Dance on the Wind

5

As his mother handed Titus a heaping platter of soda biscuits, she said, “Amy asked me have you come over after supper, Titus.”

He stared at his beans and side meat, finding it hard to swallow that last bite. “She say what for?”

“Just said it was real important she talked to you, son.”

Titus finally raised his eyes, of a sudden realizing how a great silence had settled over the table. Thaddeus, as well as his brothers and sister, gazed at him—waiting to see some reaction in him. He would not give them that pleasure, turning instead to glance out the open window, measuring what remained of that day.

“Maybe best I should go right off,” he told no one in particular as he turned back to stare at his food. “Night coming down soon.”

“Yes,” his mother replied. “You should do that.”

He slid the wooden trencher away and pushed himself back from the table, his short, backless bench scraping noisily across the puncheon floor. “I’ll be home straightaway I get done.”

“Take your time,” she answered, clattering his trencher atop hers as she scooped up iron and pewter eating utensils from the plank table. “Amy’s a fine girl, Titus. Has the making of a good wife for some man. I want you to take good care of that one.”

“Already him and Amy planning on getting married off,” his sister blurted.

Her words seized him at the doorway, his hand hovering on the wrought-iron latch. Slowly turning, Titus glared at the girl some two years younger than he and demanded, “Where you get such a idea?”

She glanced at her mother, then her father, both appearing surprised with the news, then cocked her chin slightly to answer, “They all talking about it at school.”

“Who’s they?” Thaddeus inquired.

Twisting round to face her father, the girl said, “All Amy’s brothers and sisters, Pa. Said she told ’em about her getting married off to Titus come spring—less’n it’s sooner, what I heard.”

“Spring?” his mother asked in a gasp as she settled on the empty bench, stunned with the sudden announcement. “Why, I s’pose I had no idea, Titus, that you was thinking–”

“Ain’t nothing to it,” Titus growled, glaring at his sister.

Although he realized she wasn’t to blame for starting the dad-blamed story, he knew just how much she enjoyed being the one to carry home this tale, being the first to lay out the shocking news for all to marvel at.

“Amy will make you a fine wife and a good mother to your children,” his mother repeated as she got back to her feet, swept down her apron, and once more gathered up the trenchers and utensils.

With her matter-of-fact declaration his mouth went dry. Painfully conscious that they were all waiting for him to say something, anything, perhaps even agree with his mother, Titus looked in turn at each of them gathered there at the table. Mute, and motionless as stone bookends, his young brothers continued to stare at him impassively.

Finally his father broke the uneasy silence in that cabin.

“Maybe this is just what you’re needing to get shet of all your foolish notions, son,” Thaddeus declared, laying both of his roughened hands flat on the table in front of him. “Finish your schooling this winter and get yourself married to Amy. You’ll be seventeen come spring. Ready to shoulder an equal load here on the farm, Titus. Not a boy no more. Time for you to leave behind all that tarnal foolheadedness about slipping off to hunt every chance you get. Time now for you to leave off all that talk about seeing what’s downriver, or over the hills yonder to where the sun sets each night.”

He stood there numb, as if rooted to the spot. His eyes locked on his father’s seamed and tanned face, Titus asked, “What of it I turn seventeen and I still want to go off in the timber rather’n walking behind a mule like you?”

For a moment Thaddeus pursed his lips into a thin, bloodless line, as if weighing the heft to each of the words he would use to answer his son. “With a good woman for your wife, and hard work for your hands—why, in no time you’ll forget such utter tomfoolery and become a man, Titus. In that I got no doubt.”

He wagged his head angrily. “I ain’t so sure my own self,” he replied, jerking up the iron latch and yanking open the door. Titus dragged it closed behind him at the same moment he heard one of the benches clattering across the cabin floor, heard the last of his mother’s warning for his father to stay put.

No one followed. He was relieved his pap did not tear open that door he had just shut. No other sound behind him but the sharp-edged words flung between his parents that quickly faded as he leaped off the low porch. Slapping the side of his leg, Titus whistled low. The old hound loped around the side of the long cabin, tongue lolling, watery eyes glistening with anticipation.

“C’mon, boy,” he said quietly as the dog bounded at his knee. Titus scratched at its ears, patted the top of its short-haired head. “We gotta go see us what Amy wants—besides her getting me in a whole lot of hot water with them back there.”

By the time he reached the game trail that wound through the woods toward the Whistler place, Titus grew even angrier. But this time he was mad at himself. Able at last to admit that this was not Amy’s fault, he realized he had gotten himself into hot water all on his own. Oh, sure and certain she had smelled good and felt soft and appealing, and damn well was the prettiest girl he’d ever laid eyes on in Boone County—but a fella ought not be so weak he couldn’t keep himself out of trouble with a girl.

Tink bolted away with a sudden burst of youthful energy, bounding through the matting of red-and-white trillium undergrowth as a fat gray rabbit exploded out of the brush.

What an exquisite mess he’d made of things. About to be a father, get himself married, and start farming for the rest of his life—when he knew well enough that he was nothing more than a boy who loved the woods and had a hankering to see what waited in that country on down the Ohio.

The hound bayed from deep in the timber, the faint echo a mournful, plaintive call with night coming down as it was.

Never to chance riding one of those big Pittsburgh keelboats, even a Kentucky flatboat, down the river. No more use of dreaming he would ever see St. Lou, that city Levi Gamble spoke of where a man could jump off into the unknown. Hell, anything beyond ten miles downriver was as good as unknown to him. And as bleak as things looked from where he stood, he was bound to stay ignorant of the whole rest of the world from now on, knowing nothing more than the village of Rabbit Hash here in Boone County, Kentucky.

She sat at the edge of the plank porch as twilight squeezed itself through the clouds in the autumn sky, watching her younger brothers and sisters at play in the yard. Smoke curled up from the stone chimney. Titus sighed in looking at her, sensing that this was how things would be for the two of them soon enough. Their own place, a passel of children too. His young life over before he ever really had a chance to live it.

As he strode into the yard, Titus gazed at the swirl of her long dress billowing up at her calves as Amy swung her legs back and forth, ankles wrapped one over the other. Upon seeing him she leaped to the ground, snugging her shawl about her shoulders.

“Titus!”

He sighed, drinking in the delicate fragrance of honey-suckle on the breeze. “Heard you was wanting to see me. I come right over.”

Flicking her eyes toward the cabin, Amy stopped right in front of him. “I got … news. We’re needing to talk.”

“News?”

“Sort of bad news.”

He swallowed hard, gazing into her eyes, hoping to read something there. Hell, how much worse could things get?

Titus asked, “Can you go down to the swimming hole with me?”

With a shake of her head Amy replied, “Better not. Mama asked me watch the other’ns for her till bedtime so she can get some work done inside. Maybeso we go over by the big elm there. You can help me watch ’em from there—and there ain’t nobody hear us talking.”

He watched her settle at the base of the great, old gnarled trunk, curling her legs up at her side and snugging the dress down over her bare feet. She adjusted the shawl on her shoulders and smiled up at him, patting the grass beside her. For the longest time after he got comfortable on the ground, Amy didn’t say anything. They both sat in silence, looking after the Whistler brood scampering back and forth among a new litter of pups all ear and tail and tiny, exuberant yelps as the animals loped after the children zigging this way, zagging that.

“It happened yesterday—but I waited till today to come look you up. Since it was bad news.”

Bad news, he thought, not yet looking at her, knowing she was looking at him. Just how bad did bad news have to get? What with her having his baby in her belly, their folks already laying plans to get them married off, and his father poised to have him settle in being a farmer for the rest of his natural life?

Something eventually tugged at him, and he turned to her, their eyes only inches apart. He slid an arm over her shoulder, wondering at the thinness of her at that moment. Both times he had skinned her out of her clothes, she had seemed so rounded and fleshy. But right now she felt frail, downright bony, beneath his grip.

As brave as he could make it sound, Titus said, “I’m here with you now. S’pose you tell me your news.”

In one great gush it came spilling forth. “I got my visit yesterday. Didn’t wanna come to tell you till this morning.”

“Your visit.”

“Remember I told you ’bout women, and them carrying their man’s baby.”

He nodded. “When she starts missing her visits—yeah. She’s gonna have …” Then it struck him like a slap across his cheek. “B-but … you just said you got your visit?”

“Started bleeding yesterday.”

Anxious, scared as all get-out, afraid to be relieved just yet—he sensed his hand tightening on her shoulder. “Means you ain’t carrying my baby?”

She didn’t answer for a long time. Instead she reached over and took hold of his free hand and pulled it into her lap, squeezing it between both of hers as she stared down at it. When she finally spoke, her voice croaked with emotion. “I’m so sorry, Titus. I know we was counting on getting our family started. After all the times we … the times we done what it takes to make a baby—I was hoping.”

“You wasn’t gonna have a child all along?” he asked, trying to make sense of it.

“I missed my bleeding twice’t, I did. But it come yesterday, and mama says there’s no mistake when I asked her. I ain’t with child. So that’s when I figured I oughtta come tell you—come to look you up at school.”

He swallowed hard, sensing what was to come.

“You wasn’t there, so I figured your pa had you stay home to give him a hand this morning. I headed over to your place from school—but your mama got worried: said you took off for school with the others after breakfast.”

Turning to her anxiously, he asked, “You tell my mam you didn’t find me at school?”

Wagging her head, Amy said, “Nothing of the kind, Titus.” She stroked the back of his hand. “I know you’d get in a bunch of trouble if your pa finds out you been staying off from school—so I’d never say nothing about it.”

Relieved, Titus leaned back against the tree, sorting through the jumble of it all. She wasn’t carrying his child. After all these weeks of having others make their own plans for him, he suddenly felt like a man freed from the gallows.

She laid her head against his shoulder. “Why didn’t you go to school today?”

He set his chin atop her head and said, “Truth is, I ain’t been going last few days.”

“If you weren’t helping your pa, and you wasn’t in school—what you been doing?”

“Nothing much,” he admitted.

“We talked about this,” she said, lifting her head to look at him disapprovingly. “You needing to finish your schooling so we get married come spring.”

“We talked,” he agreed. “Just seemed to me like it was everyone else making up their minds for me.”

“Don’t you wanna finish your school?”

“Don’t see no need in it.”

“Can’t you see no need in reading and writing, in knowing your ciphers?”

“I know me a little. Cain’t see how it’s ever gonna help me, Amy.”

She squeezed his hand. “We get married and you work the farm—all that schooling’s gonna help a whole lot, Titus.”

“I ain’t figuring on working a farm.”

With a hint of a smile that told Titus she did not quite believe him, Amy said, “Just what you gonna do to support us, you don’t finish school and work on your pa’s farm?”

“Haven’t thought that far ahead on it.”

Wagging her head as she would at one of her errant siblings, Amy scolded, “You got to finish school. You don’t—why, I can’t marry you, Titus Bass.”

For some time he gazed into her eyes, looked at the fullness of her lips, wanting to lie with her again the way they had times before. So much did he want that. Almost enough to change his mind and tell her everything that she wanted to hear. Maybe he was stupid, after all, just like his pap and some other grown-ups made him feel most nearly all the time.

“I thought some on this, Amy,” he began. “I figure I can support a wife wherever I go.”

“Wherever you go?” she asked with a shriek. “W-what’s that mean?”

“Means I’m figuring I won’t stay around Boone County for long.”

Shaking her head emphatically, Amy replied, “No. I ain’t going nowhere else, Titus Bass. This is where I was born, where I’m going to birth my own children and raise them up. Here’s where I’m staying till I die. Ain’t you gonna stay on this land with me?”

A great gray owl flapped over their heads as Mrs. Whistler stepped onto the porch and sang out for the younger children to come in for the night. Then she called, “Amy?”

“I’m over here, Mama.”

“You two don’t be long,” the woman said, hustling little ones through the cabin door. “Night’s getting cold, and Titus has his school in the morning.”

Once her brothers and sisters were shuffled inside the cabin, Amy turned to him, beginning to push away so she could get to her feet. “You got school in the morning. I best be going in too.”

He sensed a sudden chill around her, more than the autumn twilight lent a frost to the air. “If I take a mind to do something else, ain’t going to school tomorrow.”

“What else can be more important than your schooling?”

“Hunting. Watching the boats down on the river. Wondering where all them folks is going. What they’ll be doing down the Ohio to Louisville and on yonder. There’s places futher still. Lot futher.”

She stomped a foot in the cold grass. “All that talk from Levi Gamble got your head filled with having yourself adventures, don’t it?”

“Maybeso it does.”

Pulling herself away from him, Amy whirled about, crossing her arms. “Then maybe you better figure out what it is you want more: me or some old adventure downriver.”

Looking up at her, Titus asked, “Why you make me have to choose?”

“Can’t have both,” she answered coyly, smoothing the bodice of her dress beneath the firm mounds of her breasts. “You want me, you’re gonna finish your schooling and get yourself a way to support a family. My pa and yours see to their families by working the land. Such as they do is good and honorable work, Titus. Work any man be proud of.”

“If’n he was cut out to be a farmer.”

“You was cut out to be a farmer,” she snapped. “You was born to a farming family. It’s what all your kin done since they come into this country years and years ago.”

“Don’t matter what they done afore me—”

“It’s what you’re expected to do,” she interrupted.

As he stood beside her, Titus felt enough resolve to declare, “I ain’t cut out to work the land.”

Her words took on more frost. “You’re making a great mistake: you don’t want to marry and settle down with me.”

“You’re telling me I gotta pay too big a price, Amy. I can’t be a farmer. Don’t see no sense in schooling neither.”

“You’ll never amount to much, then, you go off on your own now,” she said haughtily. “Never be as good a man as your pa—make the mark on life that he’s making, Titus.”

When he reached for her hand, Amy pulled away from him. Instead, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and said, “There’s more for a man to learn than reading and writing letters, working numbers, Amy. What I want to learn is waiting for me out there.”

“Oh, damn that Levi Gamble!” she grumbled. “Damn that devil for making you—”

“Don’t blame Levi,” he protested. “I knowed I wasn’t no farmer long afore I run onto Levi at the Longhunters Fair.”

“He went and filled your head with such poppy-cock—”

“I told you,” he interrupted her with a snap. “I decided long ago I was one day gonna be leaving all this life behind.”

“Leaving?”

“There’s a bigger world out there than what is right here in Boone County. I aim to see me a share of it afore my dying day, Amy.”

Her eyes narrowed as she asked, “And if that means losing me?”

“Sounds of things, you’ll be better off without me.”

She turned on her heel again, staying in that same spot. He could see her shoulder shudder in the mercuric light of the autumn moon rising out of the east. He even thought he heard a muffled sob from her. Titus reached out to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged him off.

“I aim to learn more out there than what I can learn in school, Amy.”

“All you’ll ever need to know is right here—living your life with me, Titus.”

“I’ll learn more out there than I could ever learn following the rump end of a god-blamed mule.”

Her face tightened as she turned from him again. “Sounds like you made up your mind, all for certain.”

For a few moments he looked at her back, that dark spill of her hair tumbling nearly to her waist. He wanted to touch her, knowing she had only to hear the words she needed to hear and they would lie flesh to flesh. As much as he wanted to reach across that few inches remaining between them at that moment—it might just as well have been a chasm. Something kept him from retreating, from giving in to what his body begged for.

“This ain’t easy,” he confessed. “Not just you I’m leaving behind. Thinking about my mam and pap too.”

“You think hard on them. Think about me tonight—how we been together. Then you come tell me for sure you’re going.”

“I don’t have nothing to decide, Amy. I’m going. Only thing left to figure out is when.”

She twisted round on him, her red eyes brimming, fury written on her face tracked with its first tears. “I’ll make some man a damn fine wife, Titus Bass. That’s for certain. Just as certain is the fact you’re never gonna make a husband for no woman.”

“Likely I never will, Amy,” he admitted, watching the look of surprise come to her face.

“That’s right,” he continued. “Seems what a woman wants is more’n I think I’ll ever be likely to give. If being a husband to you means staying here to work behind a mule, being a farmer like your pa and mine—then, no: I’ll never be husband to no woman. If it means I gotta feel yoked in like an ox to what my pap ’spects of me, no—I won’t ever be settling down with a woman and making a family for myself.”

He said the last few words to her back as she dashed across the dusty yard while night came down around him.

“I want you to do some reading for me,” Thaddeus Bass said to his firstborn son as he rose from the table.

“Reading?” Titus asked, confusion raising alarm within him. Why would his father want him to read…? “Can’t it wait?”

“Wait? Wait for what, son?”

Titus shrugged. “I was looking to sit outside till it got cold after sundown, then I’d come in.”

He watched his father go to the stone mantel and take from it a piece of foolscap twice folded.

Shaking the paper out before him, Thaddeus said, “You ain’t going much of anywhere for a long time, Titus.”

His eyes kept flicking from the foolscap to his father’s face, back and forth, eager to figure out the suddenness of his father’s turn on him. Titus quickly glanced at his mother, his face filled with appeal. But she turned away, busying herself at the washbasin over the trenchers and utensils the family had just used at dinner. His eyes climbed toward the roof, finding above him in the shadows those three faces peering down from the edge of the sleeping loft, all of them watching the tense scene below. As soon as his father began speaking, Titus’s gaze locked on Thaddeus’s face.

“I been needing your help around here last few weeks since schoolmaster started up again, Titus.”

“Yes, sir.” Uneasiness squirmed inside.

“School taking up all your time, has it?”

“Yes. I s’pose it has.”

“Learning a lot, I’d wager,” Thaddeus said, slowly crossing the cabin floor toward his son.

“Some.”

“Then you won’t mind sharing all you been learning with me and your mam. How ’bout reading to us?” Thaddeus held the paper out at the end of his arm.

He shuffle-footed on the spot, his nervousness growing. He tried begging his way out. “You and me both know you’re a better reader’n me. Just make me out to be a fool in front of everyone—you go and make me read that.”

“You was learning to read of a time, Titus. If’n you’d keep learning the way you was, why—I figured one day you’d be a better reader’n me.”

“Maybe I can be, at that.”

Thaddeus shook the paper. In the cabin’s silence it rattled noisily, like a huge elm leaf, autumn dried to a parchment’s stiffness. “Won’t be, you don’t keep learning.”

He glanced at his mother, finding that she had turned and was watching them both now. “I’ll just have to see that I do.”

“Read it, Titus.”

With reluctance he took the paper and unfolded it, surprised at first—for he had suspected it was something written in his father’s own expansive hand. Instead, this was written in a very neat and crimped penmanship. He did not recognize it.

Clearing his throat, Titus began, faltering, halting at nearly every word as he sorted out the marks and the sounds of the tongue each one took.

“Mr. Bass. I … write you … this day over … something most … t-troubling … to me … c-concerning your … eldest child, Titus.”

His eyes flew to his father’s face, then shot back to the bottom of the page, trying to conjure what the name was.

“Go on, Titus. Read it to me.”

He pleaded, “What is this?”

“You gonna read it to me, son?”

By now he could see the anger beginning to rise in his father’s eyes, the pressure throbbing up and down the thick cords in his father’s neck. Titus grew frightened.

“I … I don’t think I can—”

Thaddeus ripped the paper out of his son’s hand and snapped its folds taut. “Then I’ll damn well read it to you!”

Glancing at his mother for a moment, Titus found her staring down at her feet, twisting the scrap of muslin rag in her hands.

“Mr. Bass. I write you this day over something most troubling to me concerning your eldest child, Titus. When the new season began, I was in hopes that you would allow your son to complete his last year of schooling without interruption. I’m sorry to see that you’ve seen fit to have him stay home to work with you in the fields for the last two weeks. If you can free him up to finish his schooling with me, it would be in the best interest of you both. I pray you will agree with me. Yours ever sincerely, Henry Standisti.”

For a moment Titus moved his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

“You know me and that schoolmaster ain’t never shared nothing much in common before, Titus. But now you’ve gone and got him thinking the worst of me. Keeping you home to work the fields, is it? Bah!”

He watched his father fold the page as he returned to the fireplace. But instead of throwing it into the flames, Thaddeus set it atop the mantel again.

“Were you to lay out of school—least you could have done was to give me help in the fields. Where’d Standish get such a notion you was here helping me? You tell me that.”

In a frightened, pale voice he replied, “I t-told him.”

“What? I didn’t hear you!”

“I told him.”

“You told him I wanted you to stay away from school to help me in the fields, is it?”

He nodded, sensing his palms grow moist. “Yes.”

Laying an arm across the stone mantel, Thaddeus suddenly roared, “If you weren’t at school, Titus … and you weren’t here working in the fields—just where the devil were you?”

“Thaddeus!” his mother whimpered. “Please watch your tone.”

He wheeled on her, shaking. “I’ll mind you to keep out of this, woman. I’ve a good mind to get angry at you as well. Likely you’re to blame for allowing his fool-headedness to go on as long as it has. And now look what you’ve done, look what we’ve got for it. He’s lied to us and lied to his schoolmaster. If you’d’ve helped me cram some responsibility into him from the beginning—he wouldn’t be in the fittle he is today.”

“Tell him you’re sorry, Titus,” his mother begged.

“We’re long past the point of his apologizing, Mother,” Thaddeus growled, and whirled back on his son. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Hunting.”

“Hunting, is it?” he thundered. “And with you doing so much hunting—just what have you been doing with all the meat you’ve shot?”

“Been eating it every day,” Titus answered, staring at a knot in the floor.

“All of it?”

“Most I been drying. What I learned to do—”

“Not bringing any home to help feed your family?”

“With all we got here, I didn’t figure—”

“You ain’t helping in the fields,” Thaddeus interrupted. “And you ain’t been helping put food on this family’s table. Maybe you ought just go off and live in the woods like you’ve been wanting so bad.”

For a moment he thought his ears had deceived him. Perhaps it was a trick his father was playing with words. How wonderful the idea sounded—too wonderful to hope for!

“I can bring in some meat tomorrow, I promise.”

“If you do, it won’t be with my permission. And you won’t do it with that gun yonder in the corner.”

“You taking my gun?”

“That was your grandpap’s.”

“He give it to me!”

“It’s going to stay right there. A damned poor example you been to your brothers, and your sister too. I counted on you—and you let me down bad: running off with your squirrel gun every day like you done.”

He felt the anger surge in him like white windblown caps frothing on the gray surface of the Ohio. “You can’t take my gun away from me—”

“I can and I have. It stays here. I won’t have you wasting your life on tomfoolery.”

“Wasting my life?” Titus roared so suddenly that it caught his father by surprise. “You telling me I’m wasting my life? I’d be wasting my life if I was to settle for being a farmer like you! I don’t wanna waste my life the way you done!”

He watched his words visibly slap his father in the face, as surely as any man’s blow would make him flinch in pain. The arm Thaddeus had braced against the stone mantel came down slowly, that big hand tensing into a fist. Those dark, brooding eyes, shielded behind hoods of sudden rage, fixed Titus with their fury.

“Thaddeus!”

He sensed his mother’s alarm as she took a step, stopping immediately when his father pointed at her—instantly nailing her to the spot.

“Stand right there, woman! This is between the boy and me.”

“I ain’t no boy no longer!”

Thaddeus whirled back on his son, scorn dripping from his every word. “Not no boy? Sure as hell are! A man owns up to his responsibility. Owns up to his mistakes and goes on. You ain’t no man, Titus!”

“I ain’t a boy no longer.”

“You’re my boy, and you’re gonna do as I tell you long as you’re under this roof, eating my food!”

“Don’t make you right!”

Slowly, he started moving across the cabin toward his son, his words ominously calm. “I’m your father—and that’s enough for you to show your respect for me.”

“Thaddeus—oh, dear God, don’t!”

“Just gonna teach the boy a little respect for his father, woman.”

“You can’t teach me that,” Titus argued, setting his feet for what he feared was coming his way. “You gotta earn it.”

“Then—by God—I’ll beat some respect out of you!” Thaddeus roared. “Telling your old man he’s wasting his life working the land? Just who the hell you think you are?”

He shuffled his feet, readying himself. “Don’t come any closer, Pap!”

“Tell me not to come—”

“I said don’t come any closer!” Titus snapped, beginning to bring his arms up, hands clenched. “I ain’t no boy no longer … and I ain’t gonna take no more of your whuppin’s!”

Thaddeus stopped short, drew back, then snorted, “Just what the hell you think you’re gonna do if’n I take a mind to give you the whippin’ you’re deserving right about now?”

“You ain’t gonna ever lay a hand on me again.”

His father brought both his hands up, fingers spread in claws of rage. “What in hell’s name—”

“Thaddeus!” she cried.

“Don’t ever you raise your hands to me no more,” Titus warned. “You go to lay a hand on me—I’ll lay you right out.”

That brought Thaddeus up short. “You’ll do what?”

“Don’t make me, Pap. Please don’t make me. Not in front of my mam. Not in front of her.”

“Oh, God—please don’t, Thaddeus,” his mother whimpered, twisting that piece of muslin in her hands.

“You’ll lay me out, will you?” his father asked, his voice gone thoughtful, eyes gone to slits.

Titus watched his father’s face, saw something register in those eyes as Thaddeus looked him down, then up again. It was only then that Titus realized he stood nearly as tall as his father, shy no more than an inch of his father’s height. Though Thaddeus carried more muscle upon his frame, that which came of wrestling animals and harness and pitting himself against the land, although Titus might well be as thin as a split cedar-fence rail, he was nonetheless every bit as tough in his own sinewy way: as solid as second-growth hickory.

And in that moment of indecision he knew his father realized the same thing for the first time. That pause he had caused Thaddeus served to give Titus a glimmer of confidence that he would not have to grapple with the man, here below the wide, muling eyes of his brothers and that troublesome sister. Here before the fright-filled eyes of his mother.

“You heard me before, Titus,” Thaddeus finally said, his shoulders sagging as he retreated to the fireplace. “Your rifle stays in the corner. In the morning you go to school or stay to work with me. There’ll be no hunting till spring when planting time is done.”

“Till s-spring?” he said, swallowing it like gall.

“And you can’t see Amy for a month,” the man continued, his back to his son, placing both hands out wide on the top of the stone mantel, his head sagging between his shoulders as he stared down at the fire at his feet. There was resignation, if not outright defeat, in the way he held himself. “Maybe it’ll take a month. Maybe it’ll take all winter and into the spring … but maybe by then you’ll have some respect for your father and the work what’s fed you, the work what’s put the clothes on your back for sixteen summers.”

“I can’t hunt till spring?”

Without turning his father repeated his stricture. “Not till you learn to respect your father, Titus. Damn, but you hurt me when you said I been wasting my life being a farmer. Damn you for that.”

He looked at his mother. She shook her head in warning, put a finger to her lips.

“Go on now, Titus,” Thaddeus instructed. “I turn around, I don’t wanna see you down here. Time you went to bed. Morning’s coming soon, and you’ll either go to school, or be up afore then to help me on that new ground I want to plant come spring.”

For a moment he didn’t move, despite his father’s directive. It was so quiet, Titus could hear the stuffy-nosed breathing of one of the children in the loft, the crackle of the hardwood in the fireplace.

“You hear me, son? Get on up there to bed like I told you.”

He wanted to bolt away, out the door and into the night with the tears of rage he refused to let fall. Instead he swallowed them down, turning again to look at his mother. She nodded her head and gestured toward the ladder. Titus started that way.

“You plan on staying away from school, that’s all right with me, Titus,” his father said, his back still to his son. “I can use the help around our farm. But if’n you ain’t up in time to help me, I ’spect you to be off to school with your brothers and sister. Go on now and get to bed.”

Titus shuddered as he crossed the few steps it took to reach the foot of the beechwood ladder that climbed to the sleeping loft. As he took hold of a rung, Titus was suddenly compelled to turn back and recross his steps, wanting to embrace his mother, to somehow reassure her that all would turn out right. She stood with that twisted scrap of muslin still snaked between her hands, her red-rimmed eyes watching him silently approach. He stood nearly a head over her as he came to a stop, gripping her shoulders. Then he bent to kiss her on the cheek and brushed his hand across the other side of her face, wrinkled with worry and work, childbearing and thirty-three winters enduring this land. Her eyes flooded, and she bit her lip as he turned from her.

Quickly he clambered up the ladder, scattering the three youngest as they scrambled back to their grass-filled ticks and their wool blankets like a covey of chicks.

It would be a frosty night, he told himself as he lay down in the darkness, watching the last of the fire’s light flicker in reflection against the roof of the cabin above him. Colder still come first light.

His father was right: he did have a choice to make.

And he knew he’d have to make it before first light.

Some of them squeaked, so he reminded himself to count the rungs on the ladder as he settled his weight on each of them one by one. Fifth one down he skipped altogether, sliding past it, his hands and feet gripping the ladder’s uprights as he descended into the cabin’s darkness suffused only with a faint crimson glow from the coals banked in the fireplace.

Even at this murky, early hour just before pre-dawn gray drained from the sky above, the puncheon floor wasn’t that cold beneath his bare feet, although from time to time he could see red wisps of his frosty breath before his face in what muted light the dying fire radiated. Especially when he turned in the direction of the stone fireplace, moving one slow step at a time, making his way toward the corner where his father had leaned the rifle.

From the moment his head had struck the pillow stuffed with wool batting, Titus had slipped in and out of sleep for the rest of the night. At first he listened to the sounds of his parents arguing, then talking. Eventually his father was the only one saying anything. His mother had gone about her business of making dough to rise before the hearth overnight, then made her way to bed. Thaddeus wasn’t far behind her, delaying only to finish his pipe there in the glow of the fireplace as the candles were snuffed. There in the silence of his home.

Gazing down on him from the sleeping loft, Titus thought how at peace his father looked as he sat in his chair. Satisfied, secure, perhaps completely content with his lot, with the niche he had carved out for himself in life.

At long last Thaddeus stood and laid his pipe on the mantel, perhaps near that letter from the schoolmaster, and pushed past those three blankets hanging from nails to separate his bedchamber from the main room. Titus heard the rope bed creak in protest as his father settled next to his mother, then a shuffling of blankets, followed by a sigh of making one’s own place—like that of old Tink when he spun round and round and finally made a nest for himself under the porch.

Still Titus waited, awake beneath his blankets and down coverlet, propping an arm under his cheek to doze as he let the next few hours pass. He would awaken with a start and immediately turn to look through the small mullioned panes at the sky—trying to assess the passage of time by the whirl of the stars in that small patch of speckled black suspended over the Ohio River country. His sister was a noisy sleeper, more so than either of his brothers, so when he rose to his hands and knees to push open the hinged window, he timed each minute application of pressure on the window with her resounding snores. With one side finally cracked open just far enough, Titus slipped out the long wool cylinder—heard it land with a muffle.

Along with three pair of moccasins, his hand-cobbled boots were tied in the blanket roll, in addition to his heavy wool coat, and that shooting pouch. In it and a small belt pouch he carried everything a young man might need to survive out there in the woods. Fire steels and a good supply of flints, not only to start fires for heat and cooking, but flints for the rifle too. Tinder he kept in a small tin stuffed at the bottom of his possibles pouch. Greased patches for the rifle were to be found in another small tin that lay at the bottom of the shooting pouch. Screws and worms for cleaning the weapon. A large vial with cork stopper filled with grease for his patches. The brass-trimmed knapping tool to shape an edge to his flints. Not to mention a crude pair of pliers and a driver to use on the screws that held the lock securely in the rifle’s stock.

Somewhere deep among it all lay his bullet mold and half a dozen extra bars of pig lead. Enough to last him until he could find a job and thereby purchase some more of the necessaries. Folded in a piece of oilcloth was a coil of strong, thin hemp line and a few hooks of varying sizes for fishing. Besides his two belt knives, he was taking along the small patch knife in its scabbard sewn to the strap of the shooting pouch.

On thongs suspended from that pouch strap hung the thin, delicately curved Kentucky powder horn. Last night in the dark of this loft as he hunkered over his few treasures, Titus had quietly shaken the heft of the horn. Nearly full. He hoped it would be enough to last until he could buy more powder as well as lead. If anything, powder would be what he needed first off.

So with everything else dropped outside and the window snugged back into place beneath the low rumble of his sister’s snores—Titus had only to get the rifle and himself out of the cabin without awakening anyone. Most of all his father.

Through those hours of dozing and fitful, anxious wakefulness, he had been lying there thinking mostly on that: getting his hands on his grandpap’s rifle. Trying to get some measure of just what he should do—no, what he would do—if his father awakened while he was reaching for the rifle in the corner, when he was making for the door the way his grandpap told him Injuns made their sneak.

Last night his father had been coming for him—sure and certain of that. But he had been stopped in his tracks, just shy of an arm’s length from Titus by the boy’s mother, perhaps by Titus himself—a youngster standing there ready to fend off blows and land some of his own in anger and frustration. No more to take his punishment, the whipping with straps of mule harness, as he suffered when he was a child.

Somewhere through that night Titus had decided he wasn’t about to be treated as a youngster no more. Decided that in the next few minutes he would defend himself and do everything he could to leave the cabin with that rifle … if it came down to it.

The rifle. It meant damned near everything to him right now. Oh, he realized he might likely make it downriver without the rifle and find himself some work. But having that rifle along made things just all that much easier, while it gave Titus that much more freedom. It meant he could eat when he wanted to eat, camp where he pleased, freed from depending upon villages and towns. And he could defend himself against others, such as those thieves and pirates the loose talk claimed were working the shadows up and down the Ohio along with honest riverfolk.

In the dim, cold light Titus took a step at a time, staying as close to the hearth as he could. At least where the stones lay, there was little chance of the floor puncheons creaking their warning. It was warm there beneath his bare feet too. With one hand gripping the top of the mantel, he leaned forward, slowly reaching out with the other arm. Just past the end of the fireplace his fingers touched it, confirmed what it was by touching the brass thimbles that held the wiping stick beneath the long forestock. Afraid to drag it across the floor, he raised it carefully, bringing the weapon slowly around the corner of the stone fireplace. Into both his hands with an anxious sigh. And a leap of his heart.

He had his rifle.

Now he could leave. Moving off the stone hearth, Titus shifted his weight carefully, one foot at a time—testing the boards that no one gave any notice to other times. But at this moment, when all was quiet and the rest were asleep …

Of a sudden he thought on old Tink outside, dozing the way hounds would on the porch, or beneath it. Likely he might set up a clamor—a howl or a yelp of happiness, some declaration that he too wanted to come along on what the old redbone would believe was to be a hunt, off for a romp through the woods.

Maybe if he found something to give Tink to eat, something to chew on as soon as he got out the door. Keep the old hound’s mouth too busy to yowl or bay. Titus inched foot by foot toward his mother’s table.

Not until he got right to it did he see that on the table lay the new shirt his mother had been working on for Thaddeus. She must have finished it last night after pap had sent him up to the loft, he thought. And beside the shirt sat a pewter bowl of the biscuits left over from last night’s supper, piled within the folds of a clean square of muslin. Gathering up its four corners, smelling the yeasty dusting of flour that made him think not only of his mother but of Amy as well, Titus rolled the biscuits into the center of the shirt and knotted the sleeves. All the biscuits but one, that is—he clutched one in his hand, then stuffed the shirt beneath his arm.

Step by step he moved off from the table, then suddenly came to a halt when his sister’s snoring stopped. Balancing on one foot, he waited those long, breathless moments, his thundering heart climbing out of his chest and into his throat until she began snoring once more.

At the doorway he halted again. From a peg where they hung their coats he took down a small pouch, fingeringing it a moment to be certain. Inside he felt the scrape and rattle of a handful of rich amber French flints. His father’s prized flints for his own rifle. Titus dropped the pouch inside the neck of the shirt he wore. Patted them against his belly. His father wasn’t much of a hunter, nohow. Thaddeus would never use all them flints anyway.

As he raised the iron latch within the door’s slot ever so slowly, some of the metal growled faintly. He stopped, his ears pounding as the rope bed creaked a few feet away behind the blankets divider. Breathlessly he waited, the latch half-raised, watching the wall of blankets, his eyes straining, ears working so he might have first jump when his father emerged to catch him. He would yank up the latch all the way and be out on the porch before Thaddeus truly realized what was going on. Off the porch and into the shadows of dawn, off to the cover of woods. Once there—no one would ever catch him.

His father snorted, coughed, and the rope bed creaked again. Then came an audible sigh, and all fell quiet once again. His eyes rose to the edge of the loft above him, and he nodded one time in farewell. Turning back to the door, Titus released the latch, pulling the heavy oaken planks toward him an inch at a time so the door would not drag across the puncheon floor. Open … open just wide enough, he told himself. Only that much. There.

And he was out, into the shocking cold of that autumn dawn. Dragging the door carefully toward him, latch raised—quietly pulling it closed and lowering the iron back into place.

He turned at the sound of the padding feet to find Tink had pulled himself out from under the porch and stood there stretching in a great flexing of his back, followed by a shake of his head with those long ears that slapped his muzzle. The dog was at the steps, ready to leap up in greeting, his mouth just opening when Titus reached out and stuffed half the biscuit into Tink’s jaws.

Sweeping past the hound as fast as he could, in hopes of getting the dog far enough away from the cabin before either of them made the sort of noise that would awaken his family, Titus held the other half of the biscuit out for Tink to see, for him to smell. The hound followed obediently, quietly. Jowls flapping like this was turning out to be some game to go on.

Titus did not stop to feed the dog nor to look back until he had slipped around the side of the cabin, snatched up his blanket roll, and finally stood at the far edge of the trees. The gray of dawn was oozing out of the sky. Beneath the autumn canopy he had come to a halt, turning to kneel as the dog loped up to his side. With the biscuit held out in one palm, Titus scratched the hound’s ears for what he knew was to be the last time.

“You got to go back, Tink,” he whispered, sensing the sour clutch of sentiment burn at the base of his throat.

A good, old friend. Many, many hours had they roamed the timber and hills together, looked down on the boats plying the Ohio from the same rocky prominence.

“I don’t wanna tie you up, you gotta understand that.” He cupped his hand beneath the moist lower jaw and raised Tink’s head so he could look into the dog’s sad, watery eyes. “But you can’t go with me this time. This is something I gotta do on my own, and you’re better off here. Don’t know what’s out there, so it’s safer for you here.”

Then he finally stood, gazing back at the cabin where a thin streamer of smoke from last night’s fire lifted itself from the stone chimney.

“G’won, Tink. Get.”

The hound looked up at the youth with a bewildered expression, cocking his head to the side.

“I said, get. We ain’t hunting today.” He pushed the dog toward the cabin. “Get.”

More gray was seeping into dawn’s coming. He felt anxious to be gone before his father arose and stoked the fire as he always did before moving out to the barn to begin his day.

He shoved the old dog again, and Tink finally loped off twenty feet, then stopped and looked back at Titus—as if hopeful this was just one of the games they had played when the boy was younger. Many, many years gone now.

“Get! I can’t take you with me.”

Then Titus realized his eyes stung, and that made him mad, mostly at himself. “You gotta stay and look after them others now. G’won—get! Shoo!”

His head hanging morosely, the hound turned away from Titus and plodded one slow step at a time toward the cabin, as if being punished. Halfway there Tink halted one more time and looked back over his shoulder at Titus.

He waved both hands at the hound, to keep him moving.

By the time Tink got close to the porch, Titus was crying. And that made him madder than anything.

Angrily he squatted, scooping up the new shirt and the biscuits, retying the arms around an end of the rolled-up blanket with the rest of his necessaries before he unknotted the thin strip of leather he had used to secure the boots to the bundle. These he pulled over his bare feet, then dragged a hand beneath his drippy nose.

Looking one last time at Tink as the old hound clambered up onto the porch, turned, and lay down with his muzzle between his front paws, Titus was almost certain he heard the dog whine. Mournful.

A dove called out from the canopy being brightened by day with more and more of autumn’s fire.

Swiping a shirtsleeve under both eyes, Titus took one last, lingering look at the family’s place, that cabin where the rest would live out most of their lives. The barn where his father’s animals were kept, critters that helped Thaddeus in the farming. The hog pens. The summer kitchen and the smoke shed.

He didn’t belong here, he knew. So why was he crying?

Swallowing down the sour taste of his empty belly, Titus turned from the glade, stepped into the timber, and was lost among the shadows and the game trails, all those sounds of the small things up and moving to water that dawn.

He didn’t fit in here no more, he had decided. Knowing it was now up to him to find someplace where he did.