Dance on the Wind

19

The air was pregnant with the fragrance of early summer while his nostrils drank in the heady aroma of fresh-cut grass even before he opened his eyes to the sun creeping over the horizon. Without looking he knew it was morning’s call: clearly making out the gentle lowing of a half-dozen cows below him all chewing their breakfast in their stalls.

Titus stretched, yawned, rolled over, and pulled the blankets over his head, grinding out a new place for both his shoulder and hip down in the soft crunch of the fragrant stalks that cradled him in the barn’s loft. Moments of blissful reverie swallowed Bass until that voice jarred him.

“You coming down to help out today?”

Damn.

Titus shoved his blankets back from his face and replied, “I’ll be down straightaway, Mr. Guthrie.”

Instead he lay there for a few moments more—listening, hearing the settler murmur to his cows, settle atop a stool and begin milking. The first stream of milk struck the red cedar piggin loud enough for Titus to hear it. He had slept in again, later than he’d intended. Right now he didn’t know whether he should be angry with himself, or the girl.

But then he smiled. How could he possibly be angry with her for keeping him up late into the evening after a long day, talking as they did on the porch to her parents’ cabin? A few days ago he had decided there were no two ways about it. He simply would have to work hard not to fall in love.

For certain, this wasn’t anything like what it had been with Amy Whistler. That was nothing more than some mutual exploration and discovery, wherein she was seeking a dutiful husband and Titus was craving some relief from all those greatest mysteries of youth.

Nor was this at all like what he had experienced with Mincemeat back in Owensboro for close to three years. That had only been a matter of his hungers and his loneliness. Nothing more to it, he had kept himself convinced. All Abigail Thresher had done was guide him into manhood; then in return she was free to take all that she wanted from him through their season upon season together as that Kentucky frontier settlement grew like a gangly child.

When he awoke one cold morning this past spring to find that she hadn’t come home to the tiny shake-and-pole cabin he had built for them, Titus went off asking to round her up—fearful at first she had been hurt by one of the violent men who were a river-port prostitute’s only clientele. That’s when he was told Mincemeat had run off for New Orleans. As much as she had talked about it over the years, he had never once truly believed she really aimed to go there.

That morning he was unable to understand why anyone would want to go to New Orleans. Bewildered and shaking his head, Titus trudged back to their shanty—to find that Abigail had not only run off with what little weekly pay he had just earned from his work at the wharf, but over the past few days, with him gone to work, she had evidently been rooting around until she found his secret cache of what coins were left him from his trip downriver on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky broadhorn bound for New Orleans.

As spitting mad as he was at first, it didn’t take long at all before he found himself laughing until he cried, there and then in that shanty leaking with a cold early-spring drizzle, thinking how his New Orleans pay was on its way back down the Ohio and Mississippi right about then, traveling full circle without him.

That very day Titus determined to up and set out downriver himself.

Just shy of the mouth of the Ohio he decided he’d make camp and wait to fetch himself a ride to the far shore of the chocolate-hued Mississippi. After three days of signaling to every passing keelboat and broadhorn and even the ungainly log rafts, a flatboat finally pulled over to tie up at the bank nearby late one afternoon. In return for bringing in a couple of deer for the hungry crew’s supper, Titus was awarded a trip to the west shore of the old muddy river at dawn the next day.

Waving in farewell, he watched that boat’s crew urge their broadhorn into the main channel. On south lay the mouth of the Arkansas and the White and all the rest of those rivers he had floated past when he was younger. Now he stood there on the far side of the Mississippi at twenty, turning expectantly to face the north that spring of 1814. Upriver. New country he had never laid eyes on. Nothing else really concerned him now but moving north. His eager feet set themselves in motion.

St. Louis lay somewhere beyond the horizon. How far, he had no idea. At the time it really had mattered little when he would reach that mythical place. For the time being, he exalted in the journey itself. He was young, feeling the fiery surge of every heartbeat as the wide breadth of his life seemed to stretch out before him. For now, time as measured in days, months, or years was of little concern for him.

He was on his way to see for himself the city that had lured Levi Gamble out of the eastern forests … when one evening Titus heard nearby the lowing of cows, about the time he was ready to roll himself up in his blankets that twilight. How his mind whirled with memories of home and barns, turned earth and the heady aromas of a cabin kitchen. No, sir—those surely weren’t wild critters he heard. Why, one of them even wore a bell by the gentle clang of it.

Titus had followed the lowing to its source, and near dark he’d found the shed attached to a corral and paddock. Beyond stood a cabin where a telltale thread of smoke rose from the stone chimney. In the lengthening shadows Bass decided he didn’t feel all that much like company. Quite the contrary, the possibility of warmth in that cattle shed beckoned him even stronger. After a solid night’s rest, he figured to be up and on his way early enough, scaring up something for breakfast somewhere down the trail.

Besides, this settler might even have him a chicken or two roosting in that shed. And chickens just might mean eggs. Even pullets, those young chickens less than a year old, would mean eggs for a settler. Titus sorely missed his eggs. In these years since fleeing Rabbit Hash, he hadn’t eaten anywhere near as many as he used to eat back in Boone County. Yes, indeed. It had all sounded like a fine, fine idea to lay out his blankets in that shed for the night, then purloin himself some eggs come dawn and cook them in his cup over a breakfast fire once he had put a few miles between himself and the settler’s place later that morning.

Trouble was, Titus was about to learn that Able Guthrie was an early riser.

Which meant that he awoke not to the gentle cluck of a chicken or two as they went about laying his breakfast. No, Bass awoke instead to someone tapping the bottom of his bare foot, just barely opening his eyes enough to squint up at the muzzle of that big fowler the settler had pointed down at his privates.

“You wanna keep all your parts in working order, I’ll pray you tell me what you’re doing here in my shed.”

While there had been guns pointed at his head and his heart, never had Titus Bass had one aimed at that most tender piece of his anatomy. A downright pleasurable piece it had proved itself to be too.

“Ju-ju-ju—”

“Spit it out, son.”

“J-just sleeping.”

The settler poked the muzzle of that gun firmly against Titus’s crotch. “Where you from?”

“Nowhere … n-now.”

“Don’t fun me!”

“Ain’t gonna try funnin’ you a bit.”

“Best you tell me where you hail from.”

“Owens … Owensboro.”

“On the Ohio?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What you doing here in this country?”

“Set on seeing St. Louie.”

“So you sleep good?” the settler asked him, something easing around his eyes.

“I’m beginning to figure I slept too damned good,” Titus grumbled, looking cross-eyed down at that rifle stuffed into his crotch.

“Don’t pay to be sneaking into a man’s cow shed and sleeping the night away less’n you can get up afore that man stumbles onto you, does it?”

“No, sir,” he replied as polite as he could, watching something slowly crossing the man’s face that convinced Titus he might soon be breathing a bit easier.

“Way I figure it,” the settler said as he leaned back, dragging that big muzzle away from Bass’s most responsive part, pointing at the floor as he continued, “you owe me a little of your time and muscle.”

“T-time … and muscle?”

The farmer quickly gazed around him at the small shed and sighed. “This ain’t gonna do me much longer, son. Already I’ve gone an’ laid the corner posts for a new barn. Staked and stringed everything else. I figure you can help me today afore you push on tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“You’re likely to be real tired after I work you hard as I’m gonna today. You’ll wanna sleep another night right there in that hay.”

Bass had to grin with relief. And that had made the settler smile, finally raising his fowler away from its delicate target.

“My name’s Able Guthrie.”

He held his hand up to the man. “Titus Bass.”

“You come down from Owensboro of recent, yes—I remember,” Guthrie replied. “Well, c’mon, young Mr. Titus Bass. The woman’s waiting breakfast for us.”

“B-breakfast?”

“Damn right, er—pardon me,” Guthrie apologized sheepishly. “I don’t but rarely curse. The woman don’t like it—not a hoot—and I promised the Good Lord I wouldn’t do no cursing around my girl.”

Bass threw back the blankets and stood, dusting hay from his clothes. “Girl? Your family?”

“Only the one. Marissa. After her my woman couldn’t have no others. Had hoped for at least one boy to have my name. Carry on the family, like any man would hope for.” He flashed a courageous smile, his eyes crinkling with such brave, good humor in that way Titus would come to appreciate in those months still ahead of them. “But I got me a fine, fine girl. A strong woman she’ll be real soon. Gonna raise her mama and me some handsome grandbabies. You come now and have your breakfast afore we start the day.”

“Don’t believe it,” and he wagged his head. “You’re gonna feed me.”

“Sure as hell am…. Dear Lord, there I go again!” He whispered this last, his eyes flicking at the cabin, where the door opened and a full-framed woman waved him in from the cow shed. “Sure I’m gonna feed you. I can’t expect a man to work his all for me without first putting some fodder down into his belly.”

They had crossed the muddy yard, dodging greasy rain puddles and fresh cow dab close by the paddock to reach the cabin, where they climbed onto the low porch and pushed through the open doorway that faced south like most settlers’ places erected foursquare with the world. It made perfect sense for the main entrance to look out on the southern side, which stayed sunny in the winter, cool in the summer, where the hard-driving rains and sleet and snows that mostly came out of the north and west of those hard months of the year could not beat in upon those taking shelter there.

Guthrie led him into the main room, thick with the heady perfume he had long ago forgotten. Like a warm flood the seasoned memories washed over him. Titus drank in the aromas of sizzling sausage, fragrant biscuits just scraped free from the Dutch oven, pungent smoked bacon piled high on a big platter at the center of the table where Guthrie went to settle. The seductive allure of boiled coffee made his mouth water almost as much as the sight of that pitcher of creamy milk and an apple-tree knot that served as a bowl for freshly churned butter just waiting to be lathered on those biscuits.

Looking around the room in amazement, Bass took in the hutch table covered with wooden bowls and pewter trenchers and utensils, several three-legged stools and a handful of half-log benches, on the shelves near the fireplace a hominy block, deerskins laid out for rugs across the uneven floor, brass tinder boxes with their dull sheen near the hearth, lug poles for the tea kettles and cast-iron cookware handy by the mantel, pepper grinders squatting on the table before him, a well-used cherry seeder atop a small table stuffed back in the corner, joined there by a coffee mill and a butter paddle, yellowed by use and age, lying among it all.

“This here’s the woman, my missus,” the settler said, steering Titus’s attention away from the table to the woman rising from the fireplace with the bail of her Dutch oven at the end of her arm, still scraping loose the pull-apart biscuits that had baked themselves together in a mounded loaf beneath a golden-brown hue. “Lottie, the young fella’s name is Titus Bass.”

“Ma’am,” Titus replied, glancing once at the woman’s flushed face as she dragged the entire biscuit loaf onto a platter with her wooden spatula. In wet-mouthed wonder he went back to gaping at that table. He hadn’t eaten like this in … in longer than he could remember. A real sit-down family meal, complete with all the fixings he could ever hope to have for breakfast.

“How would you like your eggs?”

He turned dumbly at the new voice, startled to discover the other female at the fireplace had turned to him, a great iron spatula in one hand, a coarse linen towel in the other, hand and towel both wrapped around the handle of a large cast-iron skillet. She squatted beside it so she could swing the trivet it sat upon over the flames in the fireplace made of stones daubed with a proper plaster of lime and gypsum, the chimney of fine-grained sandstone.

“Eggs?” Titus answered her with his voice rising, stunned by the surprising beauty of the girl, finding her cheeks flushed by the heat at the fire, sensing a thrill at the way her chestnut hair spilled down each side of her neck in curls she kept pushing out of her way … then suddenly he felt guilty as a pig snatcher, remembering last night how he had planned on gathering up a few of those very same eggs for himself, then stealing off into the dawn before anyone in the cabin was the wiser.

“Maybe you don’t like eggs?” she asked him.

Able Guthrie nudged into the discussion, saying, “Mayhaps he don’t, Marissa.”

“Eggs?” Bass repeated, and swallowed hard again, locked into looking at her deep, round eyes. So much like a doe’s. Heavy-lidded, long-lashed, and damned near as big around as that skillet she sat beside. “I I-like eggs a whole lot. Yes, ma’am. I mean miss. Sorry. Yes. Eggs. I’ll take me some.”

“How many?”

“A couple maybe.”

Atop his crude cane chair Guthrie snorted, turning to his daughter and waving a hand in her direction as he said, “Just g’won and fix him a half dozen for starters, daughter. I’m planning on having you women stuff this here young fella so I won’t feel the least bit guilty ’bout working the bedevil out’n him till dinnertime.”

Titus grew wide-eyed, asking, “Dinner too?”

“I figure by midday I’ll work your breakfast off you,” Able explained, planting his elbows on the rough table. “So these two here gonna fill you back up come dinnertime. Then later on—by supper—it’ll be getting dark, so it’s only fair I feed you again at the end of the day. So tell me: that sound like fair pay for using your muscle and ’flowing you a place to sleep out to my cow shed?”

“I’m making syllabub for dessert this evenin’,” the girl at the fireplace said.

He looked from Able Guthrie to the girl. “S-sylla …”

“Syllabub,” Lottie instructed, coming to his shoulder. “It’s a fine and heady drink we make by mixing fresh cream with our own apple cider and whipping it up to a fine froth.”

It made his mouth water just thinking about how sweet it might rest upon his tongue. The girl at the fireplace smiled softly as she turned back to her chore of cracking eggs over the skillet. For the moment he wasn’t sure if it was the flush of the fire’s heat, or the crimson of her own embarrassment that had brought such a lovely blush to Marissa Guthrie’s face.

“Yes, sir,” Titus eventually said, turning on his stool to look at the settler. “That’ll do … I mean them meals—they’ll do just fine for my pay, Mr. Guthrie.”

“Then sit yourself and dig in,” the woman said, moving past the table in a swirl, a tangy cloud of sourdough clinging to her. “I’m Lottie—seeing how Able forgot to introduce us proper. You eat, and make yourself to home, son. We don’t get much folk out here. Not much folk at all.”

“What folks there is seem to be on the hurry north to St. Lou,” Guthrie explained as he speared some fat sausages onto his pewter fork and freed them into his shallow wooden bowl. “While other folks is scampering south—getting as far away from that place as a person can get.”

Lottie Guthrie turned to Titus, asking, “You want to see St. Louis yourself?”

“Yes’m. Figured I would see it for some time now.”

“Don’t be in such a rush, young Mr. Bass,” Able Guthrie warned. “There’s far more to life than the push and shove of folks when they get all crowded together, more to living than the hurly-burly of wine and song and the great trouble all that can bring a man.”

“Able Guthrie! Leave this young’un alone,” Lottie snapped as Marissa came to the table with the skillet still sizzling with more than a dozen eggs popping in hot grease. She settled on a bench opposite Bass.

“Just giving Titus his due, as I would warn and watch over my own son, missus.”

“Just like you keep me from ever knowing anything about St. Lou,” Marissa suddenly spoke up.

“Many are the times I think I done the wrong thing to come across the river to set down new roots here—just after the earth shook more’n two year back,” the settler grumped. “The farther away from that sin hole, the better, you ask me.”

She leaned toward Titus as if exchanging a confidence. “My pa claims the devil makes his home right up there in St. Louis.”

“He truly does!” Guthrie bawled, dragging some eggs out of the skillet, piercing the fat yellow yolks in the process. “And that’s a fact.”

Just looking at those fried eggs made Titus’s mouth water with an unaccustomed tang.

“Hush and let the boy eat his breakfast,” Lottie scolded. “You gonna go off and work him so hard, then I say, hush: let him have a minute’s peace to put away all this food and ’llow it settle in his stomach.”

“Maybe you’re right, woman,” Able said, grinning at Titus. “We treat this young man good, I might just get more’n just a day’s work out of him. Might talk him into staying on so’s I got a extra hand to see that barn gets built before he skedaddles off north to see all the devil’s temptations what wait up in St. Lou.”

“You hush yourself and eat, Able,” she scolded.

The settler grumped under his breath, but spoke not another word as Marissa slid Titus’s tin cup toward her, pouring him some foamy, cream-rich milk from a dented pewter pitcher. That hand of hers she had wrapped round the cup lingered a moment too long in passing it to the visitor, just long enough that his roughened, callused fingers brushed hers as he took it from her. She’d pulled back as if she was scalded, then shyly looked up from her hand to peer across the table at him from beneath some of those chestnut curls spilling across her great, round calf eyes.

He had sensed the sudden flight of tiny wings across his belly. Bass swallowed hard, all but choking on the bacon he had just bitten off. “I … I think I might just do that, Mr. Guthrie,” he forced the words out, almost embarrassed as he turned to look at the settler. “Might like to hang on a while and help out with raising your barn.”

How he liked the way those calf eyes sparkled when he said that to her father, how one side of her pale, pink lips curved up in just the faintest hint of satisfaction. It was as if she were admitting to what he had just then owned up to. And that would mean moving St. Louie to the back of the fire for now—off the hottest of the coals. Way he was feeling right about then, Titus figured this girl mayhaps would make the delay worth any cost in days, or weeks, or even months….

“I asked if you was coming down to breakfast or not, Titus,” Abie’s voice cracked through his reverie, dissipating his remembrance of that first morning he happened on the Guthrie place.

Yanked back to the present, Bass kicked his way out of the covers and reached for his britches, pulling them over his bare legs.

“Coming, Mr. Guthrie.”

“That mean today?”

“Now, sir,” he said, crow-hopping his britches up his legs.

He so enjoyed lying naked with her, his legs pressed against hers, locked around hers, the two of them knotted within a tangle of heat and perspiration as they struggled together nearly every one of these short, hot summer nights. A strong tingle twitched through his groin now, stirred just by thinking about Marissa and the pleasure her body gave his.

He pulled his working shirt from the peg driven into the beam right over his makeshift bed and dragged it over his head. A yoked, drop-shoulder shirt with three bone buttons in front. She had made it for him, sewn it with her own hands, having dyed the tow cloth a pale buckskin color from crushed walnut shells. It smelled strongly of him from that first day, all sweat and dust and fresh-sawed lumber, even some hint of the animals in the paddock below. The honest, earthy smells of a settler.

Heading for the ladder, Titus listened to the wood thrush singing of late summer and decided what smell he liked best was hers. The heated eagerness of her these brief, sultry nights as summer reached its peak. The taste of her sweat trapped in that small cleft at the bottom of her throat. The hot earthiness of her mouth once he had taught her how to kiss back with her tongue and her teeth, her lips scampering all over his body like a ravenous beast he had unleashed within this lonely settler’s girl.

She was waiting on the porch for him that morning. And Lottie stood in the doorway, just as she did every morning.

From the look Mrs. Guthrie had been giving him these past few days, it was certain the woman had already figured out how her daughter felt about this young stranger who had wandered into their lives last spring. Lottie’s warm smile this morning said it all, said how she approved of Marissa’s choice.

“They been fighting north of us for some time now,” Guthrie declared that late-summer evening when they gathered in the cool of twilight.

“You getting worried for us, Able?” Lottie asked from her chore of setting a new hackle on the spinning wheel.

“No,” the settler admitted. “Not with St. Louis north of us. Chances are slim that place will ever fall in British hands even if them redcoats and their Injuns come down the Mississip.”

“My grandpap fought the British,” Titus explained. “Back to Kentucky. They sent the Injuns down on the settlers then too.”

“Oh, dear,” Lottie exclaimed a bit breathlessly.

Guthrie shot Titus a severe, disapproving look before he turned to his wife. “It’s a different time, dear. And a different place now. My own pa fought against the soldiers of the British crown just afore he come back home to marry my ma. No, them redcoats and their cutthroat Injuns can run all over hell up there on the lakes—”

“Able!”

“Sorry, Lottie,” he apologized. “They can run all over that north country they want to, it ain’t gonna do ’em a bit of good.”

“Your pa and me heard yesterday the talk from that neighbor of your’n,” Titus said to Marissa. “There’s word of the Britishers landing at the mouth of the Messessap.”

“New Orleans?” Marissa asked of that evening, the air filled with the joyous calls of whippoorwills and scritch of the katydids, noisy of a summer night, along with the soft but reassuring clang of the old cow’s bell down in the paddock. She turned to tell her mother, “Titus told me all about New Orleans.”

Lottie’s eyes widened in disapproving exasperation as she glanced at her husband.

“Yes,” Able replied. “Word was that folks fear the redcoats gonna attack New Orleans.”

Exuberantly, Titus added, “Which means them Britishers likely to try squeezing us atween ’em.”

“From the north up there at the big lakes with all their wild and bloody Injuns,” Guthrie said. “And now from the south.”

“Where they just might get them Chickasaws and the rest to join their fight agin the Americans,” Titus added as he set the peg he had just whittled into the Cumberland basket with all the rest he had finished that night.

Instead of what frontier folks called an “Indian basket”—one made of cane splints or even grass stalks—the Cumberland was woven of white-oak splits, the very same material the pioneer used to weave chaif bottoms, that oak peeled in the spring at the same season he peeled his hickory bark.

Sitting atop split-log benches on the narrow porch, Titus and Able worked beneath the light of two candle lanterns, each of them carving out a different size of peg. Like expensive, hand-forged nails, these oak pegs were used for all sorts of construction and repair on the frontier farms.

Nearly every evening the males all along the border country spent their last few hours after supper and before retiring to bed repairing wood and leather farm equipment, if not whittling the pegs they would use in making those repairs to buckets and kegs, yokes and plows. Whittling at pegs as well as buttons for the barn door, grainmill gears from good, strong hardwood, beech or oak carved into a dasher for the red cedar butter churn—although every good farmer knew that beech always seemed to decay far before its time—maybe even a wooden door hasp, complete with turning key. Seemed that a man never stopped whittling—even as he sat up with a sick relation taken to bed with a fever, waiting for the ague to loosen its grip on a loved one. All time was precious in and of itself on the frontier, and so best used in keeping one’s hands busy.

While panes of glass could be had inexpensively, iron wasn’t cheap in this country. What there was of it found its way down the Ohio, thence up to St. Louis, where the price of the long iron bars just the right thickness for making tenpenny nails easily quadrupled with the cost of its transportation. Like most settlers, Able Guthrie was a fair enough hand at the hot and sooty work over a forge and bellows, although most men on the frontier generally used the cabin fireplace for their forge and a block of wood topped with a thick plate of iron for their anvil. There they could repair a broken grubbing hoe or fashion a badly needed log chain—for pulling up stubborn stumps—from strips of iron cut with a cold chisel, even reshape and sharpen a worn plowshare, and always, always repair their most vital tool on the frontier: firearms.

True enough that, for most things, repairs with wood and rawhide proved to be far cheaper than repairs with expensive and hard-to-come-by strap iron. Not to mention that most settlers preferred to weld all their wood construction together with pegs hammered into hand-drilled holes lathered with a generous dollop of oakum, which would swell each peg and seat it with no possibility of give, instead of investing in the cost and time to forge-cut and hammer out all the iron nails the same job would require.

“Over in the Illinois I’ve heard tell a time or two of them Chickasaws,” Able said. “That bunch you told us jumped you, then killed your flatboat pilot. They sound just like the sort the redcoats could talk into making war down on the lower Mississip.”

“Just as long as we got warning,” Lottie said as she settled back onto her stool beside the spinning wheel, shifting her skirts up to lay a moccasin on the treadle. “We can get ourselves out of here afore they come tearing through.”

Indeed. Such worry had always been a fact of life on the borderlands.

For more than a year now there had been growing unrest along the western frontier, an uneasiness wrought of rumor and speculation, to be sure, but more so born of a genuine fear that a real threat of Indian invasion once again existed. Like Able Guthrie and Titus Bass, frontier folk were people with family who had fought in the French and Indian War, and a short generation later battled against the British—this time in bloody rebellion against the crown.

Word carried up and down the river in the last year or so that every Indian nation between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains had come under British influence, summoned to revolt against the Americans by none other than Tecumseh, whose very name struck fear into the hearts of many white settlers strung out along the borderlands. Robert Dickson, the sinister British Indian agent upriver at Prairie du Chien, had himself been fomenting all the unrest and insurrection he could—sparking serious fears that thousands of wild-eyed, painted warriors were about to descend the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in a grand assault to wipe the frontier clear of Americans.

Despite the fact that they had launched an invasion of the Illinois in 1813, and a year later Clark himself had led a campaign against the British at Prairie du Chien, they had been less than successful in choking off the possibility that Tecumseh’s federation might just thunder across the sparsely settled frontier. Rumors continued to ignite American passions as those hardy souls waited in the darkness of their lonely cabins, watching and listening, keeping their guns primed and always within reach, whether by the door, or in the fields as harvest neared. These were not a people easily frightened, nor given to hobgoblins of their own making. Folks who had cleared land and settled in that fertile band of country extending from the lower Missouri to the mouth of the Arkansas all had very legitimate fears when reports came north of redcoats down the Mississippi.

Now with all this talk of the British bringing in their huge men-of-war to New Orleans, there to off-load lobster-backed regulars in preparation of launching a pincers invasion on the entire Mississippi valley … why, it only gave the faint of heart another reason to dwell long and hard on heading back east somewhere, anywhere the British weren’t coming ashore and the Indians weren’t skulking.

“I’ll tell you this for a fact,” Able declared, dusting shavings off his lap onto the porch and standing to stretch backward, working the kinks out of his spine. “The Injuns don’t need no British to help ’em make trouble in this country. Forests thick as they are hereabouts, the Injuns got millions and millions of friends.”

“Friends?” Titus asked, nicking a finger with his knife.

“The trees,” Guthrie answered, jabbing his knife into the dark. “Trees what can hide them savages as they come sneaking up on a settler’s place. Hide ’em again after they’ve done their devil’s work and are skulking away into the forest, getting off with scalps and prisoners and everything else the durn blooders can carry away.”

“There simply ain’t no way of figuring what goes on in an Injun’s mind,” Lottie added as her foot rocked the treadle, the hackle spinning in rhythm with the giant wheel as the wool fibers wrapped themselves around one another in a long, continuous strand she was carefully taking up on another spindle.

Marissa sat nearby atop a three-legged stool as the air cooled and the twilight deepened, carding more of last spring’s wool sheared from the family’s sheep. He looked at her a long moment, watching her hands at work, remembering his mother at work on her own linsey-woolsey, the cane splints clacking as she moved them back and forth in the weaving sleigh, making her coarse cloth for those loved ones needing new shirts and britches, dresses and stockings.

“The missus is right, Titus,” Able agreed. “No way of knowing when Injuns will break loose. That’s why my folks kept the doors barred tight, and come summer they plugged the chimneys too.”

Bass looked up at Able. “Injuns come in down the chimneys?”

“They sure as … they sure do,” Guthrie said, barely catching himself. “They’ll come to get you anyways they can. Mingoes, Wyandots, them Shawnee what your grandpa fought in his day. Any and all of ’em. They’re the devil’s seed, that’s the gospel. Their kind’s the red offspring of ol’ Be-Hell-Zee-Bub himself!”

“Didn’t you and Titus tell me word has it Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio are all clamoring for war the loudest?” Lottie asked.

“It’s the God’s truth there,” Able replied. “Folks what settled in country the farthest from the fight with the redcoats appear the most eager to stir things up now.”

Bothersome gnats had gone with the fall of the sun, as had the buzz of the hummingbirds, but still Titus could hear the reassuring chirp of the cicadas clinging to the trees, thinking about how Able had said every one of those big trees was a friend to the Indians coming to wipe the valley clear of Americans. A threat so real that it took on shape and body as he remembered his footrace from the Chickasaw hunting party, the smell of them strong in his nostrils as they boarded the flatboat, grappled hand to hand with the crew, leaving Ebenezer Zane dead.

“While’st it’s the rest of us out here—we’re the ones who’ll fight their war when it comes,” Guthrie eventually added.

“If’n them Injuns was coming,” Titus said in that tone of his when he wanted most to prove he knew whereof he spoke, “they’d long come by now, Mr. Guthrie.”

The settler’s knife stopped in the middle of a long peg, a tiny curl still wrapped over the blade and Guthrie’s finger. After a moment’s contemplation he said, “Maybeso you’re right, Titus.”

“They was coming, they’d come in the first full moon of spring,” Bass explained. “Even first full moon of early summer.”

Guthrie’s brow crinkled. “How you figure it by the seasons like that?”

“I don’t,” Titus replied. “Just recollect what my grandpap allays said. The Injuns, they come right after winter breaks up. Now, well—it’s getting too late in the raiding season.”

With a great harump the settler turned to look at his wife. “See there, Lottie. This young man’s got him some good sense ’bout such things, don’t he, now?” He looked back at Titus. “Let’s just pray your grandpap was right.”

“’Nother thing too,” Bass said as he selected another oak limb to whittle on from the pile at his feet. “Injuns fight for what they figure to be their land.”

“Your grandpappy teach you that too?”

“Yes, sir. Them Injuns folks say are far up the Missouri—’bout them coming down here to raid? No, sir: they won’t get all that fired up ’bout coming down here to fight when this ain’t the land where the bones of their grandfathers are buried.”

Slapping his knee, the farmer exclaimed, “I’ll be damned!”

“Able Guthrie!” Lottie scolded.

“Oh, hush now, woman. I been minding my mouth long enough that I’m due a damn now and again!” He twisted on his half-log bench to gaze at Titus wonderingly. “So you know something of Injuns, do you?”

“Not near enough,” Bass replied with a disarming smile. Then he remembered. “What I didn’t know almost got me kill’t in Chickasaw country four years back.”

Guthrie rocked against the cabin’s wall, gesturing with his knife at the youth. “Just my point, son. Just my point. Don’t you ever forget it. No matter how right or wrong you are in them Injuns invading us here in this country … you just remember that as soon as a fella thinks he’s got an Injun figured out, that fella’s made him a big mistake.”

That made immediate sense, sinking in the way it did all at once. He grinned back at Guthrie. “I do believe them are words a man can live by, sir. An Injun is a real uncertain critter. Yes, sir. An Injun is a most uncertain critter.”

“You ever said anything to your ma about us?”

He sensed Marissa’s hair glide across the bare skin of his chest, that flesh feeling a little tighter now as the sweat dried.

“No, I ain’t said a word.”

“She knows.”

“I know she knows,” Marissa replied, then fell quiet for a time, and finally added, “I guess a mother always does know when her only daughter falls in love.”

He wondered how it felt to be so completely swallowed up in love like she was, like he was afraid to be. He lay there listening to the cicadas and the peeping of the tree frogs, and her breathing against his chest. The sweet, heady fragrance of forsythia and redbuds exuded a delicate perfume on the air. A few yards away the thick, verdant woods abounded with violets and wild plum having just come to bloom.

“You think she knows you’re slipping out to come see me most ever’ night now?”

“She can’t help but know, Titus,” Marissa answered. “There’s just something atween a woman and her daughter what I can’t put into words. But one woman always knows when another woman’s in love.”

“How ’bout your pa?”

“Him? He’s a sleeper. A hard sleeper. Works hard every day, so he needs his sleep every night. Not like ma. She don’t get much rest anymore. Last few months. Something’s changed with her—but she won’t own up to it for me. But I know she gets real weary and that sometimes she ain’t sleeping when I come slipping out to see you here. Times I know she’s already awake when I go sneaking back in afore first light.”

“How you feel about that?” he asked, already knowing how he felt: more scared of hurting those good people who had taken him in than he was scared in facing any punishment meted out for dallying with their daughter’s heart.

“If she knows about us and ain’t said anything to me—I figure she don’t have a problem with it. Any way you look at it, my ma’s give us her blessing.”

“Blessing,” he echoed in a low whisper, knowing what Marissa meant.

“I ain’t never asked you if you love me,” she finally whispered against his chest, “even though I been telling you my feelings for some time now.”

“I told you I’d say the words when I knowed I could say ’em.”

“And I always told you that’s fine by me.”

She brushed her fingers across his belly, nails scratching across the bony prominence of one hipbone where the skin was stretched taut. He twitched. It was almost a tickle, but not quite. Something more urgent, deeper and less easily stilled than a tickle that she aroused in him with her wandering touch. As little as she had known about her body and the way of men when they had first grappled in the hay one hot night back in June, Marissa sure had made up for lost time with how she threw herself into their coupling. Some folks was just natural-born riders, or swimmers, maybe even runners. But to Titus, Marissa Guthrie was a natural-born humper. Unashamedly she hungered for him every bit as much as he hungered for her. Time and again he had studied at that cloudy piece of mirror Lottie had given him to keep in the barn for shaving, searching for the telltale bite marks and bruises Marissa had left during her exuberant coupling.

Of a time or two he had even grown scared she would wake up her parents in the nearby cabin, moaning so loud the way she did, mingling her passion with an uninhibited shriek every now and again. But still Lottie never said anything about her daughter’s noise, and Able was likely too tired to hear.

The past few days they had labored long and hard. He and Guthrie had been finishing up splitting some shakes for the cabin’s roof—working fast against the coming of autumn’s harvest and another onslaught of winter. For the past two winters the Guthries had lived beneath a roof constructed of rough-sawed boards jointed with oakum to seal the seams as best the man could. Boards Able had cut into six-foot lengths and laid in overlapping rows, held in place with long, straight saplings called butting poles he pegged down by their ends to roof joists.

Folks along the frontier were always quick to learn the superstitious rites so much a part of working with native woods: a roof board rived on a waning moon would curl; a cedar post would rot before its time if set when the sign was in the feet; or timber cut when the sap was down would last far longer.

Titus listened to Marissa breathing against him for some time, then asked her, “How come you ain’t got no brothers and sisters?”

She trembled slightly when he asked the question, then clutched him tightly as she answered. “I was first born. Nobody will tell me for certain, maybe they don’t know for certain—but I figure me being born hurt something inside my ma. Folks always said it was just God’s will that she and pa had no more children. But I know she missed out on a lot by not having a big family like she and pa had always planned on.”

“That’s why she’s allays talking about the grandbabies you’re gonna give her—”

“The grandbabies we’re gonna give her, Titus,” she corrected. “I just know ma can’t wait to hold our babies, like they was the ones of her very own she missed out on because something got tore up inside when I was born. So you and me gonna give her the little ones she couldn’t have for her own self.”

Every day he found himself growing more and more comfortable with the idea of staying on there. Especially on those nights when she came to him like this and they lay together, cool flesh to cool flesh. Yet every morning after she left him to slip away in the chill, predawn air, Titus sensed his doubts of staying return, his confusion on just how to tell her resurfacing, and, oh—how to explain it to her parents?

He sensed this pull on him as if it were the tides, as if he were floundering in that swimming hole back home where he and Amy had swum as children, then made one another lovers. Floundering he was: flailing away with his arms and legs, not ever drowning, but never getting any closer to shore either. All that work and effort, only to keep his head above water … gasping, gasping for breath….

She was talking to him now about their first night together, recalling how she had come to the bottom of the ladder and called out his name in a whisper until he had poked his head over the side of the loft and looked down at her wrapped in her sleeping gown of fine white linen cambric, one bare foot on the bottom rung. How that bare foot and those little toes had made him want her right then and there. She went on to remind him how scared he had acted when she’d asked if she could climb up the ladder, the better to sit and talk with him.

“I finally talked you into it, didn’t I?” she asked. “Talked you into a lot of things. Just like I’m sure I’ll talk you into falling in love with me one day real soon.”

Then Marissa’s chatter drifted back to that first night, how she had explained to him she wished to be kissed, to be held, just like a woman. Miserable because she believed she was getting so old, when other girls her age were spoken for, some even getting married and starting their families.

“You got lots of time,” he soothed her. “Sixteen ain’t old.”

“Out here it’s old. A girl learns to lye corn and weave nettle cloth at six or seven in this country. My pa always said if he’d had him a boy, he’d learned to hunt and trap afore that boy learned to hoe and plow—at least long before he learned how to read. Why, I know of girls marrying when they was thirteen or fourteen, Titus. Even my ma said she was late in posting her banns—she had me when she was seventeen.”

Lying there, Bass winced on the seriousness of that, this custom of declaring before all that he intended to marry, as his mother had often said, to heartily cleave unto one person and only one person for the rest of his natural life. On the early frontier the parents of young couples announced their “banns”: publicly posting one’s intention to marry on three successive Sundays, allowing anyone who might object for whatever reason the courtesy of so doing.

Now she was running her fingertips down from his chest across his solar plexus, causing his manhood to squirm slightly as she drew nearer and nearer to it with every brush of her hot fingers.

Then she raised herself on an elbow, bit at his earlobe, and whispered to him, hot and moist, “I’ll be a good mother to your children, Titus. Ain’t no one gonna ever be a better woman for you than me.”

“I ain’t ready to have children.” He fought to get the words out. They sounded low and raspy, rumbling in his throat as his own passion rose.

In moments Marissa was biting him across the shoulder, down one side of his chest, and licking across his nipples. As much as he didn’t like that because it tickled, he had never once said anything to her, not daring to have her stop once she got herself worked up enough to start biting and licking his flesh. Instead, he lay there as riverbank clay in her palms, letting her shape him and move him, listening to her breathing become more and more rapid and ragged until she finally climbed over him, taking his rigid flesh in her hand and gently guiding him into her readiness as she settled her buttocks atop his hips.

As much as anything else in what they shared, he liked that part of it—when she first took hold of him and made his flesh a part of her. What fevered grappling he and Amy Whistler had shared, it had never been like this. Maybe it had been what Abigail Thresher had taught him about a woman’s body, taught him about his own, showing him how to satisfy both need as well as hunger.

But maybe, just maybe—it had to do with Marissa Guthrie too.

God, how he didn’t want to fall in love with her, a part of him afraid that he already had.

He looked up at her in the summer light, nothing but starshine, the crescent shadows beneath both small breasts, the rounded shadow beneath her chin as she leaned over him and let her chestnut curls tumble across his face before she met his lips with hers, opening her mouth, moist and hot and flavorful.

He was certain this was how a woman got hold of a man and would never let go. A woman’s power over a man just like this. For a moment he wondered if his mother had been like this with his father—getting Thaddeus so wrought up that he couldn’t leave if he had wanted to. Maybe that’s why his pap stayed on the land, settled in and never again gave thought to seeing what was out there. Maybe it was this mystical power of a woman.

Titus struggled against the rising crescendo orchestrated throughout his body, coursing into his loins—vowing he would not fall in love with Marissa Guthrie because she was too much like his mother: the sort of woman who had the strength to hold a man in one place.

Slowly, slowly she rocked back, back farther still, putting her hands down near his knees as she arched her back and braced herself while she throbbed atop him, round and round in an ever-faster cadence that seemed to join itself with the rhythm of his own heart. How she did that, he didn’t know. Part of the mystery that was woman.

He must not fall in love with her, for if he did, he would forever be there. Never to push on to St. Louis. Never to see what lay up the river where Levi Gamble said furs and Indians and the shaggy buffalo reigned. If he fell in love, Titus was scared down to the marrow of him that he would end up like Able Guthrie. Never to taste the caliber of the wind, never to dance on it a free man.

Like poor Able Guthrie: loving a woman who held him to her so tightly he couldn’t breathe, didn’t have room to roam. A good woman like Lottie, who wanted her daughter to give her the children she had been robbed of having for herself.

A good, but sad, woman.

His mother, a tired and worn woman after four children, three stillbirths, and two other babes who had died within their first year of life. A hard toll, even on a tough woman.

Now he looked at Marissa as she ground herself down onto him, as if she desired to swallow him, engulf him completely—groaning as the beast welled up within her. Did he have it in him to watch what toll childbirth took on her year after year?

He had run from the Chickasaw and fought them up so close, he could smell their sweat and their paint and even what they ate for supper. He had stood against the might of those rapids on the Ohio and held his own against the very worst the great Mississippi threw against a boatman. Titus had even dared free a slave within earshot of his masters, then shoot a slave hunter in the back when that man stood between his friends and freedom. No, let no man be so bold as to say that Titus Bass was one to shrink from fear. Instead, he had learned that fear often emboldened him—made him all the more ready to pit himself against a challenge.

But this … this thing of a woman and love … it was something that nonetheless made him shrink as never before. Afraid to his core. Frightened of Marissa? Yes, he admitted. For he had come to believe that she held the power to make him stay. For some men it might be a woman who kept them prisoner, for those like Able Guthrie. For others, like his father, it might well be the land that held Thaddeus Bass captive. The warm, steaming, fertile earth, that soil rich and black with humus. For a certain breed of man the land was no different from a heated, moist, fertile woman.

At long last he was beginning to understand his pap, and why Thaddeus stayed on and on in one place … almost to the point of growing enraged when his own flesh and blood did not lust after the soil every bit as much as he. Now Titus was coming to understand.

To know why he would be expected to stay here in this place with the Guthries. Not so much because of the seductive lure and hold of the land, but because of the love a man held for his woman. And all that woman needed from him.

She began thrashing her head side to side as she whimpered, raking her fingers down his chest as she reached a crescendo atop him. With great, heaving thrusts of his hips he spent himself violently within her, listening to her muted shriek in response to every last one of his explosions.

Then Marissa collapsed, murmuring in his ear to promise that she would awaken in a while and have him again before she crept off across the starshine splayed on the yard below them, slipping away to her bed in that cabin. The words were no sooner out of her mouth than he felt her breathing deepen, become rhythmic, and he knew she was sleeping.

He lay there for a long time that night, the chestnut curls spilling across his chin, her hair smelling of the musty hay where they always coupled there above the cow pens. Titus lay there knowing that if he ever did fall in love with Marissa, he vowed never to tell her.

For if he told her of his love, he would thereby be trapped in this place. He simply could not be trapped there. Not held in one place, whether held by the land or imprisoned by a woman. Never to lay eyes on the wilderness at the horizon’s edge. Never to taste the bite of the wind as it roared out of those faraway places.

There and then he vowed that should he ever fall in love with Marissa Guthrie, he would have no choice but to simply convince himself that it wasn’t true. Then force himself to leave.

If not for his own good, for hers.