Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  “The man’s daft, and he pumped you up with his wild stories!”

  “No,” Levi told the doubters. “There’s bear out there the likes of nothing we seen here in these eastern forests. Said there’s some called silvertips. What some call grizzlies. Stand half again as tall as a man on their hindquarters. Claws a good six inches long tear the heart out of a elk or rip a man’s arm off in one swipe!”

  Amy leaped back as Gamble’s arm suddenly swung in a great arc toward Titus, his fingers stiffened into the curve of imaginary claws.

  Bass did not flinch at Levi’s frightful pantomime. Steady and sure, he asked, “What other critters out there what’s big?”

  Gamble stared into the youth’s eyes for a moment, then answered, “Lisa told me ’bout buffalo, bigger’n a cow an’ a elk an’ a grizzly too.”

  Titus whispered huskily, “My grandpap tol’t me ’bout buffalo.”

  The tall woodsman held out his arms wide. “A great and shaggy animal.” Then put his crooked fingers on either side of his head. “Big black horns they scrape and keep shiny for to do battle when it comes time for the rut each year. Thick fur from the top of their head back across a big hump on their shoulders. Seems they crowd together in herds a man likely couldn’t walk through in a hull day.”

  “This Lisa and his boys ever try that?”

  Gamble looked across the fire at the farmer. “No, they didn’t say they ever did.”

  “Poppycock stories!”

  “No, listen,” Gamble said. “They saw ’em, great herds of ’em. Saw ’em with their own eyes as they was pushing north on the Missouri River.”

  One man wagged his head and commented dryly, “Just hard for me to believe there’d really be such a critter, and so damned many of ’em.”

  “We ain’t none of us never see’d any back here,” claimed another.

  “I heard talk once, long back,” an old man spoke up for the first time, “used to be a woods buffler in this country.”

  “Must’ve been long back,” the man’s grandson replied.

  “Surely was,” the old one continued. “But there was always talk that a critter even bigger lived on west. Talk was we killed off all them woods buffler in this country, but folks said we’d likely never kill off all them big critters out yonder.”

  “If Manuel Lisa and his men are right,” Levi added, “folks’ll never make a dent in their numbers.”

  “Buffalo.”

  Gamble turned back to young Bass. “That’s right, Titus. Buffalo. Biggest thing on four legs God ever made for this country.”

  “A man walk all day and not get through a herd of ’em.”

  Levi nodded. “For six days running, Lisa told me, they was pushing upriver, poling and warping their keelboats past just one herd. Six hull days it took ’em.”

  “So that’s where you’re headed, Levi? To see them buffalo?”

  He wagged his head. “I’m going for the beaver, Titus. To see for myself those mountains and them rivers a’foam with melting snow. Rivers so muddied up they’re gobblin’ away at their banks, chewing trees right outta the ground in one bite and drowning buffalo by the thousands every spring. It’s them rivers I gotta see me afore I die. And trust me, fellas—Levi Gamble being tied down to one place is a fate wuss’n dying.”

  Titus asked, “What your father do in Emsworth?”

  “He’s a blacksmith. Like his papa before him, an’ before him too.”

  “So you learned the family trade?” asked one of the older men.

  With an affirmative nod Gamble said, “A good thing too: I don’t recommend nary a man going west what can’t do some simple blacksmithing work.”

  “True, true,” was the assent of most.

  “Not just to repair his traps, but to care for his guns as well.”

  The moon-faced farmer commented, “Out across the Missouri a man is going to be too durned far from the settlements, from the help of those he’s used to counting on to help.”

  Turning then to Titus, Gamble said gravely, “From all what them upriver men told me when they come through Pittsburgh, it takes much more’n just good shooting to make your mark out yonder to the far west.”

  “I imagine so,” the big farmer echoed the general sentiment. “Out there a man’s bound to be all on his own.”

  “Most times he’s got no other to call on but his own self,” Levi replied.

  “Not a lot of folks, neither—I wouldn’t imagine,” an old gray-head commented. “Not a lot of white folks out there for company.”

  The big farmer guffawed at that and slapped his hand down on his knee. “Farther west a man goes, I’ve heard—less an’ less civilization there be to count on.”

  “For some of us,” Gamble replied, “maybe we’re just looking to get someplace where there’s a little less of that civilization to close in around us.”

  “Hell, son,” declared the oldest man there at the fire, “all a feller has to do is get a mile away from any of these here farms, back into the woods, up into the hills … and he’s as far away from civilization as any man needs.”

  “When’d you come here, mister?” Gamble asked the gray-head.

  “Come here myself back when I was a tad. Seventeen and fifty-three. We took this ground from the Injuns. Held on to it against the French, and agin them Englishmen too when we was through with the crown saying we had to do this, a king saying we had to do that.”

  Levi Gamble leaned forward, the fire’s light leaping across his face in a moving dance. Bass leaned forward too as the tall woodsman began to speak in soft tones, something wistful, almost a whisper that emerged from someplace deep within him. “This land was good then, weren’t it?”

  The old gray-head only nodded, his lips pursed, eyes half-closed in reverie. “T’weren’t no others but you and the land back then.”

  Bass quickly glanced at the old settler, seeing those old eyes glisten with pooling moisture in the dancing firelight.

  “But the others come in,” Gamble continued. “They always come. One or two other families at first, I’d imagine. Then a handful not long after them. And the word was spreading, weren’t it? They was coming like bees to the honeycomb. Next thing there was towns where once lay only campsites. River ports and landings where you used to run up your canoe on the bank and not see another soul all evening. Roads where once there was only game trails or Injun footpaths going from one place off yonder t’other.”

  The old man dragged a gnarled, wrinkled finger beneath one eye and said, “Land’s bound to change, man comes to it.”

  “Don’t you see?” Gamble whispered, forcing the others to lean in to hear him over the crackle of the fire. “I want to go someplace where the land ain’t changed yet. Where it’s old, and new at the same time.”

  “Ain’t much new land what ain’t been walked across to this side of the river,” one of the farmers said.

  “There is out there,” Gamble said, pointing.

  “There’s allays been two types of men, way I sees it,” the old settler spoke up. “Them few that comes to a place first—to discover it. And then there’s all the rest of us, by the hunnerts and hunnerts, and even more’n that: we come once the place’s been found. We come and move in, settle down. And them few what come first—well, that’s when they got to move on.”

  “My time to move on,” Levi added.

  The moon-faced farmer said, “There’ll be our kind what will follow along after you in the years to come.”

  “We ain’t moving no more,” retorted the farmer’s wife, patting her husband on his shoulder as she stepped up behind him. “I come here when we was young to set down roots and raise up a family. We done that—so here we’ll stay.”

  He looked up at her, taking her hand in his. “I was speaking of others, Mary. Others of our kind what will follow the first to go into a new land.”

  “We’ve got young’uns,” she explained. “A man with babes to care for and feed don’t have no business uprooting his
family to go traipsing off to the west.”

  When Amy squeezed his hand in agreement, Titus looked down at it held between the two of hers. His eyes rose to find her smiling at him. From the look in her eyes he knew she was thinking about the baby. Their baby. The baby he had made for her there by the swimming pond.

  And when he looked up, Titus found Levi gazing at him.

  Gamble slowly took his eyes from the youngster and looked at those other, older men gathered round that fire this last night of the summer’s fair. “I ain’t got no babes, no children. Ain’t got no roots either, ma’am. I figure I don’t go west now—I won’t never have the chance. Man gets married, starts him a family … why, then—he never will move on.”

  “True, true,” murmured the old settler.

  “Time for us’ns be off to bed,” the farmer’s wife said, tugging lightly on her husband’s arm.

  Reluctantly, that middle-aged settler rose beside her, draped an arm over her shoulder. His right hand he held out to the tall woodsman. “Levi Gamble, I wish you God’s speed on your journey.”

  They shook as others stood and moved up to offer their own fare-thee-wells and parting words of encouragement.

  “Man’s only young once’t,” the old settler advised, leaning on his cane. “Your sap only runs once in a young man’s life.”

  “And a man should always go where his heart leads him,” Gamble replied.

  In a matter of moments the hands had ceased shaking his and slapping the woodsman on the back. Shadows moved out of the ring of firelight, back to their tents and canvas shelters. Across the meadow in all directions, a number of the fires were still blazing strong. But most were dying, their caretakers moving off to blankets and blissful dreams of another summer’s Longhunters Fair come now to a close.

  “Where’s your camp?” Titus asked.

  Gamble swept his arm across the ground where he stood. “Any place I choose to lay my blanket for the night. Here’s as good a place as any. Fire’s banked good. Don’t need nothing else to make a place for Levi Gamble to sleep.”

  “We oughtta be getting back to my folks’ camp,” Amy admitted.

  Turning to the young woman, Levi smiled and said, “I’ll forever treasure your kiss, Amy. Even more’n the money I won for the shooting—your kiss for the winner is something I’ll remember for a long, long time.”

  She blushed in the moonlight and turned toward Titus, her arms tightening around one of his.

  “Ain’t there some way you’d stay on, Levi?” the youth finally blurted out his fervent wish. “Leastways for a few more days, a week or two so we got time to talk.”

  Laying a hand on the young man’s shoulder, Gamble said, “Much as I’d love to, I best be moving on. Autumn coming. Winter right behind. Hoping to make it to the Mississippi before then, up to St. Lou afore the first snow if’n I can.”

  Titus watched the tall woodsman bring up his right hand. He shook with Gamble, feeling tongue-tied with all that he wanted to ask, everything he wanted to say. Here was the sort of man he wanted to be: a man who had the will to leave everything behind in taking the risk of what might lie out there. The sort of man who wasn’t tied to place and people. A free man. Not a slave to the land.

  Someone who would see and do things far west of Boone County before Titus would ever get the chance to clear the last of those stumps from that damned field.

  “Let’s go, Titus,” Amy reminded. “I don’t wanna worry my folks.”

  “You’re with me,” he replied sharply. “They damn well ought not to worry, you being with me.” Titus saw the wounded look in her eyes as he turned back to Gamble. “Maybe you write me when you get yonder, Levi.”

  He looked at his moccasins a moment, his eyes lowered. “I don’t write at all, Titus. Not a lick.”

  “Can you have someone else write a letter for you? Tell me you made it downriver, or when you reach St. Louie?”

  “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” Gamble asked with a grin. “Yes. You damn right I’ll send word back to you, young’un.”

  “I’ll count on it.”

  “Count on it. Levi Gamble will send you word that I’m there and ready to jump off to the up-country. See them rivers, catch them beaver. Lay my eyes on places no white man ever laid eyes on. I’ll write to say when I’m going.”

  “An’ say when you might be coming back this way.”

  “If’n I ever come back this way,” Gamble admitted. “Not likely, Titus. Once a man gone out to see the elephant—he can’t really ever come home again.”

  “You won’t ever be coming back? Not even to St. Louie?”

  “Maybe there. Most like,” Levi replied.

  “Then I could look you up if’n I come to St. Louie.”

  Amy whirled on Titus, tightening her grip on his left arm. “Just when the devil would you be going off to St. Lou and for what purpose?”

  He shrugged off her question, saying to Gamble, “You lemme know where you’re gonna be. When you’ll be coming back downriver—I’ll see you again, Levi Gamble. Count on it: I’ll see you again.”

  Gamble gave a gentle slap to Bass’s shoulder, then turned from the young couple, settling down among the stumps where the others had been seated that evening. He snapped out his blankets and settled upon them with a sigh, his back to Titus.

  It was another long moment more before he led Amy from that fire. From the tall man’s back. Into the darkness.

  And though she was on his arm, even though they walked through that great summer’s crowded encampment, Titus Bass felt not only lonely, but unsettled, almost empty.

  She was talking to him about their future once he finished his schooling that year, how she’d care for the babe and all those babes to come. Saying how he would take his place beside his father and all would then be right in their lives.

  But Titus Bass heard very, very little of her words.

  The night was simply too crowded with the crushing silence of his need to be gone before he became everything his father was.

  He cursed his ignorance as much as he cursed this farming, even as much as he cursed the father who imprisoned him to the land.

  But right now it was his ignorance of women and how nature made babies that made him feel as if he were locked inside a tiny wooden box, suffocated and cramped, hollering to get out.

  “Mama told me I’d miss out on them visits of the terribles each month,” Amy had explained in recent weeks most times she talked of the expected child. “Woman with a baby coming wouldn’t have no bleeding each month neither.”

  “Bleeding?” he asked. She hadn’t told him anything about that.

  “Sure,” she explained in that matter-of-fact voice she saved only for the times she wanted to flaunt her two-year head start on life over him. “That’s how a woman knows for certain she ain’t carrying her man’s baby—she starts bleeding when her monthly visit time comes.”

  “W-what sort of bleeding?” His mind was instantly busy on his remembrance of her naked moonlit body stretched out on the grass beside the swimming hole. Where in the devil would she bleed? And the image in his mind became that of a game animal, sprawled out on the forest floor as he dressed out squirrels and rabbits, turkeys or deer, before setting off for home with the family’s dinner.

  Her eyes dropped as she laid a hand softly on her belly. “You know, don’t you?” When he shook his head, Amy explained, “From down … there. Where a man puts his seed. Like you done, Titus.”

  “My seed?”

  “That’s what mama calls it. The seed what a man gives a woman so she can carry his baby inside her till it’s time for it to be born.”

  He nodded, swallowing hard, remembering how he had exploded across the soft flesh on the inside of her thighs. Thick and sticky. Seeds that landed on a woman’s fertile ground and were thereby made into a child by some mysterious force of nature. The way he and his father prepared the ground for planting, then walked slowly across that ground they had turned, fresh an
d fertile, warm and upturned, dropping their seed into the folds of the earth like the folds of a fertile woman. Sun and rain did the rest.

  God must surely have made a woman like the land. And a man was always the farmer, sowing his seed.

  Farmers!

  Damn! he cursed himself in silence. Now more than ever he wanted to flee as far away from farming as he could go.

  “I been counting, Titus,” Amy went on, slowly rubbing her bare feet back and forth on the cool grass beneath that maple at the far end of the pen that held the Bass family’s milk cow. “It’ll still be winter when I have the baby. Likely you’ll be finishing up school sometime after spring planting.”

  He sensed his last shreds of hope tumbling out of his life the way crumpled clumps of earth spilled between his father’s fingers just after newly plowing a piece of ground. More so like long coils of purple gut spilling out of the belly of a deer he had dropped….

  “—know my folks let us have the wedding right there in the yard,” Amy was explaining. “Let all our kin and friends know, even up to Burlington, over to Union and down to Beaver Lick. I’m sure there’ll be some real celebrating for us—what with as long as our families been settled here in Boone County.”

  Squeezing his eyes, Titus could not help but imagine that sight: he and Amy standing before one of those circuit riders or civil justices speaking marriage words to them out of the Holy Book.

  “—then all there is after that is deciding on where we’re gonna live till you and your pa get to raising up our own place for us to live in.”

  “Where?”

  Amy looked at him hard, her gaze showing she realized he had not been paying her the heed due her as the mother of his child. “Yes, Titus. Either here with your folks, or over to mine. We’ll have to thrash that one out atween us all.”

  “I don’t know about living here—”

  “No matter. We’ll make room for ourselves, wherever we are,” she said with that air of confidence exuded only by one who is nearly shed of her teens. “Just you think about finishing your education, Titus Bass. Our children gonna be counting on their father. So you think about getting this last year of school learning under your belt so you can put your mind to helping your pa with the family farming.” She extended her arm in a slow arc across the yard, cabin, barn, and outbuildings. “One day this all be yours … ours. But first you finish up your schooling.”