Dance on the Wind

by Johnston, Terry C.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “You’re likely to be real tired after I work you hard as I’m gonna today. You’ll wanna sleep another night right there in that hay.”

  Bass had to grin with relief. And that had made the settler smile, finally raising his fowler away from its delicate target.

  “My name’s Able Guthrie.”

  He held his hand up to the man. “Titus Bass.”

  “You come down from Owensboro of recent, yes—I remember,” Guthrie replied. “Well, c’mon, young Mr. Titus Bass. The woman’s waiting breakfast for us.”

  “B-breakfast?”

  “Damn right, er—pardon me,” Guthrie apologized sheepishly. “I don’t but rarely curse. The woman don’t like it—not a hoot—and I promised the Good Lord I wouldn’t do no cursing around my girl.”

  Bass threw back the blankets and stood, dusting hay from his clothes. “Girl? Your family?”

  “Only the one. Marissa. After her my woman couldn’t have no others. Had hoped for at least one boy to have my name. Carry on the family, like any man would hope for.” He flashed a courageous smile, his eyes crinkling with such brave, good humor in that way Titus would come to appreciate in those months still ahead of them. “But I got me a fine, fine girl. A strong woman she’ll be real soon. Gonna raise her mama and me some handsome grandbabies. You come now and have your breakfast afore we start the day.”

  “Don’t believe it,” and he wagged his head. “You’re gonna feed me.”

  “Sure as hell am…. Dear Lord, there I go again!” He whispered this last, his eyes flicking at the cabin, where the door opened and a full-framed woman waved him in from the cow shed. “Sure I’m gonna feed you. I can’t expect a man to work his all for me without first putting some fodder down into his belly.”

  They had crossed the muddy yard, dodging greasy rain puddles and fresh cow dab close by the paddock to reach the cabin, where they climbed onto the low porch and pushed through the open doorway that faced south like most settlers’ places erected foursquare with the world. It made perfect sense for the main entrance to look out on the southern side, which stayed sunny in the winter, cool in the summer, where the hard-driving rains and sleet and snows that mostly came out of the north and west of those hard months of the year could not beat in upon those taking shelter there.

  Guthrie led him into the main room, thick with the heady perfume he had long ago forgotten. Like a warm flood the seasoned memories washed over him. Titus drank in the aromas of sizzling sausage, fragrant biscuits just scraped free from the Dutch oven, pungent smoked bacon piled high on a big platter at the center of the table where Guthrie went to settle. The seductive allure of boiled coffee made his mouth water almost as much as the sight of that pitcher of creamy milk and an apple-tree knot that served as a bowl for freshly churned butter just waiting to be lathered on those biscuits.

  Looking around the room in amazement, Bass took in the hutch table covered with wooden bowls and pewter trenchers and utensils, several three-legged stools and a handful of half-log benches, on the shelves near the fireplace a hominy block, deerskins laid out for rugs across the uneven floor, brass tinder boxes with their dull sheen near the hearth, lug poles for the tea kettles and cast-iron cookware handy by the mantel, pepper grinders squatting on the table before him, a well-used cherry seeder atop a small table stuffed back in the corner, joined there by a coffee mill and a butter paddle, yellowed by use and age, lying among it all.

  “This here’s the woman, my missus,” the settler said, steering Titus’s attention away from the table to the woman rising from the fireplace with the bail of her Dutch oven at the end of her arm, still scraping loose the pull-apart biscuits that had baked themselves together in a mounded loaf beneath a golden-brown hue. “Lottie, the young fella’s name is Titus Bass.”

  “Ma’am,” Titus replied, glancing once at the woman’s flushed face as she dragged the entire biscuit loaf onto a platter with her wooden spatula. In wet-mouthed wonder he went back to gaping at that table. He hadn’t eaten like this in … in longer than he could remember. A real sit-down family meal, complete with all the fixings he could ever hope to have for breakfast.

  “How would you like your eggs?”

  He turned dumbly at the new voice, startled to discover the other female at the fireplace had turned to him, a great iron spatula in one hand, a coarse linen towel in the other, hand and towel both wrapped around the handle of a large cast-iron skillet. She squatted beside it so she could swing the trivet it sat upon over the flames in the fireplace made of stones daubed with a proper plaster of lime and gypsum, the chimney of fine-grained sandstone.

  “Eggs?” Titus answered her with his voice rising, stunned by the surprising beauty of the girl, finding her cheeks flushed by the heat at the fire, sensing a thrill at the way her chestnut hair spilled down each side of her neck in curls she kept pushing out of her way … then suddenly he felt guilty as a pig snatcher, remembering last night how he had planned on gathering up a few of those very same eggs for himself, then stealing off into the dawn before anyone in the cabin was the wiser.

  “Maybe you don’t like eggs?” she asked him.

  Able Guthrie nudged into the discussion, saying, “Mayhaps he don’t, Marissa.”

  “Eggs?” Bass repeated, and swallowed hard again, locked into looking at her deep, round eyes. So much like a doe’s. Heavy-lidded, long-lashed, and damned near as big around as that skillet she sat beside. “I I-like eggs a whole lot. Yes, ma’am. I mean miss. Sorry. Yes. Eggs. I’ll take me some.”

  “How many?”

  “A couple maybe.”

  Atop his crude cane chair Guthrie snorted, turning to his daughter and waving a hand in her direction as he said, “Just g’won and fix him a half dozen for starters, daughter. I’m planning on having you women stuff this here young fella so I won’t feel the least bit guilty ’bout working the bedevil out’n him till dinnertime.”

  Titus grew wide-eyed, asking, “Dinner too?”

  “I figure by midday I’ll work your breakfast off you,” Able explained, planting his elbows on the rough table. “So these two here gonna fill you back up come dinnertime. Then later on—by supper—it’ll be getting dark, so it’s only fair I feed you again at the end of the day. So tell me: that sound like fair pay for using your muscle and ’flowing you a place to sleep out to my cow shed?”

  “I’m making syllabub for dessert this evenin’,” the girl at the fireplace said.

  He looked from Able Guthrie to the girl. “S-sylla …”

  “Syllabub,” Lottie instructed, coming to his shoulder. “It’s a fine and heady drink we make by mixing fresh cream with our own apple cider and whipping it up to a fine froth.”

  It made his mouth water just thinking about how sweet it might rest upon his tongue. The girl at the fireplace smiled softly as she turned back to her chore of cracking eggs over the skillet. For the moment he wasn’t sure if it was the flush of the fire’s heat, or the crimson of her own embarrassment that had brought such a lovely blush to Marissa Guthrie’s face.

  “Yes, sir,” Titus eventually said, turning on his stool to look at the settler. “That’ll do … I mean them meals—they’ll do just fine for my pay, Mr. Guthrie.”

  “Then sit yourself and dig in,” the woman said, moving past the table in a swirl, a tangy cloud of sourdough clinging to her. “I’m Lottie—seeing how Able forgot to introduce us proper. You eat, and make yourself to home, son. We don’t get much folk out here. Not much folk at all.”

  “What folks there is seem to be on the hurry north to St. Lou,” Guthrie explained as he speared some fat sausages onto his pewter fork and freed them into his shallow wooden bowl. “While other folks is scampering south—getting as far away from that place as a person can get.”

  Lottie Guthrie turned to Titus, asking, “You want to see St. Louis yourself?”

  “Yes’m. Figured I would see it for some time now.”

  “Don’t be in such a rush,
young Mr. Bass,” Able Guthrie warned. “There’s far more to life than the push and shove of folks when they get all crowded together, more to living than the hurly-burly of wine and song and the great trouble all that can bring a man.”

  “Able Guthrie! Leave this young’un alone,” Lottie snapped as Marissa came to the table with the skillet still sizzling with more than a dozen eggs popping in hot grease. She settled on a bench opposite Bass.

  “Just giving Titus his due, as I would warn and watch over my own son, missus.”

  “Just like you keep me from ever knowing anything about St. Lou,” Marissa suddenly spoke up.

  “Many are the times I think I done the wrong thing to come across the river to set down new roots here—just after the earth shook more’n two year back,” the settler grumped. “The farther away from that sin hole, the better, you ask me.”

  She leaned toward Titus as if exchanging a confidence. “My pa claims the devil makes his home right up there in St. Louis.”

  “He truly does!” Guthrie bawled, dragging some eggs out of the skillet, piercing the fat yellow yolks in the process. “And that’s a fact.”

  Just looking at those fried eggs made Titus’s mouth water with an unaccustomed tang.

  “Hush and let the boy eat his breakfast,” Lottie scolded. “You gonna go off and work him so hard, then I say, hush: let him have a minute’s peace to put away all this food and ’llow it settle in his stomach.”

  “Maybe you’re right, woman,” Able said, grinning at Titus. “We treat this young man good, I might just get more’n just a day’s work out of him. Might talk him into staying on so’s I got a extra hand to see that barn gets built before he skedaddles off north to see all the devil’s temptations what wait up in St. Lou.”

  “You hush yourself and eat, Able,” she scolded.

  The settler grumped under his breath, but spoke not another word as Marissa slid Titus’s tin cup toward her, pouring him some foamy, cream-rich milk from a dented pewter pitcher. That hand of hers she had wrapped round the cup lingered a moment too long in passing it to the visitor, just long enough that his roughened, callused fingers brushed hers as he took it from her. She’d pulled back as if she was scalded, then shyly looked up from her hand to peer across the table at him from beneath some of those chestnut curls spilling across her great, round calf eyes.

  He had sensed the sudden flight of tiny wings across his belly. Bass swallowed hard, all but choking on the bacon he had just bitten off. “I … I think I might just do that, Mr. Guthrie,” he forced the words out, almost embarrassed as he turned to look at the settler. “Might like to hang on a while and help out with raising your barn.”

  How he liked the way those calf eyes sparkled when he said that to her father, how one side of her pale, pink lips curved up in just the faintest hint of satisfaction. It was as if she were admitting to what he had just then owned up to. And that would mean moving St. Louie to the back of the fire for now—off the hottest of the coals. Way he was feeling right about then, Titus figured this girl mayhaps would make the delay worth any cost in days, or weeks, or even months….

  “I asked if you was coming down to breakfast or not, Titus,” Abie’s voice cracked through his reverie, dissipating his remembrance of that first morning he happened on the Guthrie place.

  Yanked back to the present, Bass kicked his way out of the covers and reached for his britches, pulling them over his bare legs.

  “Coming, Mr. Guthrie.”

  “That mean today?”

  “Now, sir,” he said, crow-hopping his britches up his legs.

  He so enjoyed lying naked with her, his legs pressed against hers, locked around hers, the two of them knotted within a tangle of heat and perspiration as they struggled together nearly every one of these short, hot summer nights. A strong tingle twitched through his groin now, stirred just by thinking about Marissa and the pleasure her body gave his.

  He pulled his working shirt from the peg driven into the beam right over his makeshift bed and dragged it over his head. A yoked, drop-shoulder shirt with three bone buttons in front. She had made it for him, sewn it with her own hands, having dyed the tow cloth a pale buckskin color from crushed walnut shells. It smelled strongly of him from that first day, all sweat and dust and fresh-sawed lumber, even some hint of the animals in the paddock below. The honest, earthy smells of a settler.

  Heading for the ladder, Titus listened to the wood thrush singing of late summer and decided what smell he liked best was hers. The heated eagerness of her these brief, sultry nights as summer reached its peak. The taste of her sweat trapped in that small cleft at the bottom of her throat. The hot earthiness of her mouth once he had taught her how to kiss back with her tongue and her teeth, her lips scampering all over his body like a ravenous beast he had unleashed within this lonely settler’s girl.

  She was waiting on the porch for him that morning. And Lottie stood in the doorway, just as she did every morning.

  From the look Mrs. Guthrie had been giving him these past few days, it was certain the woman had already figured out how her daughter felt about this young stranger who had wandered into their lives last spring. Lottie’s warm smile this morning said it all, said how she approved of Marissa’s choice.

  “They been fighting north of us for some time now,” Guthrie declared that late-summer evening when they gathered in the cool of twilight.

  “You getting worried for us, Able?” Lottie asked from her chore of setting a new hackle on the spinning wheel.

  “No,” the settler admitted. “Not with St. Louis north of us. Chances are slim that place will ever fall in British hands even if them redcoats and their Injuns come down the Mississip.”

  “My grandpap fought the British,” Titus explained. “Back to Kentucky. They sent the Injuns down on the settlers then too.”

  “Oh, dear,” Lottie exclaimed a bit breathlessly.

  Guthrie shot Titus a severe, disapproving look before he turned to his wife. “It’s a different time, dear. And a different place now. My own pa fought against the soldiers of the British crown just afore he come back home to marry my ma. No, them redcoats and their cutthroat Injuns can run all over hell up there on the lakes—”

  “Able!”

  “Sorry, Lottie,” he apologized. “They can run all over that north country they want to, it ain’t gonna do ’em a bit of good.”

  “Your pa and me heard yesterday the talk from that neighbor of your’n,” Titus said to Marissa. “There’s word of the Britishers landing at the mouth of the Messessap.”

  “New Orleans?” Marissa asked of that evening, the air filled with the joyous calls of whippoorwills and scritch of the katydids, noisy of a summer night, along with the soft but reassuring clang of the old cow’s bell down in the paddock. She turned to tell her mother, “Titus told me all about New Orleans.”

  Lottie’s eyes widened in disapproving exasperation as she glanced at her husband.

  “Yes,” Able replied. “Word was that folks fear the redcoats gonna attack New Orleans.”

  Exuberantly, Titus added, “Which means them Britishers likely to try squeezing us atween ’em.”

  “From the north up there at the big lakes with all their wild and bloody Injuns,” Guthrie said. “And now from the south.”

  “Where they just might get them Chickasaws and the rest to join their fight agin the Americans,” Titus added as he set the peg he had just whittled into the Cumberland basket with all the rest he had finished that night.

  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.