“Back to home in Nashville—that’s what was my favored thing to sink my teeth into.”
“Your mama made it?” Lancaster asked.
Nodding, Culpepper continued, “She made the best tarts—and always used some of my da’s rum to pour on ’em just before we sunk our teeth into ’em.” He smacked his lips noisily, then peered down at the skillet to find his lard had melted. “Hey, ol’ soldier—you best get them cakes over here in a shuffle-quick. I’m ready to cook!”
Lancaster legged back the bench he had been sitting on and rose with the pewter platter he had piled high with mush cakes. “You’re gonna stay long ’nough to eat, ain’cha, Bass?”
Drawing in another deep breath of that room no longer rank with the smell of rain and men living too close to one another—but now filled with the strong, corn-tinged fragrance of memories, Titus said, “Yes. Them pone cakes do sound good this morning.”
“Pone?” Clayton repeated. “You from somewhere south, mister?”
“Kentucky. Hard by the Ohio.”
At the fire Lancaster slipped a fourth cake into the heated oil in the skillet. “Ain’t heard these’r called pone in a spell.”
“My …” And he struggled to get the rest out without his voice cracking in remembrance. “My mam most times made all us young’uns pone cakes of a cold autumn morning.”
“I growed up calling ’em hoecakes,” Culpepper declared as he jabbed at the frying mush with a long iron fork.
“Maybeso they’re nothing more’n johnnycakes,” Clayton said, turning away from Bass as if he appeared to recognize something familiar in the look on the older man’s face.
Titus was grateful the young sergeant had turned away as his eyes began to mist up and he troubled his Adam’s apple up and down repeatedly, trying to swallow the sour gob of sentiment that threatened to choke him.
His damp leather britches and wool coat began to steam there in the heat of the mess hall—arousing a long-ago memory all of its own. The smells of frying oil, the crackling of the wood beneath the heady fragrance of the crisping corn. He remembered those long years gone by: how his grandmother always used conte in baking some sweet treats—that spice made from powdered China briar she would mix into her corn fritters fried in bear’s oil, then sweetened with honey.
At the side of the fire the steaming coffeepot began to boil, and as quickly Sergeant Clayton tossed in two hand-fuis of the coarse coffee grounds, then tugged on the bail to move the pot off the dancing flames and onto the coals at the stone hearth.
Blinking his eyes with those tears of remembrance, Titus savored the earthy perfume of that frying pan bread. Corn. His father’s crop. What his grandpap before him had grown in that rich bottomland of the canebrakes they cleared of every stone and tree, season after season slowly enlarging their fields. Corn. It not only fed Thaddeus Bass’s family, but the stalks and tops of the harvested crop fed their horses and milch cows. Corn had fattened their hogs—which meant lard for their lamps during those long winter nights there near the frozen Ohio in Boone County. And what corn was left over after the family and the stock were properly cared for, after some had been sold and shipped south to New Orleans on the flatboats, then Thaddeus, like his father before him, would boil down into whiskey mash for proper occasions like birthing, marrying, or funerals: time when a man was planted back in that very ground where he had spent his life in toil.
“Don’t ever let me catch you spitting in my fireplace again!” his mam had scolded him that first time Titus so proudly attempted to show off his new skill at the ripe old age of five and a half.
“Your mama uses them ashes,” his pap had explained, sharply yanking the youngster to his knee. “Uses ’em to make her prized hominy, Titus. So don’t ever let either of us catch you spitting in the fireplace. G’won outside with that sort of thing.”
How he fondly recalled her frumenty, their wooden bowls heaped with boiled grains of wheat served with a topping of hot milk and sugar. Not at all like the rye mush a working man had to settle for in the tippling houses along the banks of the Ohio, back there in St. Louis. Nothing more than meal, salt, and water brought to a boil before it was set before him—nothing more than animal fodder to fill his belly until a midday meal.
And, oh: his mam’s crackling bread. How his mouth began to water with the remembrance as he settled on a half-log bench across from Lancaster, right beside the fireplace where Culpepper tended to the hoecakes. Crackling read: made tasty with a crisp crust, flavored with generous handfuls of leaf-hard hog cracklings turned into the batter just before baking in the Dutch oven.
On his tongue this cold, wet morning rested the remembered taste of those meals he had not recalled in far too many years since leaving home that autumn of 1810. Only sixteen back then, but certain sure he was man enough to make out on his own. And so he had for nearly fifteen years now. Yet the memories came all the more into focus on mornings like this when he missed most the johnnycakes smeared with butter and dripping with his mam’s preserves. Or all those evenings spent remembering how as a skinny child he had climbed up to sit astraddle the top rail of the snakeline fence his pap had thrown up around their fields—patiently watching the western fall of the sun and wondering on those yonder places his grandpap spoke so dearly of, munching on the crackling, earthy taste of parched corn there at the end of the day. How the coming quiet of each evening allowed him to listen to familiar sounds of the forest softly roll across the dark, plowed ground to reach his ears: the mournful toodle of the whippoorwill calling out to its sweetheart, often interrupted by the abusive cry of a strident catbird.
Homespun memories were all he was left with now—especially now that he had chosen a’purpose to be without a home of his own.
“The Missouri makes her bend to the north little more’n ten leagues upriver from here,” Sergeant Clayton reminded him later when the time had come.
He had shaken hands with Culpepper and Lancaster there that drizzly morning as the rain became more insistent, and now Titus grasped the young sergeant’s. “You’ve made me welcome … and for that I am in your debt.”
“Think nothing by it,” Clayton said. “Those tales you spun of your whoring back to St. Louis, and them wild windies that ol’ feller Washburn told you of the far wilderness—why, they made your layover with us a genuine pleasure, Mr. Bass.”
“Next time you hap to come by—maybe on your way back to St. Louie,” Lancaster added, “I’ll wager you’ll have some wild windies of your own to tell us.”
Turning away, Titus rose to the saddle and tugged on the mare’s lead rope. “Thanks all the same for the invite, soldiers—but I don’t plan to be back this way a’tall. Have to be something damned important—nothing less’n life and death … to bring me back to St. Lou.”
As the river meandered, Titus had to cross more than thirty more miles before he reached the big bend of the Missouri, its roiling surface seeming to grow muddier with every hour he put behind him that first long day after leaving Fort Osage. Before the sun had climbed all that high that following morning, Titus realized the river had changed directions for good and no longer flowed out of the west. Now he would follow the Missouri north. Mile after mile he watched how it was becoming even more the color of unsweetened chocolate, frothing and bobbing with snags and clutter, tumbling with drift and refuse carried down from far upriver.
A river become the color of the quadroon’s skin. That warm-fleshed whore who abandoned her tiny crib down on Wharf Street where she had to belong for an hour at a time to any man with a guinea or pistole in his pocket, choosing to have herself put up in a fancy house where she would belong thereafter to only one wealthy Frenchman who could afford to provide himself the sweet delights his frigid wife would no longer pleasure him with.