Dance on the Wind (6 page)

“Folks in these parts?” he repeated as his feet stumbled along the dusty path.

“School, too. You can finish up your schoolin’ afore we’re married,” she instructed.

On the frontier, girls simply did not receive any education, informal or not. Such a privilege was left to the males. Instead, girls were to devote themselves to preparing for homemaking and motherhood. Like most young girls, Amy had been given a sitting of goose eggs as a start on her own dower: a goose-down tick and feather pillows. Once her birds were hatched and grown from goslings to geese, the down could be plucked once every seven weeks. Such was a skill handed down from mother to daughter, a task requiring the utmost patience as well as strength and not the least bit of courage in the face of a strong and struggling bird. A goose might well end up with torn skin,
while the picker might come away with bites and bruises from the flapping wings.

For those nestled far away on the frontier, feathers were the most expensive item after gunpowder. Good goose feathers would cost a minimum of a dollar a pound. Or, in trade value, a pound of feathers was equal to a gallon of good whiskey. As the oldest in her family, Amy had long ago started on her dower. This very summer she had completed the feather-battened counterpane she intended to spread across her wedding bed—that, and two huge, fluffy goose-down pillows where she and her husband would lay their heads.

Amy continued. “Don’t you see how I want you finish school first? Then you’re ready to build us a proper place where we can set up housekeeping like my mama and papa done when I first came along.”

“Amy—”

“And my pa told me your pa’s gonna give you that new ground he’s stumpin’ this season … now that the other fields is all planted.”

As they reached the boulder there above the placid waters where years before they had dammed up a portion of the narrow creek to create a swimming hole, he asked, “Don’t you think they all rushing us a bit, Amy?”

“Who’s they?” she asked as they climbed.

“Your folks. My folks.”. He shrugged and settled onto his haunches. “Anyone getting us to get married.”

She quartered away from him atop the rock, drawing her shawl around her shoulders again huffily.

He could feel the chill from her. “Amy?”

“If you don’t wanna get married to me, then why you paying me court, Titus?”

How the devil did he know the answer to any of these questions? he wondered right then and there. Ciphering and writing his letters were hard enough in school now, what with the way his mind wandered away to other things—like Amy or the cool shadows of the forest where he wanted to be walking with his rifle. But as difficult as they were, ciphering and writing his letters were nowhere near as tough as the questions she was flinging at him. He
wondered if his pap had struggled this hard growing to be a man.

Was it all worth it?

“Well?” she asked him. “If you don’t wanna get married, then why you wasting your time on me? And why the devil am I wasting my time on you?”

He watched her slide down off the far side of the rock. “Amy—c’mon back up here.”

“No. I’m goin’ home.”

“Amy,” he coaxed.

“Got bread due to come off the fire,” she explained, standing still at the foot of the rock below him, yet with her back his way. “Mama be expecting me.”

“They damned well know we gone off to court, Amy.”

Lord, where did those words come from? Right out of his mouth that way, so smooth he sounded like he was sure of himself. Why, when he didn’t feel smooth and sure of himself, no ways?

“Is that what we’re doing, Titus?” she asked finally, turning partway back to face him, looking up at him still seated atop the rock. “Are you paying me court now?”

“I can’t very well spoon you with you down there and me up here.”

She gathered up her long skirt and planted her bare feet along the slope of the rock, clutching her shawl with one hand while she clambered her way back up to sit beside him. His heart was hammering like all get-out by the time she settled and swept up one of his hands. Amy held it between hers in her lap, the way she always did, gently stroking the back of his with her sure, hard fingers.

He smelled the yeast and the flour on her hair as the breeze came up, Smelled the milk and butter and a hint of vanilla. She baked bread like her people had for centuries. Folks what was Englishers from long back.

Titus’s grandpap said they was from a long line of Scottishers, but they’d give up on fighting the English years before and come to the colonies when the lobsterbacks were trying to hang all the rebellious highlanders. Grandpap had many a tale of huge, double-bladed claymorgans wielded by wiry Scots. Legends of lowland
battles against the mighty English ranks while small, brave youths swirled in among the lobsterbacks’ herds, stealing the finest horseflesh to drive back north into the moors and sheltering hills amid the angry shouts and whistling gunshots.

He lifted a lock of her dusty-red hair and smelled it. And found his flesh stirring, hardening, heating up.

“You …,” he began tentatively, then swallowed and licked his lips. “Amy, you ever think back on them times we come here to swim of a summer afternoon or evenin’?”

“Yes. I do, Titus. Sometimes I wish we was children again. Do you?”

“No. No, never.” He dropped that lock of her hair and stared at the water below them. “I can’t wait till I’m on my own. Never wanna be a young’un again.”

“When you’re on your own, I’ll be there with you,” she confided softly.

He stared at her mouth as she formed the words, wanting his mouth to touch her lips the way the words just had.

She continued, “We won’t be living with our folks no more. Just each other, with children of our own.”

“I don’t … I never done nothing … with a girl….” And suddenly his cheeks grew hot with shame.

“Me neither,” Amy admitted, turning away.

He felt better when she did turn. Maybe she was as shy about it as he was. Scared to talk of it, as afraid as he was to talk of his fears. “Don’t know nothing about having children—how it happens ’tween a man and woman.”

“Atween a husband and wife, Titus.” She fixed him with her eyes. “Atween two folks what love each other and are making a life together. He works the fields, growing things. And she takes care of all else, growing their young’uns up.”

Young’uns. Hell, most times he was so bewildered, Titus figured he was still just a child himself. Not that he’d let anyone know what he thought. Not Amy and not her folks. And sure as hell he wouldn’t let his pap know. Certain it was that Titus knew he wasn’t grown-up. All he had
to do was look at Cleve Whistler, look at his own pap, to know that.

Being a man meant settling down with a woman on your own land, raising up a cabin and starting a family. Leaving your bed before light each morning and working the dark, moist soil into every crack and crevice of your hands all day until you stopped for a cold midday meal of what had been left over from last night’s supper. Then you went back to turning the soil behind the oxen or an old mule, watching each fold of the earth peel away from the share blade as you were pulled along by the animals you coaxed and prodded, whipped and cajoled ahead of you up and down the fields you had cleared of rocks and stumps, fields that you walked over so many times that your bare feet must surely know them by rote.

Being a man meant you hunted only to make meat. You never took up your rifle and disappeared into the woods just to walk among the shadows, across the meadows, along the game trails. Never did a man just go to sit and listen to what the quiet told him. There to watch the deer come to drink, or gather at the salt licks, and not once raise his rifle against them. No, only a boy wasted such precious time like that. Never a man.

A man never played with the same zest and fervor that Titus felt when he stepped past the last furrow of a field at the edge of the trees and looked back, his rifle on his shoulder, then slipped on into the timber, the squirrels chirking their protests above him, the drone of flies and the startled flap of other winged things singing at his ears.

No, sir—only a boy could play as much as Titus wanted to play. A man had more important things to be about than walking in the woods with no purpose at all. Just as Amy had explained it: a man had to provide for others. When all Titus wanted to do was to be left alone to sort out why he wasn’t yet ready to be a man.

How many times had he looked at his pap—really looked at him—studying the way Thaddeus went about things, dealt with situations, reached out to folks and was regarded by his neighbors … only to realize he himself was a long way from being the same sort of growed-up man his pap was? Titus wondered if he ever would be that
growed-up. Wondered if such a state just came with time, this settling in to be a farmer, raising a family and crops, raising cows from calves and butcher hogs from shoats. Maybeso being a man just came with time, on its own and natural.

Problem was, everyone around him seemed to be saying now was his time. His own folks, and the Whistlers too. Even Amy her own self—all of ’em was saying it was Titus’s time to grow up to be a man and put aside childish things. For certain he knew he was not a child no more. Not yet a man neither.

Leastwise, not a man in the way every other man he knew of was a man.

They all took responsibility on their shoulders like a yoke and stepped into harness like one of their oxen or that old mule his pap trusted to pull those stumps out of the fields. That was what made a man, he had figured. They took on responsibility for others … when here Titus was having trouble being responsible for only his own self.

Her voice shook him. “I asked: don’t you want that too, Titus?”

Startled, he looked at her face again. Wanting to tell her exactly what she wanted to hear. Some of those smooth, oily words that could come tumbling out of his mouth if he wasn’t careful. Not knowing where they came from, except that maybe his own heat, his own tingling readiness was just the place from where they sprang.

Instead, he told her the truth. What he wanted right then and there.

“I wanna go swimming with you, Amy.”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

“Yeah. I want us to go swimming. Just like when we was young’uns ourselves.”

She shook her head, studying his face. “No. We can’t. Not now. Not ever, I fear. Not like that again.” With a sad look on her face Amy started to pull away. “I gotta get back home now. Don’t want mama to have to pull the bread off the fire for me when it’s my job, Titus.”

He trapped her hands in his. “No. Listen. Just for a short bit. Let’s go swimming.”

“I can’t,” she repeated more emphatically, tugging to free her hands from his grip. “Not time now to do nothing but go back afore my baking’s burned.”

He pleaded, “Then promise me when.”

“Promise you what?”

“We’ll go swimming.”

“I don’t know—”

“Promise me.”

She stopped wiggling, studying his eyes, cocking her head slightly to the side. “This something you really, really wanna do—like we done as children?”

His head bobbed up and down. “More’n anything I could think of doing with you, Amy.”

Finally, after long moments of what seemed like tortured consideration, she answered. “All right. We’ll go swim—”

“When?” he interrupted in a gush.

“Soon.”

“Tell me when.”

Her eyes darted about, as if searching the darkening woods for her answer. “Come Saturday. When your school be out for the rest of summer now that planting’s done. I can get things done back to home so that we got us enough time to have alone, Titus.”

“Saturday,” he said, his mouth gone dry just to think of it, faced with the waiting.

She gazed into his eyes, as if trying to measure something there that even she could not sort out. “Yes. Saturday. You come fetch me up after supper. We head down here and be alone to go swimming like kids.”

“But we ain’t really young’uns no more,” he wanted her to know as he let her hands go.

Amy placed them on either side of his smooth, hairless cheeks. “No. We ain’t children no more.” Then she pulled him to her and kissed him on the forehead. And turned to slide down the gentle slope of the swimming-hole boulder.

At the bottom she looked up at him. “You coming? Fella’s always gotta walk his girl home when they’re courting.”

He glanced at the quiet surface of the pool they had
made years before when they were young. Then he looked at Amy in the starlight.

“Yeah. I’ll walk my girl home.”

And realized he could never look back again.

Everything lay before him. Only memories of childhood rested behind him.

And as he walked out of the trees toward the Whistler cabin, Titus wondered if this was how a boy like himself became a man like his pap. Or like Cleve Whistler, who sat on the porch, idly stripping thin slivers of bark from a hickory limb with his folding knife.

“Evenin’, Titus,” he called out, his teeth clenched around the cob pipe. “Amy said you’d be dropping by.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You going for a walk?”

“Yes,” he answered as steadily as he could, hoping his face would not give him away. Titus was afraid a man was sure to see a certain look on a boy’s face when he was about to become a man. “Going for a … walk.”

“Nice evening for it, son.”

Whistler reached over and snatched up a small bundle of long hickory sticks, each more than four feet long. Every one he had peeled and carefully knotted with his knife. He untied the four long leather straps lashed around the narrow bundle, slipped in the limb he had just finished, then retied them all together as tightly as he could before knotting the straps.

In the near distance came the reassuring clang of an ox’s bell, floating in from the fenced paddock.

“You ’scuse me a minute, Titus—I gotta go put these back to soaking an’ bring that ol’ beast in from his feed.”

“Yes, sir. You go right ahead.”

He swallowed as he watched the man’s back disappear around the side of the cabin. Every man Titus knew of had a special trough somewhere close where a fella would keep peeled hickory shafts soaking and straightening, all bound one to the other in a tight bundle.