Buffalo Palace (6 page)

Now as one they began to rock there beneath the stars on that moonless night as the earth spun toward
dawn. The closer he got to spending himself within her, it seemed the larger his penis grew. And the more Edna whimpered. Low and sporadic at first, now she tangled her fingers in his long hair, pulling him down, holding him there so that she could press her lips against his ear as he continued to thrust himself against her with a growing urgency.

Then a high-pitched, staccato, and almost silent screech escaped her throat as she shook volcanically beneath him in those seconds Titus finished inside her. Her scream quickly became a whimper, then a raspy, breathless whisper at his ear as he collapsed fully atop her. Spent, as weak as a newborn calf.

“You sleep for ’while now, Mr. Bass.” Her words brushed his flesh as she nestled her head against his neck. “Then I’ll be rousing you well afore first light another time. That way I can be back with the young’uns and no one’s the wiser come morning.”

She was true to her word, Edna was.

It seemed like no time at all until he was nudged awake. Bass found her kissing on his neck and down his chest, her hands busy as ever stroking him, her small breasts brushing and tantalizing against his shoulder, his arm, his belly as she shifted beside him.

Then, just as she had promised, after that second feral coupling the woman rolled herself away from him, peeled her coat from the jumble of his blankets, and wrapped herself within it before she leaned over him.

“Mr. Bass,” she whispered, her lips almost against his, her eyes staring right into him. “I ain’t no young woman no more. And I ain’t got a damn prospect one way out here where Heber brought us for to find his dream. So I’m telling you to take what I give you of Edna Mae Grigsby and ride off come morning. I damn well know you’re gonna ’member the smell of me when you’re out there fighting off them Pawnee or any them other nasty Injuns. An’ then maybeso you’ll wanna come riding back here to me, to what you had you a taste of this night.”

The guilt rose in him like an underground spring. “I …
I
don’t want you getting the wrong idea—”

“Don’t have me no idea a’tall, Mr. Bass,” she interrupted.
“Fact is, you’ll likely not ever be back. But if you’ve got yourself a hankering for a good woman to spend out your days with—just remember I’m here.”

“Edna.” He said it in such a way that she already knew.

Apologetically.

And the woman put her fingers on his lips to silence any more rejection of her. Edna drew her face back from his as he fought to find the words to explain.

“Then go, Mr. Bass,” she whispered. “I figger we both got what we wanted here tonight. You’re on your way out there for something. And I got what I been needing—needing for the better part of a year since my Heber gone and left me with young’uns to raise and fields to plow.”

“But you ain’t never cried,” he said. “That’s what—”

“No I ain’t,” she admitted, her lip stiffening. “But likely I will one of these days soon, Mr. Bass. At first, I only got dead inside when Heber died. It hurt so bad him going that I made myself go all dead inside, like a dried-up autumn leaf. Then I tol’t myself another man be coming along and want the pleasure I could give him for the rest of his days. Didn’t know if’n it’d be you …” She wagged her head as she leaned back. “So be it.”

The look on her face, the sag in her shoulders—it caused him such pain inside. “I didn’t tend to hurt no one, Edna.”

“Hush now. Ain’t you caused me the hurt,” she said, brushing her fingers down the side of his face, her eyes pooling, shiny in the inky starlight. “I figger leastways now I can go on and shed myself of these tears.”

Feeling the first of them spill hot upon his chest, Titus pulled the woman against him, nestling her head in the crook of his neck as she began to sob. He cradled her there as Edna cried after all those months, her body shaking harder than it had when she twice rocked beneath him. Then her sobbing grew quieter, and it seemed she drifted off to sleep there within his embrace.

Out east on the horizon the sky was graying when he came awake himself, one of his arms gone to sleep, tingling beneath the woman.

Suddenly he smelled the woodsmoke, rising slightly to
gaze across the yard at the cabin where he realized a fire had been lit and coffee set to boil.

“Edna!” he whispered down at her sharply.

She came awake immediately, rubbing at her eyes and realizing. “I best go,” she said in a small voice, throwing back the covers, slipping out, then carefully tucking them back against his naked body.

Titus asked, “You … things gonna be all right with you?”

With a sad smile she leaned close to him again. “I’ll make out just fine.”

“You’ll make some man a handsome wife again one day real soon.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bass. Thank you.” She bent over his face, kissed him lightly, then rose to her knee, pulling the long flaps of the wool coat about her bare legs. “You don’t find what you’re looking for out there, you come riding on back here and look for me.”

He couldn’t help but grin. “That’s a awful tempting offer, Edna Mae.”

“It’s a offer only a
crazy
man like you’d turn down, ain’t it?”

Remembering what he had told the Franklin shopkeeper, Titus leaned forward, kissed her forehead. “I am a bit crazy. But—a man never knows what the future holds for him.”

“Ever’ now and then … you remember me, won’cha?”

“Said I was
crazy,”
he replied with a wide grin. “Not no idjit what can’t remember the feel of a good woman. And you are a good woman.”

Reluctantly she got to her feet. “Good-bye, Mr. Bass.”

“Good-bye, Edna Mae.”

He watched her turn and quickly sprint across the grassy yard, her feet slicked with dew until she was lost in the dark shadows of the dogtrot, where she would slip back into her cabin, to wait out the minutes until sunrise with her children.

In the sudden cold vacuum that she left, he felt sorry for leaving her and this place. Then he felt an even deeper remorse for having decided to stop over. But as he yanked
on his clothes, Titus decided what was done was done. Some unseen hand had guided him here, perhaps. And there was no denying that he might well have needed her as much as she had needed him.

Edna Mae was putting an end to something.

What with Titus Bass standing at the precipice of the adventure of his lifetime.

Maybeso they had both been fated to cross paths just when they needed each other the most.

By the time he had the blankets rolled up and ready to lash onto the mare, he heard the scrape of the door across its jamb. Turning, he found the settler emerging from the cabin, a steaming china cup in each hand as he stepped off the narrow porch and onto the dewy grass.

“Promised you coffee, Titus,” he said as he presented the cup to Bass.

Self-consciously, he took it from the man. “Smells damned good.” Nervously twisting inside as he took that first steaming sip, Titus figured the settler couldn’t help but know.

Eyes not touching, they drank in silence for some time, savoring the quiet of the morning as the gray turned to bluish-purple off in the distance—back to the east where both of them had left a life behind them.

“You’re ready to be off … it appears to me,” the man said to break that stillness of time.

“Dallied long enough,” he replied, then hated himself for saying it. Making it sound the way he did, what with the man knowing about Edna Mae creeping off to the lean-to.

The farmer asked, “You a breakfast man?”

“A’times, I am.”

“Maybe you’ll stay on while I rustle us up some—”

“I—I feel the pull to be on my way,” Titus interrupted, feeling the embarrassment bordering on shame all the way down to the soles of his feet.

“I could have the missus wrap up some of the leavin’s from supper—”

“I thankee for your kindness and all,” Bass broke in again. “But—I’ll do just fine.”

Taking a step closer to Titus, the settler looked Bass squarely in the eye, and with an even voice he said, “She
needed you … so there ain’t no reason to feel ashamed for it.”

“Damn,” he sighed with disgust at having his fears confirmed. “I shouldn’t have got myself—”

“Listen here, Mr. Bass,” the man interrupted this time with a doleful wag of his head. “Edna Mae is her own woman. Allays has been. I figure she knows her own mind too, and I don’t hold you on account for that. She’s a widow now. Been one too damned long for my way of thinking. True enough, she may’ve been my brother’s wife, but likely you done her what she needed.”

“Look here—I swear I didn’t come out here for none of that to happen.”

He held his empty hand up as if to silence Bass and pursed his lips a moment before he said, “Like I said, chances are you done her what she needed. And … for that, I can thank you.” He switched the coffee cup to his left hand and held out the right. “I wish you God’s speed, Mr. Bass.”

Eagerly he accepted the man’s big, muscular, dirt-imprinted hand, and they shook. “I thankee for all you done.”

As he accepted the empty cup from Titus, the settler asked, “You’ll be careful out yonder now?”

Taking up the rein to the Indian pony, Bass turned and stuffed a foot into the stirrup. “Didn’t get near this old ’thout watching out for my own hide.” He rose to saddle, settled, and said, “Time was I didn’t figger I’d see my thirtieth year. But”—and he leaned back with a sigh—“look at me now. Here I’ve put that thirtieth year ahind me, and I’m on my way to the Rocky Mountains.”

“Likely so it’s the right time for you.”

“Believe it is,” Titus responded, then nodded toward the cabin, where he was sure he saw at least two small faces pressed against the smudged isinglass panes on that solitary window. “You’ll tell Edna Mae I took leave of here wishing her all the best fortune to come her way.”

“I will do that.”

“You tell her again I ain’t got a fear one she ain’t gonna find a good man to care for her and the young’uns.”

“I’ll tell her.” And he took a step back, flinging the
coffee from his own cup, then looping both cup handles over the fingers of one hand as he shoved some unruly hair back from his eyes.

“You’re the kind to take care of all of them, ain’t you?”

The man gazed up at Bass. “If that’s what the Lord calls upon me to do.”

With a smile Titus replied, “Then you’re just the sort like my own kin … my own pap. I’m glad all of them here got you to depend on.”

And before the settler could utter another word, Bass tapped his heels into the pony’s ribs and yanked sharply on the mare’s lead rope.

Moving off in a hurry, with the newborn sun rising at his back.

He didn’t see a human or smell firesmoke for something close to another two hundred river miles.

Then of a sudden, on the warming midday breeze, he drew up, catching that first whiff of burning wood. As much as he strained his eyes to see beyond the thick timber clustered along the hillside, Titus could not make out a puff, much less a column, of smoke. The thick, stinging gorge rose in his throat—remembering so many years before having been caught flat-footed along the Mississippi by a Chickasaw hunting party.

It would not happen again, he swore under his breath.

Quickly he urged the animals toward a thick copse of leafy green and hurled himself out of the saddle, landing as quietly as he could upon the thick carpet of spring grass. Lashing the horses to a low-hanging limb, Titus retrieved his rifle and crept toward the side of a low hill a quarter of a mile ahead of him. Hugging the shadows offered by the thick hardwood timber that bordered this southern bank of the Missouri, Bass carefully picked his way around the brow of the knoll. For all he knew, he had made it to Pawnee country and had blundered smack-dab into them—just about the way he had bumped into those Chickasaw warriors while out hunting for Ebenezer Zane’s boat crew.

Dropping to his knees as the wind came full into his
face, rank with the sharp tang of woodsmoke grown strong in his nostrils, Titus crept forward, parting the brush with the muzzle of the fullstock flintlock rifle. Yard by yard he pressed until he stopped: hearing the familiar call of birds in the distance, followed by the roll of at least one woodpecker thundering its echo within a nearby glen. Were it an Indian camp, he figured, there sure as hell wouldn’t be such routine noise from the forest creatures.

Swallowing down the dry lump clogging his throat, Bass again parted the branches of the brush and pushed his way forward until he sat at the edge of the clearing. Ahead of him bobbed waves of tall grass that seemed to stretch all the way to the sharp-cut north bank of the Missouri. He dared to raise his head a little higher, catching a glimpse of the river at the foot of that north bank—still not all that certain he wouldn’t see a cluster of Indian wickiups.

Across the river to the south the spring sky was sullied with but a single thin trail of smoke rising from a solitary stone chimney that protruded over the top of a stockade wall. The double gate stood open just wide enough to easily admit a wagon, almost as if expecting visitors.

Quickly glancing left down the south bank, then north, Bass thought it curious he did not lay eyes on any humans. Then he spotted a pair of draft horses picketed just outside the stockade wall, contentedly grazing on the spring grass. He craned his neck to see more of that western side of the stockade. Beyond the pair grazed three more horses.

After all these days without sign of another human—just possibly there was life here.

At first the open gate and no sight of folks had unnerved him—causing him to fear the place had been attacked, its inhabitants killed, and the fort left empty. But it just didn’t figure that Injuns would leave good horseflesh behind.

A voice called out from the woods beyond the fort, surprising him. Bass craned his neck to the east to watch a figure emerge from the line of trees, an ax over one shoulder and his shirt carelessly draped over the other. Again he
called back to the timber, and almost immediately two other men burst from the woods to join the first. The heaviest of them, also naked to the waist, tugged at leather braces, slipping them over both arms, then adjusting the belt line of his drop-front britches below his more-than-ample belly. That one mopped his face with a bright-yellow bandanna, then stuffed it into the back of his pants.