Dance on the Wind (69 page)

The women had fluttered around the long line of tables strung end to end through the center of the neighbor’s yard, setting every dish and pot and kettle just so while the young children needed no formal introductions and got
right down to playing blindman’s buff and hide-and-seek. Titus had come there with the Guthries, finding how contented it made him to watch Marissa among the women-folk, seeing her eyes find his from time to time while he stayed with the men, old and young alike. They loaded their pipes, drank from their great clay mugs, and told their bawdy stories when there were no women about nor children playing among their legs. Stories of St. Louie. Unbelievable tales of the rouged and willing women that beckoned all passersby to come use their manhood on them, promising wild and devilish delights. Titus knew such places were not the stuff of myth and fable. He had seen Natchez-Under-the-Hill and the Swamp with his own eyes.

So he had watched Abie’s impassive face as the talk went on and on as the men poured down more and more of their own home brew. Then Guthrie wagged his head, knocked the black dollop from the bottom of his pipe bowl, and strode off muttering that he would be with Lottie. Titus started to move off as well at the settler’s elbow.

“No, you stay with those others, son,” Able said with some resignation. “Might just learn all for yourself about the sinful delights waiting to lure a man to St. Louie. Time that you listen, and pay heed.”

Bass needed no further coaxing. He had seen enough down the Mississippi to whet his appetite for more. So he sipped at his spruce beer, listening wide-eyed to the farmers who had made that journey north to the mouth of the Missouri for supplies and equipment.

“Thar’s Natchez, an’ Norleans,” a man was saying. “But the king of ’em all has to be St. Lou.”

Another asked, “How come you figure it’s the king?”

“’Cause it ain’t got a lick of nothing to do with the Spanish, that’s why,” the first answered, pounding his clay mug against his chest hard enough that he sprayed himself with cherry flip.

A third man in a scraggly beard nodded knowingly. “We all know the French can damn well show a man a better time than any else, don’t we, fellers?”

The whole lot of them gushed and laughed, guffawed and poked one another in the ribs.

“Why the French better?” Titus inquired.

One of them turned and eyed the young man, then explained, “Them Spanish is mean li’l bastards, nasty and fighters.”

When another agreed, “But them French, they allays been lovers.”

“Never was good at fighting and such,” a third piped in. “That’s why the English throwed ’em out more’n fifty year ago.”

“Yep, the French sure know how to show a man the time of his life.”

“Why—there’s so much shameful delight up that way—”

“Sh-sh! Here comes your woman, Henry,” one warned, and they all went silent.

After supper, when the fiddle and squeeze-box were brought out, Titus again clung to that group regaling themselves with tales of the houses of pleasure and the great French homes built behind the tall limestone walls, stories of the stinking, brawling watering holes where a man’s life might well be worth little or nothing, depending on how a man might look at another. It sounded no different from life down the Mississippi—but St. Louis was all the closer right then.

Soon she had come to Titus and asked him to dance. When he begged off, embarrassed, Marissa asked if he knew how.

“Course I know how to dance,” he growled.

“Then dance with me,” she begged.

“You likely dance different here in this country than I learn’t back in Kentucky.”

“Dancing is dancing,” she pleaded. “Just come here and hold my hand, like this. Good. And put your other hand here on my hip, like that, Titus. Oh, dear—you’re blushing, ain’cha?” she whispered. “Now, you’ve had your hand on my hip lots before.”

“But these here folks never knowed it!” he rasped.

With the perfume of those hillsides matted with ivy and laurel’s aromatic green leaves and greenish-yellow flowers brought on that evening breeze, she led him away across the cropped grass in a simple pattern, slowly
describing a large circle as Marissa guided him across the yard, closer and closer to meld with the other dancers. Soon enough he was whirling her in great, dizzying spins, her head flung back as she gasped and giggled, the whole world blurring around them. At times they even fell, sitting there in a heap, laughter gushing from them until they caught their breath and rose to spin again.

“I can’t wait until next year,” she confessed that next morning when all the celebrants had shared breakfast and families were parting for home, saying their farewells beneath the trees draped with hop vine.

“Next year?”

“Yes,” Marissa replied. “Everyone’s decided we need at least one good celebration a year.”

“End of summer,” Lottie added as she pulled her shawl over her head. “We’ve decided to get back together come the end of harvest next year. All that wheat and barley, corn and potatoes. Good cause to dance and laugh, don’t you say?”

“I can’t wait, dear,” Able said, grinning, rubbing a hand across his belly.

Neither could Titus. On that long, long ride back to the Guthrie place, he thought and thought on it. One celebration a year was just not enough. To wait four whole seasons without busting loose and forgetting one’s cares? Simply unreasonable. Why, it was just like the Longhunters Fair back to Boone County. Even the boatmen with their hard and dangerous life grabbed for more excitement and celebration than that! Such men reveled and made merry whenever and wherever!

Now, up to that St. Louie—that was the place, he had brooded. From the sounds of it there was a celebration going on there every night. Winter, summer, fall, or spring. The folks up there didn’t wait for harvest to come around once a year. They made themselves happy just for the sprig of it!

That was the life for a young man.

But then his gaze was drawn over to Marissa, seated opposite him in the back of that big dray wagon the oxen were pulling home to the Guthrie place. And just looking at her, he doubted. Confused. Torn. Was he meant to stay?
Or was he meant to go? Just to look into her eyes made him want to stay.

Oh, how he had wanted her last night after the spruce beer and the dancing and the way the aroma of her heated body rose to his nostrils as they whirled and laughed. She looked at him in that way of hers on the way home, and he knew she was coming to him that night. Titus decided he would stay.

Yet over the next eight days he changed his mind twice as many times. Lunging back and forth on the horns of his own private dilemma. Like an unbearable torture.

Until at last that morning came and he arose to the first real hard frost of the season. Knowing if he did not go then, he never would. What might hold him there was something much, much stronger than what would ever hold him to Rabbit Hash in Boone County. If he were to be free, he would have to be free of her.

Trembling even more with his fear of leaving—with his fear that he wouldn’t—he had found a slip of paper. Looked to be a bill of sale as he smoothed it out across his thigh. On the back he rubbed the letters with a stub of a lead pencil, not sure of all of them as he formed the few words in making his good-bye to Marissa and her parents. Then he stood and tore a small hole in the corner of the paper, slipping it over the peg where he always hung his shirt of an evening before sinking into the blankets and the hay to await her coming to him all those hot summer nights.

That big barn smelled of oiled leather and new wood and animal sweat. His throat seized as he descended the ladder and stepped around Lottie’s keeler—that shallow tub the women used for cooling milk and to catch drippings from the cheese press. From a peg he seized the hackamore he looped over the old horse Able Guthrie had given him many weeks ago: “Too old to work a plow, too weak to pull a wagon, son. It ain’t much use to me nowdays, but maybe you can get the animal to ride under you.”

Titus had done just that since last summer, many times taking Marissa for a ride through the cool timber,
the two of them bareback atop that old, plodding plowhorse.

He led it through the low door into the cows’ paddock, where he pulled out the corral rails, leading the horse through the opening, then refit the rails in their posts before he slipped into the forest just as he had that morning more than four years before. The frosty blades of dying grass crunched, the thick mat of big orange and red leaves crackled beneath his moccasins and those four old hooves.

Titus stopped back in the still-dark shadows, looking at the cabin where he had first seen her at the hearth, the fire’s glow igniting the red in her chestnut curls. Bringing a blush to her cheeks, the same blush painted there when she became aroused in the hayloft with him. The merest hint of smoke rose from the chimney in a ghostly wisp above the leafy canopy turning gold and orange and sienna-brown with autumn’s first cold kiss.

Maybe if he crept to the window for one last look inside … to see her, a last lingering look at what he was leaving behind.

Closing his eyes instead, he sought to remember that cabin where he had his first look at her. In his mind once again seeing the gleam of a hair ribbon poking from Marissa’s sewing basket. The glossy spray of feathers in a turkey wing hung by the fireplace, used to stir the fire or shoo away pesky flies. The dull sheen of the black walnut highboy in a corner, atop it resting the Irish Book of Kells—that Latin manuscript of the New Testament. The white and satiny shine of a pair of slat-backed, split-bottomed chairs made from gouged buckeye where Lottie and Marissa sat as they carded and spun. Those Cumberland baskets filled with weaver’s spools, warping frame, wool and cotton cards, flax and hemp hackles. The old family safe, its doors lined with hammered tin, where Mrs. Guthrie stored her flour and herbs away from the ever-present mice and spiders, its poplar wood softly yellow in the firelight from so many scrubbings.

Yes, Titus thought, forcing himself to turn quickly before he gave in. Yes, there would surely be pain in his leaving.

She loved him.

But perhaps every bit as great was the pain he felt right then at leaving without ever telling Marissa to her face that he loved her too. He hoped the few words in that note would say it for him.

He was more afraid than he had ever been. Not strong enough nor brave enough to tell Marissa to her face. To say that he loved her, but he still had to go. He wasn’t man enough to do that, so he stole away before he caused her even greater pain: marrying; beginning a family; her believing they were putting down roots. Then he would up and leave her.

No. The pain he felt at that moment was nowhere near as great as her pain would be if he failed to leave right then. So he would let the note tell her, and decided to leave in silence.

Heading southwest through the timber, he kept himself deep among the trees before he circled back to the west, then pointed his feet due north. Those first moments in turning away had been so hard. All through the first hour. And that first day—the pull still so strong. Her smell clung to his shirt every time he opened his blanket coat and brought the homespun tow cloth to his nose—forced to remember what he was leaving behind, to remind himself of why he had forced himself to go.

Titus had struck the river the following day near Grand Tower Rock as the Mississippi angled lazily toward the northwest, his mind still coming back again and again to Marissa.

Now he had nothing more difficult to do but follow the river to St. Louie.

And pray that glittering old French city was enough balm to ease the sharp pain he still carried even after all these days and distance put between them.

With his heels now, he set the old horse into motion, his eyes still straining to find in all the aching autumn blue overhead that solitary osprey.

“Whereaway you bound, my son?”

With a start Titus peered up at the old man leading a fine horse up to his evening fire. Night came early, and with it the cold as he drew near the city of his dreams.

“St. Louie.”

“Ah.” The older man halted, staring down in study at the fire a moment, then regarded the youth and the rifle across his lap. “I am but a poor wayfarer. Do you mind if I share your fire and a bit of conversation this night?”

He tossed another limb onto the flames and shrugged. “I was just getting used to the lonesome.”

Turning toward a tow sack he had tied behind his old, worn saddle, the stranger said, “I have food to offer, young man. You decide to share your fire and your talk, I’ll share supper.”

Looking more closely now at the dance of the firelight across the man’s deeply seamed face, Titus decided he liked the gap-toothed grin. The eyes were kind, yet possessed of great, great sadness. “What you got to eat?”

“Capons. A farmyard cock—castrated to improve the flavor of his meat for the table. Fresh as can be, I suppose. Butchered this morning just before I took my leave of a farmer’s place north of here—a family where I spent the night as their guest.” The old man squatted, began tugging at the huge knot in the tow sack. “The truth to it, we stayed up most of the night talking on ships and kings and sealing wax.”

Bass watched the bony, veiny old hands struggle over that knot, thinking how strange this stranger was—to talk in such an outlandish, confusing manner.

“I mean to say we spoke of all sorts of critical matters.” The stranger tugged the tow sack open.

“Didn’t know what the hell you meant.”

“Aye, easy to see that on your face, young man.” He pulled forth a dead bird, handing it over to Titus. “This one be yours.” Then stuffed his hand into the sack again and pulled forth another, smiling with those gapped teeth. “God’s rich bounty.” Laying the bird aside, he next retrieved four potatoes and a half-dozen ears of corn from the sack. “I must tell you the corn might be past its prime—long gone is the sweet milk in the ear, I say. But they truly will do for a man hungry for the manna of the fields.”

Titus put his hand over his mouth, catching himself about to laugh. After all these past days of loneliness and
dark brooding, it brought merriment to him just listening to the way this old man talked.