Beneath the surface Amy sought out his left hand, pulled it to her, placed it on the other breast as she eased a step closer to him.
“That’s—oh! You’re making me shiver like I was cold,” she confided. “But it ain’t really like I’m cold. Shivering ’cause you’re making me warm there to touch me.”
Her palms brushed across the flat hardness of his skinny chest at the same time he felt a hardening of some of the skin at the middle of her breasts. She had to be made the way he was, Titus decided. Not all that different: with nipples just like him and the hogs and even the bitch hound that slept under the porch, out of the snow and out of the sun. But as he gently raised her breasts out of the water, he saw these were not at all the same nipples. Amy’s were something deliciously different.
And in looking at them, he felt all the more stirring as he rose beneath the surface of that tranquil pond.
Or perhaps it was the way her eyes half closed once more when she tilted her chin back and slowly slid her hands down below the water, just barely brushing the skin of his chest until she reached his belly and held there as Titus rubbed his hands across her hardened nipples.
With a groan emanating from the back of her throat, Amy’s hands inched on down—suddenly reaching his engorged flesh.
“Oh,” she said, opening her eyes and bringing them down to look squarely at him.
How they glistened in the starlight there as the moon rose.
“What’s this?” she asked.
When she ran a single, roughened finger down the length of it, his flesh quivered. “My. Did you feel what it did when I touched it?”
“F-feels good, Amy,” he begged.
Hurried, with one hand he traced a path from a breast down to her belly, and stopped as he felt the mat of curly hair. Made different from him, constructed perhaps like half of those coupling critters he had watched in rapt amazement over the past few years. He sought to go lower, finding that the hair ended and her privates parted in two soft folds of skin. Just like the cows he had observed. Of a sudden he realized it was there he was to put himself, to slip within as the males of other species mounted their females.
Her breathing had become ragged, short and raspy. Inching his finger farther down, he gently moved the skin apart. Amy gasped deeply. And clamped her hand around him, hard.
He felt his flesh jerk as if it were about to leap free of him, even free of her lock on him, a sudden constriction seizing his lower belly.
Titus had to bury himself in her. Now.
Clumsily he dragged her hips toward him, working his groin upward as he pulled her thighs apart. With her arms Amy tread water, her widening eyes locked on his, their faces marked with strained intensity. Time and again he thrust himself at her, his hands grappling violently at the small of her back, yanking her down on him, seizing hold of her buttocks as he thrust against the water’s buoyancy, which made her rise from him.
“N-not like this,” she ordered as she kicked her legs off his hips. Pointing, she added, “The bank. Up there.”
In despair he watched as she turned away, laying out on the surface of the water, kicking her legs and stroking with her arms, the long hair playing out behind her. Titus was within reach of her as they arrived at the grassy bank and stepped out of the pond, both of them trembling with the summer’s breeze as it kissed their wet skin.
With a sudden sense of how he was to mesh his body with hers, Titus was on top of Amy even as she settled quickly to the grass and rolled over from her hip. Barely lying back before he was atop her thighs. Legs that spread beneath the press of his weight.
Looking down at her, his long hair dripping into her face, Titus suddenly closed his eyes, dipped his head, and laid his mouth fully on hers. She sucked at his lips hungrily, thrusting her hips upward at the same moment. He sensed that same tightening across his lower belly and drew back, confused at this all-compelling need to concentrate not on her mouth, but to get himself between her legs.
As he rose on his hands, he looked down at the soft, rounded mounds of her breasts, the skin pale against the darker pink of her nipples. Then attempted to thrust himself farther against her.
“Not, not like …,” she said huskily.
And in the next moment Amy had seized his hard flesh and was guiding it against a softer spot, lower between her smooth thighs. Making the end of him brush the folds of flesh as the sky seemed to light up all around him with shooting stars, the earth quaked beneath him, as if to swallow them up.
He felt that first explosion—no doubt of that—yet it was the second and all those that rocked him afterward that seized Titus with such force he knew he would likely never see again. Everything had turned black except for the shooting stars. Again and again his hips flung forward against her, his hot flesh still enclosed in her hand, trying desperately to bury his rigid penis in her without success as he spent himself in great waves against the inside of her thigh.
She sighed as he trembled to a halt, and laid his head in the curve where her neck met a shoulder.
“We’ll have lots of babies,” she whispered, clutching his head to her chin, the other hand still gripping his softening flesh. “I’ll give you lots of children, Titus. I’ll raise them, and you raise the crops. Man and woman supposed to be like that.”
He shuddered again, this time from fear. Of a sudden afraid at what he had just done. This talk of babies and joining Amy on the land. Knowing he was not the sort who could sink the rest of his life into the ground with her.
Afraid he would never be man enough to stay.
3
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 water
y 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.”
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