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 b
oy 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.
He sensed something behind him. When he turned, the four of them were there again. Each one of the children stared up at him from those expressionless faces that regarded Titus as if he were of no real particular interest, yet the only thing of any interest at all for that particular moment in their world nonetheless.
“I’m ready.”
He whirled about, finding her on the porch above him. Behind Amy stood Mrs. Whistler framed by the open doorway, tucking a wisp of her hair behind an oversize ear. From the cabin came the strong lure of salat greens simmering in a pepper-pot soup over a fire. Daughter tossed mother her apron, then pulled at the loose end of a ribbon that had held her own hair back from her face.
“Here, Mama,” she said, laying the ribbon in her mother’s palm, then planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek.
No different from the kisses she gives me, he thought.
But when Amy turned back to Titus, she wiggled her head, shaking out her hair, combing her fingers through the long, wavy tresses that caught the sunset with a hint of coppery shimmer. Oh, how he loved her for the way she tossed that mane from side to side. He was positive she had to know what a trembling pan of mush it made of his insides to watch her do something so seductive as flip that hair around, suddenly loosened from its ribbon.
“You young’uns have fun now,” Mrs. Whistler cheered them, waving to them both as Amy leaped barefoot from the porch to his side.
Swallowing hard, Titus waved back and nodded lamely, not taking his eyes off Amy—for the moment he could dwell on nothing more than seeing her get loose of her clothing. He wondered how a woman looked skinned. Shet of her garments—almost like skinning an animal to get down past all the layers of concealment.
He thought he wouldn’t be able to take another breath when she slid her hand into his and tugged him away, stumbling and ungainly as a newborn calf at her side.
“You been looking forward to tonight, Titus?” she finally asked when they had pierced the shadows beneath the timber at the far side of the yard.
He glanced back at the Whistler cabin, her brothers playing mumblety-peg in the yard and her sisters fluttering around that rope swing, not sure what to feel now that he found himself truly alone with her and on their way to the swimming hole. Anticipating to the point that he found it hard to speak.
“M-more’n anything … ever,” he stumbled getting the words out.
Amy didn’t say anything more on that walk through the woods until they reached the creek and turned south, using the game trail that ran close to the bank, a path likely every bit as familiar to their bare feet as it was to the four-legged creatures who shared this hardwood forest. An owl flapped low over their heads as they reached the pool, hooting once in the shrinking light that seemed to compress the world in around them. As far as he was concerned, there really was nothing beyond the ring of trees and tangle of brush that covered either bank, immediately surrounding them with a sense of privacy, intimacy. Despite the coming twilight, the yellow of tansy and whitish-blue of periwinkle were still evident among the fragrant wild clover.
For several minutes they stood at the side of the boulder, staring at the black water stretching to the far bank, not uttering a word. Then Amy finally turned and spoke.
“You still wanna swim with me way we done when we was children?”
“I ain’t really thought of nothing else for days, Amy,” he confessed. “Working that field for my pa, yanking stumps outta the ground—everything I done it made, no matter: I ain’t thought of nothing else.”
Slipping her hand from his, she stepped away to the side of the boulder. “I’ll shinny out of my clothes over here. You stay there and … I’ll meet you in the water.”
“Aw-awright,” he answered, of a sudden dry-mouthed.
He felt that left hand she had been holding grow cool in a gentle nudge of breeze rattling the heavy green leaves on nearby beech and cedar trees. Cool enough to make him aware for the first time that the dampness had been there in his palm all along. He looked down at it, then swiped both palms down the front of his britches. When Titus glanced back up, she was gone behind the boulder.
For an instant he thought of following her, just closely enough to watch her disrobe—a little miffed that she robbed him of experiencing her shinny out of her clothes. Then he quickly realized he would see all of her soon enough. And that set him to tearing at the bone buttons on his square-shouldered, pullover shirt, ripping it from his shoulders and flinging it onto a bush close by. He fought with the wooden buttons at the wide flap of his drop-front britches, then tugged them down his legs and crow-hopped out of them a foot at a time.
The water was cold when he stepped off the grassy bank and into the shimmering pond, cracking the surface of the placid waters that flowed peacefully toward the Ohio River less than two miles off to the northwest. He gasped audibly as the water met his privates, but on he sank as his feet felt their way across the bottom. Within heartbeats his skin grew accustomed to the feel of the pool, and he sank to his chin, arms treading slowly as he moved away from the bank, then turned back to the boulder that stood overlooking the grassy bank.
He stopped, stunned into utter motionlessness.
Amy slipped through the starlight, more silhouette than shape. Just enough starshine and nibbled moon for him to see the milky whiteness of her skin as she emerged from the shadows of overhanging branches, and no sooner had he gasped again than she was swallowed by that shiny black surface of the water, which reflected the night sky the way a tortoise’s shell shimmered like polished ebony. With his belt knife he had carved his mother a pair of hair combs from just such a shell for her last birthday.
Remembering that, he watched Amy sink slowly to her chin, her long hair trailing out behind her on the surface of the water as she slowly rippled her way toward him.
When she was a good six feet from Titus, Amy turned aside and stretched out her body, her legs bobbing to the surface, her feet kicking playfully at the water. Her white body merging with a distinct line against the black surface of the disturbed water, Amy rolled over and swam off toward the far side of the creek.
He watched her feet splash at the water, the curve at the back of her legs where the ankles ran up to meet her calves. There at the crook of the knees she moved up and down ever so slightly as she kicked in a great arc while turning back. And he stared transfixed at the tight mounds of her rump exposed above the water’s plane like a rounded hillock draped with the first snow of the winter in this silvery li
ght. Against that black, glimmering slide of the roiling surface she plied back toward him.
Her legs ceased kicking, her arms no longer crawled through the water as she came close. A little breathless, Amy spoke.
“I forgot how good this feels. Been some time since’t I come down here. So busy helping mama with the chores, with all the rest of the babies.”
He only nodded, and swallowed hard. Unable to speak as she drew up to arm’s length.
She whispered. “I’m glad I come, Titus.”
“Me too.” His eyes sought to divine a vision through that black water. How he wanted to see bare what he had never seen before.
Inching closer, now well within his reach, Amy stopped and bobbed slightly as she settled her feet to the creek bottom. As her shoulders emerged, the tops of her young breasts broke the surface of the water. He felt himself stir, twitch, strengthen like nothing before in all those nights alone beneath his blankets.
“This … this is important to me,” she whispered, as if it were a secret that could not be shared even with the creekbank. “Important to us.”
“Us,” he repeated. Then reached out a hand, hoping to touch.
She felt it brush the underside of one breast, then seized it in one of her own, inching his down along her ribs to rest at the soft curve of her pelvis. Amy shuddered.
“There,” she said. “When you touched me … there.”
“I want to.”
For a moment she didn’t say anything, only stared back into his eyes. Then admitted, “It made me … not like you was tickling me. Just a … a nice tingle.”
“I want to, Amy.”
“Yes,” she replied. “I want you to.”
As she said it, Amy moved Titus’s hand up her ribs to place it on her breast. He gasped at the soft, slippery feel to it cupped in his hand. She closed her eyes halfway, and he sensed the shudder shoot through her.
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