It was cold in here, Titus thought. Damp too. Must have gone and rained.
“I said get up!” Thaddeus Bass repeated more urgently. And this time he added his own boot toe for emphasis.
Titus pulled back his bare foot. “I know I done wrong—”
“Get up! Afore I pull you up by your ears!”
The youngster stood, shedding hay as he clambered to his feet, shivering slightly, hunch-shouldered in dawn’s dampness. His breath huffed before his face in wispy vapors. Outside a mockingbird called. “Jest lemme explain, Pap.”
“Nothing to explain, Titus. You left off work to go traipsing the woods. Left off the mule too. No telling what’d become of her I didn’t come back to see to your work at that stump.”
The look in his father’s eyes frightened him. He could remember seeing that fire in those eyes before, yet no more in all of Titus’s sixteen years than the fingers on one of his hands. “It was getting on late in the day anyhows—”
With a sudden shove his father pushed him down the path between the two rows of stalls in that log barn. “Grab that harness.”
“Yes, sir,” he said with a pasty mouth, too scared not to be dutiful and obedient.
A rain crow cawed on the beam above him. He shuddered as his bare feet moved along the cold, pounded clay of the barn floor. But he wasn’t all that sure he trembled from the morning chill. Not knowing what would come next from his father’s hand was all it took to make the youth quake. Alone Titus had faced most everything nature could throw at this gangly youth—out there in the woods and wilderness. But he had never been as frightened of anything wild as he was of his father when Thaddeus Bass grew truly angry.
As Titus took the old mule’s harness down, his father said, “G’won, hitch her up.”
The boy pushed through the stall door and moved into the corona of warmth that surrounded the big animal. She raised her head from a small stack of hay to eye him, frost venting from her great nostrils, then went back to her meal as he came alongside her neck and slipped the bridle and harness over her.
“Bring her out to me.”
“Here, Pap,” he said, almost like whimpering. “I … I’m sorry. Never run off on the work again, I swear—”
“I don’t figure you ever will run off again, Titus,” his father snapped. “Not after I’ve learned you your lesson about work and responsibility.” He pointed to a nearby post. “Get you that harness.”
“What for? I got the mule set—”
“Jest you get it and follow me.”
He trudged after his father, out the barn door and into the muddy yard, where a faint drift of woodsmoke and frying pork greeted him as warmly as the dawn air did in cold fashion. How it did make his stomach grumble.
“Can I quick go and fetch me something to eat while we’re off to the field, Pap?”
In the gray light shed by that overcast sky the man whirled on his son. “No. You ain’t earned your breakfast yet.”
“But—I didn’t have no supper last night.”
“Didn’t earn that neither. Off lollygagging the way you was.”
He swallowed and walked on behind his father, bearing south toward the new field they were clearing. Suddenly appearing out of the low, gray sky, the bright crimson blood-flash of a cardinal flapped overhead and cried out. In the distance Titus heard the faint call of a flatboat’s horn rise out of the Ohio’s gorge. Was it one of those new keels with a dozen polemen? Or was it one of those broadhorns nailed together of white oak planks the boatmen would soon be selling by the board-foot on the levee at far-off New Orleans?
“Here, girl,” Thaddeus said as he put the mule ahead of the harnesstree and himself at her head, beginning to coax her back a step at a time. “Titus, hitch her up.”
Titus hoisted the oiled hardwood and locked both harness traces in place. Then he straightened, watching his father pat the mule between the eyes.
Gesturing toward the tangle of leather and chain his son had dropped onto the ground, Thaddeus said, “Now you hook up that harness to the tree.”
Maybe he didn’t want to know any more than he already could guess. Maybe he refused to believe his father would really make him do it. No matter—Titus didn’t ask, didn’t say a thing as he bent over his work. His cold hands trembling, he found it was a tight fit lining up all the metal clasps into the harnesstree’s lone eye, but he got it done and stood again. Shivering in the cold air as a breeze rustled the green leaves of the nearby elms.
“We gonna pull the stump out and then we go to breakfast?”
His father slapped the mule one time on the rump as he moved back to take up the reins. “We gonna pull out the stump, that’s right. We’ll see for ourselves what comes next, Titus. Now, step in that harness and cinch yourself up.”
“M-me?”
“You heard me, son.”
“Y-yes, Pap.”
For a moment longer he stood there, gazing at his father. Thaddeus had taken the long, wide leather reins into his weathered hands, shifted it all to his left, then took one long double length into his right and began to wave it over the mule’s wide back.
“You seen what your pap has to do if’n an animule ain’t obeying, ain’t you, Titus?”
Quickly, he turned and stepped into the harness. “Yes, Pap.”
“Buckle yourself in and take up the slack,” the man ordered, then ever so gently laid the long strap of leather onto the mule’s back. Obediently she leaned into her harness and raised the harnesstree off the damp ground, then stopped, awaiting the next command.
“Aside her, I’m just gonna be in the way—”
“Lean into it, boy!”
“You ain’t really gonna make me pull this stump out—”
“I’m gonna make a farmer outta you, Titus—or I’ll kill you trying. Now, lean into it, goddammit!”
“Pap!”
“There’s work you left afore it was finished, son.” Thaddeus’s eyes glowed like all-night coals.
“Lemme pull the stump out by my own self with the mule. I’ll get it done—”
“Damn right, you’ll pull it out with the mule,” his father growled, savagely bringing the leather strap down on the animal’s back.
With a sudden snap she lowered her head, bobbing, her front quarters reaching forward for a purchase on the slick ground as her rear hooves dug in and both muscled haunches rippled while she locked herself against the stump.
Beside the snorting, heaving animal Titus pushed against the wide, soaped harness so hard, his feet lost their bite on the muddy ground. He spilled onto his hands and knees.
“Get up, boy!” the man bellowed. “Git, git, git!” He coaxed more effort out of the mule.
Leather stretched and the thick-linked log chain hummed as everything that could give was taken out of the links and latigo. Now it was nothing more than muscle and sinew and will against what grip this piece of ground still had on the stump.
Titus struggled back up, sickened, wobbly, nearly the whole of him covered in mud now. Looping his soppy hands inside the harness, he struggled to plant his bare feet again as the mule lurched forward a few inches. That sudden slack between him and the harnesstree they shared flung the youth into the mud once more.
“You ain’t pulling, Titus! Giddup!”
“Dammit, Pap!” he spat, his mouth filled with the damp earth once more.
“What’d I tell you ’bout cursin’?” and he laid the leather strap down on the mule’s back just enough to get her to strain forward again with those powerful rear haunches.
Titus’s thin neck swelled, bulging as his hands cramped around the harness lashed tightly across his filthy work shirt. Pushing this hard, he was sure something inside him was bound to burst.
“That’s it, son! Put your back into it and work with the animal! Work with her—not agin ’er!”
Out of the corner of his eye Titus glanced at the big mule; then he slowly turned to stare at her as he strained every muscle in the effort. E
ntranced, all but mesmerized by the two streams of vapor issuing from those great moist nostrils of hers. Then she seemed to roll her eyes his way as if to remind him that he was supposed to pull in tandem with her.
“Git, git, git!” Thaddeus clucked behind them.
Back against the harness he flung himself anew when he heard the leather crack across the mule’s broad back. In the next instant he pitched forward again as she wrenched more of the stump from the ground.
“Good girl!” Thaddeus cried out jubilantly. “Git, git, git! Now, git!”
Time and again he laid the leather strop down on her back more insistently. Titus watched foam fleck at her nostrils as her front hooves pawed at the muddy ground, flinging clods back toward Thaddeus, spraying Titus with more dark, damp, fragrant earth each time she plunged a hoof down into the soil.
“Git, git!” he bellowed behind them both. “Git, Titus. Lean into it, boy!”
They lurched forward another two feet. The strop laid down on her back, again. Thaddeus coaxed her with his almost constant chatter. Then a yard more and they were out of the chewed-up ground. He and the mule now churned bare feet and monstrous hooves on grassy furrows—bull nettles and the Spanish needles that thrived in newly turned ground. He fought for a grip with his right foot as the mule shuddered with fatigue, then leaned back into the fight.
“You got it! By Jupiter—you done it!”
The words rang in his ears as the mule shot past him and Titus stumbled into the damp grass, the leather and chain and harnesstree jangling over him, pulling him along as Thaddeus leaned back against the reins, bellowing his orders to bring the mule to a halt.
Her massive sides heaving in throbbing quakes, she stood a few yards from the youth, frost rising in a ragged halo around her big head as she turned to wearily regard him. Then blinked her eyes once before she looked away from Titus.
Suddenly his father was on him, pulling him up by the back of his collar, pounding him on his shoulder, yammering as he shook Titus by the shoulders in exultation. Then Thaddeus Bass gripped his son’s shoulders in those big, meaty hands of his and put his face right up to his boy’s.
“Don’t you damn well ever forget what you just done—you hear me? Don’t you ever go and forget what a man and a animal can do together, when they work together, son.”
Gulping down more of that moist earth on his tongue, Titus nodded, staring back at the fiery intensity burning in his father’s eyes. Minutes ago he had been frightened to the core by those eyes. But that anger, that iron-nail-spitting rage in his old man’s eyes had disappeared, and now Titus saw only mirth and joy and jubilant self-satisfaction.
Thaddeus tousled his son’s hair, smeared some of the dirt from one of the boy’s cheeks. “C’mon, Titus—let’s go get you both some breakfast.”
As he walked back beside that great, sweating animal, Titus wondered if he would ever be as satisfied with his lot in life as was his father.
2
How he loved the smell of her. A dusting of flour. The sweet mingling of creamy milk, maybe some rich yellow butter. Perhaps a dash of vanilla beans, or crumbling of cinnamon sticks, even the faintest hint of ginger. Most always the stirring tang of yeast whenever he dared get that close.
Never was there any smell of soap or laundry to her. Much less the earthy odor come of butchering farm animals that clung to other girls he knew. No, none of that—not even the stale, sourish fragrance of dust and sweeping and mopping out the floors rose from her skirts or hung about her hair when he chanced close enough to smell of it. Instead, Amy Whistler had the smell of baking about her, the promise of bread rising and pie crusts turning golden, of corn fritters and johnnycakes and nothing more grand than swollen butter-yellow corn kernels frying in a great iron skillet over the flames of the fireplace. Parched corn. How he had come to favor her parched corn.
“You set yourself on the porch there, Titus,” she told him, grinding her hands into her apron, a tiny cloud of flour puffing about them. “I’ll be out straightaway as soon as the dough is pounded and set to its second rise.”
He watched her retreat back into the shadowy interior of the cabin lit by the glowing fire and those candles waxed atop iron pegs driven into the logs all about the big room, their fluttering giving the place the appearance of constant movement. Then he drank deep of the smell of cool milk and fragrant butter, fresh from the springhouse, and turned with a sigh.
Amy Whistler didn’t grow food to eat in the ground like his father, by God. But from her hands she grew things nonetheless. Tasty and seductive concoctions, confections, and elixirs. Whereas a man who coaxed green vines and tender shoots out of the rich black soil might be called a wizard, Titus had long ago decided she was an angel.
It was more than merely the fact that she was two years older than he. Titus was in awe of the way her hands felt when she let him hold one of them. And only then when they were off and out of sight of her cabin, far from her younger brothers and sisters in that great Whistler brood. How they did flock around Titus every time he wandered down the lane or crossed the country as the crow flew to pay a call on their eldest sister. Out of sheer orneriness did they cling to his legs and arms when he came visiting, beseeching him to play their games with them, to swing on the rope from the great maple that stood squarely in the middle of the yard, or fashion some thing wondrous and new with his folding knife and a sliver of kindling from the woodbox by the door.
Most of them eventually wandered away this evening, as they always did, shooed from the porch by their mama and told to be off to play until sunset. Yet four stayed on, remaining every bit as silent as the bristles on the back of a sleeping hog, standing stock-still no more than a yard away from Titus, all of them staring like statues at him. Watching with such undistracted intensity as if he were going to change shape right before their eyes, sprout wings, and take flight—something that would eventually merit all their rapt, undivided attention. The youngest among them sucked on a thumb. Another repeatedly swiped at a runny nose. A third stood statuelike with his hands stuffed down inside his hand-me-down canvas drop-front britches with new patches repairing old patches. And the last brushed a thick rosy twist of her dusty-red hair in and out of her mouth, sucking on the strands as her green eyes studied Titus.
His eighteen-year-old angel had that same hair, those same eyes. For a moment that remembrance made him smile, to think how little he had noticed Amy Whistler in those days so far behind them now, when Amy had been this young. Hard to believe ten years had passed since he first remembered noticing the girl—not for the beauty of her hair and eyes, but for her lean, hard fists and quick feet. Far from being demure, Amy struck back whenever she felt aggrieved: swinging those tight little fists at an offender’s nose, lashing out with her bare feet to wallop some bully’s shins. No, Amy Whistler was not just a tomboy—she had quickly become one of the boys.
For years the two of them shared the same secret fishing spot, enjoyed the same rope that swung them out over the summer swimming hole, where they let go and dropped into the cool creek of a hot, muggy afternoon, or tracked the same fox and deer, raccoon and turkey, he with his grandpap’s rifle, she with her father’s in hand.
Then one day on the banks of their swimming hole a few years ago, when Amy found Titus gazing at her with unabashed amazement, she had little choice but to own up to the fact that she was no longer a child. While other girls her age had blossomed early, as they so often did on this Kentucky frontier, for the longest time Amy’s figure remained boyish, thin and bony, almost as angular as Titus’s … until she blossomed with a vengeance.
In the short weeks of that single summer years ago, it seemed Amy went from skinny and hard-boned to rounded, filled-out, and more than painfully shy about the sudden changes in her late-blooming body. By the time another year had passed, however, she had come to accept the inevitable march of time, wholly embracing her new station in life. With the arrival of each new summer it seemed Amy Whistler grew more beautiful
, acquired new curves, learned more about the way she could hold a boy with her eyes, came to speak to the object of her attentions in that just-audible whisper, or could stand silhouetted by the falling sun to accent her ample figure just so.
It was in this last year Titus found his own body awakening. Oh, for certain he was still as skinny and angular and unsure of just what his muscles might or might not do to embarrass him from day to day—but the greatest changes occurred within. Those first stirrings of manhood. An awakening of the sweet juices of youth that fired his veins—in very nearly the same way as had the thrill of the hunt and the flush of conquest for all those years spent in the woods, along the game trails of this Kentucky hill country.
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.
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