As Hatcher dragged that ragged bow across the strings slowly, tightening a peg here, another there, dragging the bow slowly again and again until he had each string to his liking—then suddenly kicked off with the wild, appealing strains of a high-pitched Kentucky reel … Bass felt a lump grow in his throat. Never could he remember Hatcher looking so happy, so content, so—complete. Not even when the man was well into his cups.
Scratch had only to gaze around the fire at the others, the greater of them strangers, to see just how true was the expression that music calmed the savage breast. Here were the roughest cut of mankind, every last one of them sitting in rapt attention, struck silent in unabashed awe, their eyes every bit as big as the smiles that creased their hairy faces. Slowly, step by measured step, Hatcher moved through them, in and out of the crowd as he swayed side to side with the tempo of his reel, circumscribing a sunwise circle around this largest of the fires. More figures appeared out of the deepening darkness to stand or kneel at the edge of the light thrown off by the leaping flames.
How it seemed Jack thrived on this hypnotic sway he could command over groups large and small when he began to caress the crying strings of his fiddle. Then that first song was done before any of them realized, and the summer night fell quiet for a matter of heartbeats before any of them stirred, or spoke, leaving it up to Caleb Wood and Titus Bass to slap their hands together.
In an instant the others were hooting as well, whistling and roaring their approval. They finally fell quiet when Jack jabbed the violin beneath his chin once more.
“There’s one I’d like to play: a song that makes this child remember where we all come from, where it is we’re all bound,” Jack explained when all had grown completely still.
“Is it loud?” a man demanded.
“No,” Solomon Fish roared angrily.
A new voice declared, “We want something loud we can stomp to!”
“You want the man to play for you or not?” Wood asked the assembly as Jack lowered the violin from beneath his chin.
“Play, goddammit!”
Another bellowed, “Just let ’im play anythin’ he wants!”
They were shoving and shouldering one another now that he had them expectant. Hatcher knelt, starting to lay his violin back in its case.
“Hatcher!” cried Brody as he tore away from a knot of others. “I’ve got me likker for your gullet, but only if’n you play that fiddle o’ your’n.”
“Likker?” Jack asked, holding the violin suspended in midair over the battered case.
Isaac Simms lunged up a huge step into the merry dance of light. “Real lik … likker?”
“Traders’ likker?” John Rowland wanted to know.
“Right here,” Brody said. “Right now. So you gonna play?”
Standing once more with the violin and bow clutched in one hand, Jack drew a forearm across his mouth. “Fiddle playin’s hard work, coon. Dry work too. What say ye: pour me a tin of that traders’ likker, and I’ll see what I can do to play a while for ye niggers.”
While the others set to hollering in merriment, Brody turned to wave two men out of the dark at the edge of the grove where they had been waiting offstage with their prize: a small five-gallon keg constructed of pale oak staves clamped together with three dark iron bands. The pair hobbled forward with it slung between them until they reached an open spot near the biggest fire and eased the keg to the grass. Then, as Hatcher stuffed the fiddle beneath his chin, one of the pair stuck his hand into his shooting pouch and pulled out a wooden spout.
“Punch ’er!” Brody ordered.
And with that the trapper ripped the camp ax from his belt, using it to drive the spout into the bunghole. The keg was tapped.
As the notes from Hatcher’s fiddle climbed higher still, and the fires spat sparks into the coal-cotton night, the men clamored to fill their cups with the clear grain alcohol David Jackson and Bill Sublette had freighted west from St. Louis after sealing up a small plug of tobacco and a handful of red peppers inside each diluted keg. While the plug had dissolved to give the potent brew the pale, imitation color of sour-mash whiskey, the peppers lent this Rocky Mountain libation its peculiar bite. Not that the pure grain liquor wouldn’t already have the kick of an unrepentant Missouri mule.
Squeeg Brody was the first to shove his cup beneath the spout and the first to take a sip of the night’s squeezin’s. Smacking his lips with approval, he turned and parted the rest as he stepped back to the fire, cup held out, and stopped before Hatcher. Jack stopped playing immediately, looped the bow at the end of a finger on his left hand, and accepted the offered cup.
“Thankee, most kindly!” and he bowed graciously.
When Hatcher brought the cup to his lips, the rest of his outfit came to stand around him, all of them staring at that magical vessel, some unconsciously licking their lips, most of them gone wild-eyed with whiskey-thirst. Jack sipped in a manner most genteel, then brought the tin from his mouth and savored the taste of it a moment, eyes closed.
At last he declared, “That’s some!” And with that, Jack threw back his head and went to guzzling the cup dry without drawing a breath.
Fish, Wood, Simms, and the others joined Bass in screeching like scalded alley cats as they leaped away from Hatcher, lunging for the keg themselves. Among the company men there were suddenly tussles, shoving, and some playful wrestling as they all jockeyed to be the next in line to have their cup filled.
“Keep on playing, Jack!” Titus hollered as he knelt with his tin beneath the spout that the keg keepers never had to turn off.
“Get me some more, then, dammit!” Jack flung his empty cup at Scratch, then resumed sawing the bow back and forth across the strings as he dipped and swayed, wriggling his hips, prancing about on his skinny legs, cavorting this way and that like the madman he was.
As the men had their cups filled and rose to return to fireside, each of them swayed or tapped a foot, some stomping harder than the others as they sipped or guzzled at their pint tin cups of grain. Among them a man plopped to the ground with a beaver skin still stretched tightly inside a willow hoop, crossing his legs before him. Snapping off a short piece of kindling a little bigger than two of his stubby fingers, he set about slapping the stiffened, dried flesh of the beaver hide with his make-do drumstick right in cadence with Hatcher’s merry tune.
As soon as he heard the loud thumping, Jack himself turned and jigged over, giggling like a child on a lark as his head wobbled from side to side, humming and grunting with the music he was urging from the singing strings. At the drummer’s side Hatcher began stomping one foot dramatically, lifting his leg into the air as high as he could before driving it down into the grass and the dust, over and over and over again.
Of a sudden a realization came over Titus as he stood with Hatcher’s cup refilled. He knew that song. Hurrying over to Jack, he held the cup in front of the fiddle player’s face. “Where you want me to set it down?”
“Don’t set the son of a bitch down!” Hatcher snapped as he went right on playing and bobbing without missing a note.
“I ain’t gonna hold on to it all night—”
“No ye ain’t, Scratch. Here, pour it in my mouth.”
“P-pour …”
“Right here in my mouth, dammit!”
The tall, skinny Hatcher bent a little at the waist, squatting slightly and contorting himself as he continued to play, lolling out his tongue as Scratch brought the big cup to his lips and slowly began to pour. He was amazed at just how little spilled out, what few drops dribbled down Jack’s chin, off his whiskers, and onto the fiddle.