Titus inquired, “Them dogs of your’n was chasing a coon under the house that very morning the earth was shaking?” 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!’” “That first day the shaking started early off to the morning, afore the sun even thought to come up. “I was working on the Ohio-a place called Owensboro. By the prophets, I do remember the day the earth shook under my feet. “You ’member the day the ground shook so terrible the rivers rolled back on themselves?” “Likely you figgered you was man enough to set your own foot down in the world.” “You was sixteen then-a time when a boy figgers he’s just about done with all his growing,” Asa confided. “That was the fall I left home,” Bass admitted, watching his words drift away in hoarfrost.

“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. 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. Louie, but only a few French farmers down at the Cape. “Not many a white man had come across the Mississap to settle. “If you was a young’un when you come to the Cape, it must’ve been a wild place back then.” After them three boys, they had ’em three girls. It was a hard life, but a good one for my folks.

He brung to the villages blankets and axes and mirrors and paint, goods like coffee and sugar too. 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.

“My folks had three boys awready to bring along with ’em when they come to America. “So you was the firstborn to your mam and pap?” 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. “I was on the Mississap when it come time to point my nose for these shining hills. “You come west to the mountains from Carolina country?” “My grandpap was a Scot his own self,” Bass announced. Though I was borned this side of the east ocean, I’m a Scotsman like my pappy’s people.” He always told folks he got here when this here country got its first president. Was down along the Natchez Road, clear to the Muscle Shoals-but never got that far east.”

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