Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  Instead of what frontier folks called an “Indian basket”—one made of cane splints or even grass stalks—the Cumberland was woven of white-oak splits, the very same material the pioneer used to weave chaif bottoms, that oak peeled in the spring at the same season he peeled his hickory bark.

  Sitting atop split-log benches on the narrow porch, Titus and Able worked beneath the light of two candle lanterns, each of them carving out a different size of peg. Like expensive, hand-forged nails, these oak pegs were used for all sorts of construction and repair on the frontier farms.

  Nearly every evening the males all along the border country spent their last few hours after supper and before retiring to bed repairing wood and leather farm equipment, if not whittling the pegs they would use in making those repairs to buckets and kegs, yokes and plows. Whittling at pegs as well as buttons for the barn door, grainmill gears from good, strong hardwood, beech or oak carved into a dasher for the red cedar butter churn—although every good farmer knew that beech always seemed to decay far before its time—maybe even a wooden door hasp, complete with turning key. Seemed that a man never stopped whittling—even as he sat up with a sick relation taken to bed with a fever, waiting for the ague to loosen its grip on a loved one. All time was precious in and of itself on the frontier, and so best used in keeping one’s hands busy.

  While panes of glass could be had inexpensively, iron wasn’t cheap in this country. What there was of it found its way down the Ohio, thence up to St. Louis, where the price of the long iron bars just the right thickness for making tenpenny nails easily quadrupled with the cost of its transportation. Like most settlers, Able Guthrie was a fair enough hand at the hot and sooty work over a forge and bellows, although most men on the frontier generally used the cabin fireplace for their forge and a block of wood topped with a thick plate of iron for their anvil. There they could repair a broken grubbing hoe or fashion a badly needed log chain—for pulling up stubborn stumps—from strips of iron cut with a cold chisel, even reshape and sharpen a worn plowshare, and always, always repair their most vital tool on the frontier: firearms.

  True enough that, for most things, repairs with wood and rawhide proved to be far cheaper than repairs with expensive and hard-to-come-by strap iron. Not to mention that most settlers preferred to weld all their wood construction together with pegs hammered into hand-drilled holes lathered with a generous dollop of oakum, which would swell each peg and seat it with no possibility of give, instead of investing in the cost and time to forge-cut and hammer out all the iron nails the same job would require.

  “Over in the Illinois I’ve heard tell a time or two of them Chickasaws,” Able said. “That bunch you told us jumped you, then killed your flatboat pilot. They sound just like the sort the redcoats could talk into making war down on the lower Mississip.”

  “Just as long as we got warning,” Lottie said as she settled back onto her stool beside the spinning wheel, shifting her skirts up to lay a moccasin on the treadle. “We can get ourselves out of here afore they come tearing through.”

  Indeed. Such worry had always been a fact of life on the borderlands.

  For more than a year now there had been growing unrest along the western frontier, an uneasiness wrought of rumor and speculation, to be sure, but more so born of a genuine fear that a real threat of Indian invasion once again existed. Like Able Guthrie and Titus Bass, frontier folk were people with family who had fought in the French and Indian War, and a short generation later battled against the British—this time in bloody rebellion against the crown.

  Word carried up and down the river in the last year or so that every Indian nation between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains had come under British influence, summoned to revolt against the Americans by none other than Tecumseh, whose very name struck fear into the hearts of many white settlers strung out along the borderlands. Robert Dickson, the sinister British Indian agent upriver at Prairie du Chien, had himself been fomenting all the unrest and insurrection he could—sparking serious fears that thousands of wild-eyed, painted warriors were about to descend the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in a grand assault to wipe the frontier clear of Americans.

  Despite the fact that they had launched an invasion of the Illinois in 1813, and a year later Clark himself had led a campaign against the British at Prairie du Chien, they had been less than successful in choking off the possibility that Tecumseh’s federation might just thunder across the sparsely settled frontier. Rumors continued to ignite American passions as those hardy souls waited in the darkness of their lonely cabins, watching and listening, keeping their guns primed and always within reach, whether by the door, or in the fields as harvest neared. These were not a people easily frightened, nor given to hobgoblins of their own making. Folks who had cleared land and settled in that fertile band of country extending from the lower Missouri to the mouth of the Arkansas all had very legitimate fears when reports came north of redcoats down the Mississippi.

  Now with all this talk of the British bringing in their huge men-of-war to New Orleans, there to off-load lobster-backed regulars in preparation of launching a pincers invasion on the entire Mississippi valley … why, it only gave the faint of heart another reason to dwell long and hard on heading back east somewhere, anywhere the British weren’t coming ashore and the Indians weren’t skulking.

  “I’ll tell you this for a fact,” Able declared, dusting shavings off his lap onto the porch and standing to stretch backward, working the kinks out of his spine. “The Injuns don’t need no British to help ’em make trouble in this country. Forests thick as they are hereabouts, the Injuns got millions and millions of friends.”

  “Friends?” Titus asked, nicking a finger with his knife.

  “The trees,” Guthrie answered, jabbing his knife into the dark. “Trees what can hide them savages as they come sneaking up on a settler’s place. Hide ’em again after they’ve done their devil’s work and are skulking away into the forest, getting off with scalps and prisoners and everything else the durn blooders can carry away.”

  “There simply ain’t no way of figuring what goes on in an Injun’s mind,” Lottie added as her foot rocked the treadle, the hackle spinning in rhythm with the giant wheel as the wool fibers wrapped themselves around one another in a long, continuous strand she was carefully taking up on another spindle.

  Marissa sat nearby atop a three-legged stool as the air cooled and the twilight deepened, carding more of last spring’s wool sheared from the family’s sheep. He looked at her a long moment, watching her hands at work, remembering his mother at work on her own linsey-woolsey, the cane splints clacking as she moved them back and forth in the weaving sleigh, making her coarse cloth for those loved ones needing new shirts and britches, dresses and stockings.

  “The missus is right, Titus,” Able agreed. “No way of knowing when Injuns will break loose. That’s why my folks kept the doors barred tight, and come summer they plugged the chimneys too.”

  Bass looked up at Able. “Injuns come in down the chimneys?”

  “They sure as … they sure do,” Guthrie said, barely catching himself. “They’ll come to get you anyways they can. Mingoes, Wyandots, them Shawnee what your grandpa fought in his day. Any and all of ’em. They’re the devil’s seed, that’s the gospel. Their kind’s the red offspring of ol’ Be-Hell-Zee-Bub himself!”

  “Didn’t you and Titus tell me word has it Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio are all clamoring for war the loudest?” Lottie asked.

  “It’s the God’s truth there,” Able replied. “Folks what settled in country the farthest from the fight with the redcoats appear the most eager to stir things up now.”

  Bothersome gnats had gone with the fall of the sun, as had the buzz of the hummingbirds, but still Titus could hear the reassuring chirp of the cicadas clinging to the trees, thinking about how Able had said every one of those big trees was a friend to the Indians coming to wipe the valley clear of Americans. A threat so real that it took on shap
e and body as he remembered his footrace from the Chickasaw hunting party, the smell of them strong in his nostrils as they boarded the flatboat, grappled hand to hand with the crew, leaving Ebenezer Zane dead.

  “While’st it’s the rest of us out here—we’re the ones who’ll fight their war when it comes,” Guthrie eventually added.

  “If’n them Injuns was coming,” Titus said in that tone of his when he wanted most to prove he knew whereof he spoke, “they’d long come by now, Mr. Guthrie.”

  The settler’s knife stopped in the middle of a long peg, a tiny curl still wrapped over the blade and Guthrie’s finger. After a moment’s contemplation he said, “Maybeso you’re right, Titus.”

  “They was coming, they’d come in the first full moon of spring,” Bass explained. “Even first full moon of early summer.”

  Guthrie’s brow crinkled. “How you figure it by the seasons like that?”

  “I don’t,” Titus replied. “Just recollect what my grandpap allays said. The Injuns, they come right after winter breaks up. Now, well—it’s getting too late in the raiding season.”

  With a great harump the settler turned to look at his wife. “See there, Lottie. This young man’s got him some good sense ’bout such things, don’t he, now?” He looked back at Titus. “Let’s just pray your grandpap was right.”

  “’Nother thing too,” Bass said as he selected another oak limb to whittle on from the pile at his feet. “Injuns fight for what they figure to be their land.”

  “Your grandpappy teach you that too?”

  “Yes, sir. Them Injuns folks say are far up the Missouri—’bout them coming down here to raid? No, sir: they won’t get all that fired up ’bout coming down here to fight when this ain’t the land where the bones of their grandfathers are buried.”

  Slapping his knee, the farmer exclaimed, “I’ll be damned!”

  “Able Guthrie!” Lottie scolded.

  “Oh, hush now, woman. I been minding my mouth long enough that I’m due a damn now and again!” He twisted on his half-log bench to gaze at Titus wonderingly. “So you know something of Injuns, do you?”

  “Not near enough,” Bass replied with a disarming smile. Then he remembered. “What I didn’t know almost got me kill’t in Chickasaw country four years back.”

  Guthrie rocked against the cabin’s wall, gesturing with his knife at the youth. “Just my point, son. Just my point. Don’t you ever forget it. No matter how right or wrong you are in them Injuns invading us here in this country … you just remember that as soon as a fella thinks he’s got an Injun figured out, that fella’s made him a big mistake.”

  That made immediate sense, sinking in the way it did all at once. He grinned back at Guthrie. “I do believe them are words a man can live by, sir. An Injun is a real uncertain critter. Yes, sir. An Injun is a most uncertain critter.”

  “You ever said anything to your ma about us?”

  He sensed Marissa’s hair glide across the bare skin of his chest, that flesh feeling a little tighter now as the sweat dried.

  “No, I ain’t said a word.”

  “She knows.”

  “I know she knows,” Marissa replied, then fell quiet for a time, and finally added, “I guess a mother always does know when her only daughter falls in love.”

  He wondered how it felt to be so completely swallowed up in love like she was, like he was afraid to be. He lay there listening to the cicadas and the peeping of the tree frogs, and her breathing against his chest. The sweet, heady fragrance of forsythia and redbuds exuded a delicate perfume on the air. A few yards away the thick, verdant woods abounded with violets and wild plum having just come to bloom.

  “You think she knows you’re slipping out to come see me most ever’ night now?”

  “She can’t help but know, Titus,” Marissa answered. “There’s just something atween a woman and her daughter what I can’t put into words. But one woman always knows when another woman’s in love.”

  “How ’bout your pa?”

  “Him? He’s a sleeper. A hard sleeper. Works hard every day, so he needs his sleep every night. Not like ma. She don’t get much rest anymore. Last few months. Something’s changed with her—but she won’t own up to it for me. But I know she gets real weary and that sometimes she ain’t sleeping when I come slipping out to see you here. Times I know she’s already awake when I go sneaking back in afore first light.”

  “How you feel about that?” he asked, already knowing how he felt: more scared of hurting those good people who had taken him in than he was scared in facing any punishment meted out for dallying with their daughter’s heart.

  “If she knows about us and ain’t said anything to me—I figure she don’t have a problem with it. Any way you look at it, my ma’s give us her blessing.”

  “Blessing,” he echoed in a low whisper, knowing what Marissa meant.

  “I ain’t never asked you if you love me,” she finally whispered against his chest, “even though I been telling you my feelings for some time now.”

  “I told you I’d say the words when I knowed I could say ’em.”

  “And I always told you that’s fine by me.”

  She brushed her fingers across his belly, nails scratching across the bony prominence of one hipbone where the skin was stretched taut. He twitched. It was almost a tickle, but not quite. Something more urgent, deeper and less easily stilled than a tickle that she aroused in him with her wandering touch. As little as she had known about her body and the way of men when they had first grappled in the hay one hot night back in June, Marissa sure had made up for lost time with how she threw herself into their coupling. Some folks was just natural-born riders, or swimmers, maybe even runners. But to Titus, Marissa Guthrie was a natural-born humper. Unashamedly she hungered for him every bit as much as he hungered for her. Time and again he had studied at that cloudy piece of mirror Lottie had given him to keep in the barn for shaving, searching for the telltale bite marks and bruises Marissa had left during her exuberant coupling.

  Of a time or two he had even grown scared she would wake up her parents in the nearby cabin, moaning so loud the way she did, mingling her passion with an uninhibited shriek every now and again. But still Lottie never said anything about her daughter’s noise, and Able was likely too tired to hear.

  The past few days they had labored long and hard. He and Guthrie had been finishing up splitting some shakes for the cabin’s roof—working fast against the coming of autumn’s harvest and another onslaught of winter. For the past two winters the Guthries had lived beneath a roof constructed of rough-sawed boards jointed with oakum to seal the seams as best the man could. Boards Able had cut into six-foot lengths and laid in overlapping rows, held in place with long, straight saplings called butting poles he pegged down by their ends to roof joists.

  Folks along the frontier were always quick to learn the superstitious rites so much a part of working with native woods: a roof board rived on a waning moon would curl; a cedar post would rot before its time if set when the sign was in the feet; or timber cut when the sap was down would last far longer.

  Titus listened to Marissa breathing against him for some time, then asked her, “How come you ain’t got no brothers and sisters?”

  She trembled slightly when he asked the question, then clutched him tightly as she answered. “I was first born. Nobody will tell me for certain, maybe they don’t know for certain—but I figure me being born hurt something inside my ma. Folks always said it was just God’s will that she and pa had no more children. But I know she missed out on a lot by not having a big family like she and pa had always planned on.”

  “That’s why she’s allays talking about the grandbabies you’re gonna give her—”

  “The grandbabies we’re gonna give her, Titus,” she corrected. “I just know ma can’t wait to hold our babies, like they was the ones of her very own she missed out on because something got tore up inside when I was born. So you and me gonna give her the little ones sh
e couldn’t have for her own self.”

  Every day he found himself growing more and more comfortable with the idea of staying on there. Especially on those nights when she came to him like this and they lay together, cool flesh to cool flesh. Yet every morning after she left him to slip away in the chill, predawn air, Titus sensed his doubts of staying return, his confusion on just how to tell her resurfacing, and, oh—how to explain it to her parents?

  He sensed this pull on him as if it were the tides, as if he were floundering in that swimming hole back home where he and Amy had swum as children, then made one another lovers. Floundering he was: flailing away with his arms and legs, not ever drowning, but never getting any closer to shore either. All that work and effort, only to keep his head above water … gasping, gasping for breath….

  She was talking to him now about their first night together, recalling how she had come to the bottom of the ladder and called out his name in a whisper until he had poked his head over the side of the loft and looked down at her wrapped in her sleeping gown of fine white linen cambric, one bare foot on the bottom rung. How that bare foot and those little toes had made him want her right then and there. She went on to remind him how scared he had acted when she’d asked if she could climb up the ladder, the better to sit and talk with him.

  “I finally talked you into it, didn’t I?” she asked. “Talked you into a lot of things. Just like I’m sure I’ll talk you into falling in love with me one day real soon.”

  Then Marissa’s chatter drifted back to that first night, how she had explained to him she wished to be kissed, to be held, just like a woman. Miserable because she believed she was getting so old, when other girls her age were spoken for, some even getting married and starting their families.

  “You got lots of time,” he soothed her. “Sixteen ain’t old.”

  “Out here it’s old. A girl learns to lye corn and weave nettle cloth at six or seven in this country. My pa always said if he’d had him a boy, he’d learned to hunt and trap afore that boy learned to hoe and plow—at least long before he learned how to read. Why, I know of girls marrying when they was thirteen or fourteen, Titus. Even my ma said she was late in posting her banns—she had me when she was seventeen.”