Authors: Terry C. Johnston
In the cool of twilight, after an entire day with no further sign of more Apache, Bass felt confident enough to stand and move around in the dimming light. Managing to free his saddle from the carcass of the dead mount, he propped it atop the boulders while he went to work pulling the supply packs from the dead packhorse. After removing the last of the packs from Hannah and McAfferty’s second horse, Titus began to tediously go
through all that they possessed—setting aside what was essential. That done, he put everything else in two stacks: what they would readily put to use, and what was more luxury than necessity. This last pile they would leave here in the shadows of the bluff, beside the Gila, come nightfall.
Titus stood and looked down at the rest when he was done, wagging his head at how pitifully small was what they could carry away from this place. Without those two extra animals and their four packs—why, what they were taking along now might just outfit a small band of Digger Injuns. No more than that.
But he and Asa had their lives back in their own hands, and that was a damned good feeling for a man who had no hankering to turn over his fate ever again to another, nor to the desert. His life was back in his hands, and his hands alone.
As soon as it was nearing full dark, Bass was already strapping the rebuilt packs back on Hannah and on Asa’s packhorse. Kneeling, he nudged McAfferty awake, and together they hauled themselves into the saddle and reined away from the boulders, following the river toward those mountains looming in the distance. Swinging loosely from the ropes lashing both bundles carried by Asa’s packhorse were the nine Apache scalps. Every bit of the long black hair, and the tops of the ears too. Titus wasn’t about to let any hoo-doo haunt him from here on out.
With the arrival of dawn Bass was half dozing in the saddle. McAfferty lay asleep, slumped forward against the withers of his horse. It wasn’t until some time after the sun came up that Scratch found them a place out of the light among some small but shady paloverde trees.
Another day out of the sun, followed by another long autumn night of relentless riding—pointing their noses northeast, keeping the North Star at the corner of his left eye. Pick out some feature of the land in the dark and ride right for it until they got there. Then select another landform in the distance and make for it. Again and again while the stars continued to wheel overhead and the night turned cold enough to turn their lips blue and cause their teeth to chatter.
Night after night of riding. Waiting out each day, keeping a rotation of watch between them, their eyes constantly searching the horizon for pursuit until sundown again marked the hour for them to pack up and remount.
How much longer? he had often wondered. How much farther did they have to go? … Until he scolded himself and forced his mind to think on something else. Day and night Bass tried hard to remember the look of Taos from afar, remember the smell of the rutted streets littered with refuse and offal. Were the women really as pretty as he remembered them? Was the village as gay as his memories painted it? Or had he only grown so sick and lonely for the sight of another human face, desperately yearning for some sign of those whitewashed walls, that the Taos he conjured up was far more than it really was?
“How ol’t a man you be, Mr. Bass?” Asa asked early of a morning after they had snuffed out the moon and rolled into their robes to sleep out the frosty day.
He thought a moment, tugging at the figures the way a man might tug at the strings on his moccasins to knot them securely. “I’ll turn thirty-six this coming birthday.”
“When will that be?”
“First day of the year.”
“A noble day, that,” McAfferty replied. “Meself, I’ll be turning thirty-six next year too. Late of the year, howsoever.”
Bass turned in the growing light and pulled the edge of his robe from his face to peer over at his partner. “You’re younger’n me?”
“’Pears to be.”
“S’pose it’s that white hair of your’n,” he said finally. “Makes you … seems you’re older’n me.”
“My years out here make me a old man to some,” Asa confessed. “But I’m a young’un to others.”
“Never asked where you come from.”
McAfferty hacked at some phlegm, then answered, “I was bred and borned in North Carolina.”
“I ain’t never been there. Was down along the Natchez Road, clear to the Muscle Shoals—but never got that far east.”
“A purty country, so my pappy said. He come to America back in eighty-nine. He always told folks he got here when this here country got its first president. I be full-blooded Scot, you know. A Scot I am—and most proud of that. Though I was borned this side of the east ocean, I’m a Scotsman like my pappy’s people.”
“My grandpap was a Scot his own self,” Bass announced. “You come west to the mountains from Carolina country?”
“By the heavens no,” McAfferty snorted. “I was on the Mississap when it come time to point my nose for these shining hills. Wasn’t too old when my family up and moved west from the Carolinas, clear across the Mississap to the Cape, south there from St. Louie.”
“I know of the Cape,” Scratch replied. “So you was the firstborn to your mam and pap?”
“My folks had three boys awready to bring along with ’em when they come to America. The family come in from the coastal waters, on to the deep forests where my pappy started off trading with the wild Injuns for their skins. He brung to the villages blankets and axes and mirrors and paint, goods like coffee and sugar too. It was a hard life, but a good one for my folks. After them three boys, they had ’em three girls. Then I come along there at the last.”
“If you was a young’un when you come to the Cape, it must’ve been a wild place back then.”
“Not many a white man had come across the Mississap to settle. Oh, there was folks up around St. Louie, but only a few French farmers down at the Cape. Good, rich ground that was too.”
With no school within hundreds of miles, McAfferty had come to learn his reading and writing as most did on the frontier, if they were fortunate: studying at his mother’s knee, copying words every night, following supper, from their old Scottish Bible, by the light of the limestone fireplace.
“By summer of 1810 more and more folks was coming in, so my pappy itched to move us on to a crik near the Little White River—a place more’n a week’s ride on west of St. Louie.”
“That was the fall I left home,” Bass admitted, watching his words drift away in hoarfrost. “Run off and ain’t ever been back.”
“You was sixteen then—a time when a boy figgers he’s just about done with all his growing,” Asa confided. “Likely you figgered you was man enough to set your own foot down in the world.”
Scratch turned to his partner. “You ’member the day the ground shook so terrible the rivers rolled back on themselves?”
“I do,” McAfferty said. “I was turned seventeen that fall. By the prophets, I do remember the day the earth shook under my feet. ’O
Lord, be not far from me!’”
“I was working on the Ohio—a place called Owensboro. Where was you?”
“On the Little White,” Asa replied. “That first day the shaking started early off to the morning, afore the sun even thought to come up. I woke up, me pappy yelling at me, ’Asa! Asa! Get up, boy! Fetch the dogs! They under the floor after a coon, boy! Fetch them dogs out!’”
Titus inquired, “Them dogs of your’n was chasing a coon under the house that very morning the earth was shaking?”
“No—my pappy thought the rumbling and the roaring under the floor come from the dogs chasing a coon critter under our cabin. We all come right out of our beds—hearing the dogs outside the window, in the yard—all of ’em howling and yowling. Wasn’t a one of ’em
under
the floor!”
“You all knowed right then it weren’t the dogs?”
“Pappy hit the floor with his knees, and my mama was right beside him—and they both started praying like I ain’t ever heard ’em pray afore or since. Their eyes so big—saying they was sure the day of judgment was at hand.”
“I was up the Ohio a ways that cold day,” Titus explained. “Remember my own self how the ground rolled and shook so hard, the river come back on itself.”
“We was all on our knees—praying our hardest together,” McAfferty continued his story. “Soon as my
mama went to singing ’Shall We Gather at the River,’ the might of the Holy Spirit come right over me, commanding my tongue to speak words right from the Bible:
’Thou are my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.’”
“You knowed those words by heart back then?”
“I never paid me much attention to the lessons my mama gave me from the Bible,” Asa admitted. “But there I was—watching my pappy pray like he never done afore, the trees outside our window swaying this way and that, big limbs snapping off like they was fire kindling, my sisters caterwauling like painter cubs … when my mama up and tells us all she see’d it all real plain, see’d it as a sure sign that I was to preach God’s word to his wayward flocks.”
Scratch nodded, enthralled with the story. “You knowed back then you was made for speaking them Bible words.”
McAfferty snorted and rubbed the raw end of his cold nose. “No, Mr. Bass. I was a idjit nigger back in them days. This child just laughed at the notion of me taking up the Lord’s work.
’Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’”
“You didn’t turn to preaching then and there with that ground shaking under you?”
With a wag of his head Asa declared, “No, not till later on that year when we had us a great shooting star come burning ’cross the sky. The ground shook under my feet. But that star was something made me look right up at heaven. Something made me behold the power of the Lord.
’The God of glory thundereth.’
Maybeso the ground shook for there is the dominion of the devil hisself … but to have me a sign from above, from the realm of God!”
“That’s when you knowed you had a calling then and there?”
“That shooting star come back night after night,” he explained. “Made it plain I had the Lord’s calling.”
For the next few years Asa studied the family’s Bible,
investing nearly every waking hour not spent in the McAfferty fields in reading, prayer, and long walks in the woods as he talked to his Maker.
“Wasn’t until eighteen and sixteen when I felt the burning in my heart that set me on the path to tell others of the word of our redeemer.”
It wasn’t long after that the young circuit rider took a proper wife. For more than a year his heart had been the captive of Rebekka Suell’s beauty. Finally, as the eldest in the family of nine children he visited once a month on his lonely circuit, sixteen-year-old Rebekka’s pa agreed to Asa’s marriage proposal.
McAfferty dolefully wagged his head now as darkness came down on the valley. “I can see how it weren’t no life for a woman—that riding the circuit from gathering house to gathering house. What few days a month we was home, she tried her best to keep up a li’l garden, and I done my best to bring game to our pot … but we never had much more’n my trail of the Lord’s calling and that tiny piece of ground where I scratched us a dugout from the side of a hill.”
By 1819 two interlopers came in and filed for ownership on the land where Asa had neglected to make his claim formally. Amid rumors that they accepted “donations” from rich landowners, the slick-haired government folks issued a demand that threw Asa off his place.
“‘Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches.’
Losing what little we had took the circle for Rebekka,” Asa declared with bitterness. “With her gone, I put what little I had in my saddle pockets and set to drifting.”
Asa preached where he could, wheedling a meal here and there, sleeping out in the woods or slipping into some settler’s shed when the weather turned wet or cold. Those next two years were a time of sadness, loneliness, despair. Still—he had his Bible, and his faith that the Lord was testing him for something far, far bigger.
In the late spring of twenty-one he found himself among the outflung Missouri settlements, hearing news
that two traders by the name of McKnight and James had cast their eye on the villages of northern Mexico.
“Asa McAfferty had no home in the white diggings,” he said. “And this was one nigger what had him nothing or no one to leave behind. Even the tiny flocks I was shepherd to didn’t heed to my warnings that the world was near its end.
’For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not!’”
“That when you come west? Twenty-one?”
“I was a man broke down, ground under the heel: ready to look west for my salvation, Mr. Bass,” and he nodded. “The west—where a man depends only upon the Lord … and mayhaps a rare friend, for his daily salvation.
’This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.’”
On through the late autumn Bass and McAfferty continued their crossing of the craggy mountains and the desert wastes as the days continued to grow short, as the nights lengthened beneath each starlit ride, pushing hard for the Rio Grande. It was snowing the night they reached its banks—a light, airy dusting, the air around them filled with the sharp tang of a harder snow yet to come.
“Santy Fee ain’t far off now,” Asa said, nodding to the east.
“We going there?”
“Not ’less’n we want to cut out more trouble for ourselves,” McAfferty replied. “
’They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.’”
Downstream at a ford they crossed that black, shimmering ribbon in the dark and rode until the sky began to lighten in the east before locating an arroyo where there were enough leafless cottonwood to provide some shelter, branches to disperse the smoke from their tiny campfire, modest protection from any distant, any curious, eyes.
So they skirted Santa Fe and its seat of Mexican territorial power, wary of the frequent army patrols the officials sent out—
soldados
instructed to detain any gringo careless enough to be caught on Mexican soil with beaver but with no Mexican license to trap that fur. Better was it for them to stay with the Rio Grande as they continued
north each night rather than make for the well-traveled road that lay between the territorial capital and that string of villages in the Taos valley itself.