“I… I—”
“You ain’t got it figured out, do you?” Thaddeus interrupted. “And you won’t for some time to come, Titus. What else you think you can do?”
Titus watched his father step back in among the leather, metal, and wood of the harness, tugging at it, straightening, adjusting the wrap of log chain his son had placed around the resistant stump.
“I like hunting, Pap.”
Without raising his head from his work, Bass said, “Man can’t make a living for his family by hunting.”
“How you so damn sure?”
The eyes came up from the singletree and penetrated Titus like a pair of hot pokers that shamed him right where he stood.
“Sounds like you’re getting a real bad mouth these days, son. Time was, I’d taken a strop of that harness leather to your backsides teach you to watch your tongue better.”
Titus felt his cheeks burn. No, he wouldn’t let his father raise a strap to him ever again. In as low and deep a voice as he could muster, the boy replied, “You’ll never lay leather on me again.”
For the longest moment they stared at one another, studying, measuring the heft of the other. Then his father nodded, his shoulders sagging a bit wearily. “You’re right, Titus. If you ain’t learned right from wrong by now, it ain’t gonna be me what’s teaching it to you. Too late now for me to try to straighten out what needs to be straightened.”
Titus swallowed, blinking back the tears of anger that had begun to sting his eyes as he stood his ground before his father. Suddenly confused that his father had agreed with him. It was the first time in … He couldn’t remember if his father had ever agreed with a single damned thing he had ever said or done.
Thaddeus Bass patted the mule on the rump and stepped closer to his son. “But you heed me and heed me welclass="underline" if I ever hear of you using such words around your mam, if I ever catch you saying such things under my roof—then we’ll see who’s man enough to provide for his own self. You understand me, son?”
With that dressing Titus filmed under his damp collar. “I ain’t never cursed under your roof, and I sure as hell ain’t never gonna curse in my mam’s hearing.”
“Just make sure you don’t, son,” his father replied, stepping back of the mule and taking up the harness reins. “It’d break your mother’s heart to hear you use such talk—what with the way that woman’s tried to raise you.”
Turning, Thaddeus Bass laid the leather straps in his son’s hands. “Now, get back to work. Sun’s going down.”
Titus pointed over at the nearby tree where he had stood the old longrifle. “I been at this all day, and I ain’t had a chance to go fetch me no squirrel yet.”
“It’s fine you go playing longhunter when you get your work done, Titus. That stump comes out’n that ground and gets dragged off yonder to the trees afore you come in to sup at sundown.”
His stomach flopped. “If’n I can’t get the stump up afore the sun goes down?”
His father looked at the falling orb, wagged his head, and said, “Then you best be making yourself a bed right here, Titus.”
Anger was like a clump of sticky porcupine quills clogging his throat with bile. Time and again he tried to swallow as he watched his father’s retreat across the field. Thaddeus Bass never turned as he headed purposefully for the far trees. Above the verdant green canopy beyond the diminishing figure rose a thin, fluffy column of smoke from the stone chimney of their cabin. He wondered what his two brothers and sister were doing right then.
Grinding the leather straps in his hands, Titus seethed at the injustice. He knew the rest of them would eat that night and sleep on their grass ticks beneath their coverlets. While he’d be right here in the timber, sleeping with the old mule and the other critters. Mayhaps that wasn’t all so bad—but his belly was sure hollering for fodder.
Maybeso he could slip off with his old rifle and shoot some supper for himself, bring it back to roast over an open fire—then at least his stomach would be full for the night.
Titus took a step behind the mule, then stopped, staring; down at the reins in his hands.
If he set off on his hunt to fill his grumbling belly, just what in blazes would he do with the mule?
“Hell, she ain’t going nowhere,” he reasoned, looking over the harness that bound her to the stump. “Can’t get that stump out, she sure as the devil ain’t running off from here.”
Quickly he tied off the reins to the harness and leaped around the tangle of upturned roots. The rifle came into his hands like an old friend. More like an accomplice who had helped him in hunts without number in these very woods—ever since he was big enough to hoist his grandpap’s longrifle to his narrow, bony shoulder and stride right out the cabin door to disappear within the forest’s leafy green shadows.
Dusk was settling on the woods in just the way the mist gathered in the low places by the time he stopped at the edge of the narrow stream and listened. Titus jerked at the sudden, shrill call from a shrike as it dived overhead and disappeared in the coming gloom of twilight. The forest fell silent once more.
He figured he was too late to catch any of the whitetail coming here to water before slipping off to their beds for the night. Their tracks pocked the damp earth at the bank near the natural salt lick the deer sought out. No matter anyhow. Titus hadn’t really figured when he’d started out from that stump that he would scare up any critter at these riffles in the stream. More than anything, he had come here just to get away from the mule, and the stump, and the work, and his pap.
On the far bank a warbler set up a song as the spring light disappeared from the sky. Another joined in, then they both fell quiet. Far off he heard the cry of a riverman’s tin horn on the Ohio. A boat plying the waters—coming down from Cincinnati, which lay a twisting forty-some miles from where he knelt in the damp coolness of that dark forest glen. Perhaps a big flatboat speeding downriver to Louisville, on down, down to the faraway Mississippi with its rolling ride south all the way to New Orleans. Maybe even one of those keelboats that would eventually point its prow north on the old river to St. Lou. Seemed everyone in nearby Rabbit Hash, here on the Kentucky side of the Ohio, was talking about St. Lou these days.
“The place holds promise,” claimed one of the drummers who came to town regular from Belle view, just five miles upriver.
Thaddeus Bass had snorted and wagged his head as if that was the most ridiculous assertion ever made. “Maybeso for shop-folk like yourself. Not for this family. We be farmers. Work the soil. Worked it since my grandpap come into Kain-tuck and staked himself out a piece of ground he and others had to defend from the Injuns. Naw, let others rush on to St. Lou. They been rushing on west, right on by my ground for three generations already.”
“Opportunity enough for any man, I’d imagine.” The drummer smiled benignly, pulling at his leather galusses.
“To hell with opportunity,” Bass retorted. “Opportunity’s the retreat of a weak-spined sort. Hard work is what makes a man’s life worthwhile. Ain’t no better blessing for a man than to feed his family with the fruit of his sweat and toil.”
Breathing lightly, Titus listened to the nightsounds, cradling the old flintlock, and wondered if he could ever forgive his father for keeping him chained to a mule, mired waist-deep in the muddy fields that surrounded their cabin and barn and outbuildings. Could he ever forgive his father for throwing cold water on his dreams?
“You’ll get over it, son. Every boy does when he grows to be a man,” Thaddeus had explained. “That’s the difference between a whelp like you and a man like your pap here. Feller grows up to do what he has to do for them what counts on him, and he’s a man for it. A boy just got him dreams he goes traipsing off after and he don’t ever come to nothing ’cause dreams is something what cain’t take him nowhere.”