Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  He dragged himself away, gasping for breath to keep from losing his stomach on the floor, sliding on his bare legs over to the fire pit beneath that sheet-iron chimney, and blew on the coals. Finding plenty of life in them, Titus began to lay bark chips and slivers of kindling on the glowing embers until he had a warming fire stoked once again. It did not take long for it to knock the chill from the log-and-chink lean-to constructed at the back of Mathilda’s alehouse and road inn.

  In the corner sat a short three-legged stool supporting a copper kettle. What caught his eye was the handle of an iron ladle poking over the lip of the kettle. Ladling out some of the liquid in the kettle, he took a cautious sniff. Water. He drank his fill, dipper after dipper, nearly emptying the kettle before he got himself sated. His mouth was no longer so dry, but his eyes still hurt with a hot, gritty pain. Maybeso he could sleep some more now that he had taken care of his thirst.

  But then he was reminded of the immense pressure in his groin. In searching under the low bed he found a copper chamber pot and dragged it over to a far corner. With his back to the bed and the fire, he pulled the blanket apart, rose upon his knees, and relieved himself. From a wooden bucket with a rope handle he took a handful of red cedar shavings and tossed them into the chamber pot so the small, closed room would not reek so badly with the stench of his urine.

  That business seen to, Titus kneed his way across the pounded clay floor, reaching the side of the bed, where he crawled back under a second wool blanket. He had no more got himself settled and let out a contented sigh than he jerked in surprise, feeling her hand tickle across the flat of his belly, her fingers descending to encircle his limp flesh. Startled, he lay there, partly frightened, partly hypnotized with sensing his flesh grow and harden as quickly as it did.

  “You be a good boy now and give me another one of your rides, river rat.”

  “M-my name’s Titus,” he said cautiously. “Told you last night I wasn’t no riverman like the rest of them. Don’t you go and call me a river rat.”

  “Awright, Titus,” she purred, sliding her body up against his once more. “You’re just a boy long, long way from home, ain’t you?”

  “Ain’t no boy.”

  “Awright,” she agreed. “So tell me where you’re headed.”

  “Always aimed to make it here to Louisville.”

  She kept on kneading him, saying, “Ain’t all that much work round here. Might find work for the army down there to Fort Knox.”

  “Don’t know what I’ll do,” he replied, one of his hands moving as if on its own accord to find her thigh, climbing to stroke the curve of her buttock. It felt good beneath his touch. Almost immediately he grew curious about her breasts. Dragging the blanket back from her shoulder, Titus looked down at them.

  “Go ’head. Kiss ’em,” she said in a husky whisper. “They want you to kiss ’em, Titus.”

  Not at all sure how it should be done, he planted a chaste peck on each one.

  “No,” she instructed, reaching up with her free hand to force his head down onto a breast. “Open your mouth. Lick ’em. Suck on ’em too. That’s the way you can make ’em feel good.”

  Obediently, he did as she asked. Finding that not only did she respond with a growing murmur in the back of her throat, but he found himself becoming inflamed with hunger the more he fondled, kissed, sucked, and licked on her. And through it all she pressed his face down into that pliant fleshiness of her.

  “Don’t be selfish, now, Titus,” she finally said. “The other’n wants some attention too.”

  He let her shove his face over to the other breast, where he continued his enjoyment of her damp skin. While he was, there came a couple of times when he thought he just might explode, so fiery was the stimulation she was giving him between his legs. Then he put his head between her breasts, licking down, down, down to her belly.

  As she arched her back, he continued to kiss back and forth across her flat, smooth belly, from one sharp hipbone, licking the groin to the other hip.

  “Do this,” she said huskily, taking one of his hands now and pushing it down upon the soft hairiness of her thigh. Moving it up and down twice in a heated flurry, the woman finally positioned his fingers on the inside of her leg.

  “C’mon up with your hand to where you’ll find me getting wet.”

  “W-wet?” he asked, more than a little concerned. Perhaps there was something wrong—maybe even her getting her monthly visit like Amy finally did. Scared that maybeso what he was doing was making the woman bleed.

  “It’s awright, Titus. Just what happens to a woman. Feel it—how warm I got for you awready. How wet I am for you to climb up on me now.”

  “Now?”

  She shook her head. “We can wait a bit. Just touch me all over down there and see just how wet you’re making me. This be the best way for a young’un like you to learn all ’bout a woman.”

  As he began to explore with his fingers, climbing higher and higher until he reached her warmth and wetness, hearing her groan low and feral, the woman dragged his head back down against her flesh: tangling her fingers within his hair as she pulled his face back to her breasts once more, rubbing him there with an urgent need. His fingers continued to explore her, studying the rise and fall of the contours of her body, afraid at first with its newness when he discovered her skin grew all the more moist the more he probed along that parting of her flesh between her thighs.

  “There,” she whispered. “Right there. Put your fingers in.” Then without ceremony she reached down and roughly guided his hand against her flesh, positioning him, easing his fingers within her with a groan. Gripping his wrist with a trembling lock, the woman moved his fingers back and forth within her as her hips began to rock upward, just as she had rocked against him earlier that night.

  When he felt her shudder convulsively, tossing her head from side to side, Titus again grew scared—fearful he had hurt her, but as soon as he tried to yank his hand from her, the woman seized it, dragged it back against the same moist warmth. Afraid to move, ignorant of what had just happened with her, he lay there still as a cat about to pounce on a mouse.

  “You done good,” she said eventually when her breathing became more regular. The woman stroked his hair with the hand that held his face against her breast.

  Wanting to sort out the mystery so badly, but not sure how to ask, Titus finally said, “Tell me what I done good for you.”

  “Ever’thing. Bet you done good in school—quick as you are at learning. The kissing and licking, and how you learn’t to touch me where it drives me near crazed. That all come to you pretty fast, Titus Bass.”

  “You done most of it yourself.”

  He could feel her wag her head.

  “I just showed you—an’ you done the rest like you was born to make a woman’s body happy.”

  “Is that what I done?” he asked, lifting his head and looking down into her face.

  “Damn right. Just you remember me whenever you want a woman to hump. I’ll allays save time for you, Titus-from-upriver.”

  “What about all them others what come back here with you—”

  “Shit,” she grumbled sourly, shifting position slightly. “All the rest of them just interested in their own good time. Not that I don’t make a living at it, mind you, now—but they don’t think about me a’tall.”

  “’Fraid I don’t rightly understand.”

  “See, I’d rather take me a young’un like you and teach him what a man ought’n do to make a woman happy, ’cause all them older ones only worried about themselves. An’ speaking of that: it’s about time Titus climbed on me with that hammer of his and knocked a few pegs loose hisself. C’mon, lover.”

  She kept her fingers locked around his flesh as he rolled over her, positioned himself, and rocked forward. He was beginning to think there wasn’t much of anything better than that feeling of getting inside a woman. For a fleeting moment he thought how he had lain atop Amy beside their old swimming hole las
t summer and never really gotten his pecker buried in her. Only between her thighs. It wasn’t until the second time that together Amy and he had gotten him inside her, both of them moving frantically, urgently before he repeated his first performance and exploded all too quickly.

  But now this, the way the woman showed him to make it last precious minutes longer. If something felt so damned good, it just made sense for him to find all the ways he could to prolong his pleasure.

  Locking his elbows so he could rock above her, hurling his hips into her with a growing insistence, Titus sensed the fire rising, the flames climbing across his lower belly for no more than a matter of heartbeats before the stars exploded back of his eyelids.

  Once his breathing had slowed, he lay with a hand cupped on one of her soft breasts, fingertips sensing the bony ribs beneath it. “How you come to be called Mincemeat?”

  She didn’t answer for some time, then replied, “You see’d my face in the light. That oughtta tell you. I been called that name since’t I was no more’n a wee child. Back to Virginia where I was raised, whole valley had us a time with the pox. Some got it real bad and died, burning up with the fever. Some didn’t get it at all. But most young’uns was like me. Got real sick, closing in on death’s door—but we come back to the land of the living. Only our faces to show that we’d been marked by the pox.”

  “Why call you Mincemeat?”

  “The pox on our cheeks looked red and angry, crusted and weepy for the longest time. My older brothers got to calling me Mincemeat ’cause my face looked like the meat mama chopped up and mixed in her mincemeat pies.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Awright to call me Mincemeat. Ever’body does,” she answered, turning her head away.

  “No,” he insisted. “I really wanna know your real name.”

  “Ain’t been called by my real name in longer’n I can remember.”

  “You know mine. So tell me yours.”

  When she finally answered, her voice sounded distant, sad. “Abigail,” she replied softly.

  “That’s pretty, your folks naming you Abigail.”

  “Abigail Thresher.”

  “And you’re from Virginia?”

  “Family’s all back there.”

  “Some of my kin come from Virginia.”

  “You born there too?” she asked.

  “No. Like Ebenezer said, I’m a Kentucky man. But my grandpap come from Virgin’a. By the time he got over the mountains with the others to settle, I s’pose it weren’t Virgin’a no more. They was already calling the place Caintuckee. That’s where I’m from—downriver from Cincinnati an’ Fort Washington.”

  “Your folks farming?”

  “Long way back, we been farmers. What they wanted me to be too.”

  “But you’re gonna be a riverman like Ebenezer Zane and them others now, ain’cha?”

  “I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think hard on it some last two days—but I first set my sights on coming here to Louisville. Still think I like the forest better’n the river.”

  She cleared her throat and replied, “Probably better for you, Titus. I seen enough these last few years to know river life can be mean on a man. On the women what work ’longside the rivers too. Ain’t all men gone bad—some of ’em like Ebenezer. He’s half horse, half alligator like the best of ’em, but he’s still got him good feelings inside. You’re damned lucky you bumped into him coming downriver. Been some of them others, they’d had you stripped of all you owned and killed you just for the fun of it. Dumped your body off the side of the boat.”

  “I can take care of myself,” he bristled.

  “You’re still just a boy—”

  “I ain’t a boy!” Titus snapped, rolling away from her angrily, shuddering with the cold as he pulled out from beneath the blanket.

  She eased against his back. “Sorry if I hurt your feelings. What I meant to say was you ’pear to be growing into a fine young man. It’s easy to tell you ain’t got no business on the river … less’n you learn the riverman’s life from someone like Ebenezer Zane.”

  “You said Ebenezer ain’t mean—like most of ’em are,” Titus began. “S’pose you tell me ’bout what happened that made them three ugly fellers want nothing to do with tangling with Ebenezer last night.”

  For some time she lay quiet, nestled into his back. He could hear her breathing, feel the rise and fall of it against him as he watched the dip and dance of the fire’s light on the far wall.

  “It was to last summer,” Abigail eventually began, in too quiet a voice. “The run Ebenezer made afore this’un. Most crews can make two trips downriver a year if they try—”

  He was instantly edgy at the way she took her own sweet time to roll out the story, interrupting to say, “Just tell me what happened when he come through Louisville last time.”

  “There was two of ’em he picked a fight with.”

  “Ebenezer Zane?” he asked in disbelief. “Picking a fight?”

  “This is the God’s truth, it is,” she explained as she laid a scratchy wool blanket over his body once more. “You push any man far enough—”

  “All right, so I believe you. He picked a fight with two of ’em.”

  “Ebenezer had his reasons. Trust to that.”

  “They was?”

  “Them two he picked a fight with were hard users.”

  Bass wagged his head slightly. “I don’t know what that is—a hard user.”

  “The kind’s rough on women,” she explained. “This time it was Mathilda.”

  “Same one’s your boss?”

  She nodded. “Mathilda owns the Kangaroo and keeps us girls working. She don’t have nothing to do with the men no more—bedding down with ’em—unless they hap to be favorites of hers, like Kingsbury is. Mostly she just keeps out there in the tavern, making sure all folks are happy and them that aren’t get throwed out.”

  “So what does she got to do with Ebenezer and them two he picked a fight with?”

  “It all went back to the day before when Ebenezer’s boat landed and his boys come in for some supper and a good time,” Abigail continued her story. “Ebenezer stayed down to the boat—said his belly wasn’t feeling all that good. But Kingsbury come up here, and him and Mathilda was having themselves a drink together when a bunch of Pennsylvania riffraff come in. Their steersman set his eyes on Mathilda, right off—and when she told him she wasn’t bedding down with the customers no more, that big fella sour-mouthed her but he went off so’s to keep on drinking, like it wasn’t gonna matter.”

  “You gonna tell me how Ebenezer picked a fight with ’em?”

  “You’re jumping way ahead in the story,” she snapped, sitting up and letting the blanket fall from her upper body. He watched her breasts and bony shoulders as she rolled away from him on her hip. Then he stared at the mottled skin stretched over her bony back like a plucked bird’s folded wings as the woman swept up another dirty blanket from the end of the bed and wrapped it around herself. “You ever smoke afore?”

  As she rose, Titus swallowed hard. “No, I ain’t.”

  “Ever care to? Like now?”

  Abigail went to a small walnut lap chest beneath the lamp table and from it drew out a drawstring pouch and a small clay pipe. She continued her story while she settled back on the edge of the bed beside him.

  “Later on that night it seemed that bunch from Pennsylvania watched that Kingsbury and Mathilda was gone from the tavern for a long time together. And when the two of ’em come back, I was there to see the big steersman come over to grab hold of Mathilda—telling her he wanted some of her too. When she got angry and tried to explain she didn’t do that no more, he slapped her and dragged her up by her arm from the place where she was sitting.”

  As he watched Abigail taking finger-pinches of fragrant tobacco from the pouch and dropping them in the tiny clay pipe bowl, Titus could clearly picture the scene in his mind: the hazy, lamplit tavern, so noisy and raucous no one
would know what was happening right at first.

  “That’s when Kingsbury got up and jumped for the steersman. About as far as he got, ’cause some others got him and started whopping on him while the pilot knocked Mathilda around good.”

  “But when I come in last night, I watched a couple of fellas throwing a man out,” Titus said. “What about them she hires to protect her place?”

  “She has help now. Since last summer, anyways,” Abigail explained, rising from the bed, clutching the blanket around her upper arms, her shoulders naked as she stepped to the fire. There he watched her squat, bare feet and ankles exposed as the blanket slurred out across the floor around her. He smiled to see that flesh while she took a straw from a bucket and for a moment held it in the fire. “But back when Kingsbury and her got whopped on, there was nobody in the place who could help. They all just backed away and let them strangers beat up that woman, and a good man too. Four of ’em throwed Kingsbury outside in the yard, good as dead. While’st the pilot dragged Mathilda outside too—carried her off down to their boat, where the bunch of ’em held her down and started using her bad.”

  “Using her bad?”

  Taking the burning straw from the fire, Abigail held it over the pipe bowl and inhaled, sucking noisily to light the tobacco. Then she pulled the stem from her lips and blew a great gush of smoke toward the low beam-and-mud roof, finally saying, “Like you and me just done, ’cept it’s one man right after ’nother—and none of ’em gentle about it,” she commented sourly, her pocked face gone hard again, “The more they hit her, the more she cried and bled. And the more she cried, the more they hit her.”

  “How’d Ebenezer get in all of this?”

  “Said he heard a woman moaning. The more he listened from where he was sick on his boat, with his belly hurting him—the more he figured out what was happening: a woman crying and men laughing. Said he could even hear them smacking her, they was whopping on her so hard.”

  “That’s when he jumped on ’em?”