Dance on the Wind (67 page)

“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.