Dance on the Wind (66 page)

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!”