That color of unsweetened chocolate she was, all over. How the turbulent, brown Missouri reminded him now of their tempestuous coupling.
As the pony picked its way along, several yards out from the brushy riverbank, and they pointed their noses north to the mouth of the Platte, Bass dug into the blanket pouch he wore slung over his shoulder. Dragging out the lue scarf the coffee-skinned quadroon gave him not all that long ago, he drank deeply of its fragrance. Disappointed to find that her scent no longer filled the cloth. Her smell was as gone as she herself was. Crumpling the scarf in his hand, angry to learn that some memories were far too fragile to last out the miles and the years, he stuffed it back into the pouch—no more did he want to think upon her and the joy she brought to his body.
Still, far easier was the chocolate-skinned whore to remember than was … Marissa.
There beneath the breaking clouds Titus squeezed down hard to expel the sudden appearance of Able Guthrie’s daughter at the horizon of his memories. The soft, sweaty, sticky feel of her heated flesh against his as they lay that summer in her father’s barn. The dusty fragrance of hay and the pungent scent of the animals rising from the stalls below them. Oh, for so long, how he had done his best to hold her image at bay, to prevent it from nibbling away at the edges of his certainty that he had done the right thing by leaving.
Opening his eyes to the spring sun, Bass scratched at the back of his neck, there beneath the brown curls at the collar of the warm shirt he had put on that morning at Fort Osage: square-armholed, drop-shouldered, sewn from flax and wool … hoping he had not taken on tiny varmints during his brief layover among the soldiers. He should have known better, he scolded himself—such places had the reputation of sharing lice, mites, and fleas with all visitors. All it took was but one man to bring them in.
As it had been on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky flatboat. By the time Hames Kingsbury got the dead pilot’s load of hemp, ironmongery, flour, and tobacco down to New Orleans, even Titus found himself cursed with what the boatmen affectionately called the “Scotch-Irish itch.” Few, if any, of those men who made the rivers their life ever bathed in the waters of the Ohio or the Mississippi. Much less did they patronize the public baths in New Orleans’s “Swamp” at journey’s end. Simply put, most Kentucky boatmen of the era shunned anything that remotely resembled soap and water.
Pretty sure of it he was, what with the way such vermin bit and burrowed, that he might well have himself a case of them already. At least one tormentor back there, and maybe as many as a handful. With a fingertip he tried to find one there at his collar, remembering how many a boatman would remove his colorful crimson bandanna to expose his neck made raw and red itself from a row of lice all lined up on the irritated flesh like a string of pearlish beads.
He brought his hand up before his eyes, staring at the louse he had captured between thumb and forefinger—then crushed it between his nails and flung it aside as the recognizable border of trees came in sight. Reining up among the brush on the bank minutes later, Bass peered across the river flowing in from the west, dumping its clear flow into the muddy Missouri.
“What the hell you figure that be?” he asked almost in a whisper as he patted the Indian pony on the side of the neck.
Bass straightened, peering to the north and west, stretching some saddle kinks out of his back. Eventually he admitted to the two horses, “I s’pose it don’t matter. This here’s the Missouri—and to follow it, a man’s gotta cross this’un. Giddap.”
With his heels he urged the pony into motion, moving along the brush, tugging on the lead rope to the mare. In no more than a half mile Bass found what he figured was a suitable place to make his crossing. Down the grassy bank and into the sparkling water, loosening up on the reins to give the pony its head—allowing it to find its own footing as it slowly took its rider deeper, step by step toward the middle of the river. Cold wicked up his boots, flowed over the top to bite at his calves, then billowed over his knees. Spring runoff soaked his thighs, saddle, and blanket by the time the pony began swimming at midstream. With every yard the horse carried him, Titus was compelled to raise his rifle all the higher until he held it high overhead.
Just as Bass began to heave himself off the back of the saddle onto the pony’s haunches, ready to swim alongside the animal, the pony instead recovered its footing with a sudden start that almost jerked him free of his hold on a thick strip of latigo woven into the back of the saddle pad.
Titus came out of the water, sputtering, his right arm still held aloft with the rifle—cursing the river and the pony, cursing the soft-bottomed crossing.
On the north side the pony and mare lurched up the muddy, grassy bank as he slid off the wet saddle—ultimately cursing himself for not yanking off his shucks before plunging into the river. He slogged over to the brush, water sluicing from his clothes as he stood tying off the two horses. Their flesh quivered as Titus quickly collapsed to the grass, yanking at the waterlogged boots. Standing again to tug at the wet leather britches, he struggled to pull them off one leg at a time, and finally yanking free of the wool and flax shirt.
For those first moments he was cold, chilled to his marrow as he suffered the breeze left in the wake of last night’s thunderstorm. But it wasn’t long before the climbing sun began to work its eternal magic, caressing his goose-pimpled skin with its warmth. Every bead of water dippling his arms or clustered at the base of each tiny hair on his chest, across the top of his bare thighs—all of them shimmered like tiny, iridescent rainbows as the sun began to dry every one.
Raising his face toward the sky, eyes closed, “Thank you,” he said quietly.
Surprised that he had. Not knowing what had come over him of that moment, causing him to offer his gratitude right out loud. Out of the corner of one eye, Titus glanced quickly at the sky, self-consciously regarding that great tumble of white-and-gray clouds dabbed against the pale-blue dome. With the rustle of the wind through newly leafed brush, he suddenly felt the presence of something greater than himself, something so immense here across the wide Missouri that it was almost impossible to comprehend.
At that moment he looked around him, certain that he was standing shamelessly naked within the sight of someone. But try as he might, he could not see, nor did he hear, another being, save for the two horses gently tearing off the green shoots at their feet as they dripped and dried in the sun, now spearing bright shafts through the breaking clouds.
This was as good a place as any, he decided. A fine spot, indeed. So from his shooting pouch he retrieved a small tin the size of his palm, then laid it among some stones where he figured he would build his fire. Titus began to scrounge among the brush for dry kindling. After the showers of the last two days, it was not all that easy to find dry wood, but eventually he had all in readiness.
From the German silver tin he removed the firesteel curved in a large and elegant C big enough to fit over the four fingers of his right hand. In his left he gathered some charred cloth, a bit of dried cotton boll, and the large gray chunk of flint. Striking downward on the sharp-edged stone with the firesteel, he began creating sparks, a few of which soon caught hold on the cloth, smoldering there within the boll’s loose fibers. Very softly he blew on the reddish coal he had created until it burned bright enough for him to slip the char beneath the tiny cone of kindling he had stacked up right at his knees.