laughing with other customers, glancing at him once in a while—those eyes of hers asking why it was not he who was pushing his hand up her skirts and hungrily rubbing her legs then and there, panting to drag her back to her little room.
After struggling to get the buckskin shirt down over his head and arms once more, Bass concluded he would wear the scarf as she had intended him to. Working at the two resistant knots, he eventually freed the head bandage as the sky became greasy with twilight. Tucking the scarf under his belt, Bass slowly crabbed over to the trickling freshet, then slipped the buckskin and moss from his head.
As he set the moss scrapings aside atop a small rock, Bass grew curious—just how would the bare bone feel to his touch, how would his touch feel to the bare bone? Before he could talk himself out of it, Scratch reached up to lay his fingertips on the wound. One by one his fingers tiptoed across the exposed bone, gingerly feeling their way around the circumference of the lacerated flesh. There at the bottom of the wound he felt the thin, stiffened strip of flesh. Tugging on it gently, Scratch figured he could not pull it—that shriveled curl of skin must still be attached to some living flesh.
Drawing the worn skinning knife from its old scabbard at the back of his belt, Scratch bent forward so that he could use his right arm—the right hand grasping the long flap of skin so he could lay the blade against his skull and saw the knife through it.
Bringing the curled flesh down to stare at it, at the same time Bass also rubbed a finger along the wound where he had cut the scrap free, reassured that he hadn’t stirred up any more bleeding.
A curious object it was—this long, narrow strip of his own flesh, no more than three inches in length now that it had shriveled. Attached to its entire length was some of his very own hair. As careful as the Arapaho had been in scraping the scalp itself clean before stuffing it into his belt, it appeared the warrior had made himself two cuts to free the cherished topknot, both of those cuts ending at the bottom, where they overlapped. That narrow thong of overlap had been left to dangle when the warrior had yanked off the topknot, the flesh drying, dying, shrinking into a long, twisted curl.