Dance on the Wind

8

When she took his hardening flesh in her hands and began to stroke her fingers lightly up and down the length of him, Titus didn’t know whether he was going to laugh out of sheer unabashed joy, or cry from the bliss he felt flooding over his entire body.

This was more than the feeling he had experienced with Amy, twice even. But instead of the nerve-jolting joy lasting but a few seconds at most while he exploded, this woman prolonged his eruption to the point Titus became certain he was enjoying more pleasure than any one man could endure.

“Why you called Mincemeat?” he had asked her when she’d first led him back to her tiny, cramped shanty across the muddy rear yard behind the Kangaroo, where she, like the rest of the bar help, was given a crude bed frame of saplings and rope, a musty tick filled with moldy grass, a chamber pot, and a small sheet-iron chimney beneath which she could build a cooking fire. It was the only thing that could chase the damp, bone-numbing chill from the room.

At least that’s what Titus thought until the skinny woman rose from striking sparks to kindling in that rocklined fire pit and came back to the tall, gangly youth—intent on starting a fire in him.

“It just a name what don’t mean nothing,” she answered as she peeled off his oiled jerkin, then gazed up at his eyes smokily.

God, how thirsty he was, his tongue thick and pasty. He asked, “You got any more of that ale left you?”

“Little bit,” she said, reaching across the narrow crib for the small table where sat her mug. “You can finish it off, sweet boy.”

My, but it still tasted good, although some of the sparkle and bite on his tongue had diminished. The spruce beer Ebenezer had started him out on still had that earthy body to it as he let it wash back against his tonsils, just the way he saw so many of the others in the Kangaroo do throughout that evening and into the long night. After a while he had stopped counting how many mugs Ebenezer and the others bought for him, and now he couldn’t even remember what the tally was when he had stopped caring. For so long there it had seemed like the thing for a man to do—to know how many he had put under his belt—what with this being his first drunk.

She had stayed beside him all that evening, even when they’d moved from the tavern, through the low-beamed entry into the dining hall, passing men who sat on crude benches at long tables where they clattered their mugs down to get the attention of at least one of the maids busy balancing steaming platters and trenchers and even more pitchers of ale from the kitchen fireplaces at the rear of the room where a half-dozen old women and men tended the fires and the food. The venison and pork, along with heaping helpings of potatoes and corn, took the edge off his lightheadedness, yet not so much that he wasn’t anxious to head back into the tavern once all of them were bloated with solid food.

The rest of the night proved all the more raucous as he grew warmer, his forehead and the end of his nose more and more benumbed as time seemed to slither by without notice, and people with it. After the longest time now he suddenly remembered the boat crew and took the mug from his lips, turning slowly around so he wouldn’t topple over as he slurred at her.

“Where they go?”

“Who?”

“Ebenezer and the rest.”

“They got their own places to be tonight,” she replied, back at the tiny fireplace, where she laid more of the kindling on the first licks of flame. It was finally beginning to drive the chill from the narrow room constructed of chinked logs, a low, sloping roof overhead of oiled canvas on which saplings had been laid, then brush, followed by a thin layer of sod to turn out the heavy rains and wet snows that battered the Ohio country three seasons out of the year.

He gazed down into the mug, saw there wasn’t much left. He swilled it back, then leaned forward to plunk the mug back upon the table. That made his head swim and he felt mushy in the knees, as if he might go down. As heavy as his eyelids were, Titus struggled to prop them open as he tried to figure just what to do, weaving slightly on that spot where he was rooted for the moment.

Then he lunged forward with one step. From the corner of his eye he saw her turn slightly, saw her cheeks flushed with the warmth of the fire she was tending; then he kept on trudging flat-footed toward the bed near the fireplace. Banging into it with a shin, he grunted more in surprise than in pain and clumsily wheeled about, causing his mind to swim in a great, sweeping wave as if it were unhinged and adrift, rocking back and forth within his skull. Like a tow sack filled with rocks, he collapsed back onto the bed, let out a sigh, and sank backward across the rumpled quilts and wool blankets.

“Lift your foot up,” she told him. “Best we take off these here moccasins afore your feet get froze.”

After she flung them over to the pounded clay floor by the fire, the woman kicked one leg over him so she could straddle him. He stared up at her face, trying so hard to focus, just to keep his eyes open. He groaned from the effort it was taking, sleep calling him more fervently now.

“You ain’t gonna get sick, is you?” she asked. “You get sick—you’ll be cleaning your own mess up.”

He tried smiling at her to let her know he wouldn’t as his eyelids grew too heavy to fight them any longer. Not sick. Just sleepy.

She was tugging on the long tail of his shirt, yanking to get it out of his leather britches. He felt himself giggling softly. So damned warm, inside and out.

Titus did not know how long he had been asleep, but he was sure he had been. Time had passed. He knew this feeling, coming awake slowly, drifting down in the warm immersion of that land between sleep and wakefulness. He giggled again, not really sure if he made a sound with it, or just laughed within.

Then he groaned. And remembered groaning for the last few minutes, sensing the rise of pleasure. He felt his breathing grow shallow, increasingly rapid as the fixed, physical joy intensified, warmth radiating from his groin. Slowly he opened his eyes, hoping to discover just what was overcoming him when he found her hands working over his rigid flesh.

The woman had it standing up straight as a poplar volunteer bursting from the ground, about as hard as one of those hickory wiping sticks Amy Whistler’s pap kept curing in that trough all the time. And just as he worked a pumice stone up and down a new wiping rod he was making for his own rifle, the woman kneaded her hands up and down his hardened flesh, making it almost too hot to be comfortable.

Groaning again, he closed his eyes, not wanting to wake up and find out that this feeling was nothing more than one of those dreams he used to have back in that darkened sleeping loft outside the tiny hamlet of Rabbit Hash. Such pleasure simply could not last this long. This exquisite torture hadn’t lasted anywhere near this long with Amy—none of the times at the swimming hole or in the woods when he had decided it didn’t matter anymore and he no longer gave a damn, he was going to have her body whenever he wanted.

This time when he opened his eyes halfway, she looked up and found him watching her.

“It don’t matter you gone and got yourself drunk.”

“I’m drunk?”

“Had yourself a man-sized snootful this night, I’ll tell you,” she declared. “But Mincemeat’s real glad you ain’t had you so much she cain’t get your pizzer hard for our fun.”

“Our … our fun.”

He looked up from the tops of her breasts in that bulging chemise to find her eyes burning into his.

“You wanna touch ’em?” she asked, her whole face alive with a knowing smile.

“Touch ’em?” he asked in reply, then brought a wobbly hand up.

But as he did, she reached up and yanked down the front of her chemise. Both breasts spilled out over the top of the chemise and the leather bodice she had laced around her midsection. He was startled at the size and shape of them, larger than any he had seen before. Hell, he had only seen Amy’s, and only then in moonlight at best. Hers had been smaller, hard and firm. But these—as he brushed his fingers across the flesh of one—were soft, pliant, and seemed to have a strange and direct effect on just how he felt down there where she continued to rub him.

She inched back, withdrawing the breasts just beyond his reach, saying, “Tell me if’n you like this.”

Once she laid his hot flesh within her cleavage, she used both her hands to press her breasts inward, encircling him as she began to rock back and forth on him, moving slightly up and down as she squeezed and released her breasts against him while keeping her eyes locked on his.

“Don’t you worry ’bout nothing,” she cooed. “I can tell just from looking at you when you’re ’bout ready to toot. An’ I won’t let you toot till I’m good and ready for you to do just that.”

His mouth had gone dry again, so dry. Rolling his drumming head to the side slowly, he spotted the mug on the table. Then remembered he had drained it. There had to be something else hereabouts for him … but in another heartbeat Titus’s thoughts no longer dwelled on his thirst.

He felt her shift her weight atop him, taking her breasts from his flesh as she went to her feet beside the bed. There she yanked furiously at the oiled-leather whang that lashed the bodice beneath her breasts. After pulling it and the rumpled chemise over her head, she tugged at her belt and shimmied out of her long skirt, skipping out of the long, quilted pantaloons at the same time, while he stared hypnotically, captivated by the sway and bobble of her heavy breasts.

By the time she had placed one knee back on the low bed, he had rolled to the side and reached out for her, locking her shoulders in his hands, flinging her down to roll atop her.

“Think you know what you’re doing, do you, young river rat?” she murmured.

He was rocking back slightly to plant himself when she took him in her hand and drove him against her.

“Right there,” she groaned. “Gimme all what you got for Mincemeat—right there, now, li’l river rat.”

He wanted to stop and tell her he wasn’t a river rat. He wasn’t a man who worked the Ohio like the others. He was just a runaway farm boy wanting something different. Something more. But Titus didn’t stop, and he couldn’t make the words come out of his mouth, what with all the whimpering he heard himself making as he worked himself in and out of her growing wetness that clung to him all the more with every thrust.

It had never lasted so long—not this high-pitched ringing in his ears as he clawed up toward the pinnacle, expecting to explode any moment as he fought his way upward. With Amy it had been so earth-shattering the first time, so violently short the next times—none had lasted like this.

He thought he could feel her raking her chipped and battered nails along his back, digging furrows along the straps of muscle as he hammered harder still. Sensing the woman’s ankles lock behind his buttocks as she throbbed back into him with every one of his strokes. For just a moment he gazed down at her face, finding her eyes become catlike slits, the tip of her pink tongue just peeking between her browned teeth. Lower still he noticed that the firelight glistened on her neck, some strands of hair plastered against her damp skin. Dewdrops of sweat stood out like clusters of diamonds on her soft breasts, the shape of those mounds changed somewhat—perhaps flatter now—as she lay on her back, moving against him.

In that next moment those flickering droplets he watched seemed to explode into a million fragments of whirling, shattered particles of light. Shooting stars was all he thought of as the first explosion rocked him to the core. His hips drove forward to plant himself ever deeper within her center. As he slowed over her with the succeeding thrusts, Titus could feel her shudder beneath him at last, her chin arched back as her hips continued to grind upward against him.

With one last quiver he was finished, and he looked down at her, feeling an immense weight suddenly piercing his head from temple to temple. His body relaxed from the center outward, an inch at a time as he sagged upon her. Sensing the sharp angularity of her hips against his, the boniness to her rib cage beneath those breasts where her breathing eventually slowed like his, he slowly let go.

So tired was he that he thought he could rest his head in the crook of her shoulder for just a little while. Feeling his nakedness all the way down to the soles of his feet. Later he could drag his clothes back on and wander back to the tavern to look up the rest of the boat crew. Have some more of that beer.

And—mayhaps if he was lucky enough—Titus would talk this woman into bringing him back here to her bed one more time before he had to join Ebenezer Zane and the rest in pitting themselves against the Great Falls of the Ohio.

It all sounded good enough to be a dream.

His tongue felt like he had dragged it all the way up the trunk of a black walnut tree, tasted like he’d used it to clean out the stall muck caked within all four of the plow mule’s iron shoes.

Thirsty, Titus thought of getting his hands on more of that spruce beer … but that only made his head throb all the more. Slowly becoming aware of the pressure on his shoulder, he opened his eyes and looked down—finding her sleeping against him. The fire in the corner pit had all but died out.

Been asleep at least that long, he thought. And the tiny Betty lamp on the small table flickered low, its wick floating in oil the only light in that tiny room.

The arm she laid her head upon had gone to sleep, filled with painful pinpricks: he knew he had to move it. Inch by inch Titus dragged himself from beneath her, then slipped out from beneath the rumpled blankets she had pulled over them both—spilling onto the clay floor. Landing on his knees and one hand beside the bed, his head thumping like wind-driven waves slapping against the hull of Zane’s flatboat, Titus tried to remember some shred of what had happened since swallowing that first spruce beer. There was a piece of the night here, and there.

When he cocked his head around to see for sure, finding the length of her bare thigh and a portion of one naked breast peeking from beneath the greasy blanket—he was sure he had humped her. No … maybe she had humped him.

That would’ve been a first, he started to snort, yet it made not just his head, but his whole body, hurt. Then he recalled a pale vision of sitting with the four carousing boatmen in that stinking, noisy tippling house, their table wet from spilled ale and rye. Two more women were there, one bouncing animatedly atop Ovatt’s lap, and the other laughing as she stood directly behind Kingsbury, her partially exposed breasts secured on either side of his head like a wool muffler while he fondled her flesh and she rubbed his belly. She was a big one, that woman, and older than the others who plied their trade in the Kangaroo.

A voice or two came clear as he dragged his knees up and slowly squatted beside the bed. Titus remembered how the others had poked their fun at him while the skinny woman ran her hands over him, exploring more and more boldly as the night got older and older, kissing on his neck, pushing his curly brown hair back from his ear to breathe huskily in it—tickling, teasing, taunting him until he figured he just couldn’t take it no more and stumbled back here with her.

Now she was snoring lightly. And when he looked at her face, he recalled how Kingsbury, Ovatt, and especially Zane had all winked at him again and again throughout the evening, as if they were privy to something he had yet to learn.

Maybe he would eventually find out why she was called Mincemeat.

From the disheveled end of the bed he carefully yanked one of the striped wool blankets so he wouldn’t disturb her, then draped it over his bare shoulders with a shudder. Scooting along on his knees, his head sagging heavy as a chunk of rain-soaked granite between his shoulders, Titus inched over to the table and peered down into the small tin where floated a feeble stump of wick in what his nose told him was bacon grease. It saturated the tiny room with the rank odor of cooking pork. What with supper last night, and all those meals the crew ate on the river—so much pig meat he sensed his stomach revolting, about to heave at the stench.

He dragged himself away, gasping for breath to keep from losing his stomach on the floor, sliding on his bare legs over to the fire pit beneath that sheet-iron chimney, and blew on the coals. Finding plenty of life in them, Titus began to lay bark chips and slivers of kindling on the glowing embers until he had a warming fire stoked once again. It did not take long for it to knock the chill from the log-and-chink lean-to constructed at the back of Mathilda’s alehouse and road inn.

In the corner sat a short three-legged stool supporting a copper kettle. What caught his eye was the handle of an iron ladle poking over the lip of the kettle. Ladling out some of the liquid in the kettle, he took a cautious sniff. Water. He drank his fill, dipper after dipper, nearly emptying the kettle before he got himself sated. His mouth was no longer so dry, but his eyes still hurt with a hot, gritty pain. Maybeso he could sleep some more now that he had taken care of his thirst.

But then he was reminded of the immense pressure in his groin. In searching under the low bed he found a copper chamber pot and dragged it over to a far corner. With his back to the bed and the fire, he pulled the blanket apart, rose upon his knees, and relieved himself. From a wooden bucket with a rope handle he took a handful of red cedar shavings and tossed them into the chamber pot so the small, closed room would not reek so badly with the stench of his urine.

That business seen to, Titus kneed his way across the pounded clay floor, reaching the side of the bed, where he crawled back under a second wool blanket. He had no more got himself settled and let out a contented sigh than he jerked in surprise, feeling her hand tickle across the flat of his belly, her fingers descending to encircle his limp flesh. Startled, he lay there, partly frightened, partly hypnotized with sensing his flesh grow and harden as quickly as it did.

“You be a good boy now and give me another one of your rides, river rat.”

“M-my name’s Titus,” he said cautiously. “Told you last night I wasn’t no riverman like the rest of them. Don’t you go and call me a river rat.”

“Awright, Titus,” she purred, sliding her body up against his once more. “You’re just a boy long, long way from home, ain’t you?”

“Ain’t no boy.”

“Awright,” she agreed. “So tell me where you’re headed.”

“Always aimed to make it here to Louisville.”

She kept on kneading him, saying, “Ain’t all that much work round here. Might find work for the army down there to Fort Knox.”

“Don’t know what I’ll do,” he replied, one of his hands moving as if on its own accord to find her thigh, climbing to stroke the curve of her buttock. It felt good beneath his touch. Almost immediately he grew curious about her breasts. Dragging the blanket back from her shoulder, Titus looked down at them.

“Go ’head. Kiss ’em,” she said in a husky whisper. “They want you to kiss ’em, Titus.”

Not at all sure how it should be done, he planted a chaste peck on each one.

“No,” she instructed, reaching up with her free hand to force his head down onto a breast. “Open your mouth. Lick ’em. Suck on ’em too. That’s the way you can make ’em feel good.”

Obediently, he did as she asked. Finding that not only did she respond with a growing murmur in the back of her throat, but he found himself becoming inflamed with hunger the more he fondled, kissed, sucked, and licked on her. And through it all she pressed his face down into that pliant fleshiness of her.

“Don’t be selfish, now, Titus,” she finally said. “The other’n wants some attention too.”

He let her shove his face over to the other breast, where he continued his enjoyment of her damp skin. While he was, there came a couple of times when he thought he just might explode, so fiery was the stimulation she was giving him between his legs. Then he put his head between her breasts, licking down, down, down to her belly.

As she arched her back, he continued to kiss back and forth across her flat, smooth belly, from one sharp hipbone, licking the groin to the other hip.

“Do this,” she said huskily, taking one of his hands now and pushing it down upon the soft hairiness of her thigh. Moving it up and down twice in a heated flurry, the woman finally positioned his fingers on the inside of her leg.

“C’mon up with your hand to where you’ll find me getting wet.”

“W-wet?” he asked, more than a little concerned. Perhaps there was something wrong—maybe even her getting her monthly visit like Amy finally did. Scared that maybeso what he was doing was making the woman bleed.

“It’s awright, Titus. Just what happens to a woman. Feel it—how warm I got for you awready. How wet I am for you to climb up on me now.”

“Now?”

She shook her head. “We can wait a bit. Just touch me all over down there and see just how wet you’re making me. This be the best way for a young’un like you to learn all ’bout a woman.”

As he began to explore with his fingers, climbing higher and higher until he reached her warmth and wetness, hearing her groan low and feral, the woman dragged his head back down against her flesh: tangling her fingers within his hair as she pulled his face back to her breasts once more, rubbing him there with an urgent need. His fingers continued to explore her, studying the rise and fall of the contours of her body, afraid at first with its newness when he discovered her skin grew all the more moist the more he probed along that parting of her flesh between her thighs.

“There,” she whispered. “Right there. Put your fingers in.” Then without ceremony she reached down and roughly guided his hand against her flesh, positioning him, easing his fingers within her with a groan. Gripping his wrist with a trembling lock, the woman moved his fingers back and forth within her as her hips began to rock upward, just as she had rocked against him earlier that night.

When he felt her shudder convulsively, tossing her head from side to side, Titus again grew scared—fearful he had hurt her, but as soon as he tried to yank his hand from her, the woman seized it, dragged it back against the same moist warmth. Afraid to move, ignorant of what had just happened with her, he lay there still as a cat about to pounce on a mouse.

“You done good,” she said eventually when her breathing became more regular. The woman stroked his hair with the hand that held his face against her breast.

Wanting to sort out the mystery so badly, but not sure how to ask, Titus finally said, “Tell me what I done good for you.”

“Ever’thing. Bet you done good in school—quick as you are at learning. The kissing and licking, and how you learn’t to touch me where it drives me near crazed. That all come to you pretty fast, Titus Bass.”

“You done most of it yourself.”

He could feel her wag her head.

“I just showed you—an’ you done the rest like you was born to make a woman’s body happy.”

“Is that what I done?” he asked, lifting his head and looking down into her face.

“Damn right. Just you remember me whenever you want a woman to hump. I’ll allays save time for you, Titus-from-upriver.”

“What about all them others what come back here with you—”

“Shit,” she grumbled sourly, shifting position slightly. “All the rest of them just interested in their own good time. Not that I don’t make a living at it, mind you, now—but they don’t think about me a’tall.”

“’Fraid I don’t rightly understand.”

“See, I’d rather take me a young’un like you and teach him what a man ought’n do to make a woman happy, ’cause all them older ones only worried about themselves. An’ speaking of that: it’s about time Titus climbed on me with that hammer of his and knocked a few pegs loose hisself. C’mon, lover.”

She kept her fingers locked around his flesh as he rolled over her, positioned himself, and rocked forward. He was beginning to think there wasn’t much of anything better than that feeling of getting inside a woman. For a fleeting moment he thought how he had lain atop Amy beside their old swimming hole last summer and never really gotten his pecker buried in her. Only between her thighs. It wasn’t until the second time that together Amy and he had gotten him inside her, both of them moving frantically, urgently before he repeated his first performance and exploded all too quickly.

But now this, the way the woman showed him to make it last precious minutes longer. If something felt so damned good, it just made sense for him to find all the ways he could to prolong his pleasure.

Locking his elbows so he could rock above her, hurling his hips into her with a growing insistence, Titus sensed the fire rising, the flames climbing across his lower belly for no more than a matter of heartbeats before the stars exploded back of his eyelids.

Once his breathing had slowed, he lay with a hand cupped on one of her soft breasts, fingertips sensing the bony ribs beneath it. “How you come to be called Mincemeat?”

She didn’t answer for some time, then replied, “You see’d my face in the light. That oughtta tell you. I been called that name since’t I was no more’n a wee child. Back to Virginia where I was raised, whole valley had us a time with the pox. Some got it real bad and died, burning up with the fever. Some didn’t get it at all. But most young’uns was like me. Got real sick, closing in on death’s door—but we come back to the land of the living. Only our faces to show that we’d been marked by the pox.”

“Why call you Mincemeat?”

“The pox on our cheeks looked red and angry, crusted and weepy for the longest time. My older brothers got to calling me Mincemeat ’cause my face looked like the meat mama chopped up and mixed in her mincemeat pies.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Awright to call me Mincemeat. Ever’body does,” she answered, turning her head away.

“No,” he insisted. “I really wanna know your real name.”

“Ain’t been called by my real name in longer’n I can remember.”

“You know mine. So tell me yours.”

When she finally answered, her voice sounded distant, sad. “Abigail,” she replied softly.

“That’s pretty, your folks naming you Abigail.”

“Abigail Thresher.”

“And you’re from Virginia?”

“Family’s all back there.”

“Some of my kin come from Virginia.”

“You born there too?” she asked.

“No. Like Ebenezer said, I’m a Kentucky man. But my grandpap come from Virgin’a. By the time he got over the mountains with the others to settle, I s’pose it weren’t Virgin’a no more. They was already calling the place Caintuckee. That’s where I’m from—downriver from Cincinnati an’ Fort Washington.”

“Your folks farming?”

“Long way back, we been farmers. What they wanted me to be too.”

“But you’re gonna be a riverman like Ebenezer Zane and them others now, ain’cha?”

“I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think hard on it some last two days—but I first set my sights on coming here to Louisville. Still think I like the forest better’n the river.”

She cleared her throat and replied, “Probably better for you, Titus. I seen enough these last few years to know river life can be mean on a man. On the women what work ’longside the rivers too. Ain’t all men gone bad—some of ’em like Ebenezer. He’s half horse, half alligator like the best of ’em, but he’s still got him good feelings inside. You’re damned lucky you bumped into him coming downriver. Been some of them others, they’d had you stripped of all you owned and killed you just for the fun of it. Dumped your body off the side of the boat.”

“I can take care of myself,” he bristled.

“You’re still just a boy—”

“I ain’t a boy!” Titus snapped, rolling away from her angrily, shuddering with the cold as he pulled out from beneath the blanket.

She eased against his back. “Sorry if I hurt your feelings. What I meant to say was you ’pear to be growing into a fine young man. It’s easy to tell you ain’t got no business on the river … less’n you learn the riverman’s life from someone like Ebenezer Zane.”

“You said Ebenezer ain’t mean—like most of ’em are,” Titus began. “S’pose you tell me ’bout what happened that made them three ugly fellers want nothing to do with tangling with Ebenezer last night.”

For some time she lay quiet, nestled into his back. He could hear her breathing, feel the rise and fall of it against him as he watched the dip and dance of the fire’s light on the far wall.

“It was to last summer,” Abigail eventually began, in too quiet a voice. “The run Ebenezer made afore this’un. Most crews can make two trips downriver a year if they try—”

He was instantly edgy at the way she took her own sweet time to roll out the story, interrupting to say, “Just tell me what happened when he come through Louisville last time.”

“There was two of ’em he picked a fight with.”

“Ebenezer Zane?” he asked in disbelief. “Picking a fight?”

“This is the God’s truth, it is,” she explained as she laid a scratchy wool blanket over his body once more. “You push any man far enough—”

“All right, so I believe you. He picked a fight with two of ’em.”

“Ebenezer had his reasons. Trust to that.”

“They was?”

“Them two he picked a fight with were hard users.”

Bass wagged his head slightly. “I don’t know what that is—a hard user.”

“The kind’s rough on women,” she explained. “This time it was Mathilda.”

“Same one’s your boss?”

She nodded. “Mathilda owns the Kangaroo and keeps us girls working. She don’t have nothing to do with the men no more—bedding down with ’em—unless they hap to be favorites of hers, like Kingsbury is. Mostly she just keeps out there in the tavern, making sure all folks are happy and them that aren’t get throwed out.”

“So what does she got to do with Ebenezer and them two he picked a fight with?”

“It all went back to the day before when Ebenezer’s boat landed and his boys come in for some supper and a good time,” Abigail continued her story. “Ebenezer stayed down to the boat—said his belly wasn’t feeling all that good. But Kingsbury come up here, and him and Mathilda was having themselves a drink together when a bunch of Pennsylvania riffraff come in. Their steersman set his eyes on Mathilda, right off—and when she told him she wasn’t bedding down with the customers no more, that big fella sour-mouthed her but he went off so’s to keep on drinking, like it wasn’t gonna matter.”

“You gonna tell me how Ebenezer picked a fight with ’em?”

“You’re jumping way ahead in the story,” she snapped, sitting up and letting the blanket fall from her upper body. He watched her breasts and bony shoulders as she rolled away from him on her hip. Then he stared at the mottled skin stretched over her bony back like a plucked bird’s folded wings as the woman swept up another dirty blanket from the end of the bed and wrapped it around herself. “You ever smoke afore?”

As she rose, Titus swallowed hard. “No, I ain’t.”

“Ever care to? Like now?”

Abigail went to a small walnut lap chest beneath the lamp table and from it drew out a drawstring pouch and a small clay pipe. She continued her story while she settled back on the edge of the bed beside him.

“Later on that night it seemed that bunch from Pennsylvania watched that Kingsbury and Mathilda was gone from the tavern for a long time together. And when the two of ’em come back, I was there to see the big steersman come over to grab hold of Mathilda—telling her he wanted some of her too. When she got angry and tried to explain she didn’t do that no more, he slapped her and dragged her up by her arm from the place where she was sitting.”

As he watched Abigail taking finger-pinches of fragrant tobacco from the pouch and dropping them in the tiny clay pipe bowl, Titus could clearly picture the scene in his mind: the hazy, lamplit tavern, so noisy and raucous no one would know what was happening right at first.

“That’s when Kingsbury got up and jumped for the steersman. About as far as he got, ’cause some others got him and started whopping on him while the pilot knocked Mathilda around good.”

“But when I come in last night, I watched a couple of fellas throwing a man out,” Titus said. “What about them she hires to protect her place?”

“She has help now. Since last summer, anyways,” Abigail explained, rising from the bed, clutching the blanket around her upper arms, her shoulders naked as she stepped to the fire. There he watched her squat, bare feet and ankles exposed as the blanket slurred out across the floor around her. He smiled to see that flesh while she took a straw from a bucket and for a moment held it in the fire. “But back when Kingsbury and her got whopped on, there was nobody in the place who could help. They all just backed away and let them strangers beat up that woman, and a good man too. Four of ’em throwed Kingsbury outside in the yard, good as dead. While’st the pilot dragged Mathilda outside too—carried her off down to their boat, where the bunch of ’em held her down and started using her bad.”

“Using her bad?”

Taking the burning straw from the fire, Abigail held it over the pipe bowl and inhaled, sucking noisily to light the tobacco. Then she pulled the stem from her lips and blew a great gush of smoke toward the low beam-and-mud roof, finally saying, “Like you and me just done, ’cept it’s one man right after ’nother—and none of ’em gentle about it,” she commented sourly, her pocked face gone hard again, “The more they hit her, the more she cried and bled. And the more she cried, the more they hit her.”

“How’d Ebenezer get in all of this?”

“Said he heard a woman moaning. The more he listened from where he was sick on his boat, with his belly hurting him—the more he figured out what was happening: a woman crying and men laughing. Said he could even hear them smacking her, they was whopping on her so hard.”

“That’s when he jumped on ’em?”

She nodded once as she rose to return to the edge of the bed. “He got him his cutlass—you ever see his cutlass?”

With a wag of his wide-eyed head, Titus looked down at the pipe she held out to him and said, “No, I ain’t.”

“Ask Ebenezer to see his cutlass sometime,” she advised knowingly. “Right then he come on that boat and got right in the middle of ’em afore he even saw it was Mathilda they was beating bad. When he started swinging that cutlass around, two of them sonsabitches run right off, wanting nothing of Ebenezer Zane and that big knife of his’n. Here—take this.”

He took the pipe, but when his palm met the heat of the clay bowl, Titus let it fall to the earthen floor.

“Silly man,” she said, bending over to pick it up by the stem, the blanket parting to expose most of those fleshy mounds, enough for him to see how her breastbone stood out beneath her pale skin like a freshly pressed sheet draped over a drying line. “Here, hold it like this.” She presented it to him again. “You try it again.”

“What of the other two?” he asked as he took the pipe, gripping it back on the stem, fingertips away from the hot bowl. He brought it to his lips, and his eyes met hers as he began to suck in.

“Them two what gave Ebenezer the worst of it? Well, now—one snatched out a pistol and brung it up to shoot, but Ebenezer was quicker with that cutlass, cleaving off a couple of fingers of that bastard’s pistol hand. But right about then Ebenezer went to his knees, a knife in his back. Say, you don’t gotta hold that smoke in so long, Titus. Let it out now if’n you want.”

With a gush it exploded from his mouth.

“Did you swaller it down into your chest?” she asked.

Titus swallowed, sensing the strong taste of it. “I dunno.”

“Then try it again. Just like breathing in. You’ll feel it down there in your chest, then you’ll know.”

“One of ’em, you said he stabbed Ebenezer?” and he put the stem to his lips.

Abigail waited to answer, watching his face as he drew long and slow on the pipe stem, pulling it into his lungs with all that was in him. The potent heat hit him hard: he found this smoking stuff like trying to force down a coarse old horseshoe file. As soon as it began to hurt more than he could stand, Titus coughed it right back up, gagging and retching, his face hot with embarrassment.

“That’s awright, Titus. Best to take it gentle and slow—not so much all at the first. Go ’head on and give ’nother try.”

He closed his eyes as he brought the pipe to his mouth a third time. Had to admit he’d always liked the smell of it, what with menfolk smoking around him all those years back in Boone County—something mighty flavorful. But getting it past his mouth into his chest appeared to be another matter. Still game for it, this time he did as she had suggested, drawing the smoke in slow and easy, a tiny bit at a time. He held it for a moment without coughing, opening his eyes wide in self-astonished celebration at his own triumph, then exhaled every bit as slowly as he had just pulled the smoke into his lungs. It was nothing less than a wonder to watch it all come back out in a steady stream.

Abigail smiled at him. “That’s it, Titus. Now you try some more.”

“G’won and tell me about Ebenezer getting stabbed.” Only then did he bring the pipe stem back to his lips.

“The pilot done it. With a big ol’ guttin’ knife—but lucky for Ebenezer Zane that the tip of the blade hit a rib and only sliced up some skin. Hurt him enough I s’pose that he went to his knees. That’s when Mathilda watched that bastard yank the knife back, ready to plant it in Ebenezer’s back again—’bout the time Zane grabbed hol’t of that pistol one of them others dropped out’n his chopped-up hand. Ebenezer turned and fired.”

“Who’d he hit?”

She wagged her head, insistent on telling the story her own way. “First thing Zane done was pick Mathilda up and wrap a blanket round her—what with the way them four had tored every stitch off her. She asked him if the pilot was dead, and when Ebenezer said he didn’t know, Mathilda said they should make sure he was. She told Ebenezer go pour some powder and coal oil all over the cargo.”

He blew out a gush of smoke, so damned proud of himself that he hadn’t coughed anymore nor made himself sick like his pap had warned him he would. Titus asked, “But he still didn’t know for sure if that river pilot was dead?”

“Didn’t matter,” she said matter-of-factly. “Mathilda wanted the bastard dead her own self. She was the one used that pistol’s flintlock to drop a spark down on the powder, setting it off and putting the coal oil to flame just as Ebenezer was loosing the mooring ropes. He pulled her onto the wharf afore he jumped back onto that flatboat and steered her long enough to get it out of the harbor into the main channel of the river.”

“Then what’d he do?”

She took the pipe from him, sucked on it twice without results, and said, “’Pears you’re out’n tobacco. I’ll get us some more.”

He sat up at the side of the bed and pulled a blanket around himself, anxious to hear the rest of the story as she went back to the skin pouch in the walnut chest, then squatted by the fire. “Tell me what Ebenezer done out on that burning boat headed into the river.”

Holding the stump of the straw in the flames, Abigail explained, “Why, he gone and jumped in the river—an’ don’t you know he was cut up and bleeding pretty bad—but he swum right back to where Mathilda was waiting for him at the wharf. By the time he got hisself swum there, a goodly crowd was watching, and they dragged him out of the water. I was there by that time too. We all stood, with the rest—watching that boat drifting off across the Ohio, burning to beat the band. Ever’ now and then there’d be a poof, and come a big shower of sparks like a cannon firing. And soon enough—there weren’t no more fire, and no more Pennsylvania flatboat.”

This time he readily took the pipe from her and put it to his lips.

“I gotta pee,” Abigail declared, as if she made such a confession to men all the time.

His eyes widening, he snatched for the blanket with one hand, pushing himself off the bed. “I’ll go stand … go outside—”

“You silly,” she chided, her smile one that involved her whole face. Abigail inched over to the chamber pot. “Just turn away and look at the fire.”

From the corner of his eye he watched her for a moment as she turned her back to him, then flipped out the bottom of the blanket to squat over the chamber pot. As she rose, he quickly looked back at the fire and sucked on the pipe. Once more he glanced from beneath the shock of brown hair that spilled across his brow, finding her scoop a handful of red cedar shavings from the copper kettle, which she tossed into the pot. He heard her slide open the crude door and carry the pot out.

While she was gone, the door hung open—the small fire’s warmth scurried from the room in one long draft. Then she was back, closing the door behind her, seeming to bring with her an aura of cold and dampness that clung about her threadbare blanket.

“I feel like I ain’t et in a week,” he said as she took the pipe from him. “How about us going out for some breakfast?”

“Ain’t time for breakfast yet,” she said, setting the pipe on the table and turning back to the bed.

Glancing at the door, he asked, “Ain’t morning yet?”

“Still dark out there. Hardly a soul moving.”

He watched her lie back on the bed, slowly sliding the blanket back from her body in that firelight and frail, wispy lamplight. Not able to help himself, he swallowed hard, staring at her bony hips, that dark delta between her legs, then up across her flat belly to those fleshy breasts. He licked his lips, mouth gone dry as he found her staring at him, her eyes intent.

Patting the narrow bed beside her, Abigail said, “C’mon in here with me, Titus. I’m certain we can find us something to do till it’s time for victuals.”