Dance on the Wind

4

Summer had a way of redeeming itself on an evening like this. These long, hot, and sticky Kentucky summer days grew tiresome in the Ohio country come late August.

Yet redemption arrived after sundown when the flies ceased droning and the mosquitoes no longer raised angry welts on what bare skin one had provided for their feast that afternoon. Cool breezes stirred the weeping willows and rustled the leaves of the red elm. The heavy air hung rich with the fragrance of sumac and trumpet-flower vines climbing the dogwood and pecan trees. Fires twinkled through that encampment like a sugar-coated crusting of flickering diamonds against the indigo seep of night.

It was as if Titus could breathe again. After the heat of that long afternoon. After the drama of the rifle match.

With Amy’s supper in his belly they had set off hand in hand in no certain direction once the youngest of the Whistler brood had been put in their blankets, seeking a stroll through camp beneath a half-moon this last night before the revelers would pack up come morning and drift off in all directions for home, to talk across another full year of the Longhunters Fair just past and gossip on what next summer would bring.

As long as this year was in passing, he doubted 1811 would ever arrive.

Days like this one went far to prove how reluctant summer was to lose its grip on the land. Yet day eventually gave way to night—balanced in the sort of evening that could stir a young man’s juices, cause him to think on little else but getting his girl off to himself—to touch all those forbidden places on her young body once more. As exciting and compelling as was his desire for Amy at this moment … his dread that he had already put her with child cooled his fevered ardor.

Once during their walk she had pulled him into the shadows of the overhanging umbrella of long weeping-willow branches and there put her mouth on his, stoking his fire with the sudden, fierce intensity of a blacksmith’s bellows. Amy took his hand and raised it to her breast, squeezing his fingers around and over that soft flesh covered by a thin layer of her summer dress. In that brief and stolen moment she groaned at the back of her throat, exciting him while aroused herself at the same time.

Her lips were moist, wet enough so that her mouth slid across his. It seemed she became hungrier as he grew breathless. Rolling her hips upward, Amy pressed herself into him, more insistent still as she sensed his flesh harden and grow. He had to have her.

Titus whispered, “Got to find us a place … some place—”

But as his mouth left hers, fear drenched him with cold once more.

A child. Marriage. Settling on the land. Rooted to one spot the way his father, and grandpap before him, had sunk their lives into a particular piece of ground. Great-grandpap before them had been a different tale: come here in the beginning when it was a new land, fresh and un-walked, when adventure waited among the wild critters and the Injuns too. Perhaps great-grandpap hadn’t realized what he was doing when he’d brought his family here to raise up a cabin and a passel of young’uns too.

Such was a legacy Titus feared he could not live up to.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered at his ear, her breath hot and moist. “Find us a place. Yes, yes! I promised you—touch me all over again like you done at the swimming hole.”

“You … you’re,” and he wanted desperately to find a way to say it. “Gimme a chance to figure it all out.”

Amy stiffened, drawing herself back to arm’s length. “Figure out what?”

“This being a father.”

“Already you learned that it don’t take nothing much to be a father,” she said, stepping back against him, her head below his chin. “I liked how quick you learned.”

“Scares me.”

“The babe scares you?” she asked, taking up his hand again, this time placing it against the flat of her belly. “This little child what brings us together as husband and wife?”

Extracting his hand from hers, Titus turned slightly, staring out at the flickering fires that pricked the meadow like dancing fireflies, campsites extending from tree line to tree line to tree line. In a gust of laughter carried to them on the breeze, he thought he recognized a voice drifting over from a nearby camp.

Turning to Amy, he said, “Ain’t the child what scares me. What I’m afeared of is living the life my pap cut out for hisself.”

“Don’t you want the same things he has, Titus? A home and family, making a living for us outta the ground?”

He looked away from her face, not able to gaze into those frightened eyes. “I think you always knowed the answer to your own question, Amy. Down inside, you knowed the answer all along.”

“There’s still time to decide, Titus,” she replied, pressing herself back against him. “Time for you to finish your schooling. Then you can figure out what we’re gonna do about a family and where we can put down roots.”

Gripping her shoulders, he stared intently into those doe eyes. “Sounds like you don’t have no idea what I’m trying to tell you. This ain’t about deciding where to put down roots, Amy. This got all to do with not putting down any roots at all.”

She lunged for his arm as he turned away. “Where you going?”

“C’mon,” he replied, taking one of her hands in his. “You come with me.”

As they stabbed their way through the spindly branches of weeping willow, Titus was sure, all the more determined, especially when he heard another burst of laughter. It was his voice.

Drawn to the tall, freedom-loving hunter every bit as much as he was drawn to the soft flesh of Amy Whistler. The sound of his laughter and the merry talk drew Titus on, tugging on her hand to keep up.

“Yo, ho!” Levi Gamble called out, turning as he spotted them come into the light. “Look here who approaches camp!”

He watched Gamble stand from the stump where he and three others were calling out their bets in playing quadrille, a most popular game played between four persons with the forty cards left in a deck after the tens, nines, and eights had been discarded. At that moment, backlit in firelight, the woodsman seemed even taller than he had that afternoon.

Titus shuffled nervously, explained his interruption. “We was out taking ourselves a walk and I heard your voice.”

“C’mon. C’mon—you’re among friends here, Titus Bass. Sit yourselves and join us.” He turned to the others at the fire as he swept up the greasy cards into his hands. “Titus is the lad nearly whupped me in the shooting match today. A likely hunter he’ll make one day soon.”

“Titus an’ me getting married,” Amy blurted to those gathered in that ring of firelight. “Settlin’ in to start our family.”

Each of them stared at the young couple for a heavy moment. And as quickly as the young woman had shattered the mood, Levi Gamble jumped in to work his magic.

“Then congratulations are in order!” he cheered. “You there—pass over that jug of cherry flip and we’ll send her round the circle for this young couple.”

They did, and Titus took him a taste of the sweet brandy after he and Amy settled atop a large tree trunk rolled close to the fire. At times his father cooked up some corn mash or made a strong potato beer, but nothing that had the sweet decadence of that brandy. He took a second taste upon his tongue as the first warmed his belly and handed it past Amy to Levi.

“The young lady here gave her husband-to-be a kiss when we all thought Titus was the winner of the shooting match,” Levi explained to the circle of those at the fire. Then he brought his hand to his chest expressively to continue, “But she never give me a kiss when we discovered I beat the lad by a hair.”

“Maybe next year, young Titus Bass,” a moon-faced man across the flames called out. “Levi Gamble here tells us he won’t be here to steal first prize from you.”

“Why not next year?” Titus asked.

Gamble’s eyes took on a glaze weighed both in time and distance. “I’ll be far, far from the Ohio country come this time next year.” Of a sudden he turned on Amy. “So—sweet lady. What say you to giving Levi Gamble a winner’s kiss?”

Her eyes dropped. “I cannot.”

“Why?” he asked quietly.

“I’m spoke for, and it would not be the thing to do when a girl’s spoke for.”

“Titus?” Gamble asked, raising his head to look at the youth. “What say you about my kiss? Will you let your sweet Amy put a kiss here, on the cheek of the winner who whupped you in our gallant match this day?”

“Sure,” he replied after a moment’s hesitation.

“Now, sweet Amy—come give me my prize.” Gamble turned his face to the side and leaned toward her. “I’m ready when you are.”

The girl glanced once at Titus, then turned to Levi and leaned his way with her lips puckered. Just as she drew close, Gamble suddenly turned and planted his mouth on hers with a resounding smack. Amy leaped back so far she collided with Titus, and they both spilled over the tree trunk.

Gamble rose to his feet and held out his hands to them. “I’ve never done that before, Amy. Honest. To kiss a beautiful young woman and knock her off her feet that way—and you was even sitting down when I did it!”

The group at the fire roared anew with laughter as Titus and Amy settled once more. Gamble bowed to them.

“If I have caused you trouble in any way with my silly prank, I beg your forgiveness. It’s only my happiness to be off to the western waters, with money in my purse enough to see me on my way.”

“You said you’d be far away from here come this time next year,” Titus replied, seizing hold of Gamble’s wrist with worry. Now he was confused—wanting to know more about this Boone County neighbor. “You’re not staying on here?”

“No, I move on tomorrow.”

“You leave family behind?”

One of the men at the fire explained, “Levi’s from Pennsylvania.”

“P-pennsylvania?” Titus asked. “What brings you here to our country?”

“Just the road, Titus,” Gamble explained. “Going west to see the far mountains and the rivers so mighty they say a man can’t dare cross ’em come spring when the snow on those high places is melting.”

“W-where is it you come from?”

“I hail from western Pennsylvania. Family from a little town called Emsworth on the Ohio, just downriver from Pittsburgh. I was following the river west when I happed onto a shopkeeper in Cincinnati what knew of this fair taking place across the Ohio. Every fair I know of has a shooting match—a likely place for me to win some money to fatten my traveling purse.”

“Money to go west,” Titus repeated, his eyes going to stare at the fire as Amy took his hand in the two of hers.

“If I make good time, I should be well downriver come the first hard snow, and by then I can find me somewhere to winter up and wait out the spring if’n I have to. Work as I need to. Always work and wages along the river, I say. And if’n I ain’t there afore spring, then I can go on down to the Mississippi, north from there.”

“Where?” Titus asked. “Where is it you’re bound for?”

“St. Louie.”

A large man leaned forward, his elbows on knees as he asked, “What do you know of this St. Louie?”

“I’ve heard it’s a lively place ever since Tom Jefferson’s expedition come back from the western ocean with word of beaver and other fine furs to be got from those western lands.”

“What of the Injuns?” a woman asked, speaking for the first time as she came into the firelight, wiping her hands on a long apron.

“Yes,” a man replied. “There must be Injuns there the likes have never see’d a white man.”

“And perhaps they’re better for that,” Gamble said, “what with the way the English stirred up these Injuns agin us during the war for our freedom, as I hear it.”

“They did, that’s for sure!” one of the men roared.

“But those Injuns out there,” Levi continued, “I hear they come walk the streets of St. Louie—looking to talk with the redheaded chief who went west to find them.”

“Who’s that redheaded chief?” Titus asked.

“William Clark,” Gamble replied. “Aye, they come to St. Louie dressed in all their feathers and shells, paint and hides. From what we heard last winter back to Pittsburgh, the Injuns up the Missouri River been quite peaceable ’bout traders coming among ’em.”

“That what you’re fixing to do out west, Levi?” Titus inquired. “Go into the trade with them Injuns?”

He wagged his head. “No. I’m fixing to join up with a man called Manuel Lisa. He’s been working the Injun trade on the upriver for three years now.”

“Sound of his name,” a man commented, “he must be one of them Frenchies.”

“Spanish, he told me,” Levi answered.

In a flush of astonishment Titus asked, “You … you met him?”

Gamble nodded. “He come through Pittsburgh late winter. Town was all abuzz with it. He’d been up to Vincennes looking to supply a whole new kind of outfit. Couldn’t get what he needed up there, so he had to keep on east. Come to Pittsburgh, and that’s how I happed onto talking with him.”

The moon-faced man asked, “You said a whole new kind of outfit. What’s new about it?”

“That’s what got my attention, it did,” Levi answered. “Manuel Lisa was the first to go farther upriver than any of them Frenchies out of St. Louis, but ever before he’d allays just traded the Injuns for the furs. Took ’em blankets and powder and coffee and bells, that such.”

“What’s he figure to do now that’s so different?” the big farmer asked.

“Lisa told me that last year he was the first to take some white men upriver—not to trade with the Injuns—but to trap for themselves and sell their beaver back to him.”

“Injuns take to that sort of thing?” one of them asked. “Taking the fur out of their country like that?”

“Yeah,” agreed another of the farmers. “That Spaniard better be careful, or he’ll find his hair gone.”

“Yup—we ought’n just leave that country for the Injuns. We got plenty enough this side of the river for ourselves. Let ’em have whatever’s left over yonder.”

Gamble said, “I aim to find out just how much country is left over yonder.”

Titus watched the tall man’s eyes, his entire countenance—a bit relieved to consider that Levi Gamble just might have the same fear of taking root in one place that Titus Bass himself suffered. Ever since their afternoon match he had hoped Gamble was a Boone County man, someone Titus could look up from time to time, someone he could confide in and take solace with, kindred spirits they.

But now he had learned Levi wasn’t from Kentucky at all. And worse yet, the hunter was merely passing through, taking first place in Titus’s shooting match only to pay his way west, there to push on for a far country filled with beaver and Injuns and all the adventure a man could want for himself.

“And now,” Gamble continued, patting the skin pouch that hung at his belt with a dull clatter of coin, “I am flush enough to pay for food, lodging, and what fare my journey might need of me.”

“I still say it should have been Titus’s money,” Amy grumbled.

Gamble grinned. “Second place to Levi Gamble is nothing he can be ashamed of.”

“It’s a lot of money he should have won,” Amy added. “It would’ve give us a good start on our life raising young’uns and settling down.”

Gamble studied Titus a moment before he said, “Aye, I will admit that was a goodly sum of money I won me for first prize. But money is not the object. Leastways not for me. Look here,” and he tore the pouch from his belt, yanking at the drawstring to open it up. From the pouch he poured a few coins into his palm with a clink.

“You can go far with that, Levi Gamble,” the moonfaced man commented.

Ignoring the farmer, Gamble leaned closer to Amy and Titus. “Look there. It’s hard. It’s solid.” He bit on one of the coins. “Meaning it’s only a thing. Nothing magic about it. Don’t make this money I won more than it is, young people. You’ll be doing yourselves a great shame if you ever make money more than it really is.”

The big farmer asked, “What is it, then, if not a wondrous thing to have?”

“Ah, money can be a wondrous thing only when it lets you reach for what you want most. Money ain’t nothing in and of itself, you see. Only importance comes from how it keeps you going after your dream.”

“So money’s important, after all,” Titus concluded with a nod of his head.

“No,” Levi said quickly. “The only thing important is your dream.”

“So what’s yours, Levi Gamble?” asked one of those at the fire.

He looked up at the canopy of stars. “Those faraway rivers where the beaver pelts are so big they say a man can sleep under one of a winter’s night.”

“A blanket beaver?”

Gamble nodded to the farmer. “Aye. To lay eyes for myself on that land Manuel Lisa spoke of in the quiet tones a man uses when he’s speaking of something religious.”

“This Lisa claim he found him God out there?” snorted one of the older men at the fire, who spoke up for the first time.

With a grin Levi replied, “Perhaps he has, the way he talked. The way he told me come west to St. Louie and he’d put me to work that next season when his boats pushed upriver.”

Titus leaned forward anxiously. “You’ll go?”

“Aye—I will at that.”

“What’s those places you’re going?” Titus asked dreamily.

Gamble turned sideways on his stump to look at the youth. “Magic names, young Mr. Bass. Rivers called the Yallerstone. Another one Lisa built a post on called the Bighorn. Said there’s wild sheep out there in the hills, and the males get horns so long, they wrap right back around on themselves in a curl.”

“Pure poppycock!” someone spouted, and others guffawed.

Levi held up a hand. “Lisa and them as was with him swore by it when I told ’em I doubted all they told me, the size of animals and such. Claim everything’s much, much bigger out there in that big, big country.”

“Like what?” Titus asked.

“Take any critter. The deer, sure. But they got one Lisa called a elk. Big as a milk cow, with a rack o’ horns on his head would cover a dining table at a country inn.”

“The man’s daft, and he pumped you up with his wild stories!”

“No,” Levi told the doubters. “There’s bear out there the likes of nothing we seen here in these eastern forests. Said there’s some called silvertips. What some call grizzlies. Stand half again as tall as a man on their hindquarters. Claws a good six inches long tear the heart out of a elk or rip a man’s arm off in one swipe!”

Amy leaped back as Gamble’s arm suddenly swung in a great arc toward Titus, his fingers stiffened into the curve of imaginary claws.

Bass did not flinch at Levi’s frightful pantomime. Steady and sure, he asked, “What other critters out there what’s big?”

Gamble stared into the youth’s eyes for a moment, then answered, “Lisa told me ’bout buffalo, bigger’n a cow an’ a elk an’ a grizzly too.”

Titus whispered huskily, “My grandpap tol’t me ’bout buffalo.”

The tall woodsman held out his arms wide. “A great and shaggy animal.” Then put his crooked fingers on either side of his head. “Big black horns they scrape and keep shiny for to do battle when it comes time for the rut each year. Thick fur from the top of their head back across a big hump on their shoulders. Seems they crowd together in herds a man likely couldn’t walk through in a hull day.”

“This Lisa and his boys ever try that?”

Gamble looked across the fire at the farmer. “No, they didn’t say they ever did.”

“Poppycock stories!”

“No, listen,” Gamble said. “They saw ’em, great herds of ’em. Saw ’em with their own eyes as they was pushing north on the Missouri River.”

One man wagged his head and commented dryly, “Just hard for me to believe there’d really be such a critter, and so damned many of ’em.”

“We ain’t none of us never see’d any back here,” claimed another.

“I heard talk once, long back,” an old man spoke up for the first time, “used to be a woods buffler in this country.”

“Must’ve been long back,” the man’s grandson replied.

“Surely was,” the old one continued. “But there was always talk that a critter even bigger lived on west. Talk was we killed off all them woods buffler in this country, but folks said we’d likely never kill off all them big critters out yonder.”

“If Manuel Lisa and his men are right,” Levi added, “folks’ll never make a dent in their numbers.”

“Buffalo.”

Gamble turned back to young Bass. “That’s right, Titus. Buffalo. Biggest thing on four legs God ever made for this country.”

“A man walk all day and not get through a herd of ’em.”

Levi nodded. “For six days running, Lisa told me, they was pushing upriver, poling and warping their keelboats past just one herd. Six hull days it took ’em.”

“So that’s where you’re headed, Levi? To see them buffalo?”

He wagged his head. “I’m going for the beaver, Titus. To see for myself those mountains and them rivers a’foam with melting snow. Rivers so muddied up they’re gobblin’ away at their banks, chewing trees right outta the ground in one bite and drowning buffalo by the thousands every spring. It’s them rivers I gotta see me afore I die. And trust me, fellas—Levi Gamble being tied down to one place is a fate wuss’n dying.”

Titus asked, “What your father do in Emsworth?”

“He’s a blacksmith. Like his papa before him, an’ before him too.”

“So you learned the family trade?” asked one of the older men.

With an affirmative nod Gamble said, “A good thing too: I don’t recommend nary a man going west what can’t do some simple blacksmithing work.”

“True, true,” was the assent of most.

“Not just to repair his traps, but to care for his guns as well.”

The moon-faced farmer commented, “Out across the Missouri a man is going to be too durned far from the settlements, from the help of those he’s used to counting on to help.”

Turning then to Titus, Gamble said gravely, “From all what them upriver men told me when they come through Pittsburgh, it takes much more’n just good shooting to make your mark out yonder to the far west.”

“I imagine so,” the big farmer echoed the general sentiment. “Out there a man’s bound to be all on his own.”

“Most times he’s got no other to call on but his own self,” Levi replied.

“Not a lot of folks, neither—I wouldn’t imagine,” an old gray-head commented. “Not a lot of white folks out there for company.”

The big farmer guffawed at that and slapped his hand down on his knee. “Farther west a man goes, I’ve heard—less an’ less civilization there be to count on.”

“For some of us,” Gamble replied, “maybe we’re just looking to get someplace where there’s a little less of that civilization to close in around us.”

“Hell, son,” declared the oldest man there at the fire, “all a feller has to do is get a mile away from any of these here farms, back into the woods, up into the hills … and he’s as far away from civilization as any man needs.”

“When’d you come here, mister?” Gamble asked the gray-head.

“Come here myself back when I was a tad. Seventeen and fifty-three. We took this ground from the Injuns. Held on to it against the French, and agin them Englishmen too when we was through with the crown saying we had to do this, a king saying we had to do that.”

Levi Gamble leaned forward, the fire’s light leaping across his face in a moving dance. Bass leaned forward too as the tall woodsman began to speak in soft tones, something wistful, almost a whisper that emerged from someplace deep within him. “This land was good then, weren’t it?”

The old gray-head only nodded, his lips pursed, eyes half-closed in reverie. “T’weren’t no others but you and the land back then.”

Bass quickly glanced at the old settler, seeing those old eyes glisten with pooling moisture in the dancing firelight.

“But the others come in,” Gamble continued. “They always come. One or two other families at first, I’d imagine. Then a handful not long after them. And the word was spreading, weren’t it? They was coming like bees to the honeycomb. Next thing there was towns where once lay only campsites. River ports and landings where you used to run up your canoe on the bank and not see another soul all evening. Roads where once there was only game trails or Injun footpaths going from one place off yonder t’other.”

The old man dragged a gnarled, wrinkled finger beneath one eye and said, “Land’s bound to change, man comes to it.”

“Don’t you see?” Gamble whispered, forcing the others to lean in to hear him over the crackle of the fire. “I want to go someplace where the land ain’t changed yet. Where it’s old, and new at the same time.”

“Ain’t much new land what ain’t been walked across to this side of the river,” one of the farmers said.

“There is out there,” Gamble said, pointing.

“There’s allays been two types of men, way I sees it,” the old settler spoke up. “Them few that comes to a place first—to discover it. And then there’s all the rest of us, by the hunnerts and hunnerts, and even more’n that: we come once the place’s been found. We come and move in, settle down. And them few what come first—well, that’s when they got to move on.”

“My time to move on,” Levi added.

The moon-faced farmer said, “There’ll be our kind what will follow along after you in the years to come.”

“We ain’t moving no more,” retorted the farmer’s wife, patting her husband on his shoulder as she stepped up behind him. “I come here when we was young to set down roots and raise up a family. We done that—so here we’ll stay.”

He looked up at her, taking her hand in his. “I was speaking of others, Mary. Others of our kind what will follow the first to go into a new land.”

“We’ve got young’uns,” she explained. “A man with babes to care for and feed don’t have no business uprooting his family to go traipsing off to the west.”

When Amy squeezed his hand in agreement, Titus looked down at it held between the two of hers. His eyes rose to find her smiling at him. From the look in her eyes he knew she was thinking about the baby. Their baby. The baby he had made for her there by the swimming pond.

And when he looked up, Titus found Levi gazing at him.

Gamble slowly took his eyes from the youngster and looked at those other, older men gathered round that fire this last night of the summer’s fair. “I ain’t got no babes, no children. Ain’t got no roots either, ma’am. I figure I don’t go west now—I won’t never have the chance. Man gets married, starts him a family … why, then—he never will move on.”

“True, true,” murmured the old settler.

“Time for us’ns be off to bed,” the farmer’s wife said, tugging lightly on her husband’s arm.

Reluctantly, that middle-aged settler rose beside her, draped an arm over her shoulder. His right hand he held out to the tall woodsman. “Levi Gamble, I wish you God’s speed on your journey.”

They shook as others stood and moved up to offer their own fare-thee-wells and parting words of encouragement.

“Man’s only young once’t,” the old settler advised, leaning on his cane. “Your sap only runs once in a young man’s life.”

“And a man should always go where his heart leads him,” Gamble replied.

In a matter of moments the hands had ceased shaking his and slapping the woodsman on the back. Shadows moved out of the ring of firelight, back to their tents and canvas shelters. Across the meadow in all directions, a number of the fires were still blazing strong. But most were dying, their caretakers moving off to blankets and blissful dreams of another summer’s Longhunters Fair come now to a close.

“Where’s your camp?” Titus asked.

Gamble swept his arm across the ground where he stood. “Any place I choose to lay my blanket for the night. Here’s as good a place as any. Fire’s banked good. Don’t need nothing else to make a place for Levi Gamble to sleep.”

“We oughtta be getting back to my folks’ camp,” Amy admitted.

Turning to the young woman, Levi smiled and said, “I’ll forever treasure your kiss, Amy. Even more’n the money I won for the shooting—your kiss for the winner is something I’ll remember for a long, long time.”

She blushed in the moonlight and turned toward Titus, her arms tightening around one of his.

“Ain’t there some way you’d stay on, Levi?” the youth finally blurted out his fervent wish. “Leastways for a few more days, a week or two so we got time to talk.”

Laying a hand on the young man’s shoulder, Gamble said, “Much as I’d love to, I best be moving on. Autumn coming. Winter right behind. Hoping to make it to the Mississippi before then, up to St. Lou afore the first snow if’n I can.”

Titus watched the tall woodsman bring up his right hand. He shook with Gamble, feeling tongue-tied with all that he wanted to ask, everything he wanted to say. Here was the sort of man he wanted to be: a man who had the will to leave everything behind in taking the risk of what might lie out there. The sort of man who wasn’t tied to place and people. A free man. Not a slave to the land.

Someone who would see and do things far west of Boone County before Titus would ever get the chance to clear the last of those stumps from that damned field.

“Let’s go, Titus,” Amy reminded. “I don’t wanna worry my folks.”

“You’re with me,” he replied sharply. “They damn well ought not to worry, you being with me.” Titus saw the wounded look in her eyes as he turned back to Gamble. “Maybe you write me when you get yonder, Levi.”

He looked at his moccasins a moment, his eyes lowered. “I don’t write at all, Titus. Not a lick.”

“Can you have someone else write a letter for you? Tell me you made it downriver, or when you reach St. Louie?”

“You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” Gamble asked with a grin. “Yes. You damn right I’ll send word back to you, young’un.”

“I’ll count on it.”

“Count on it. Levi Gamble will send you word that I’m there and ready to jump off to the up-country. See them rivers, catch them beaver. Lay my eyes on places no white man ever laid eyes on. I’ll write to say when I’m going.”

“An’ say when you might be coming back this way.”

“If’n I ever come back this way,” Gamble admitted. “Not likely, Titus. Once a man gone out to see the elephant—he can’t really ever come home again.”

“You won’t ever be coming back? Not even to St. Louie?”

“Maybe there. Most like,” Levi replied.

“Then I could look you up if’n I come to St. Louie.”

Amy whirled on Titus, tightening her grip on his left arm. “Just when the devil would you be going off to St. Lou and for what purpose?”

He shrugged off her question, saying to Gamble, “You lemme know where you’re gonna be. When you’ll be coming back downriver—I’ll see you again, Levi Gamble. Count on it: I’ll see you again.”

Gamble gave a gentle slap to Bass’s shoulder, then turned from the young couple, settling down among the stumps where the others had been seated that evening. He snapped out his blankets and settled upon them with a sigh, his back to Titus.

It was another long moment more before he led Amy from that fire. From the tall man’s back. Into the darkness.

And though she was on his arm, even though they walked through that great summer’s crowded encampment, Titus Bass felt not only lonely, but unsettled, almost empty.

She was talking to him about their future once he finished his schooling that year, how she’d care for the babe and all those babes to come. Saying how he would take his place beside his father and all would then be right in their lives.

But Titus Bass heard very, very little of her words.

The night was simply too crowded with the crushing silence of his need to be gone before he became everything his father was.

He cursed his ignorance as much as he cursed this farming, even as much as he cursed the father who imprisoned him to the land.

But right now it was his ignorance of women and how nature made babies that made him feel as if he were locked inside a tiny wooden box, suffocated and cramped, hollering to get out.

“Mama told me I’d miss out on them visits of the terribles each month,” Amy had explained in recent weeks most times she talked of the expected child. “Woman with a baby coming wouldn’t have no bleeding each month neither.”

“Bleeding?” he asked. She hadn’t told him anything about that.

“Sure,” she explained in that matter-of-fact voice she saved only for the times she wanted to flaunt her two-year head start on life over him. “That’s how a woman knows for certain she ain’t carrying her man’s baby—she starts bleeding when her monthly visit time comes.”

“W-what sort of bleeding?” His mind was instantly busy on his remembrance of her naked moonlit body stretched out on the grass beside the swimming hole. Where in the devil would she bleed? And the image in his mind became that of a game animal, sprawled out on the forest floor as he dressed out squirrels and rabbits, turkeys or deer, before setting off for home with the family’s dinner.

Her eyes dropped as she laid a hand softly on her belly. “You know, don’t you?” When he shook his head, Amy explained, “From down … there. Where a man puts his seed. Like you done, Titus.”

“My seed?”

“That’s what mama calls it. The seed what a man gives a woman so she can carry his baby inside her till it’s time for it to be born.”

He nodded, swallowing hard, remembering how he had exploded across the soft flesh on the inside of her thighs. Thick and sticky. Seeds that landed on a woman’s fertile ground and were thereby made into a child by some mysterious force of nature. The way he and his father prepared the ground for planting, then walked slowly across that ground they had turned, fresh and fertile, warm and upturned, dropping their seed into the folds of the earth like the folds of a fertile woman. Sun and rain did the rest.

God must surely have made a woman like the land. And a man was always the farmer, sowing his seed.

Farmers!

Damn! he cursed himself in silence. Now more than ever he wanted to flee as far away from farming as he could go.

“I been counting, Titus,” Amy went on, slowly rubbing her bare feet back and forth on the cool grass beneath that maple at the far end of the pen that held the Bass family’s milk cow. “It’ll still be winter when I have the baby. Likely you’ll be finishing up school sometime after spring planting.”

He sensed his last shreds of hope tumbling out of his life the way crumpled clumps of earth spilled between his father’s fingers just after newly plowing a piece of ground. More so like long coils of purple gut spilling out of the belly of a deer he had dropped….

“—know my folks let us have the wedding right there in the yard,” Amy was explaining. “Let all our kin and friends know, even up to Burlington, over to Union and down to Beaver Lick. I’m sure there’ll be some real celebrating for us—what with as long as our families been settled here in Boone County.”

Squeezing his eyes, Titus could not help but imagine that sight: he and Amy standing before one of those circuit riders or civil justices speaking marriage words to them out of the Holy Book.

“—then all there is after that is deciding on where we’re gonna live till you and your pa get to raising up our own place for us to live in.”

“Where?”

Amy looked at him hard, her gaze showing she realized he had not been paying her the heed due her as the mother of his child. “Yes, Titus. Either here with your folks, or over to mine. We’ll have to thrash that one out atween us all.”

“I don’t know about living here—”

“No matter. We’ll make room for ourselves, wherever we are,” she said with that air of confidence exuded only by one who is nearly shed of her teens. “Just you think about finishing your education, Titus Bass. Our children gonna be counting on their father. So you think about getting this last year of school learning under your belt so you can put your mind to helping your pa with the family farming.” She extended her arm in a slow arc across the yard, cabin, barn, and outbuildings. “One day this all be yours … ours. But first you finish up your schooling.”

He looked up to find his father coming across the yard toward them, walking as if with a real purpose. That soured his milk all the worse—already Titus was in no mood to have someone yanking on his rope, Amy or his pap. Here a woman was wrapping him tighter and tighter, not to mention that his father kept him fenced in, no different than if he was that milk cow held prisoner in her tiny pen. It rankled him, the way Amy had taken to preaching at him. The same as his father did: about responsibility and family and the land, and responsibility all over again.

“How do, Amy,” Thaddeus Bass called out as he came to a halt.

“Mr. Bass. Nice to see you, sir.”

“Titus,” he said, turning to his son, “I come to tell you not to be out too late tonight. I want you back in the fields tomorrow.”

He looked at Amy quickly. “Tomorrow?”

“I want you to finish up that stump work afore you go back for any more of that school business.”

For a heartbeat he felt elation that his father was giving his permission to stay off from school. But that elation burst just like a bubble in his mother’s lye soap when he realized the substitute would be farmwork.

“That’s a lotta work,” Titus grumped.

“Not if you get after it the way I know you can. I need that field cleared so I can turn the ground afore winter. Lay it fallow to catch as much rain and snow as the sky will give us this winter. Planning on planting over there come spring—so I need to have that ground turned afore winter.”

He sighed, his head sagging between his shoulders, feeling his father’s eyes on him, waiting for an answer, judging.

“You can forget your hunting till the work’s done, Titus,” Thaddeus declared impatiently. “I put your grandpap’s rifle in the corner by the fireplace, and there it’s gonna stay till the stumps is all pulled.”

He jerked up at the admonition, as if his father had pulled on a halter rope attached to a bit shoved inside his mouth. “That’s my gun. Grandpap give it to me—”

“I know. But you’re still my son, living under my roof—and there’s chores to be done afore you go slipping off with any more of that hunting foolishness in mind. This is a farm. And this is a farming family, Titus. That comes first. You best remember that.”

Wagging his head in disbelief, Titus groaned. “I come this close to winning myself some real money with that rifle. That ain’t no foolishness.”

“You come in second and you’re right: that’s nothing no man can be ’shamed of, son,” Thaddeus replied sternly, his hands braced on his hips.

“Never gonna be ’shamed of nothin’,” he said, his jaw jutting angrily.

“But even so that you beat all the rest but one fella—it’s time you realized you was home now. Time you got back to what is really important: raising crops to feed this family.”

“Didn’t ever tell you I couldn’t hunt and help out ’round here,” Titus snapped.

“Well, it’s about time you was forgetting you ever tried to do both,” Thaddeus Bass snapped. “That rifle stays in the corner till your farming is done to my satisfaction.”

Titus glanced over at Amy, seeing by the look on her face that she clearly agreed with the elder Bass. He turned back to glare at his father. “You wanna kill something in me, don’t you?” he snarled, seeing his words bring his father up short.

Then Thaddeus Bass glowered, his lips working for a moment on just what to say, what to do with Amy right there. “Long as you’re under my roof, Titus—you’ll do as I say you’re to do. Best you remember that, and remember I raised you better’n to back-talk your elders. ’Specially in front of company.”

“I’m sure Titus didn’t mean to back-talk you, Mr. Bass,” Amy said quietly, tugging slightly on Titus’s arm.

Both of them, ganging up on him and his dreams.

“I’m sure he didn’t, Amy.”

Titus growled, “I don’t think neither one of you give a good goddamn what I really meant.”

His father took a step toward him, taking one hand off a hip to poke a thick finger in his son’s face. “Best you learn what really means something in life, Titus. That shooting, any of your hunting—none of that don’t mean a hoot. Only thing important for a fella your age is just how good a farmer you’re gonna be.”

Titus watched his father nod his leave-taking to Amy, turn, and move off toward the cabin in the waning light of that late-summer afternoon.

“Your pa only wants what’s best for you, Titus,” she said gently in the softening light. “What we all want for you.”

He turned on her. “How you know what’s best for me, Amy? How’s my pap know? You tell me that!”

“I know what’s best for you because it’s what’s best for me too: to take care of our family. Neither of us can just go off an’ do what we want anymore. Not with a child coming to us.” Her cheeks flushed with an angry crimson. “You best realize that when you laid me down and made me with child, Titus Bass—that was good as marrying me in the eyes of God Hisself. We’re married and I’m having your baby. And that means you start acting like a man and quit running off from your responsibilities like you been doing.”

“I think it’s time you went on home, Amy.”

“Ain’t you gonna walk me there, Titus?”

He looked at the cabin, the first lamp being lit behind one of the four isinglass windows. Then he gazed at Amy. His flesh stirred again, the way it always did when he looked at her in soft light. He knew he could just as well take her—grab her and throw her down into the shadows nestled back in the timber somewhere on the path to the Whistler place. He knew she would not resist. After all, hadn’t she said they were married? His anger at his father, his anger at her for agreeing with his father—it had aroused such passion in him, and he knew he would explode if he didn’t find a way to spit out all that was choking him.

There was simply no way now to swallow it down the way he had swallowed it down every time before.

“C’mon, let’s start me home, and maybeso we can find us a quiet place ’long the way.”

He let her take his hand in hers and start through the trees. For a moment he looked back over his shoulder, seeing his father sitting on the porch, that old hickory-bottomed chair of his tipped back against the cabin wall, silhouetted against the waning light. A dove cooed somewhere above them in the green canopy as they were absorbed by the shadows.

As scared as he was of what price he might have to pay, his fright was swept aside by his sudden, overpowering hunger. Stopping, whirling Amy about, he pulled her back to him, watching her eyes widen as he laid his mouth on hers fiercely. His hands came up and slipped one button after another from the holes down the front of her dress; then both hands slipped inside.

She gasped as he fondled the soft, firm mounds, her hips rocking forward against him.

“You’re right about one thing, Amy,” he said, his voice low and husky with lust as he cradled her to the ground. “Time I become a man.”