Dance on the Wind (8 page)

Titus slapped at a big blue-black fly droning in the hot, sticky air right in front of his nose. Noisy enough with all the clatter and racket, all the people moving past, with beeves mooing, pigs grunting, and sheep baaing. Yet none of it bothered him—except for the incessant, bothersome drone of that fly.

Then he had it, snapping his hand around the pesky insect in a blur. When he opened his palm, there it lay, stunned, wings flitting lamely, buzzing inconstantly. Without remorse he slapped the palm against the side of his old britches, swiped off the hand on the pants, then closed his eyes again after tugging down the old floppy-brimmed wool-felt hat.

It wasn’t cool here, even tucked back in the shade. But at least beneath this weeping willow he found it was a damned sight less hot than out there in the late-summer sun where the afternoon dragged on and on. He had a little time to rest before the next relay of shooters was due on the firing line at three. Right square in the hottest part of the day. The ten competitors who qualified from these last five relays would all compete come early evening after the sun began to sink and the air might cool to something bearable.

As for Titus, it had proved to be a long day already.

Last night he hadn’t been able to sleep all that well—not that sleeping rolled up in his blankets on the ground had ever bothered him. No, it was more that his excitement, anticipation, eagerness to be about this contest kept him tossing until he finally drifted off sometime shortly before the sun made its appearance that Saturday in mid-August.

“These dog days,” is what his mother muttered repeatedly, no matter was she at home or here at the fair.

Dog days came once a year, visited upon northern Kentucky with summer’s last vengeful fare-thee-well. Here after the crops were all in the fields, growing to beat the band, and just before that slick-eyed schoolmaster would again ring his bell signaling that first day of school for the new year, eager to get in a few weeks of book learning before classes would be suspended while the young boys stayed to home, helping out in the fields during the harvest time. Only when the crops had been gathered and all was securely put up would the farmers think of sending their children back to school.

Dog days. Beside him lay the old redbone, his hunting partner of the last handful of years. Tongue lolling, eyes glazed in fatigued stupor, the hound lay on his back upon the patch of shady grass, his belly exposed. Gnats swarmed in clouds around his watery eyes. The dog snorted at them, dragged a paw down his long muzzle in frustration, then rolled onto his side to plop a leg over his nose.

Nearby the rhythmic booming continued nonstop from the long firing line staked out at the edge of the meadow. Interposed between each rumble of the muzzle loaders he heard the squeals of children at play, the giggles of the young girls eyeing the summer’s crop of prospective beaux, and the laughter of adults passing this way and that among the meandering knots of marquees and wall tents, canvas awnings, and fire-smudged lean-tos stretched across a modest framework of poles. From every one a barker gave nearly the same call—something to entice passersby into viewing their wares: baked goods, fruits and vegetables, needlework, woolens, leather goods, harness
and plowshares, woodwork, ironmongery, all of it for sale at this once-a-year carnival begun long ago.

The Boone County Longhunters Fair—a celebration of the county’s own namesake and his blazing of a trail into this land of the canebrakes—was held on this same ground this time every year to insure the greatest turnout, and therefore sales, for each of the merchants who traveled here from as far away as Pittsburgh and as nearby as Cincinnati. Besides, a person had the opportunity to browse past the displays of fine mercantile goods spread out atop crates and display tables by the local merchants of Rabbit Hash, Belleview, and Petersburg, and even this sprawling village of Burlington as well, not to mention what many of the poorer families set out atop worn blankets spread upon the ground before their lean-tos, hoping to sell their modest, homemade crafts.

This carnival of baking, quilting, and other contests each summer brought a growing throng here to Burlington for the better part of three or four days. Families arrived on the fairgrounds to select a spot down by one of the two creeks, perhaps choosing something back against the woods, and there raised their tents and dug their fire pits. Friends greeted friends they had not seen for an entire year. Men hailed one another and spoke of their crops, their hogs and sheep. Women shared recipes and spoke of loved ones gone to their reward with the past winter. Children frolicked and dogs scampered with abandon through the meadow until fair officials came through, as they always did, ordering all animals tied up in camp.

That’s why Tink had a short length of rope loosely knotted around his neck, the end of the loop stuffed into Titus’s belt. Just so the old hound wouldn’t get himself into trouble, maybe even shot by some man whose wife screamed out that a dog had just run off with their supper, plucked right from the fireside. Such a thing had happened at noon, and the squire of Burlington, along with his duly elected town constable, had to pull that dead dog’s owner off the dog killer for the sake of not charting up more of a human toll than the town fathers counted on every year.

For certain, there was plenty of celebration flowing free enough. The wines and brandies and beers brewed
every year for just this festival were most often consumed in moderate quantities. Just enough to enliven each festive night’s music and dancing. Still, there were always a few of the young wags who could not hold their liquor and ended up taking offense at some snub, those who got nasty and often pulled up a chunk of firewood, if not a knife, to settle whatever wrong they believed done them. Most times others merely pulled the quarrelers off to opposite sides of the sprawling camping grounds, where they could cool down and eventually sleep off their revelry. Rarely was the constable called in to hustle someone off to his modest jail.

But this shooting of a man’s hunting dog was considered by many serious enough an offense to warrant the owner shooting the dog killer. Both had been dragged away to jail minutes ago, there to languish for the rest of the fair, one offender in each of the constable’s two cells, where they could glare at one another, curse a blue streak if they chose, and likely try their marksmanship spitting at one another between a set of crude iron bars.

After that pair of scrappers had been dragged off in irons, the fair quickly resumed its atmosphere of merriment and music, a celebration of rural frontier life at its best. Back on the shooting range, the judges returned to their task of determining who was to be known as the best shot in Boone County.

It was serious, this shooting contest held each summer. Merchants in nearby Burlington put up the finest in the way of a purse for the winner, with a few prizes donated for second, third, and fourth places—those who had been bested. Serious enough business that the contest had long had three divisions: one contest held between all those men who were clearly long in the tooth yet still possessed a clear eye and a steady hand; another match that allowed the county’s youth to pit their skills one against the other; and the final competition—the annual fair’s most-watched event—pitting young men from sixteen and up from all the farms and towns to compete for the right to be known as Boone County’s best marksman.

For the last three summers Titus had carried home his prizes from the fair, taking first place against the county’s
other youth each August. For the last two years how he had looked forward to this seventeenth summer: eligible to match his skill against the finest marksmen he had watched shoot ever since he was a wee lad big enough to load his own rifle.

In the last few months Thaddeus Bass had been preaching to his son, “It makes little shake what those men do toeing that line and firing their muskets at a distant mark. No, Titus—in life what matters only is what a man does to provide for those who count on him.”

More than just about anything, Titus wanted to change his father’s tune—to have his pap pound him on the back gleefully once he won the shooting contest and say that, yes, there was something worthwhile in being the best, after all, something worthwhile in his son having a dream different from his own. He knew he could never be what his father wanted him to be, for he realized he was not stamped to walk the same path his pap had taken. So it was that this year Titus carried great hope in his heart that once he proved himself not only capable, but the best, his father would finally relent and remove the tight harness he had buckled around his eldest son.

“Titus?”

He pushed back the floppy brim and gazed up at the sound of her voice. The summer’s light lit the copper strands in her dusty hair with tongues of flame. How he stirred to see her, gratified she had come to find him.

“Amy. I looked for you this morning down at the shooting line.”

With a shrug she replied, “Helping mama with her baking. Lunch is done and the other’ns’re all fed, so she said I could come look you up for a bit. Leastwise till it’s time to go help her put supper together. The young’uns is going crazy—running here and there.”

He shifted himself up against the tree and pulled the hat off his head, pushing back a thick shock of dark, damp hair out of his eyes. “I … I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Something been … what I been meaning to ask for last couple weeks.”

“Yes?” she prodded, settling near his knee, her legs
folded to the side in that way of hers that hid her bare feet and ankles beneath her faded dress, one of her mother’s best.

“You …,” he started, then cleared his throat as his eyes retreated from her face and he went to scratching at the old hound’s ear. For some time now he’d been brooding on just how to get this said—choosing his words carefully from what he realized was a most limited vocabulary of a young man totally ignorant of such mysteries in life. “I figure a girl knows about such things. ’Specially you since’t you was around when all your brothers and sisters was borned, and it seems only natural that a girl pays proper attention to such things.”

Her eyes darted back and forth between his. “What you wanna ask me, Titus?”

Again he looked into those green eyes. “T-tell me how a woman knows she’s gonna have a baby.”

Her cheeks flushed with a tint of pale strawberry, and her eyes dropped a moment. Amy yanked up a tall blade of grass and brought it to her lips. Sucking on the green shoot, she finally said, “If a woman ain’t with child, once a moon she gets a visit of a particular ailment, Titus.”

“Ailment? Like’n you got the ague?”

“Not ’sactly. She don’t feel so good. Her belly gives her fits, cramping up—like that.”

He shook his head, still bewildered. “So?”

“So if she’s gonna have a baby—like you said—those visits once a moon don’t come to trouble her.”

Still he was having trouble making the connection, unable to fathom what it all meant as he sat there in the shady, sticky heat of that August afternoon. Nonetheless, he leaned toward her, undeterred from his quest. “You saying if she don’t have that visit for two or three months, that woman knows she carrying a child?”

“That, and my mama was always sick for the first few months she was about to have another young’un.”

“Sick?”

“Like”—and she rubbed her belly—“the heaves and all that.”

He nodded. “Oh.”

“Why you wanna know about that, Titus?”

Looking away now that she had asked a question, his eyes crawled to the canopy of long weeping-willow branches swaying on the hot breeze. “You … Amy—have you got your visit … since we—since we … there at the swimming hole. Have you?”

“Is that what you’re asking about?” she replied, wideeyed and gaping in surprise. “Y’ was thinking I’m carrying your baby?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I need to know.”

“I ain’t had my visit since we was at the swimming hole, Titus. I’m telling you, jus’ so you’ll know.”

He swallowed hard. There it was—as unexpected and bad a piece of news as any could have been. And he suddenly felt a little hotter, a little more suffocated by the damp heat.

“Then you might’n be carrying m-my baby?”

Placing a hand gently over her abdomen, she said, “If’n it’s a baby, it’s your baby, Titus.”

He wagged his head, feeling dizzied by the announcement. “My baby.”

Amy patted the back of his hand, then held it in hers. “Mama says a woman don’t necessarily get herself with child every time she’s with a man. Don’t always happen.”

“Just when you don’t get your visit each moon.”

“Right,” she answered. “Things gotta be right, I guess, atween a man and a woman for a baby to grow in the woman’s belly.”

He was confused again. “Things gotta be right?”

With a shrug Amy replied, “I s’pose my mama meant that the man and woman loved the other, they was married. Maybeso like us, they gonna get married.”

“G-gonna get married,” he repeated with a mumble.

“If … if I was carrying your baby, I’d be right happy, Titus.”