Buffalo Palace (64 page)

Drawing the worn skinning knife from its old scabbard at the back of his belt, Scratch bent forward so that he could use his right arm—the right hand grasping the long flap of skin so he could lay the blade against his skull and saw the knife through it.

Bringing the curled flesh down to stare at it, at the same time Bass also rubbed a finger along the wound where he had cut the scrap free, reassured that he hadn’t stirred up any more bleeding.

A curious object it was—this long, narrow strip of his own flesh, no more than three inches in length now that it had shriveled. Attached to its entire length was some of his very own hair. As careful as the Arapaho had been in scraping the scalp itself clean before stuffing it into his belt, it appeared the warrior had made himself two cuts to free the cherished topknot, both of those cuts ending at the bottom, where they overlapped. That narrow thong of overlap had been left to dangle when the warrior had yanked off the topknot, the flesh drying, dying, shrinking into a long, twisted curl.

He knew immediately what should be done with it. After untying the narrow thong that closed the top of the small medicine pouch, Scratch stuffed the small scrap of his own scalp in among the few other objects of special significance he had been gathering since that spring parting from Fawn. Here he would keep the strip, dangling
around his neck in the medicine pouch, worn beneath his shirt, next to his heart.

With the moss dampened in the trickle of water and replaced over the bare bone of his exposed skull, Titus smelled deeply of the scarf one last time. From now on the fabric would no longer even remotely carry the fragrance of the quadroon—lo, after all these many miles and bygone seasons. Remembering painfully how the whore had abandoned him and what little they had shared together.

“I’ll go see her there,” he recalled declaring to the madam that night she had told him the quadroon would not be back. “See her where she’s working now. What’s the place so I’ll know it?”

“You can’t see her up there,” the woman tried to explain, the wounded look in her eyes showing how she tried to understand this poor man’s desire for just one woman.

“She ain’t coming back?”

Wagging her head, the woman explained, “Rich man bought her, took her off to the place where he’s gonna keep her for himself, for now on and always. Buy her all the soft clothes she’d ever wanna wear. She told me when she left, there’s a tree outside her window—where she’ll sit and watch the birds sing come the end of this goddamned winter.”

“H-he married her?”

The woman had laughed at that. “Sakes no! He’s already got him a wife—but one likely cold as ice. Land o’ Goshen, but he don’t ever intend to marry the girl. Just keep her in that fancy place he bought her—just so she’ll be there whenever he shows up so she can pleasure only him.”

“Maybeso I can see her still. Sneak up there when he ain’t around.”

Again the woman wagged her head sadly. “Don’t you see? She went there on her own. That means she wasn’t thinking ’bout being with no one else here on out. The girl, she left everything behind. And that means she left you too. Best you forget her now.”

Now, as he folded the large square of heavy silk into a triangle, Bass recalled how he had stared at the crude puncheon planks beneath his muddy boots, realizing how
the quadroon’s leaving was merely another piece of him chipped away, like a flake of plaster from one of those painted saints down at the cathedral on Rue d’Eglise. Then Titus had looked into the woman’s eyes, vowing he would not let her leaving hurt him. Then of a sudden he had remembered Isaac’s favorite.

“What about that one with the brown hair down to the middle of her back? Think she was called Jenny.”

“You’re two days late, son,” the woman declared morosely. “A mean bastard cut her up good just last night. Up to the pauper’s cemetery they buried Jenny in a shallow hole only this morning.”

Swallowing, perhaps feeling a bit desperate that so much of what he took solace in was crumbling around him, Bass said, “Any other’n. Any one a’tall.”

Squinting her eyes up at him, the woman rested her hands on her fleshy hips and asked, “You ain’t so choosy no more?”

His eyes flicked to the left down the corridor, then right. Back to the woman. “Not choosy at all.”

Here in the willow as the light quickly oozed out of the sky, Titus remembered that from that painful night on he had rutted with the fleshy ones, the pocked ones, the ones who hadn’t cared to bathe in a month or more—it made little matter to him that the quality and color of whores in that city always depended upon the size of a man’s purse. No, it wasn’t the money that was determining his choice of solace for Bass. No good reason at all could he come up with to be particular just where he took his pleasure. And for the longest time it seemed to be that he was seeking only that particular salve of a warm and willing woman to rub into all those hidden wounds he kept covered so well.

No, he hadn’t been choosy at all—until he chose to seize his dream.

When he brought the blue triangle to his head and began to knot it at the base of his skull to hold down the damp moss, Bass remembered those days when he figured it was simply too cruel to fool himself any more into believing in hope. How he had vowed never again would he cling to any dream.

Those dreary seasons passed slowly by while he
choked down his despair at never hoping again, daring never again to dream—pounding out his rage on that anvil in Troost’s Livery. Of every Saturday night he found himself a new whore to stab with his anger as he rutted above her. Until he had worked his way through them all and by the time a cold winter was waning, Titus started pleasuring his way back through what poor women he could still afford. As he did, Bass had grown more frightened that with each visit to their wharfside cribs, it was taking just a little more of that balm to soothe his deepest wounds. Scared they might never heal.

And when he found himself weakest, Titus had always brooded on this then faraway land—still mythical as it was to him back then. He had been weakest in those moments when the whiskey could no longer stiffen his backbone, when he found himself drained and done with the sweating torment of driving his rage into a woman and he lay beside her, gone limp and soft deep within himself as well as out.

Now with the moss protecting his skull, with the bandanna secured around his head, he knew with certainty that it hadn’t been a cruel hoax his grandpap and Isaac Washburn had played on him: there was indeed a magical, mystical place where the horizon ran black with buffalo. Just as they had promised, those huge, shaggy, powerful beasts indisputably ruled their domain and were servient to none.

Like that rare breed of man who had come to test himself against these mountains. The few who indisputably ruled this wild, untamed domain.

That twilight Bass used some of the last of his strength to draw back the Russian sheeting, and desperately scrounged through what baggage was left on Hannah’s back in search of something to eat. All that he found besides some green coffee beans he could suck on was a small linen sack of flour. With his blanket clutched around his shoulders, Scratch collapsed wearily to the grass, watching the sun settle far away beyond the Uintah Mountains.

He moistened the fingers on his left hand, then stuffed them into the flour. Pulling his hand out of the sack, he sucked on the fingers, repeating the movement over and
over until his stomach no longer rumbled, until he could no longer tolerate the pasty, bland taste of the flour.

Bass realized he needed meat. It was the only thing that would replenish his strength—keep him from steadily becoming weaker and weaker, until he could only curl up and wait to die. He dreamed on buffalo—big, shaggy, hump-backed buffalo. All that red meat and blood up to his elbows … but he’d take elk or deer now, a prairie goat if he had to.

Hell, Scratch thought mournfully as he looked down at the flour sack in his lap, he’d even take a rabbit or a ground squirrel right now if he had to—close his eyes and make believe it was buffalo as he was eating it.

When he had retied the top of the sack with its strand of hemp twine, Titus keeled over onto his side, dragged the rifle between his legs, and tugged the blanket back over himself.

Twilight had faded and night had arrived the next time he awoke. After putting the flour, buckskin, and beaver scraps away among the few belongings still left him, Scratch stuffed the rifle under the loops of rope. Now he was ready for the ordeal of getting himself aboard the mule.

Again he folded the blanket over her withers in front of her packs, but this time he had something different in mind for the night’s ride. Back over to the freshet, then across its narrow path he led the patient Hannah a hobbling step at a time. It was there on the far side he had seen the deadfall where he now headed.

Positioning the mule beside the big pine’s trunk, Titus slowly clambered up the rotting deadfall until he stood nearly opposite her tail root. Seizing hold of the ropes at the top of her packs, he leaned against her, pulling himself onto Hannah’s rear flanks. Securing a second hold farther up, Titus pulled himself a little farther onto her back. Nestled there between the two bundles that were lashed to her pack frame, he settled himself. Down between them he wouldn’t be near so likely to fall off as she picked her way across uneven ground while he fell asleep.

Which was just what he wanted to do more than anything right then. With his good left arm, Bass dragged the red blanket over his head, nudging it on down over his
back so that it covered his legs, flaps draping off either side of the mule’s packs. Now he would be warm, here under the blanket and next to her hide, warm no matter how cold this late summer night would become as Hannah carried him into the coming darkness.

At least he would be warm here, no matter how empty his belly. Warm, though he realized how fast his strength was flagging. Were it not for that nest within the packsaddle, Bass knew he simply didn’t have the strength to stay on her back. Without meat he might not be able to hold on much longer. Without meat he might never be strong enough to climb back on. Hunger was a cruel torturer.

Taking the long lead rope into hand, Scratch raised his chin to search the heavens a moment until he found what he looked for.

Gently reining Hannah around to the right, he told her, “Let’s go, girl. Time to carry me some.”

As he clucked to her with his tongue, Bass guided her toward that great patch of black sky there beneath the North Star. The big handle on that water dipper pointed the way he would go. In only a matter of minutes his eyes grew too heavy for him to hold them open any longer.

“Keep going, girl,” he whispered to her, stroking her withers, patting her neck and mane. “Take us north.”

Hannah moved out faster this evening than she had carried him that first night, perhaps sensing that now he was secured among her baggage. The ofttimes gentle, sometimes jarring rock-a-bye motion of her gait lulled him deeper and deeper as he repeated wearily, “Take us north. Find us … something to eat.”

At times during the night he awoke, lifting his sore, pounding head, and gazing into the starry black blanket overhead. Then he might tug a little this way or that to nudge a correction to their course before he let his head collapse once more and he was asleep again in his warm nest down between those bundles lashed to the crossed arms of the worn sawbuck saddle.

The North Star beckoned the way … suspended far, far ahead of them in the night.

He slept again, knowing that the only way he’d ever follow that star was on the back of this mule.

It was cold enough that he could see his breath come in gray streamers against the murky light of predawn, curling up before his eyes, then wisping off on each gentle gust of breeze.

The land rose gently on either side of him as Hannah plodded along. Since awaking he had realized she was beginning to slow—too weary after the night’s march beneath her added burden. He shifted slightly, rolling to his other hip between the sawbucks. And breathed deeply of the cold breeze that gusted against his cheeks. It was good, he told himself. With it in his face he would not be on the downwind of man or animal.

Turning his face to the right, regarding the paling sky, Scratch felt relieved that the mule had been moving him steadily north through another night. Soon enough he would have to tug on her rope, steer her off to one row of these hills or another, hoping there to find a sheltered draw where he could hoist himself off her back and crawl into the brush. Perhaps this morning he would have enough strength to yank back the thick, oiled Russian sheeting and spend the time and strength it would require of him to release the packs from their frame. But as weak as he was, how was he ever going to get the packs reloaded?

How many days now? he asked himself. Had it been two nights? Or three? Two, he decided—which meant she had suffered for the better part of three days without having her burdens removed.

“You’ll want yourself a good roll, won’t you, girl?”

By damn, he knew how she must feel—knowing how he got a’times, ready to back up to a rough-barked tree where he’d strop his back up and down slowly, deliciously, giving himself one hell of a good scratching.