Turning to her anxiously, he asked, “You tell my mam you didn’t find me at school?”
Wagging her head, Amy said, “Nothing of the kind, Titus.” She stroked the back of his hand. “I know you’d get in a bunch of trouble if your pa finds out you been staying off from school—so I’d never say nothing about it.”
Relieved, Titus leaned back against the tree, sorting through the jumble of it all. She wasn’t carrying his child. After all these weeks of having others make their own plans for him, he suddenly felt like a man freed from the gallows.
She laid her head against his shoulder. “Why didn’t you go to school today?”
He set his chin atop her head and said, “Truth is, I ain’t been going last few days.”
“If you weren’t helping your pa, and you wasn’t in school—what you been doing?”
“Nothing much,” he admitted.
“We talked about this,” she said, lifting her head to look at him disapprovingly. “You needing to finish your schooling so we get married come spring.”
“We talked,” he agreed. “Just seemed to me like it was everyone else making up their minds for me.”
“Don’t you wanna finish your school?”
“Don’t see no need in it.”
“Can’t you see no need in reading and writing, in knowing your ciphers?”
“I know me a little. Cain’t see how it’s ever gonna help me, Amy.”
She squeezed his hand. “We get married and you work the farm—all that schooling’s gonna help a whole lot, Titus.”
“I ain’t figuring on working a farm.”
With a hint of a smile that told Titus she did not quite believe him, Amy said, “Just what you gonna do to support us, you don’t finish school and work on your pa’s farm?”
“Haven’t thought that far ahead on it.”
Wagging her head as she would at one of her errant siblings, Amy scolded, “You got to finish school. You don’t—why, I can’t marry you, Titus Bass.”
For some time he gazed into her eyes, looked at the fullness of her lips, wanting to lie with her again the way they had times before. So much did he want that. Almost enough to change his mind and tell her everything that she wanted to hear. Maybe he was stupid, after all, just like his pap and some other grown-ups made him feel most nearly all the time.
“I thought some on this, Amy,” he began. “I figure I can support a wife wherever I go.”
“Wherever you go?” she asked with a shriek. “W-what’s that mean?”
“Means I’m figuring I won’t stay around Boone County for long.”
Shaking her head emphatically, Amy replied, “No. I ain’t going nowhere else, Titus Bass. This is where I was born, where I’m going to birth my own children and raise them up. Here’s where I’m staying till I die. Ain’t you gonna stay on this land with me?”
A great gray owl flapped over their heads as Mrs. Whistler stepped onto the porch and sang out for the younger children to come in for the night. Then she called, “Amy?”
“I’m over here, Mama.”
“You two don’t be long,” the woman said, hustling little ones through the cabin door. “Night’s getting cold, and Titus has his school in the morning.”
Once her brothers and sisters were shuffled inside the cabin, Amy turned to him, beginning to push away so she could get to her feet. “You got school in the morning. I best be going in too.”
He sensed a sudden chill around her, more than the autumn twilight lent a frost to the air. “If I take a mind to do something else, ain’t going to school tomorrow.”
“What else can be more important than your schooling?”
“Hunting. Watching the boats down on the river. Wondering where all them folks is going. What they’ll be doing down the Ohio to Louisville and on yonder. There’s places futher still. Lot futher.”
She stomped a foot in the cold grass. “All that talk from Levi Gamble got your head filled with having yourself adventures, don’t it?”
“Maybeso it does.”
Pulling herself away from him, Amy whirled about, crossing her arms. “Then maybe you better figure out what it is you want more: me or some old adventure downriver.”
Looking up at her, Titus asked, “Why you make me have to choose?”
“Can’t have both,” she answered coyly, smoothing the bodice of her dress beneath the firm mounds of her breasts. “You want me, you’re gonna finish your schooling and get yourself a way to support a family. My pa and yours see to their families by working the land. Such as they do is good and honorable work, Titus. Work any man be proud of.”
“If’n he was cut out to be a farmer.”
“You was cut out to be a farmer,” she snapped. “You was born to a farming family. It’s what all your kin done since they come into this country years and years ago.”
“Don’t matter what they done afore me—”
“It’s what you’re expected to do,” she interrupted.
As he stood beside her, Titus felt enough resolve to declare, “I ain’t cut out to work the land.”
Her words took on more frost. “You’re making a great mistake: you don’t want to marry and settle down with me.”
“You’re telling me I gotta pay too big a price, Amy. I can’t be a farmer. Don’t see no sense in schooling neither.”
“You’ll never amount to much, then, you go off on your own now,” she said haughtily. “Never be as good a man as your pa—make the mark on life that he’s making, Titus.”
When he reached for her hand, Amy pulled away from him. Instead, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and said, “There’s more for a man to learn than reading and writing letters, working numbers, Amy. What I want to learn is waiting for me out there.”
“Oh, damn that Levi Gamble!” she grumbled. “Damn that devil for making you—”
“Don’t blame Levi,” he protested. “I knowed I wasn’t no farmer long afore I run onto Levi at the Longhunters Fair.”
“He went and filled your head with such poppy-cock—”
“I told you,” he interrupted her with a snap. “I decided long ago I was one day gonna be leaving all this life behind.”
“Leaving?”
“There’s a bigger world out there than what is right here in Boone County. I aim to see me a share of it afore my dying day, Amy.”
Her eyes narrowed as she asked, “And if that means losing me?”
“Sounds of things, you’ll be better off without me.”
She turned on her heel again, staying in that same spot. He could see her shoulder shudder in the mercuric light of the autumn moon rising out of the east. He even thought he heard a muffled sob from her. Titus reached out to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged him off.
“I aim to learn more out there than what I can learn in school, Amy.”
“All you’ll ever need to know is right here—living your life with me, Titus.”
“I’ll learn more out there than I could ever learn following the rump end of a god-blamed mule.”
Her face tightened as she turned from him again. “Sounds like you made up your mind, all for certain.”
For a few moments he looked at her back, that dark spill of her hair tumbling nearly to her waist. He wanted to touch her, knowing she had only to hear the words she needed to hear and they would lie flesh to flesh. As much as he wanted to reach across that few inches remaining between them at that moment—it might just as well have been a chasm. Something kept him from retreating, from giving in to what his body begged for.
“This ain’t easy,” he confessed. “Not just you I’m leaving behind. Thinking about my mam and pap too.”
“You think hard on them. Think about me tonight—how we been together. Then you come tell me for sure you’re going.”
“I don’t have nothing to decide, Amy. I’m going. Only thing left to figure out is when.”
She twisted round on him, her red eyes brimming, fury written on her face tra
cked with its first tears. “I’ll make some man a damn fine wife, Titus Bass. That’s for certain. Just as certain is the fact you’re never gonna make a husband for no woman.”
“Likely I never will, Amy,” he admitted, watching the look of surprise come to her face.
“That’s right,” he continued. “Seems what a woman wants is more’n I think I’ll ever be likely to give. If being a husband to you means staying here to work behind a mule, being a farmer like your pa and mine—then, no: I’ll never be husband to no woman. If it means I gotta feel yoked in like an ox to what my pap ’spects of me, no—I won’t ever be settling down with a woman and making a family for myself.”
He said the last few words to her back as she dashed across the dusty yard while night came down around him.
“I want you to do some reading for me,” Thaddeus Bass said to his firstborn son as he rose from the table.
“Reading?” Titus asked, confusion raising alarm within him. Why would his father want him to read…? “Can’t it wait?”
“Wait? Wait for what, son?”
Titus shrugged. “I was looking to sit outside till it got cold after sundown, then I’d come in.”
He watched his father go to the stone mantel and take from it a piece of foolscap twice folded.
Shaking the paper out before him, Thaddeus said, “You ain’t going much of anywhere for a long time, Titus.”
His eyes kept flicking from the foolscap to his father’s face, back and forth, eager to figure out the suddenness of his father’s turn on him. Titus quickly glanced at his mother, his face filled with appeal. But she turned away, busying herself at the washbasin over the trenchers and utensils the family had just used at dinner. His eyes climbed toward the roof, finding above him in the shadows those three faces peering down from the edge of the sleeping loft, all of them watching the tense scene below. As soon as his father began speaking, Titus’s gaze locked on Thaddeus’s face.
“I been needing your help around here last few weeks since schoolmaster started up again, Titus.”
“Yes, sir.” Uneasiness squirmed inside.
“School taking up all your time, has it?”
“Yes. I s’pose it has.”
“Learning a lot, I’d wager,” Thaddeus said, slowly crossing the cabin floor toward his son.
“Some.”
“Then you won’t mind sharing all you been learning with me and your mam. How ’bout reading to us?” Thaddeus held the paper out at the end of his arm.
He shuffle-footed on the spot, his nervousness growing. He tried begging his way out. “You and me both know you’re a better reader’n me. Just make me out to be a fool in front of everyone—you go and make me read that.”
“You was learning to read of a time, Titus. If’n you’d keep learning the way you was, why—I figured one day you’d be a better reader’n me.”
“Maybe I can be, at that.”
Thaddeus shook the paper. In the cabin’s silence it rattled noisily, like a huge elm leaf, autumn dried to a parchment’s stiffness. “Won’t be, you don’t keep learning.”
He glanced at his mother, finding that she had turned and was watching them both now. “I’ll just have to see that I do.”
“Read it, Titus.”
With reluctance he took the paper and unfolded it, surprised at first—for he had suspected it was something written in his father’s own expansive hand. Instead, this was written in a very neat and crimped penmanship. He did not recognize it.
Clearing his throat, Titus began, faltering, halting at nearly every word as he sorted out the marks and the sounds of the tongue each one took.
“Mr. Bass. I … write you … this day over … something most … t-troubling … to me … c-concerning your … eldest child, Titus.”
His eyes flew to his father’s face, then shot back to the bottom of the page, trying to conjure what the name was.
“Go on, Titus. Read it to me.”
He pleaded, “What is this?”
“You gonna read it to me, son?”
By now he could see the anger beginning to rise in his father’s eyes, the pressure throbbing up and down the thick cords in his father’s neck. Titus grew frightened.
“I … I don’t think I can—”
Thaddeus ripped the paper out of his son’s hand and snapped its folds taut. “Then I’ll damn well read it to you!”
Glancing at his mother for a moment, Titus found her staring down at her feet, twisting the scrap of muslin rag in her hands.
“Mr. Bass. I write you this day over something most troubling to me concerning your eldest child, Titus. When the new season began, I was in hopes that you would allow your son to complete his last year of schooling without interruption. I’m sorry to see that you’ve seen fit to have him stay home to work with you in the fields for the last two weeks. If you can free him up to finish his schooling with me, it would be in the best interest of you both. I pray you will agree with me. Yours ever sincerely, Henry Standisti.”
For a moment Titus moved his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
“You know me and that schoolmaster ain’t never shared nothing much in common before, Titus. But now you’ve gone and got him thinking the worst of me. Keeping you home to work the fields, is it? Bah!”
He watched his father fold the page as he returned to the fireplace. But instead of throwing it into the flames, Thaddeus set it atop the mantel again.
“Were you to lay out of school—least you could have done was to give me help in the fields. Where’d Standish get such a notion you was here helping me? You tell me that.”
In a frightened, pale voice he replied, “I t-told him.”
“What? I didn’t hear you!”
“I told him.”
“You told him I wanted you to stay away from school to help me in the fields, is it?”
He nodded, sensing his palms grow moist. “Yes.”
Laying an arm across the stone mantel, Thaddeus suddenly roared, “If you weren’t at school, Titus … and you weren’t here working in the fields—just where the devil were you?”
“Thaddeus!” his mother whimpered. “Please watch your tone.”
He wheeled on her, shaking. “I’ll mind you to keep out of this, woman. I’ve a good mind to get angry at you as well. Likely you’re to blame for allowing his fool-headedness to go on as long as it has. And now look what you’ve done, look what we’ve got for it. He’s lied to us and lied to his schoolmaster. If you’d’ve helped me cram some responsibility into him from the beginning—he wouldn’t be in the fittle he is today.”
“Tell him you’re sorry, Titus,” his mother begged.
“We’re long past the point of his apologizing, Mother,” Thaddeus growled, and whirled back on his son. “What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Hunting.”
“Hunting, is it?” he thundered. “And with you doing so much hunting—just what have you been doing with all the meat you’ve shot?”
“Been eating it every day,” Titus answered, staring at a knot in the floor.
“All of it?”
“Most I been drying. What I learned to do—”
“Not bringing any home to help feed your family?”
“With all we got here, I didn’t figure—”
“You ain’t helping in the fields,” Thaddeus interrupted. “And you ain’t been helping put food on this family’s table. Maybe you ought just go off and live in the woods like you’ve been wanting so bad.”
For a moment he thought his ears had deceived him. Perhaps it was a trick his father was playing with words. How wonderful the idea sounded—too wonderful to hope for!
“I can bring in some meat tomorrow, I promise.”
“If you do, it won’t be with my permission. And you won’t do it with that gun yonder in the corner.”
“You taking my gun?”
“That was your grandpap’s.”
“He give it to me!”
; “It’s going to stay right there. A damned poor example you been to your brothers, and your sister too. I counted on you—and you let me down bad: running off with your squirrel gun every day like you done.”
He felt the anger surge in him like white windblown caps frothing on the gray surface of the Ohio. “You can’t take my gun away from me—”
“I can and I have. It stays here. I won’t have you wasting your life on tomfoolery.”
“Wasting my life?” Titus roared so suddenly that it caught his father by surprise. “You telling me I’m wasting my life? I’d be wasting my life if I was to settle for being a farmer like you! I don’t wanna waste my life the way you done!”
He watched his words visibly slap his father in the face, as surely as any man’s blow would make him flinch in pain. The arm Thaddeus had braced against the stone mantel came down slowly, that big hand tensing into a fist. Those dark, brooding eyes, shielded behind hoods of sudden rage, fixed Titus with their fury.
“Thaddeus!”
He sensed his mother’s alarm as she took a step, stopping immediately when his father pointed at her—instantly nailing her to the spot.
“Stand right there, woman! This is between the boy and me.”
“I ain’t no boy no longer!”
Thaddeus whirled back on his son, scorn dripping from his every word. “Not no boy? Sure as hell are! A man owns up to his responsibility. Owns up to his mistakes and goes on. You ain’t no man, Titus!”
“I ain’t a boy no longer.”
“You’re my boy, and you’re gonna do as I tell you long as you’re under this roof, eating my food!”
“Don’t make you right!”
Slowly, he started moving across the cabin toward his son, his words ominously calm. “I’m your father—and that’s enough for you to show your respect for me.”
“Thaddeus—oh, dear God, don’t!”
“Just gonna teach the boy a little respect for his father, woman.”
“You can’t teach me that,” Titus argued, setting his feet for what he feared was coming his way. “You gotta earn it.”
“Then—by God—I’ll beat some respect out of you!” Thaddeus roared. “Telling your old man he’s wasting his life working the land? Just who the hell you think you are?”
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