Dance on the Wind (5 page)

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.