Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  “Three?” His throat seized, feeling more constricted at that moment than when he had tasted the corn mash a friend of his pap’s had brewed up for this year’s fair.

  “Could be,” she answered. “You know how it is when a man and a woman love each other and wanna be husband and wife. It’s how we was at the swimming hole a couple weeks back.”

  “I … I—”

  She prodded him coyly, “You remember, don’t you?”

  “Ain’t never gonna forget.”

  He pulled a gay red bandanna from a front pocket of his britches and swiped it across his forehead, glad it was so hot that she wouldn’t ever tell how it made him sweat just talking about this with her.

  “In a way,” Amy said, her voice softer now, those big doe eyes of hers darting left and right before she leaned forward confidentially, “I’ve been thinking on how good that made me feel—how I’d like to feel that good again sometime soon.”

  “S-soon?”

  “Maybe real soon,” Amy answered, leaning back and bringing her legs under her to rise. “Maybeso tonight: you come look me up over to my folks’ tent after supper chores is done.”

  “Tonight. Yes.”

  He rose unsteadily beside her, his temples pounding, hoping it was just the heat that made his head swim on rising waves of pressure. Then she was pressed against him, rubbing a breast against his arm. He looked down at the contours of her straining beneath the thin fabric of her dress.

  “You want to touch ’em again, don’t you, Titus?”

  “I, I surely would.”

  Planting a kiss lightly on the singed redness of his hairless cheek, Amy giggled and turned away. Over her shoulder she said, “Look me up, Titus—an’ we’ll sneak off so you can do all the touching you want.”

  Godamighty!

  He watched her sway side to side, moving off through the grass and sunlight toward the bustle and din of the fair, her long skirt sweeping this way then that as she threw those rounded hips of hers about. It made his mouth go dry just remembering how those hips felt in his hands, how he hadn’t just held them, more even than a frantic grope, but had clawed at them as he attempted to drive himself into her there in the cool black water of that stream.

  Into … inside … he never had been inside her, if there was an inside to women. Maybe there wasn’t and everything was all outside, like he was. And a man was just s’posed to get his pecker laid down atween their legs, getting hisself pointed just right afore he shot. And that was what made babies grow: was when a man shot center—the way he was determined to shoot center this evening—and his juices landed in just the right place on a woman’s privates.

  And then he felt some self-imposed embarrassment, just in thinking about it. There was no one he could ask. Nary a friend from the Rabbit Hash school he dared mention his fears to. Sure was he that they were as ignorant of such primal matters as he was. No father he could present himself to and ask for answers to such vital questions. Maybe only Amy herself held the key.

  He’d have to learn the mysteries from her—if he dared.

  Dared … because he was scared, frightened right down to the soles of his feet that he had put her with child already. Lying down atop a gal and pointing his pecker in the right direction, then shooting center to make a real mess on her, to make a mess of their lives.

  It was one bit of marksmanship Titus wasn’t all that sure he was so proud of right now as he leaned over and nuzzled the redbone hound.

  “C’mon, you ol’ ranger. Time for me to take you back to the folks afore I mosey off to the shooting range.”

  Tink whimpered a bit, mostly howled as he leaped against the length of rope tied around his neck when Titus left him behind, secured to a tree beside his folks’ pair of poor lean-tos.

  Thaddeus had pitched their camp right beside a Cincinnati pot merchant who was selling his kettles and ovens beneath an awning of bright-blue Russian sheeting. In cherrywood boxes he also displayed the medicinais he had to sell, English ague and fever drops, as well as butter tubs and cream jugs made of fired and painted clays. On the other side of them sat the red-trimmed marquee tent of a glassman from Pittsburgh. Here in the first decade of the nineteenth century glass was relatively plentiful, not yet overly priced for those settlers pushing against the western frontier. Forty of the twelve-by-twelve-inch panes sold for fourteen shillings, little more than a nickel apiece.

  Titus had to force himself to turn his back on the disappointed dog and walk away hurriedly, as sorry as he felt leaving Tink behind at camp. But trouble it would be with the dog at the shooting line, the noise and the press of people. The match would be tough enough for him to concentrate on without Tink lolling there between his legs the way he’d done that morning during the qualifying relays.

  “Titus!”

  He turned.

  “You didn’t even gimme a kiss good-bye,” Betsey Bass scolded her son as she stopped before him.

  “Ain’t good-bye, Mam.”

  She brushed her fingers along his cheek. “You’re away to the big match, ain’tcha?”

  Titus nodded. “Where’s pap?”

  She shrugged, saying, “Don’t know. Went off with some others to go talk seeds, they was when I last saw ’em.” And she leaned up on the toes of her worn, scuffed boots to kiss his cheek. “That’s for luck, Titus. You go show ’em.”

  “I will, Mam. You gonna come, ain’tcha?”

  “Course, son. I’ll be there shortly.”

  “An’ pap? He coming to watch me win?”

  His mother’s lips quivered in deliberation before she answered. “I’m sure he’ll be looking in on the match, Titus. Now, you go show ’em your best.”

  He set off again toward the shooting range on the far side of the meadow, where they fired into the side of a tall, wooded hill. He hoped his father would show, knowing the odds were against it. Touching his cheek where his mother had planted her lips, it made him wonder—when a man got old enough to be having girls kissing on him, was he too old for his mam to kiss on him then?

  He was sure it sounded right—that there came a time when mothers should damn well stop embarrassing their sons by kissing them like they were children—then thought on fathers and their children. He struggled to recall any embrace from his pap, trying desperately to remember if he had seen his father hug his other three children. A kiss from Thaddeus—why, that was purely out of the question! A man, leastways the men Titus knew of, they never would be caught kissing. Not a woman, and surely not one of their children.

  The sun had settled so that the bottom of its orb rested on the tops of the far trees back of the range. It would be warm on his neck. Already a crowd had gathered, knots of spectators sprinkled here and there, most all of them settled on the grass in the shade of trees and brush, a few standing. Some of those were women who sported new bonnets of the brightest calicoes and ginghams. Perhaps an arm wrapped around a husband or a sweetheart who wore his finest drop-shoulder shirt. As Titus stepped into line at the judges’ table, he looked down at his own faded hickory shirt, spun and woven from the Basses’ own flax and wool by his mother, then dyed a light brown with the natural dye of walnut shells she saved for just such a purpose. Folks on this frontier rarely called such cloth linsey-woolsey. Instead, what they wove to clothe their family they called mixed cloth.

  Maybeso with his prize money he would have enough to buy himself a new shirt for this coming year’s schooling, his last. Mayhaps enough even to buy his mam something pretty. And a special gift for Amy.

  “You’re the Bass boy, ain’t you?”

  He nodded to the man seated in a straight-backed, cane-bottomed chair behind the table where sat several inkwells and packets of ink powder amid large sheets of lined foolscap where names and numbers had been inscribed. “Yes, sir.”

  “Titus?”

  “Yes.”

  The man nodded to his assistant, who hoisted a burlap bag across the table with the clatter of wood and said, “Like I’m tell
ing every one of you last ten fellers, we’ll start off at twelve rods. Each shooter will have one chance’t at his target. If he don’t hit it—he’s out, and the rest go on to the next targets set up two rods farther on. In this-a-way, we keep going till there’s only one feller.”

  “And he’s the champeen.”

  The man smiled. “That’s right. Like you been last couple years to the junior side of the shooting.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “Your targets,” the man replied. “You go and mark each of ’em in the same way. With your initials. Or your mark, if you prefer: a scratch, a line, or carve your hull name if’n you want. But we must all be able to tell just whose target it is in the case of a dispute.”

  “They’re all like this,” said the sharp-nosed farmer assisting the shooting judge. He held up a square of rough-hewn hardwood, less than a foot on each side and no more than two inches thick. At the center of the block a small circle had been blackened by smudging a candle’s flame against the flat surface.

  “The range judges check every target after all the shooters is finished at a certain distance. Them what qualifies, anyway. If there’s a hole inside the black—you go on with the others. If we cain’t find no hole in the wood, or you didn’t get in the black—”

  “I go home empty-handed,” Titus finished. “What if I put one on the line?”

  The sharp-nosed assistant answered, “It don’t count.”

  And the judge added, “You got to make it a clean shot in the black smudge.”

  “Certain enough.” Hoisting his bag off the table, Titus said, “I’m ready.”

  “In just a shake now we’ll call out for to start,” the judge replied as Bass started away, motioning the tall man forward who had been standing behind Titus in that short line of finalists.

  For the better part of a half hour Titus kept his eyes moving across the crowd continuing to grow in the shade of that rim of trees swaying with the gentle, warm breezes. None of his family had shown, not any uncles nor cousins. Disappointed, he tried telling himself it made no difference about them—not one of them saw any value in the things Titus held to be important. Nonetheless, with every minute that crawled by that late-summer afternoon, he found his young heart sinking lower and lower.

  “You gone and set yourself up prime for taking a fall, Titus,” he murmured to himself.

  All through the years he had competed in the youngsters’ matches, Titus had hoped his family would attend the shooting, supporting him as one behind their own. But time and again his father and mother had made their excuses, saying there were other more pressing concerns they had need of attending to at the same hour the matches were held. Matters of seed and discussions of weather cycles. Something, anything more important than coming to see their son strive to do his best. If only once a year he tried so hard to be the best.

  So it was he had promised himself that this year it would be different for his family, convincing himself they would all show up now that he was shooting with the finest marksmen in the county. No longer among the boys, now he would stand at the same line with the menfolk, ready to show one and all that he had the stuff of a winner. And surely his pap would finally see he was worthy of his love.

  At long last his father would congratulate him for a job well-done, would put his arms around his son and tell him how proud he was of him. Mayhaps even tell his first-born son just how much he loved him.

  “It’s all right, Pap,” Titus whispered to himself aloud, still snared in his reverie as the judge called out for the contestants to move up to the shooting line. “I know how hard it is for a man to say such a thing to his young’un. Just you being here tells me enough—”

  “You coming, boy?”

  Titus suddenly snapped to with a shake of his head. Before him stood one of the shooters, a tall, lanky, bearded man with a graceful fullstock slung at the end of his arm.

  “Me? I’m coming,” he answered, striving to make his voice sound as low as possible—angry at his shame to be caught talking to himself, off in another world.

  Eight shooters waited for him and the tall marksman to reach the line.

  “You’re ’llowed to grease your bar’l ’tween each shot—with a patch if you’re of a mind to,” one of the judges kicked off.

  “Other’n that,” the first judge said, “it’s pretty much straight-up shooting. Off-hand. No rest. You can take your time on each target. Ain’t being judged on how fast you shoot or load. Just how pretty you make each shot.”

  “Let’s get on with it,” one of the older men said with an impatient growl.

  Titus nodded and moved off to the right end of the line.

  Out close to seventy yards across the grass, which barely undulated in the faint breeze, stood a crude framework. As the judges called out names of the ten contestants from left to right, two men were placing the corresponding wood targets atop the highest plank on that framework. The shooters spread out a little more along the firing line as the crowd fell to a hush. That pair of range marshals scampered off to the side in different directions.

  “Finish loading your weapons—then fire at will,” said the man who had registered Titus for the contest.

  Bass stood at the end of the line, his target the last on the right. Titus pulled the stopper from the large powder horn he had made himself of a scraped bullhorn, and measured out his charge of black powder into a section of deer antler hollowed out to hold just the proper number of the coarse black grains he used shot after shot.

  From this twelve rods—he ciphered as he stuffed the stopper back into the narrow end of the powder horn—it would take little to put a ball from his grandpap’s .42-caliber fullstock into that black circle of candle smudge. With the round ball of soft lead barely started down the swaged muzzle of the barrel, Titus pulled the long hickory ramrod free of the thimbles along the bottom of the forestock. He gave a push, moving the ball partway down the barrel, the lead sphere surrounded by a linen patch cut just a bit larger than the outer circumference of the muzzle itself, that piece of cloth soaked in the oil rendered down from a black bear he had taken not far from Amy’s swimming hole early last winter. One of the few he figured hadn’t been killed or run out of that part of the Ohio River country.

  His mother had taken the thick yellowish fleece Titus had sliced away from the connective tissue between the hide and muscle, melting it into an oil in one of her cast-iron kettles over low heat on a trivet she swung over the coals he tended in their fireplace. It was something she had not done very often for her husband, seeing how little he hunted for the family. Thaddeus had harumped several times during the rendering process, content to leave that as his only comment from the chair where he rocked on the uneven plank floor while repairing broken leather harness using a big glover’s needle threaded with thick strips of waxed linen.

  “Waste of time, that oil,” Thaddeus had said. “A lot of work for little gain.”

  Titus remembered again that winter’s evening and how he had realized his father’s skimpy appreciation for the pleasure a person might reap from a task far from work, a task taken on for little more than its own sake. To accomplish nothing productive but for the joy of the task itself. With his father, and his mother most times as well, everything had to serve a purpose, every day’s value weighed only by what had been accomplished before one laid one’s weary body down that night.

  As he threaded the ramrod back into its thimbles below the barrel of the fullstock, Titus knew he would never be a man such as his father—at least the sort who found little joy in each day’s modest passing for its own sake.

  Thumbing the dragon’s-head hammer back to half cock, he snapped forward the frizzen a Belleview gunsmith had resoled two years before so that it would once again bestow a plentiful shower of sparks into the pan where Titus now sprinkled a dusting of the fine-grained priming powder from the smaller of the two horns hanging from his possibles pouch slung over his left shoulder.

  By th
e time the youngster brought the frizzen back down over the pan and dragged the hammer back to full cock, two shooters had taken their crack at those first targets.

  He raised the butt to the curve of his shoulder and nestled it in against the thin strap of muscle beneath the worn, much-washed hickory shirt his mother had made him years before.

  Another of the finalists touched off his shot. The firing line began to drift with the gray gauze of powder smoke suspended on the heavy, muggy air.

  Titus laid his cheek along the smooth half heart of the small cheekpiece carved into the buttstock, trying hard to shut out the sounds of the nearby crowd murmuring, laughing, cheering on their favorites, the clamor of children at play, the unsteady and surprising boom of other shooters firing their rifles behind him. If he wasn’t careful, Titus reminded himself, some man’s shot just might surprise him, and he would end up jerking on the trigger instead of concentrating on nothing more than his own squeezing caress of the trigger.

  When his longrifle went off, he watched through the curl of gray muzzle smoke while his target went spinning to the ground. As he brought the weapon’s buttstock down to rest upon his instep, Titus turned slightly, finding the other nine shooters watching him as if he were delaying them.

  “’Bout time, boy,” harped one.

  Another cried out, “You may look young as a pup an’ wet behin’t the ears—but you take much time to shoot as a ol’t lady!”

  Some of the nearby crowd roared in approval. While most of the other shooters finished reloading without a complaint, a few guffawed at Titus’s expense before they went about their own business.

  Again his eyes anxiously raked the crowd, searching for family. Not finding any, he dropped his gaze back to his shooting pouch, where he raised the tiny iron pick he used to probe and clean the vent hole bored in the breech, then put his pan brush to work. He had crafted it last winter from the hump bristles taken off that bear.

  “It’s awright,” he confided to himself, lips barely moving as he screwed a jag onto the end of his wiping stick. “Likely they’re running late still. That’un was just the first shot, anyways. They’ll be coming along directly.”