“I ain’t heard a squeezebox played that good since I floated the Mississap,” Scratch declared with pure appreciation as he eased down beside Elbridge Gray, his tin cup in one hand, a second helping of thick tenderloin impaled on the knife he clutched in the other.
Around a big bite of rare meat, Gray replied, “I’m rusty.”
“If’n that’s rusty,” Nathan Porter snorted, “I’d sure as hang wanna hear you when you’re oiled!”
Without benefit of fork, Bass held the slab of meat up, snatched hold of a bite-sized chunk between his teeth, then, holding the meat out from his lips, cut off that bite with the knife. Hardly the best of proper table manners, it was nonetheless an efficient way for a man to wolf down his fill of lean, juicy meat in less time than it would take most men to fill a pipe bowl and light it. While some ate more, and a few ate less, the standard fare in the mountains was two pounds of meat at a sitting.
Eventually Titus grew stuffed and well satisfied, ready at last for the coffee some of the company trappers had set to boil at the edge of the fires. As he wiped his knife off across the thigh of his buckskin legging, Bass turned to Elbridge. “You’ll play some more for us tonight?”
Gray asked, “You’re up to it, Jack?”
Hatcher replied, “Dog, if I ain’t. When ye’re done coffeeing yerself, Elbridge.”
Minutes later the two were at it again, the potent liquor continuing to flow, both company trappers and the free men frolicking with total abandon: dancing, singing, beating on the bottoms of kettles or banging two sticks together in time to the music They whirled in pairs or stomped about in a wild jig, knees pumping so high, they near grazed a man’s own chin.
The night had ripened and the moon had risen before Jack shushed them all.
“Gonna play ye one last song,” he told them as he stood wavering back and forth, clearly feeling his cups.
“It be a foot stomper?”
“No,” Hatcher growled with a snap.
Someone else yelled, “I wanna foot stomper!”
“Shuddup,” Caleb Wood grumped at the complainer.
“I allays play it,” Hatcher explained as the group fell quiet. “Allays …”
Solomon quickly explained to the others, “It’s his song, boys.”
Quietly, Gray asked, “You want me play with you?”
Jack nodded. “Sure do. Sounds purtier with ye siding for me, Elbridge.”
Hatcher led into the tune with a long, melancholy introduction. After a few bars Elbridge joined in, quietly, echoing Jack’s plaintive notes like the answer a man would hear to a jay’s call, the faint reply returning from the distance in those eastern woodlands where they had all been raised.
Closing his eyes as he dragged bow across strings, the tall, homely trapper began to sing to that hushed, respectful, firelit crowd.
I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger,
Traveling through this world of woe.
Yet there’s no sickness, no toil, no danger
In that bright land to which I go.
I’m going there to see my father,
Who’s gone before me, no more to roam.
I’m just going over Jordan.
I’m only going over home.
For a moment Titus tore his eyes from Hatcher’s expressive, lean, and melancholy face, glancing quickly about at the others, every last one of them spellbound by the sad, mournful strains of the two instruments, by the plaintive, feral call of Hatcher’s voice as he climbed atop each new note.
I know dark clouds will gather round me,
I know my way is rough and steep.
Yet beautiful fields lie just before me,
Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep.
I’m going there to see my mother,
She said she’d meet me when I come.
I’m just going over Jordan.
I’m only going over home.
One by one the ghostly wisps of people from his past slipped through his mind as Jack and Elbridge weaved their magic spell in that firelit darkness. A father and mother left behind in Kentucky what seemed a lifetime ago. Good men like Ebenezer Zane and Isaac Washburn, dead well before their time. Billy and Silas, and even Bud Tuttle too—those three who had come into Bass’s life, then gone to their downriver deaths.
Death so sudden in this wilderness. A man’s end come so in the blink of an eye on this unspeakable frontier. Every day was to be savored and cherished and fiercely embraced for all it was worth—a fact that every last one of these few gathered at the fire understood, knowing theirs would not be a Christian burial. No, none of these was the sort of man forever to lie at rest beneath some carved stone marker where family and friends could come to visit. Instead, theirs would be anonymous graves, an unheralded passing … their only memorial the glory of their having lived out their roster of days in the utter ecstasy of freedom.
I’ll soon be free of every trial,
My body will sleep in the churchyard.
I’ll drop the cross of self-denial,
And enter on my great reward.
I’m going there to see my brothers,
Who’ve gone before me one by one.
I’m just going over Jordan.
I’m only going over home.
To die Where the winter snows would lie deep in seasons still in the womb of time, their bones gnawed by predators, scattered to bleach below endless suns … to sleep out eternity where only the wind would come to sing in whisper over this place of final rest.
4
By the time Jack Hatcher’s bunch began to straggle back to their bowers and bedrolls across the creek from the grove where the company men had raised their camp, a strip of sky along the eastern horizon had begun to relinquish its lampblack, noticeably graying. Dawn was not far behind.
As he stumbled along, Scratch’s head throbbed, tender as a red welt. Barely able to prop his eyes open any more than snaky slits, his toes groped their way through the grass and brush. Scattered among the outfit’s packs and belongings, he finally located his blankets and lone buffalo robe. Sinking to the ground, Bass rolled onto his side and dragged the old Shoshone rawhide-bound saddle toward him to prop beneath his head. As he lay back upon it, the saddle’s wooden frame momentarily creaked beneath the weight of his shoulders, then suddenly split apart and collapsed—smacking his head against the hard ground and the saddle’s sideboards.
“What in hell are you about over there?” John Rowland demanded as he sat up, a disheveled sight to behold. He had come back to his blankets some time before the others.
Groaning as he gently rubbed the side of his skull with two fingertips, Bass slowly sat up. Struggling to catch his breath against the hammer pounding inside his brain, he carefully adjusted the greasy, sweat-salted blue bandanna he tied over the top of his head not only to keep his long hair out of his eyes but to protect that bare patch of exposed cranium where he had lost his hair to an Arapaho horse thief.