Death Rattle (55 page)

“That babe is yours, Ti-tuzz.”

His heart skipped a beat, then took off in a gallop. “M-mine?”

“Whose child do you think your daughter would be caring for?”

“I … I don’t—”

“Your son, Ti-tuzz,” she announced. “You have a new son.”

“No. It can’t be. When I left … you weren’t … I didn’t … no, it can’t be!”

“Do you remember the last time you held me in your arms?”

“That cold dawn when I was leaving on my hunt last spring?”

“Yes,” she replied. “There was still snow on the ground.”

“I remember, yes.”

Laying her hand along his hairy cheek, Waits explained, “I didn’t know that morning, but I was already carrying your child, Ti-tuzz. His life was already growing in my belly. I wouldn’t know for many days to come—and when I did know for sure, it was later in the spring. I carried this son of yours for many moons, hoping with each new moon that his father would be home before he was born. But—”

“But I was gone too long.” Titus felt the stab of pain pierce him as he clutched her tightly again. He had been gone while she went through her woman’s time all alone. “You gave birth to him while I wasn’t here to hold you, not here to see our child’s face, or to hold him while you gained back your strength. I love you for your strength, woman.”

Waits-by-the-Water asked, “Did you hear him?”

“The babe?”

“Yes, did you hear him cry?” she asked. “He has the lungs of a little buffalo bull, he is so loud.”

Wagging his head, Scratch replied, “No. He did not cry out but once when I squeezed him too tightly when I put my arms around Magpie.”

Again she smiled, warming her pocked, ash-streaked face. “You just wait, Ti-tuzz. You will hear that little bull bellow when he is hungry!”

“I will go fetch our children,” he said, starting to slip from her embrace.

“It must be dark outside,” she said, gazing quickly at the smoke hole. “I don’t think I have anything for you to eat here—”

“I have meat.” And he bent to kiss her forehead. “You
clean yourself and make ready your pot. I will send Magpie in with our new son and a pouch of yesterday’s venison. Then I will take my big son to help me with our Cheyenne horses.”

Waits reached out for his bare hand. Grabbing it between both of hers, she brought the hand to her lips, then pressed it against her wet cheek. He sank to one knee and wrapped his free arm around her shoulders.

“I will never leave you again,” he vowed. “That is a promise that I will die before I ever break. Believe me when I tell you, I will never leave you, ever again.”

Her eyes were sparkling with tears as she peered up at him, releasing his hand.

“Prepare the pot, woman,” he reminded as he stood. “There’ll be no more starving yourself, for tonight we’re going to start putting some meat back on your bones!”

Ducking back through the narrow doorway, he stood in the deepening gloom of that winter evening. All round them the lodges were aglow with a dim, translucent light cast from the fires within. Magpie stood rooted right where she had been. Flea was beside her, the weary horses strung out behind them both.

“My mother—she’s seen you are alive?” the girl asked as Scratch appeared.

“Bring my new son to me,” his voice croaked as he started toward her.

Magpie held the bundle out to her father. “He doesn’t look a thing like Flea. I thought all brothers were supposed to look alike. But this little one, he is nowhere near as ugly as Flea.”

Behind her, Flea growled.

“That is just the sort of thing you expect a sister to say about her brother, Flea,” Titus confided as he pulled back a flap of that blanket wrapped around the infant.

Beneath the cold starlight, the tiny child looked no different than Magpie had in those days and weeks after she was born, no different than Flea. Not until they began to grow older, a month or two at least, did they begin to take on their individual appearance—differences that became more marked as time went by.

“What do you think, Popo?” Flea asked as he raised himself up on tiptoes to look at his baby brother. “Do you think he is better looking than me?”

“No, you are both handsome Ti-tuzz men,” Bass gushed, filled with such overwhelming pride to hold his new son.

“Then,” Flea declared, “he must be so much better looking than his big sister!”

She half swung a fist at him as he ducked aside.

“Girl,” Titus chided. “You go inside now. And take your little brother with you. He will be hungry soon.”

As Magpie folded the infant into her arms, her face went sad momentarily. “My mother has not always had milk for him. She has been too weak at times.”

“What did she do to feed your little brother?”

“Sometimes, other women brought milk from a mare,” she confessed. “And sometimes … I think they brought their own milk. We fed him all we could with a spoon.”

Titus wrapped his arms around his daughter and the baby. “You are very strong, a very good sister, Magpie. I promise you that you and Flea will never have to worry about such things again. I will never leave my family, ever again.”

“You make good promises,” Flea said.

“You know I never make a promise I can’t keep.”

“You have always kept your word to us, Popo,” Magpie said.

“Now, go, daughter! Get your littlest brother inside. Help your mother with the fire, and get some water on to boil. Or keep your brother happy till it is time for him to eat. Now, hurry inside!”

She studied his face. “What are you going to do, Popo?”

“Me? Why, my oldest boy and his father are going to see to these horses. We’ll unload all our goods right here beside the lodge, then find a good place for these animals, where they can fill
their
empty bellies.”

The boy admitted, “I am very hungry too, Father.”

“Do you like venison, Flea?”

“You know I
love
venison!”

“I brought some with me for us to eat tonight,” he said as Magpie turned and ducked inside the lodge where Titus caught a glimpse of the flames dancing against the inside walls. Waits had laid on more wood, warming the lodge—just the way things had been in those days before he had strayed all the way to California. “And you, my dear son—you can eat venison till you’re ready to pop like a fat tick!”

“Here, Popo,” and the boy held up the lead rope for his father.

“No, Flea. You are my oldest son. I count on you more now than I ever did before. You and your sister have shown that you are children to make a father very, very proud. Bring my saddle horse along.”

“The others will come with me too?”

“They followed you here to the lodge, didn’t they?”

His little head bobbed up and down. “I think they followed because your saddle horse led them all the way back to the land of the Crow.”

Titus looped his arm over his son’s shoulders and gave him a squeeze as they started away for the snowy meadow. He was filled with such an awesome sense of love for his son, Titus didn’t know if he could contain it right then.

“You are a smart boy too. You know the way of horses, eh?”

“I am learning,” Flea admitted. “I have paid attention to everything I saw you do with them. And I’ve watched the other men in the village—when they break horses, or cut them on their privates, or have them mount the mares.”

“You have been paying attention.”

“Horses. They are something very special to me,” the boy expressed. Then he spoke as if sharing something in the strictest confidence. “Sometimes, Father … sometimes I think they talk to me in their own language that no one else can understand, or even hear.”

Titus stopped as the string of ponies came to a halt around them at the edge of the snowy meadow. “Tomorrow,
Flea—after breakfast, we will come out here together, a father and his son. And you will see which one of these Cheyenne horses talks to you.”

“Chey-Cheyenne horses?”

“Yes.”

Flea wagged his head sadly. “If these are Cheyenne horses, I won’t understand what they say to me.”

Titus put his fist beneath the boy’s chin and chucked it to the side gently. “If you are a true horseman, Flea—it doesn’t matter what language
you
speak, doesn’t matter what tribe the horses came from. In the seasons and years yet to come, you will steal horses from many tribes who do not speak the same language you speak.”

“Is this true, Father—that I can understand what these Cheyenne horses will say, just like I understand Crow horses?”

Dropping to one knee, Titus gazed directly into his boy’s eyes and said, “If you are the horseman I think you will grow up to be, my son—then you will understand
every
horse.”

“So, it really does not matter that these are horses from far away?”

He stood, tussling the boy’s hair. “Tomorrow we see which one of these horses speaks to you, my son.”

“Why are we going to see if one of them—”

“Because”—and Titus turned Flea so the boy could look up at him in the deepening twilight—“the horse that speaks to you will be yours to keep, son. It will be your war pony, Flea.”

The child’s eyes grew big, his face visibly brightened in the dim starshine. “Oh, Father—every boy should have a horse of his own!”

“No, Flea,” Titus corrected him with a warm embrace. “Every young
warrior
should have his own warhorse.”

Across the next two days he sat in utter amazement at his children—three of them now.

How tall and so like her mother young Magpie had become. Were it not for his daughter’s own inner strength and resolve, Titus was certain Waits-by-the-Water could not have made it through her grieving for a husband too late in making his return.

Then there was Flea. For so short a lad, the boy could nonetheless grab a handful of a pony’s mane and vault himself onto its back without the slightest exertion. The more he watched his son among their horses, the more certain he became that Flea really did understand the secret talk of their four-legged breed.

And the tiny blanket child—barely weeks old now that winter was fully upon them. Of the three, this boy looked most like his father’s side of the family. Sometimes in the way the infant would screw up his nose with a giggle or clench his eyes shut when about to bawl, either expression so reminded Bass of his younger brothers when they were only babes. Back in those days long, long ago before Titus knew there was any other life to covet but what his
father’s life had been, and his father before him, and his own father before them all.

In those days when Titus had been a child.

Before he put aside childish things and stepped beyond the twenty-mile bonds that imprisoned most men to the ground where they were born and whelped, raised to a life on the soil, and would eventually die having ventured no farther in distance, no further in spirit.

Wanting more than what most men accepted as their lot in life, young Bass had grown old seeking what other men could only dream, having lived what most men never
would
dream.

And in his living out the yearning, Scratch had discovered the mute secrets most men only hungered for late at night after the candles were snuffed and their frontier cabins or stately town mansions fell as quiet as the soft, sleeping breath of their wives and children.

Titus Bass was a man more blessed than any he knew.

Their first night back in one another’s arms, Waits showed she understood just how hungry he was for her, perhaps because of her own appetite for him. Long after moonrise when the babe had been fed and the older two were long asleep in their blankets, while the embers burned low with a copperish hue every bit as red as Taos geraniums, Waits-by-the-Water wordlessly sat up in the soft, flickering light and shimmied her deerskin dress over her head. Quickly scrambling back beneath the buffalo robe, her hands raised his breechclout flap and found the belt’s buckle. She tore him out of his leggings in two swift tugs.

He wasn’t at all surprised to discover how hard his manhood became with nothing more than the delicious anticipation. Yet it virtually leaped when her fingers came exploring its heat. Clearly impatient, Waits rolled over on her side, scooting her hips back against him, then raised a leg and guided him into her moistness. As certain as he was that he would explode then and there, Bass was surprised when she stopped moving the moment he was planted inside her.

“Wait,” she whispered in the darkness. “Let this last.”

Despite the blood thundering at his ears, Scratch too wanted to savor this delicious joining a few minutes longer before their coupling was over all too quickly. So his hand explored her belly still rounded with the baby’s fat, wandering upward to cup and tease that milk-swollen breast. Soon enough his touch had her volving her hips against him, her hunger growing ravenous. He let her work against him while he remained unmoving, until he felt her shudder a second time and—unable to deny this most potent force of nature—he rode out the shock waves of his own release.

Bass did not remember falling asleep, it must have come over him so quickly that first night back in her arms.

“Tell me of the women by the big water,” she awoke him with a whisper that next gray morning.