Dance on the Wind

2

How he loved the smell of her. A dusting of flour. The sweet mingling of creamy milk, maybe some rich yellow butter. Perhaps a dash of vanilla beans, or crumbling of cinnamon sticks, even the faintest hint of ginger. Most always the stirring tang of yeast whenever he dared get that close.

Never was there any smell of soap or laundry to her. Much less the earthy odor come of butchering farm animals that clung to other girls he knew. No, none of that—not even the stale, sourish fragrance of dust and sweeping and mopping out the floors rose from her skirts or hung about her hair when he chanced close enough to smell of it. Instead, Amy Whistler had the smell of baking about her, the promise of bread rising and pie crusts turning golden, of corn fritters and johnnycakes and nothing more grand than swollen butter-yellow corn kernels frying in a great iron skillet over the flames of the fireplace. Parched corn. How he had come to favor her parched corn.

“You set yourself on the porch there, Titus,” she told him, grinding her hands into her apron, a tiny cloud of flour puffing about them. “I’ll be out straightaway as soon as the dough is pounded and set to its second rise.”

He watched her retreat back into the shadowy interior of the cabin lit by the glowing fire and those candles waxed atop iron pegs driven into the logs all about the big room, their fluttering giving the place the appearance of constant movement. Then he drank deep of the smell of cool milk and fragrant butter, fresh from the springhouse, and turned with a sigh.

Amy Whistler didn’t grow food to eat in the ground like his father, by God. But from her hands she grew things nonetheless. Tasty and seductive concoctions, confections, and elixirs. Whereas a man who coaxed green vines and tender shoots out of the rich black soil might be called a wizard, Titus had long ago decided she was an angel.

It was more than merely the fact that she was two years older than he. Titus was in awe of the way her hands felt when she let him hold one of them. And only then when they were off and out of sight of her cabin, far from her younger brothers and sisters in that great Whistler brood. How they did flock around Titus every time he wandered down the lane or crossed the country as the crow flew to pay a call on their eldest sister. Out of sheer orneriness did they cling to his legs and arms when he came visiting, beseeching him to play their games with them, to swing on the rope from the great maple that stood squarely in the middle of the yard, or fashion some thing wondrous and new with his folding knife and a sliver of kindling from the woodbox by the door.

Most of them eventually wandered away this evening, as they always did, shooed from the porch by their mama and told to be off to play until sunset. Yet four stayed on, remaining every bit as silent as the bristles on the back of a sleeping hog, standing stock-still no more than a yard away from Titus, all of them staring like statues at him. Watching with such undistracted intensity as if he were going to change shape right before their eyes, sprout wings, and take flight—something that would eventually merit all their rapt, undivided attention. The youngest among them sucked on a thumb. Another repeatedly swiped at a runny nose. A third stood statuelike with his hands stuffed down inside his hand-me-down canvas drop-front britches with new patches repairing old patches. And the last brushed a thick rosy twist of her dusty-red hair in and out of her mouth, sucking on the strands as her green eyes studied Titus.

His eighteen-year-old angel had that same hair, those same eyes. For a moment that remembrance made him smile, to think how little he had noticed Amy Whistler in those days so far behind them now, when Amy had been this young. Hard to believe ten years had passed since he first remembered noticing the girl—not for the beauty of her hair and eyes, but for her lean, hard fists and quick feet. Far from being demure, Amy struck back whenever she felt aggrieved: swinging those tight little fists at an offender’s nose, lashing out with her bare feet to wallop some bully’s shins. No, Amy Whistler was not just a tomboy—she had quickly become one of the boys.

For years the two of them shared the same secret fishing spot, enjoyed the same rope that swung them out over the summer swimming hole, where they let go and dropped into the cool creek of a hot, muggy afternoon, or tracked the same fox and deer, raccoon and turkey, he with his grandpap’s rifle, she with her father’s in hand.

Then one day on the banks of their swimming hole a few years ago, when Amy found Titus gazing at her with unabashed amazement, she had little choice but to own up to the fact that she was no longer a child. While other girls her age had blossomed early, as they so often did on this Kentucky frontier, for the longest time Amy’s figure remained boyish, thin and bony, almost as angular as Titus’s … until she blossomed with a vengeance.

In the short weeks of that single summer years ago, it seemed Amy went from skinny and hard-boned to rounded, filled-out, and more than painfully shy about the sudden changes in her late-blooming body. By the time another year had passed, however, she had come to accept the inevitable march of time, wholly embracing her new station in life. With the arrival of each new summer it seemed Amy Whistler grew more beautiful, acquired new curves, learned more about the way she could hold a boy with her eyes, came to speak to the object of her attentions in that just-audible whisper, or could stand silhouetted by the falling sun to accent her ample figure just so.

It was in this last year Titus found his own body awakening. Oh, for certain he was still as skinny and angular and unsure of just what his muscles might or might not do to embarrass him from day to day—but the greatest changes occurred within. Those first stirrings of manhood. An awakening of the sweet juices of youth that fired his veins—in very nearly the same way as had the thrill of the hunt and the flush of conquest for all those years spent in the woods, along the game trails of this Kentucky hill country.

It wasn’t just that Amy had changed into a woman right before his eyes … it was that now Titus looked at her differently. No longer as merely a best friend, a companion, a confidante who kept his secrets from all others. No, he could no longer confide in her his deepest secret now, unable to tell her the way she made him feel when she came near, when he touched her hand, smelled her hair, felt her soft lips press against his bony cheek each time they parted. These feelings were the first he kept from her, unable to find words for what confusion he sensed, something so deep inside that it shook him with a tangible lurch across his groin. It was a mystery he could not hope to have explained by a distant, critical father, let alone his mother. Perhaps what made things even worse was his position as the oldest in the family: there were no brothers to confide in.

So Titus struggled along through the days and weeks and months of his own coming of age among other boys who seemed to have mastered their arrival upon the threshold of manhood with no strain at all, much less break out into those sweats Titus suffered every few nights as he lay on his grass-filled tick up in that sleeping loft. Holding his own breath while listening for the reassuring deep-breathing of his brothers and sister, then carefully letting his hand wander down below the covers to touch and explore that part of him he no longer understood with any certainty, finding it hard and swollen, and so eagerly sensitive to his touch. Night after night he rolled over on that rigid flesh and tried to force out of his mind those images of a rounded, soft-skinned Amy Whistler—struggling to think instead on red fox and gray squirrel and turkey roosting in the low branches of the trees … anything but the smell and feel and roundness of Amy so that he could soften what had grown hard, so that he could go back to sleep before the coming sun nudged them all from their beds for morning chores.

On nearly every nocturnal visit of this mystery-made-flesh Titus had been able to will himself back to blissful sleep, yet less and less so these past few weeks as the air warmed and the snow disappeared from the timbered north-facing slopes while the ground budded and the wild things in the forest cavorted. For these weeks as summer approached he could not tear his mind off Amy, drawn again and again to the feel of her lips on his cheek—imagining how they must taste on his own just one time.

Most of all, it was how he looked at her anew this time of the year, this time of his life, not so much gazing at her face, but his eyes instead focusing on her body, how it moved, dwelling on how it might feel pressed against his, how its soft responsiveness would feel beneath his trembling hands.

My, how his heart raced and his throat constricted whenever he closed his eyes in the darkness of that sleeping loft and thought of how she would feel and smell and taste to his lips with her flesh laid against his flesh. Naked. The way they used to swim so many summers gone the way of their innocence.

If only one more time, he prayed. Just to swim together one more time as they had when they were children. So that he might look at her body for himself, see if she had hair beginning to appear beneath her arms and on her chest. Hair, even down there, right where it seemed thoughts of her stirred him the most.

Times were that he wondered if she awoke in the deep of night with such strange, frightening, and deliciously evil dreams stirring her as they stirred him.

“I’m done,” she said as her skirts rustled up behind him. Amy settled beside Titus at the front of the porch. “Go on, now, you all,” she ordered the four away. “Git!”

He watched the quartet of siblings turn and shamble off, each of them turning their head to look back over their shoulder at the intriguing pair when Amy slipped two hands around one of Titus’s.

“You wanna walk?” he asked, hopeful.

She glanced back at the door. “I can’t be gone long. Got things rising, other’ns baking. Mama needs help, and I can’t leave my work for her to do.”

“We got time,” he pleaded.

Then she smiled at him in that crook-toothed way of hers and squeezed his hand. “Yes. We do got time, don’t we?”

He rose, missing her touch already as he pulled his hand away from hers.

“Lemme just tell mama I’ll be back straightaway.”

He watched the swirl of that long dress drop again over her ankles, brushing the tops of her bare feet as Amy slipped inside. The murmur of voices came to him from somewhere within. Then Cleve Whistler came to the door with a length of peeled hickory in one hand, pulling the chewed stump of a cob pipe from his bushy face.

“Evenin’, Titus,” the man said, tossing the hickory strip atop a pile with others he would use to weave a strong chair bottom.

He nodded properly, as one did when one was courting a man’s daughter. “Evenin’, Mr. Whistler.”

The farmer came to the edge of the porch and braced a shoulder against a post there beneath the overhang. “And a fine evenin’ it is.” He breathed deep. “I remember I was your age.” And he pointed back at the doorway with the battered stem of his pipe. “I first come to spoon Amy’s mama when I was your age.”

“Yes, sir.”

Whistler’s brow furrowed. “You’re serious about courting my daughter, ain’t you, Titus?”

His head bobbed in time with his Adam’s apple, just like a string toy he would carve for the younger children from time to time, the kind he could get to dance up and down a piece of hemp twine, clogging atop a white-oak shake.

“S’pose I am, Mr. Whistler.”

He smiled at the youth. “That’s good, Titus. Because Amy is the sort of girl could have any suitor she wanted. Lots of boys would love to come callin’. But she’s set her eyes on you, so it seems.”

“I … I see,” he stammered, concerned what that might portend.

Leaning forward, Cleve Whistler confided in a lower voice, “I just want what’s best for my eldest, you understand. I know your papa and his family—good people. So I figure you’ll make Amy a fine husband, father to lots of her young’uns.”

Titus swallowed again, blinked. Husband? Young’uns? Why, he’d just come to take him a walk with Amy, to touch her hand, to feel her kiss his cheeks, maybe even talk her into pressing her lips against his one time—to hold her body ever so close to his when they did touch in such a forbidden, bewildering way. Maybe tonight even to talk about his fears and this mystery of the fire in his belly if he felt safe enough with her … but here Mr. Whistler was talking about—

“—sure your papa will shave off a piece of that new ground he’s clearing down by the creek and turn it over to you one of these days real soon.”

“N-new ground,” Titus repeated with an uncomfortable stammer.

Cleve Whistler pointed off into the coming dusk, wisps of fog gathering in the low place a hundred yards off on the path to the creek. “Such would make a good place for you and Amy to raise yourself a cabin, where you could start raising yourself a family.”

A family?

How’d things get all so discombobulated so quick? How was Whistler talking about Titus taking a wife and having themselves children, with a cabin all to themselves, when he hadn’t even kissed Amy for certain and for sure right on the mouth the way he had heard tell a man was to kiss a woman to announce he wanted her for his very own gal?

“You’ll make a fine farmer, I’m sartin,” Whistler observed. “Your papa is as fine a man as they come—so you come from good stock. Not that I didn’t fret over you a time or two, Titus. Fret over giving Amy up to you. She bein’ my firstborn and all. But her time’s come.”

“Her t-time,” he echoed, his cheeks burning in embarrassment as Amy came out through the door.

She had taken off her apron and pulled a knitted shawl over her shoulders.

“Amy made that. Did you know, Titus?” Whistler asked, pointing at the shawl with the stem of his pipe as she stopped beside her father.

“It’s … it’s … yes. Real purty,” he replied, looking into Amy’s eyes, at the fullness of her lips.

“I think it’s purty too,” Whistler replied as he put an arm around his daughter’s shoulders. “She’s the kind of woman gonna make a fine man proud one day soon.”

Titus watched Amy kiss her father on his cheek and wondered if she really did know any other way to kiss a man but on his cheek. Had she ever thought of his mouth, and how it must taste, how it must feel—the way Titus so many times had dreamed on the feel of her mouth, and how it might taste to his tongue?

“Now, don’t you two be late, you hear?” Whistler said with a wave of his pipe, smiling at them.

Slipping her arm inside Titus’s, Amy said, “We won’t, Pa. Promised mama I’d be back to take the bread off the fire.”

Cleve Whistler inhaled deeply as Amy turned her beau from the porch. “Fine evenin’ for courtin’. A fine, fine evenin’.”

Crossing the yard, Titus walked dumbly at her side while Amy shooed the younger Whistlers from their heels. As soon as they reached the edge of the woods, she finally spoke.

“Don’t let my pa bother you none. He’s just, well—I figure he’s proud a young man like yourself is courtin’ me.”

“Y-young man like myself?”

With a squeeze of his arm Amy slipped her hand down into his. “Yes. A young man with what my mama calls good prospects.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s what a girl’s supposed to look for in a fella,” she answered.

“How’s that?”

“Someone take proper care of a girl he’s married to. Provide for her and their family. The children they’ll have.”

“Whoa!” he gulped, stopping and wheeling on her. “You … an’ me? Setting up a house and having children?”

“Yes, Titus,” she replied, a small crease knitting her brow with worry.

“I … I was thinking we was friends, Amy.”

“We always been friends, Titus.” She squeezed his hand.

“Where’d all this talk of prospects come from?”

“I been thinking lately,” she replied, turning him, tugging him into motion once more. “And talking to mama: she was your age when she married pa and my age when she had me.”

“Y-you wanna get married to me?”

She stopped this time, dropping his hand and pulling the shawl about her shoulders. “You don’t wanna get married to me?”

With a wag of his head he stared dumbfounded at the ground, at his bare feet a moment, then finally looked at her to say, “I can’t say as I ever thought—”

“Never thought about it?” She turned away from him in a huff, pouting.

He brushed by her shoulder to face her once more. Amy only turned away again. “Have you thought about it, Amy?”

How his heart was pounding, looking at the way her eyes were lit with such fire here at dusk, stealing a look at the way her breasts heaved with each pouting breath there above the arms she had folded across her midriff.

“What’s it all been for, Titus?” she finally asked without looking at him at first. Then her eyes squarely found his. “We knowed each other since we was children ourselves. You growed, and I growed. And … well, the way you been coming by to pay me court and all.”

“I come by ’cause I like to be with you, Amy,” he explained lamely. “I ain’t got ’nother friend I can talk to the way I talk to you.”

“You mean you ain’t been paying me court?” she asked with a quiet squeak. “Wanting to hold my hand or my arm all the time. Telling me to kiss you so much. Looking at me the way you do with those eyes of yours. Don’t go tell Amy Whistler you ain’t been thinking about courtin’ her!”

He waved his hands before him helplessly. “All right, Amy. S’pose I been courtin’ you and just never knowed what I was doing, exactly.”

She nodded once without a word. Not making it any easier on him. How small he felt standing before her at that moment. How much he wanted to put his arms around her and press his whole body against hers, to ask if she finally felt the same stirring deep across her groin that set fire to his.

“And,” he started, “I s’pose I been wonderin’ if’n you … you was really wanting me to pay court to you.”

He didn’t know where those words came from, but there they were, spilled from his tongue.

“Not wanting you to court me, Titus Bass?” Then she giggled behind her hand. “Oh, silly—how many girls has let you kiss them on the cheek, or gone and kissed you back on your cheek?”

With a wag of his head he answered, “None. None others, Amy.”

“How many girls let you just come to call whenever it strikes your fancy to pay ’em a visit, Titus? How many girls you know hold your hand, hold your arm the way Amy Whistler does?”

“None. An’ you know that too,” he said, suddenly feeling on the spot, defensive. His heart’s hackles rose like the guard hairs on one of the family’s redbone hounds. “How was I to—”

“How was you to know I wanted you to pay me court, Titus?”

Amy leaned toward him, only their lips touching, mouth closed, but pressed hard and insistent against his mouth. He blinked all through that momentary kiss, looking at her, finding Amy’s eyes closed.

Then she drew back, opened her eyes, and asked, “Now. Don’t that tell you Amy Whistler wants Titus Bass to pay her court?”

For a moment while he struggled to breathe again, Titus touched his lips with two fingertips. Only now did he realize his flesh stirred with a lightninglike tingle clear down the inside of his thighs to weaken his knees.

“I s’pose it does at that,” he admitted when he took his fingers from his lips. “You didn’t give me no warning, though. Lemme try that again.”

When he stepped toward her, Amy brought her hand up to her mouth and giggled behind it again. “Silly. I don’t just give my kisses away.”

Suddenly he was angry. “Who else you been kissing?”

“No one, Titus. No one.”

“You better not,” he declared gruffly.

“I won’t—not if you tell me we’re courtin’ proper.”

He nodded. Decided he could grant her that. “Yeah. We’re courtin’ for sure.”

“Then I can tell folks.”

“Yeah. You can tell your pap and mam.”

“No, Titus,” she replied. “Tell friends around these parts. Folks up to Rabbit Hash and over to Belleview.”

“T-tell friends?” Now he burned with embarrassment again.

“C’mon,” she urged, taking him by the arm and leading him on down the trail that would take them to the creek where they often sat on one of the limestone boulders above the swimming hole.

“Folks in these parts?” he repeated as his feet stumbled along the dusty path.

“School, too. You can finish up your schoolin’ afore we’re married,” she instructed.

On the frontier, girls simply did not receive any education, informal or not. Such a privilege was left to the males. Instead, girls were to devote themselves to preparing for homemaking and motherhood. Like most young girls, Amy had been given a sitting of goose eggs as a start on her own dower: a goose-down tick and feather pillows. Once her birds were hatched and grown from goslings to geese, the down could be plucked once every seven weeks. Such was a skill handed down from mother to daughter, a task requiring the utmost patience as well as strength and not the least bit of courage in the face of a strong and struggling bird. A goose might well end up with torn skin, while the picker might come away with bites and bruises from the flapping wings.

For those nestled far away on the frontier, feathers were the most expensive item after gunpowder. Good goose feathers would cost a minimum of a dollar a pound. Or, in trade value, a pound of feathers was equal to a gallon of good whiskey. As the oldest in her family, Amy had long ago started on her dower. This very summer she had completed the feather-battened counterpane she intended to spread across her wedding bed—that, and two huge, fluffy goose-down pillows where she and her husband would lay their heads.

Amy continued. “Don’t you see how I want you finish school first? Then you’re ready to build us a proper place where we can set up housekeeping like my mama and papa done when I first came along.”

“Amy—”

“And my pa told me your pa’s gonna give you that new ground he’s stumpin’ this season … now that the other fields is all planted.”

As they reached the boulder there above the placid waters where years before they had dammed up a portion of the narrow creek to create a swimming hole, he asked, “Don’t you think they all rushing us a bit, Amy?”

“Who’s they?” she asked as they climbed.

“Your folks. My folks.”. He shrugged and settled onto his haunches. “Anyone getting us to get married.”

She quartered away from him atop the rock, drawing her shawl around her shoulders again huffily.

He could feel the chill from her. “Amy?”

“If you don’t wanna get married to me, then why you paying me court, Titus?”

How the devil did he know the answer to any of these questions? he wondered right then and there. Ciphering and writing his letters were hard enough in school now, what with the way his mind wandered away to other things—like Amy or the cool shadows of the forest where he wanted to be walking with his rifle. But as difficult as they were, ciphering and writing his letters were nowhere near as tough as the questions she was flinging at him. He wondered if his pap had struggled this hard growing to be a man.

Was it all worth it?

“Well?” she asked him. “If you don’t wanna get married, then why you wasting your time on me? And why the devil am I wasting my time on you?”

He watched her slide down off the far side of the rock. “Amy—c’mon back up here.”

“No. I’m goin’ home.”

“Amy,” he coaxed.

“Got bread due to come off the fire,” she explained, standing still at the foot of the rock below him, yet with her back his way. “Mama be expecting me.”

“They damned well know we gone off to court, Amy.”

Lord, where did those words come from? Right out of his mouth that way, so smooth he sounded like he was sure of himself. Why, when he didn’t feel smooth and sure of himself, no ways?

“Is that what we’re doing, Titus?” she asked finally, turning partway back to face him, looking up at him still seated atop the rock. “Are you paying me court now?”

“I can’t very well spoon you with you down there and me up here.”

She gathered up her long skirt and planted her bare feet along the slope of the rock, clutching her shawl with one hand while she clambered her way back up to sit beside him. His heart was hammering like all get-out by the time she settled and swept up one of his hands. Amy held it between hers in her lap, the way she always did, gently stroking the back of his with her sure, hard fingers.

He smelled the yeast and the flour on her hair as the breeze came up, Smelled the milk and butter and a hint of vanilla. She baked bread like her people had for centuries. Folks what was Englishers from long back.

Titus’s grandpap said they was from a long line of Scottishers, but they’d give up on fighting the English years before and come to the colonies when the lobsterbacks were trying to hang all the rebellious highlanders. Grandpap had many a tale of huge, double-bladed claymorgans wielded by wiry Scots. Legends of lowland battles against the mighty English ranks while small, brave youths swirled in among the lobsterbacks’ herds, stealing the finest horseflesh to drive back north into the moors and sheltering hills amid the angry shouts and whistling gunshots.

He lifted a lock of her dusty-red hair and smelled it. And found his flesh stirring, hardening, heating up.

“You …,” he began tentatively, then swallowed and licked his lips. “Amy, you ever think back on them times we come here to swim of a summer afternoon or evenin’?”

“Yes. I do, Titus. Sometimes I wish we was children again. Do you?”

“No. No, never.” He dropped that lock of her hair and stared at the water below them. “I can’t wait till I’m on my own. Never wanna be a young’un again.”

“When you’re on your own, I’ll be there with you,” she confided softly.

He stared at her mouth as she formed the words, wanting his mouth to touch her lips the way the words just had.

She continued, “We won’t be living with our folks no more. Just each other, with children of our own.”

“I don’t … I never done nothing … with a girl….” And suddenly his cheeks grew hot with shame.

“Me neither,” Amy admitted, turning away.

He felt better when she did turn. Maybe she was as shy about it as he was. Scared to talk of it, as afraid as he was to talk of his fears. “Don’t know nothing about having children—how it happens ’tween a man and woman.”

“Atween a husband and wife, Titus.” She fixed him with her eyes. “Atween two folks what love each other and are making a life together. He works the fields, growing things. And she takes care of all else, growing their young’uns up.”

Young’uns. Hell, most times he was so bewildered, Titus figured he was still just a child himself. Not that he’d let anyone know what he thought. Not Amy and not her folks. And sure as hell he wouldn’t let his pap know. Certain it was that Titus knew he wasn’t grown-up. All he had to do was look at Cleve Whistler, look at his own pap, to know that.

Being a man meant settling down with a woman on your own land, raising up a cabin and starting a family. Leaving your bed before light each morning and working the dark, moist soil into every crack and crevice of your hands all day until you stopped for a cold midday meal of what had been left over from last night’s supper. Then you went back to turning the soil behind the oxen or an old mule, watching each fold of the earth peel away from the share blade as you were pulled along by the animals you coaxed and prodded, whipped and cajoled ahead of you up and down the fields you had cleared of rocks and stumps, fields that you walked over so many times that your bare feet must surely know them by rote.

Being a man meant you hunted only to make meat. You never took up your rifle and disappeared into the woods just to walk among the shadows, across the meadows, along the game trails. Never did a man just go to sit and listen to what the quiet told him. There to watch the deer come to drink, or gather at the salt licks, and not once raise his rifle against them. No, only a boy wasted such precious time like that. Never a man.

A man never played with the same zest and fervor that Titus felt when he stepped past the last furrow of a field at the edge of the trees and looked back, his rifle on his shoulder, then slipped on into the timber, the squirrels chirking their protests above him, the drone of flies and the startled flap of other winged things singing at his ears.

No, sir—only a boy could play as much as Titus wanted to play. A man had more important things to be about than walking in the woods with no purpose at all. Just as Amy had explained it: a man had to provide for others. When all Titus wanted to do was to be left alone to sort out why he wasn’t yet ready to be a man.

How many times had he looked at his pap—really looked at him—studying the way Thaddeus went about things, dealt with situations, reached out to folks and was regarded by his neighbors … only to realize he himself was a long way from being the same sort of growed-up man his pap was? Titus wondered if he ever would be that growed-up. Wondered if such a state just came with time, this settling in to be a farmer, raising a family and crops, raising cows from calves and butcher hogs from shoats. Maybeso being a man just came with time, on its own and natural.

Problem was, everyone around him seemed to be saying now was his time. His own folks, and the Whistlers too. Even Amy her own self—all of ’em was saying it was Titus’s time to grow up to be a man and put aside childish things. For certain he knew he was not a child no more. Not yet a man neither.

Leastwise, not a man in the way every other man he knew of was a man.

They all took responsibility on their shoulders like a yoke and stepped into harness like one of their oxen or that old mule his pap trusted to pull those stumps out of the fields. That was what made a man, he had figured. They took on responsibility for others … when here Titus was having trouble being responsible for only his own self.

Her voice shook him. “I asked: don’t you want that too, Titus?”

Startled, he looked at her face again. Wanting to tell her exactly what she wanted to hear. Some of those smooth, oily words that could come tumbling out of his mouth if he wasn’t careful. Not knowing where they came from, except that maybe his own heat, his own tingling readiness was just the place from where they sprang.

Instead, he told her the truth. What he wanted right then and there.

“I wanna go swimming with you, Amy.”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

“Yeah. I want us to go swimming. Just like when we was young’uns ourselves.”

She shook her head, studying his face. “No. We can’t. Not now. Not ever, I fear. Not like that again.” With a sad look on her face Amy started to pull away. “I gotta get back home now. Don’t want mama to have to pull the bread off the fire for me when it’s my job, Titus.”

He trapped her hands in his. “No. Listen. Just for a short bit. Let’s go swimming.”

“I can’t,” she repeated more emphatically, tugging to free her hands from his grip. “Not time now to do nothing but go back afore my baking’s burned.”

He pleaded, “Then promise me when.”

“Promise you what?”

“We’ll go swimming.”

“I don’t know—”

“Promise me.”

She stopped wiggling, studying his eyes, cocking her head slightly to the side. “This something you really, really wanna do—like we done as children?”

His head bobbed up and down. “More’n anything I could think of doing with you, Amy.”

Finally, after long moments of what seemed like tortured consideration, she answered. “All right. We’ll go swim—”

“When?” he interrupted in a gush.

“Soon.”

“Tell me when.”

Her eyes darted about, as if searching the darkening woods for her answer. “Come Saturday. When your school be out for the rest of summer now that planting’s done. I can get things done back to home so that we got us enough time to have alone, Titus.”

“Saturday,” he said, his mouth gone dry just to think of it, faced with the waiting.

She gazed into his eyes, as if trying to measure something there that even she could not sort out. “Yes. Saturday. You come fetch me up after supper. We head down here and be alone to go swimming like kids.”

“But we ain’t really young’uns no more,” he wanted her to know as he let her hands go.

Amy placed them on either side of his smooth, hairless cheeks. “No. We ain’t children no more.” Then she pulled him to her and kissed him on the forehead. And turned to slide down the gentle slope of the swimming-hole boulder.

At the bottom she looked up at him. “You coming? Fella’s always gotta walk his girl home when they’re courting.”

He glanced at the quiet surface of the pool they had made years before when they were young. Then he looked at Amy in the starlight.

“Yeah. I’ll walk my girl home.”

And realized he could never look back again.

Everything lay before him. Only memories of childhood rested behind him.

And as he walked out of the trees toward the Whistler cabin, Titus wondered if this was how a boy like himself became a man like his pap. Or like Cleve Whistler, who sat on the porch, idly stripping thin slivers of bark from a hickory limb with his folding knife.

“Evenin’, Titus,” he called out, his teeth clenched around the cob pipe. “Amy said you’d be dropping by.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You going for a walk?”

“Yes,” he answered as steadily as he could, hoping his face would not give him away. Titus was afraid a man was sure to see a certain look on a boy’s face when he was about to become a man. “Going for a … walk.”

“Nice evening for it, son.”

Whistler reached over and snatched up a small bundle of long hickory sticks, each more than four feet long. Every one he had peeled and carefully knotted with his knife. He untied the four long leather straps lashed around the narrow bundle, slipped in the limb he had just finished, then retied them all together as tightly as he could before knotting the straps.

In the near distance came the reassuring clang of an ox’s bell, floating in from the fenced paddock.

“You ’scuse me a minute, Titus—I gotta go put these back to soaking an’ bring that ol’ beast in from his feed.”

“Yes, sir. You go right ahead.”

He swallowed as he watched the man’s back disappear around the side of the cabin. Every man Titus knew of had a special trough somewhere close where a fella would keep peeled hickory shafts soaking and straightening, all bound one to the other in a tight bundle.

He sensed something behind him. When he turned, the four of them were there again. Each one of the children stared up at him from those expressionless faces that regarded Titus as if he were of no real particular interest, yet the only thing of any interest at all for that particular moment in their world nonetheless.

“I’m ready.”

He whirled about, finding her on the porch above him. Behind Amy stood Mrs. Whistler framed by the open doorway, tucking a wisp of her hair behind an oversize ear. From the cabin came the strong lure of salat greens simmering in a pepper-pot soup over a fire. Daughter tossed mother her apron, then pulled at the loose end of a ribbon that had held her own hair back from her face.

“Here, Mama,” she said, laying the ribbon in her mother’s palm, then planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek.

No different from the kisses she gives me, he thought.

But when Amy turned back to Titus, she wiggled her head, shaking out her hair, combing her fingers through the long, wavy tresses that caught the sunset with a hint of coppery shimmer. Oh, how he loved her for the way she tossed that mane from side to side. He was positive she had to know what a trembling pan of mush it made of his insides to watch her do something so seductive as flip that hair around, suddenly loosened from its ribbon.

“You young’uns have fun now,” Mrs. Whistler cheered them, waving to them both as Amy leaped barefoot from the porch to his side.

Swallowing hard, Titus waved back and nodded lamely, not taking his eyes off Amy—for the moment he could dwell on nothing more than seeing her get loose of her clothing. He wondered how a woman looked skinned. Shet of her garments—almost like skinning an animal to get down past all the layers of concealment.

He thought he wouldn’t be able to take another breath when she slid her hand into his and tugged him away, stumbling and ungainly as a newborn calf at her side.

“You been looking forward to tonight, Titus?” she finally asked when they had pierced the shadows beneath the timber at the far side of the yard.

He glanced back at the Whistler cabin, her brothers playing mumblety-peg in the yard and her sisters fluttering around that rope swing, not sure what to feel now that he found himself truly alone with her and on their way to the swimming hole. Anticipating to the point that he found it hard to speak.

“M-more’n anything … ever,” he stumbled getting the words out.

Amy didn’t say anything more on that walk through the woods until they reached the creek and turned south, using the game trail that ran close to the bank, a path likely every bit as familiar to their bare feet as it was to the four-legged creatures who shared this hardwood forest. An owl flapped low over their heads as they reached the pool, hooting once in the shrinking light that seemed to compress the world in around them. As far as he was concerned, there really was nothing beyond the ring of trees and tangle of brush that covered either bank, immediately surrounding them with a sense of privacy, intimacy. Despite the coming twilight, the yellow of tansy and whitish-blue of periwinkle were still evident among the fragrant wild clover.

For several minutes they stood at the side of the boulder, staring at the black water stretching to the far bank, not uttering a word. Then Amy finally turned and spoke.

“You still wanna swim with me way we done when we was children?”

“I ain’t really thought of nothing else for days, Amy,” he confessed. “Working that field for my pa, yanking stumps outta the ground—everything I done it made, no matter: I ain’t thought of nothing else.”

Slipping her hand from his, she stepped away to the side of the boulder. “I’ll shinny out of my clothes over here. You stay there and … I’ll meet you in the water.”

“Aw-awright,” he answered, of a sudden dry-mouthed.

He felt that left hand she had been holding grow cool in a gentle nudge of breeze rattling the heavy green leaves on nearby beech and cedar trees. Cool enough to make him aware for the first time that the dampness had been there in his palm all along. He looked down at it, then swiped both palms down the front of his britches. When Titus glanced back up, she was gone behind the boulder.

For an instant he thought of following her, just closely enough to watch her disrobe—a little miffed that she robbed him of experiencing her shinny out of her clothes. Then he quickly realized he would see all of her soon enough. And that set him to tearing at the bone buttons on his square-shouldered, pullover shirt, ripping it from his shoulders and flinging it onto a bush close by. He fought with the wooden buttons at the wide flap of his drop-front britches, then tugged them down his legs and crow-hopped out of them a foot at a time.

The water was cold when he stepped off the grassy bank and into the shimmering pond, cracking the surface of the placid waters that flowed peacefully toward the Ohio River less than two miles off to the northwest. He gasped audibly as the water met his privates, but on he sank as his feet felt their way across the bottom. Within heartbeats his skin grew accustomed to the feel of the pool, and he sank to his chin, arms treading slowly as he moved away from the bank, then turned back to the boulder that stood overlooking the grassy bank.

He stopped, stunned into utter motionlessness.

Amy slipped through the starlight, more silhouette than shape. Just enough starshine and nibbled moon for him to see the milky whiteness of her skin as she emerged from the shadows of overhanging branches, and no sooner had he gasped again than she was swallowed by that shiny black surface of the water, which reflected the night sky the way a tortoise’s shell shimmered like polished ebony. With his belt knife he had carved his mother a pair of hair combs from just such a shell for her last birthday.

Remembering that, he watched Amy sink slowly to her chin, her long hair trailing out behind her on the surface of the water as she slowly rippled her way toward him.

When she was a good six feet from Titus, Amy turned aside and stretched out her body, her legs bobbing to the surface, her feet kicking playfully at the water. Her white body merging with a distinct line against the black surface of the disturbed water, Amy rolled over and swam off toward the far side of the creek.

He watched her feet splash at the water, the curve at the back of her legs where the ankles ran up to meet her calves. There at the crook of the knees she moved up and down ever so slightly as she kicked in a great arc while turning back. And he stared transfixed at the tight mounds of her rump exposed above the water’s plane like a rounded hillock draped with the first snow of the winter in this silvery light. Against that black, glimmering slide of the roiling surface she plied back toward him.

Her legs ceased kicking, her arms no longer crawled through the water as she came close. A little breathless, Amy spoke.

“I forgot how good this feels. Been some time since’t I come down here. So busy helping mama with the chores, with all the rest of the babies.”

He only nodded, and swallowed hard. Unable to speak as she drew up to arm’s length.

She whispered. “I’m glad I come, Titus.”

“Me too.” His eyes sought to divine a vision through that black water. How he wanted to see bare what he had never seen before.

Inching closer, now well within his reach, Amy stopped and bobbed slightly as she settled her feet to the creek bottom. As her shoulders emerged, the tops of her young breasts broke the surface of the water. He felt himself stir, twitch, strengthen like nothing before in all those nights alone beneath his blankets.

“This … this is important to me,” she whispered, as if it were a secret that could not be shared even with the creekbank. “Important to us.”

“Us,” he repeated. Then reached out a hand, hoping to touch.

She felt it brush the underside of one breast, then seized it in one of her own, inching his down along her ribs to rest at the soft curve of her pelvis. Amy shuddered.

“There,” she said. “When you touched me … there.”

“I want to.”

For a moment she didn’t say anything, only stared back into his eyes. Then admitted, “It made me … not like you was tickling me. Just a … a nice tingle.”

“I want to, Amy.”

“Yes,” she replied. “I want you to.”

As she said it, Amy moved Titus’s hand up her ribs to place it on her breast. He gasped at the soft, slippery feel to it cupped in his hand. She closed her eyes halfway, and he sensed the shudder shoot through her.

Beneath the surface Amy sought out his left hand, pulled it to her, placed it on the other breast as she eased a step closer to him.

“That’s—oh! You’re making me shiver like I was cold,” she confided. “But it ain’t really like I’m cold. Shivering ’cause you’re making me warm there to touch me.”

Her palms brushed across the flat hardness of his skinny chest at the same time he felt a hardening of some of the skin at the middle of her breasts. She had to be made the way he was, Titus decided. Not all that different: with nipples just like him and the hogs and even the bitch hound that slept under the porch, out of the snow and out of the sun. But as he gently raised her breasts out of the water, he saw these were not at all the same nipples. Amy’s were something deliciously different.

And in looking at them, he felt all the more stirring as he rose beneath the surface of that tranquil pond.

Or perhaps it was the way her eyes half closed once more when she tilted her chin back and slowly slid her hands down below the water, just barely brushing the skin of his chest until she reached his belly and held there as Titus rubbed his hands across her hardened nipples.

With a groan emanating from the back of her throat, Amy’s hands inched on down—suddenly reaching his engorged flesh.

“Oh,” she said, opening her eyes and bringing them down to look squarely at him.

How they glistened in the starlight there as the moon rose.

“What’s this?” she asked.

When she ran a single, roughened finger down the length of it, his flesh quivered. “My. Did you feel what it did when I touched it?”

“F-feels good, Amy,” he begged.

Hurried, with one hand he traced a path from a breast down to her belly, and stopped as he felt the mat of curly hair. Made different from him, constructed perhaps like half of those coupling critters he had watched in rapt amazement over the past few years. He sought to go lower, finding that the hair ended and her privates parted in two soft folds of skin. Just like the cows he had observed. Of a sudden he realized it was there he was to put himself, to slip within as the males of other species mounted their females.

Her breathing had become ragged, short and raspy. Inching his finger farther down, he gently moved the skin apart. Amy gasped deeply. And clamped her hand around him, hard.

He felt his flesh jerk as if it were about to leap free of him, even free of her lock on him, a sudden constriction seizing his lower belly.

Titus had to bury himself in her. Now.

Clumsily he dragged her hips toward him, working his groin upward as he pulled her thighs apart. With her arms Amy tread water, her widening eyes locked on his, their faces marked with strained intensity. Time and again he thrust himself at her, his hands grappling violently at the small of her back, yanking her down on him, seizing hold of her buttocks as he thrust against the water’s buoyancy, which made her rise from him.

“N-not like this,” she ordered as she kicked her legs off his hips. Pointing, she added, “The bank. Up there.”

In despair he watched as she turned away, laying out on the surface of the water, kicking her legs and stroking with her arms, the long hair playing out behind her. Titus was within reach of her as they arrived at the grassy bank and stepped out of the pond, both of them trembling with the summer’s breeze as it kissed their wet skin.

With a sudden sense of how he was to mesh his body with hers, Titus was on top of Amy even as she settled quickly to the grass and rolled over from her hip. Barely lying back before he was atop her thighs. Legs that spread beneath the press of his weight.

Looking down at her, his long hair dripping into her face, Titus suddenly closed his eyes, dipped his head, and laid his mouth fully on hers. She sucked at his lips hungrily, thrusting her hips upward at the same moment. He sensed that same tightening across his lower belly and drew back, confused at this all-compelling need to concentrate not on her mouth, but to get himself between her legs.

As he rose on his hands, he looked down at the soft, rounded mounds of her breasts, the skin pale against the darker pink of her nipples. Then attempted to thrust himself farther against her.

“Not, not like …,” she said huskily.

And in the next moment Amy had seized his hard flesh and was guiding it against a softer spot, lower between her smooth thighs. Making the end of him brush the folds of flesh as the sky seemed to light up all around him with shooting stars, the earth quaked beneath him, as if to swallow them up.

He felt that first explosion—no doubt of that—yet it was the second and all those that rocked him afterward that seized Titus with such force he knew he would likely never see again. Everything had turned black except for the shooting stars. Again and again his hips flung forward against her, his hot flesh still enclosed in her hand, trying desperately to bury his rigid penis in her without success as he spent himself in great waves against the inside of her thigh.

She sighed as he trembled to a halt, and laid his head in the curve where her neck met a shoulder.

“We’ll have lots of babies,” she whispered, clutching his head to her chin, the other hand still gripping his softening flesh. “I’ll give you lots of children, Titus. I’ll raise them, and you raise the crops. Man and woman supposed to be like that.”

He shuddered again, this time from fear. Of a sudden afraid at what he had just done. This talk of babies and joining Amy on the land. Knowing he was not the sort who could sink the rest of his life into the ground with her.

Afraid he would never be man enough to stay.