In the rising fog over the surface of the Ohio, the cry of the tin horn faded off. Titus closed his eyes, trying to imagine what sort of boat it was. Oh, he’d seen plenty of those flatboats and broadhorns, keels, and even those ungainly rafts of logs lashed together for the trip downriver, every small craft’s wake lapping the surface of the Ohio against Titus’s bare feet year after year. Summers without count had he wanted to hail a boat over and beg its crew to take him on.
But instead he sat there, listening until that horn was no more in the thickening fog that clogged the valley of the Ohio.
In the quiet that settled around him he heard the faintest rustle of brush. Held his breath. And a moment later his ears itched as something moved off into the night. Whatever critter it was had scented him.
Wind wasn’t right, he decided, easing himself to his feet. Time to be moving off to home.
Times like these when he wasn’t back to the cabin for supper, his father warned he’d get none. Still his mother always wrapped up a slice of cold ham and some corn dodgers, maybe even a sliver of dried apple pie, folding it all within a big square of cheesecloth before placing her treasure just back of the woodbox that sat to the left of the door on the front porch. Again tonight he knew he would be sitting in the dark, listening to the muffled voices of his family inside the firelit cabin as he chewed on his supper and washed it down with the cool, sweet water from the well his grandpap had dug generations before.
As much as he was certain he’d likely die early if he stayed on to become a farmer, Titus knew he’d feel like a rotted stump inside if he disappointed his father. So through the past few years he had walked this narrow line between what his pap expected of him and what he had to do just to keep from dying inside, a day at a time.
Warm, humid starshine streamed down through the leafy branches of the trees as he felt his way barefoot along the game trail that would take him back to the field and the stump and that old mule he realized had likely grown just as hungry as he himself had become. He stopped and listened a minute, leaning his empty hand against the bark of a smooth sumac tree. A frightened chirp overhead startled him. Black squirrel. Something amiss in that warning.
He did not stop again until he reached the edge of the meadow Thaddeus was having cleared for cultivation. Beneath the half-moon and the bright starlight he could make out the stump he had been uprooting across the open ground. But he could see no mule. Titus burst into a trot now. His throat seized with his thundering heart. Skidding to a halt on the turned and troubled ground around the stump, he found the singletree and chain harness still lashed around the wide trunk. But no mule.
Collapsing to his knees, he quickly inspected the leather for some sign that the old girl had snapped her way out of harness. Yet nothing there suggested she had freed herself. Around on his knees he crawled, inspecting the ground for hoofprints, bootprints, anything that might tell him how she got loose. Mayhaps some of grandpap’s thieving Injuns. Or, worse yet, a white man come to steal the mule. But there was nothing untoward about that churned-up soil surrounding the stump.
“Take care of the animals gonna take care of you.”
The voice seemed so real it near made him jump out of his skin. Titus turned this way, then that, just to be certain. Assuring himself he was alone, he settled on his rump, back against the stump, and cradled the rifle into his shoulder. As his head sagged, he struggled with what to do about the mule, about his running off into the woods and leaving her to get stole.
Finally he decided. If she was anywhere, she was chewing on some grass at that very moment. It made his stomach grumble in protest to think the mule was eating, and here he was worrying about her with an empty belly of his own.
In the starlit darkness it took something less than a half hour to reach the glen where the cabin stood, its chimney lifting a gray streamer to the night breeze. The wind was off from the wrong direction, but now and then he could pick up the faintest fragrance of supper. It made his belly growl in anticipation. Behind shutters and sashes drawn against the night outside, narrow ribbons of yellow lamplight squeezed free, a wee patch of light oozing out at the bottom of the door. Across the yard stood the separate kitchen, used from spring into the fall so the cabin wouldn’t grow overly warm in those seasons of baking and cooking. Beside the kitchen stood the small smokehouse. Across the yard, the springhouse and corncrib. Beyond all of them still, the barn—taller even than the cabin with its sleeping loft.
Heading at an angle for the structure that blotted out a piece of that starry night sky, Titus kept to the shadows. Years before, so his father and grandpap had told him many times, the men of the family were required to keep an eye open at night for Injuns. Any shadow seen stealing across the yard was likely an enemy, and subject to be shot.
It had been years since the tribes had last made trouble. Back to the war with the Frenchies, later the revolt against the Englishers. It made his grandpap choke in anger to think that his father’s own countrymen had made life so hard on their fellow English citizens that the colonists had gone and fought to throw King George right back into the sea. But as distasteful as it was to admit, grandpap’s countrymen had turned out to be conniving, vicious lobsterbacks who had set the Injuns on the rebellious settlers. An army and all those Injun tribes come to make war against a few hundred farmers scattered over hundreds of miles of wilderness.
Titus slipped into the barn through the narrow door and held his breath.
His imagination soared as his eyes grew accustomed to the fragrant darkness. Recalling his grandpap’s stories of how a few brave young men had carried word of an uprising or the English army’s advance from settlement to settlement. How the farmers had reluctantly abandoned their fields and gathered families around them, hurrying to the nearby fort erected by a group of settlers for their mutual protection—each individual farmer’s outlots in the fields surrounding that communal stockade. There had been one such stockade near Belleview where the Bass clan had gone in times of emergency. Where nearly everyone in Boone county fled when the British set their Shawnee and Mingoes loose on their own white-skinned countrymen.
Now Titus’s eyes were big enough that he could make out the low walls of each stall, to discern the backs of some of the animals, the spines of a rake or a loop of harness draped over a nail. Enough light crept through tiny openings in the wall chinks that Titus could make his way down to the last stall, past the milk cows. One curious one came up and stuck her wet nose over the gate. He stroked it as he went past, feeling her long, coarse tongue lap over the back of his hand.
As he reached that last stall, he held his breath and hoped. It wouldn’t be right to say he prayed, simply because he never had really prayed for anything. But at this moment he hoped harder than he had ever hoped for something before. And if such hoping was another man’s prayer, so be it.
Daring to turn his head slowly, Titus looked into the stall.
Against the back wall stood the old mule. And on the nearby wall hung the harness.
Turning on his heel, his knees gone to mush, the youngster sank with his back against the stall door, where he leaned the rifle, catching his breath.
Leastwise the old mule was here. She wasn’t took. He swallowed hard, knowing who had come to fetch her. Likely come to fetch him for supper. More likely, come to see how he was doing on that dad-blamed stump.
Titus wondered if his pap would count “dad-blamed” as cursing.
“I don’t give a good goddamn if he does or not,” Titus whispered to the lowing animals. “His damn ol’ mule anyway—so he can take proper care of it hisself.”