But where had the First Maker been for this child he clutched, here in the crook of his left arm, just beneath his broken heart? Where was this all-powerful Creator, this Grandfather Above, whose place it was to watch over the tiniest and most helpless of creatures? Where had the First Maker been when Mary and Toote sat staring down at the child’s lifeless, blue-tinged body, lying limp across Shell Woman’s arms until Bass desperately shouldered Mary aside and took the child into his own hands, pressed his open mouth over its tiny nose and lips … where had the Creator been as he desperately fed his tiny son the breath from his own body?
With that one hand gently laid on the babe’s chest, Titus had felt each of his breaths make the tiny chest rise. After each attempt, Scratch had stared down into the wrinkled face, looking for some flicker of the eyelids, some cough and sputter, some bawling response as the legs and arms would start to flail … but instead his child lay still and lifeless, no matter how he breathed into its lungs or rubbed its cold, blue body. So helpless, so goddamned helpless as he had started to sob, his tears spilling to mingle with the thick, milky, blood-streaked substance smeared all over the limp newborn.
Titus had pressed the tiny body against him as his head fell back and he let out a primal wail that shook him to his very roots. As he rocked and rocked and rocked there by his wife’s knees, Waits-by-the-Water cried, clutching Mary and Shell Woman, clawing at their arms in grief, finally burying her face in the Shoshone woman’s lap. Finally Bridger came up and knelt beside him, put his arm around Bass’s shoulder.
“Let me take ’im, Scratch. I’ll hol’t ’im for a while.”
“No,” he had growled, like a wounded animal with its paw caught in the jaws of a trap—hurting, angry, and preparing to chew off his own foot to free himself.
But this was not the sort of pain he could swallow down and be shet of it. No bloody chewing through the gristle and bone, fur and sinew, would make this loss any better.
“G-get me something to bury the boy in, Gabe. Just you do that.”
Bridger had risen there beside him and moved with Shadrach off to locate the charred pieces of those once-used flour sacks. He had brought them back and showed them to Mary and Toote. When Titus nodded that they would do, the two women had slowly inched away from Waits while Scratch went to sit at his wife’s shoulder. Propping her against him, Bass laid their stillborn son in her arms and rocked them both in his.
“Day’s comin’,” Bridger said before he turned away with Shad and the women to see to the burial shroud and to give them privacy. “Couple hours, maybe three at the most.”
“I’ll go when you’re done wrappin’ the boy up,” Titus whispered.
“What if it’s still dark out there?”
“Even if it’s dark, Gabe. I’m gonna do this right by the child.”
Holding her, embracing both of them, from time to time he asked Flea to bring in some more firewood. Waits-by-the-Water felt as cold to him as the tiny stillborn. He knew she had to be freezing, shaking the way she was. Just keep the fire going so she did not die on him too. He didn’t know what he would do if that happened … couldn’t possibly go on without her. Wouldn’t even want to go on without her, even if he could.
Strange now that the light of a new day was coming, brightening out of the east at his back, even though he felt his own spirit withering, shriveling, darkening like a strip of rawhide left out in the elements to dry and twist and blacken. Should have been that he went to bury this little body after dark, with the coming of night instead of the start of a whole new day. The way life had of giving a man a new chance all over again every dawn.
Miles upstream on the far side of the rocky outcrop, he found the tree that had several high, thick branches. Titus dismounted below its rustling leaves touched with a gentle breath of breeze every now and then. He shuddered once at a chill gust, pulling the flaps of the old, stained blanket capote together. This was always the time of day when it was coldest, just as the sun was deciding to raise its head into this gray world of little color and contrast. Sitting there, still and silent except for the occasional snort of the pony, or the creak of cold saddle leather beneath him, Bass listened to the wind sough through the leaves of that tree—wondering why the wind blew now, this holy breath of the First Maker … wondering why that life-giving breath of the All Spirit had not entered his son’s mouth.
Damn, but he didn’t want to grow bitter. Not here and now holding this boy’s tiny body. Not when it came time for a father to do the only thing a father could for his stillborn son. He did not want to get hard and crossways with the First Maker, not now because in the last handful of years he had been sensing more and more that spirit breath move through him as it never had before. Maybe only because he was getting older. Maybe most everything he’d cared about before just didn’t matter anymore, while some things meant more than they ever had in his life.
No, he did not want to become embittered, even though he so convinced himself that he possessed the power of that spirit in his own lungs that he could breathe its wind from his body into the lungs of his infant son, giving the stillborn babe a breath of his own spirit wind. But he had found himself helpless in the face of death. Every bit as helpless as he was in understanding why the First Maker had refused to save the baby. And Lucas too. Why had young life been snuffed out in its innocence … when men like Brigham Young and their evil flourished?
But, that wasn’t for him to know, was it? Not … just yet.
Titus kicked his right foot free, gripped the round saddlehorn, and slid down from the horse’s back. A gust of wind tugged at his long, gray hair, nudging that single, narrow braid he always wore—and carried a moan to his ear. An eerie, melancholy sound strangely like the final sigh a man makes as the last air in his lungs comes whispering out in a death rattle. Drawn by that moan’s direction, he turned slightly, made to look at the high slope of loose talus that had torn itself away from the foot of the rocky cliff. Jagged seams and fissures streaked down from the top of that ridge.
One of them would be the most fitting place for the tiny bundle.
Turning back to his pony, he untied the short length of buffalo-hair rope looped at the front of his saddle, laid the shroud on the ground, and quickly knotted together a sling so that he could carry his son on his back. He stood and studied the slope covered with sage and juniper, scattered with loose rock and talus shale, knowing he would have to use both hands to make the climb if he was ever going to reach the crack he had selected, that fissure where the wind would enter at the top of the ridge, moan down the entire length of the crack, then whisper out at the bottom, making the sound of some language he did not understand. But a sound that continued to call to him nonetheless.
Planting his foot for that first step, he immediately slid back down. Clawing with his hands, he managed to hold on for the most part, but as he made a little ground, he always seemed to slide back, losing more than half of what he had gained. Eventually he found that if he kept himself low, digging in with his toes and crabbing up on his knees, he didn’t lose so much. The sun was beginning to warm the air, and he had begun to sweat inside the blanket coat by the time he reached the bottom of the narrow fissure. There on a ledge less than six inches wide he set a knee, dug in the heel of the other moccasin, and balanced himself as he turned slightly, slowly slipping his arms free of the rope loops.