He shuffled his feet, readying himself. “Don’t come any closer, Pap!”
“Tell me not to come—”
“I said don’t come any closer!” Titus snapped, beginning to bring his arms up, hands clenched. “I ain’t no boy no longer … and I ain’t gonna take no more of your whuppin’s!”
Thaddeus stopped short, drew back, then snorted, “Just what the hell you think you’re gonna do if’n I take a mind to give you the whippin’ you’re deserving right about now?”
“You ain’t gonna ever lay a hand on me again.”
His father brought both his hands up, fingers spread in claws of rage. “What in hell’s name—”
“Thaddeus!” she cried.
“Don’t ever you raise your hands to me no more,” Titus warned. “You go to lay a hand on me—I’ll lay you right out.”
That brought Thaddeus up short. “You’ll do what?”
“Don’t make me, Pap. Please don’t make me. Not in front of my mam. Not in front of her.”
“Oh, God—please don’t, Thaddeus,” his mother whimpered, twisting that piece of muslin in her hands.
“You’ll lay me out, will you?” his father asked, his voice gone thoughtful, eyes gone to slits.
Titus watched his father’s face, saw something register in those eyes as Thaddeus looked him down, then up again. It was only then that Titus realized he stood nearly as tall as his father, shy no more than an inch of his father’s height. Though Thaddeus carried more muscle upon his frame, that which came of wrestling animals and harness and pitting himself against the land, although Titus might well be as thin as a split cedar-fence rail, he was nonetheless every bit as tough in his own sinewy way: as solid as second-growth hickory.
And in that moment of indecision he knew his father realized the same thing for the first time. That pause he had caused Thaddeus served to give Titus a glimmer of confidence that he would not have to grapple with the man, here below the wide, muling eyes of his brothers and that troublesome sister. Here before the fright-filled eyes of his mother.
“You heard me before, Titus,” Thaddeus finally said, his shoulders sagging as he retreated to the fireplace. “Your rifle stays in the corner. In the morning you go to school or stay to work with me. There’ll be no hunting till spring when planting time is done.”
“Till s-spring?” he said, swallowing it like gall.
“And you can’t see Amy for a month,” the man continued, his back to his son, placing both hands out wide on the top of the stone mantel, his head sagging between his shoulders as he stared down at the fire at his feet. There was resignation, if not outright defeat, in the way he held himself. “Maybe it’ll take a month. Maybe it’ll take all winter and into the spring … but maybe by then you’ll have some respect for your father and the work what’s fed you, the work what’s put the clothes on your back for sixteen summers.”
“I can’t hunt till spring?”
Without turning his father repeated his stricture. “Not till you learn to respect your father, Titus. Damn, but you hurt me when you said I been wasting my life being a farmer. Damn you for that.”
He looked at his mother. She shook her head in warning, put a finger to her lips.
“Go on now, Titus,” Thaddeus instructed. “I turn around, I don’t wanna see you down here. Time you went to bed. Morning’s coming soon, and you’ll either go to school, or be up afore then to help me on that new ground I want to plant come spring.”
For a moment he didn’t move, despite his father’s directive. It was so quiet, Titus could hear the stuffy-nosed breathing of one of the children in the loft, the crackle of the hardwood in the fireplace.
“You hear me, son? Get on up there to bed like I told you.”
He wanted to bolt away, out the door and into the night with the tears of rage he refused to let fall. Instead he swallowed them down, turning again to look at his mother. She nodded her head and gestured toward the ladder. Titus started that way.
“You plan on staying away from school, that’s all right with me, Titus,” his father said, his back still to his son. “I can use the help around our farm. But if’n you ain’t up in time to help me, I ’spect you to be off to school with your brothers and sister. Go on now and get to bed.”
Titus shuddered as he crossed the few steps it took to reach the foot of the beechwood ladder that climbed to the sleeping loft. As he took hold of a rung, Titus was suddenly compelled to turn back and recross his steps, wanting to embrace his mother, to somehow reassure her that all would turn out right. She stood with that twisted scrap of muslin still snaked between her hands, her red-rimmed eyes watching him silently approach. He stood nearly a head over her as he came to a stop, gripping her shoulders. Then he bent to kiss her on the cheek and brushed his hand across the other side of her face, wrinkled with worry and work, childbearing and thirty-three winters enduring this land. Her eyes flooded, and she bit her lip as he turned from her.
Quickly he clambered up the ladder, scattering the three youngest as they scrambled back to their grass-filled ticks and their wool blankets like a covey of chicks.
It would be a frosty night, he told himself as he lay down in the darkness, watching the last of the fire’s light flicker in reflection against the roof of the cabin above him. Colder still come first light.
His father was right: he did have a choice to make.
And he knew he’d have to make it before first light.
Some of them squeaked, so he reminded himself to count the rungs on the ladder as he settled his weight on each of them one by one. Fifth one down he skipped altogether, sliding past it, his hands and feet gripping the ladder’s uprights as he descended into the cabin’s darkness suffused only with a faint crimson glow from the coals banked in the fireplace.
Even at this murky, early hour just before pre-dawn gray drained from the sky above, the puncheon floor wasn’t that cold beneath his bare feet, although from time to time he could see red wisps of his frosty breath before his face in what muted light the dying fire radiated. Especially when he turned in the direction of the stone fireplace, moving one slow step at a time, making his way toward the corner where his father had leaned the rifle.
From the moment his head had struck the pillow stuffed with wool batting, Titus had slipped in and out of sleep for the rest of the night. At first he listened to the sounds of his parents arguing, then talking. Eventually his father was the only one saying anything. His mother had gone about her business of making dough to rise before the hearth overnight, then made her way to bed. Thaddeus wasn’t far behind her, delaying only to finish his pipe there in the glow of the fireplace as the candles were snuffed. There in the silence of his home.
Gazing down on him from the sleeping loft, Titus thought how at peace his father looked as he sat in his chair. Satisfied, secure, perhaps completely content with his lot, with the niche he had carved out for himself in life.
At long last Thaddeus stood and laid his pipe on the mantel, perhaps near that letter from the schoolmaster, and pushed past those three blankets hanging from nails to separate his bedchamber from the main room. Titus heard the rope bed creak in protest as his father settled next to his mother, then a shuffling of blankets, followed by a sigh of making one’s own place—like that of old Tink when he spun round and round and finally made a nest for himself under the porch.
Still Titus waited, awake beneath his blankets and down coverlet, propping an arm under his cheek to doze as he let the next few hours pass. He would awaken with a start and immediately turn to look through the small mullioned panes at the sky—trying to assess the passage of time by the whirl of the stars in that small patch of speckled black suspended over the Ohio River country. His sister was a noisy sleeper, more so than either of his brothers, so when he rose to his hands and knees to push open the hinged window, he timed each minute application of pressure on the window with her resounding snores. With one side finally cracked open just far enough, Titus slipped
out the long wool cylinder—heard it land with a muffle.
Along with three pair of moccasins, his hand-cobbled boots were tied in the blanket roll, in addition to his heavy wool coat, and that shooting pouch. In it and a small belt pouch he carried everything a young man might need to survive out there in the woods. Fire steels and a good supply of flints, not only to start fires for heat and cooking, but flints for the rifle too. Tinder he kept in a small tin stuffed at the bottom of his possibles pouch. Greased patches for the rifle were to be found in another small tin that lay at the bottom of the shooting pouch. Screws and worms for cleaning the weapon. A large vial with cork stopper filled with grease for his patches. The brass-trimmed knapping tool to shape an edge to his flints. Not to mention a crude pair of pliers and a driver to use on the screws that held the lock securely in the rifle’s stock.
Somewhere deep among it all lay his bullet mold and half a dozen extra bars of pig lead. Enough to last him until he could find a job and thereby purchase some more of the necessaries. Folded in a piece of oilcloth was a coil of strong, thin hemp line and a few hooks of varying sizes for fishing. Besides his two belt knives, he was taking along the small patch knife in its scabbard sewn to the strap of the shooting pouch.
On thongs suspended from that pouch strap hung the thin, delicately curved Kentucky powder horn. Last night in the dark of this loft as he hunkered over his few treasures, Titus had quietly shaken the heft of the horn. Nearly full. He hoped it would be enough to last until he could buy more powder as well as lead. If anything, powder would be what he needed first off.
So with everything else dropped outside and the window snugged back into place beneath the low rumble of his sister’s snores—Titus had only to get the rifle and himself out of the cabin without awakening anyone. Most of all his father.
Through those hours of dozing and fitful, anxious wakefulness, he had been lying there thinking mostly on that: getting his hands on his grandpap’s rifle. Trying to get some measure of just what he should do—no, what he would do—if his father awakened while he was reaching for the rifle in the corner, when he was making for the door the way his grandpap told him Injuns made their sneak.
Last night his father had been coming for him—sure and certain of that. But he had been stopped in his tracks, just shy of an arm’s length from Titus by the boy’s mother, perhaps by Titus himself—a youngster standing there ready to fend off blows and land some of his own in anger and frustration. No more to take his punishment, the whipping with straps of mule harness, as he suffered when he was a child.
Somewhere through that night Titus had decided he wasn’t about to be treated as a youngster no more. Decided that in the next few minutes he would defend himself and do everything he could to leave the cabin with that rifle … if it came down to it.
The rifle. It meant damned near everything to him right now. Oh, he realized he might likely make it downriver without the rifle and find himself some work. But having that rifle along made things just all that much easier, while it gave Titus that much more freedom. It meant he could eat when he wanted to eat, camp where he pleased, freed from depending upon villages and towns. And he could defend himself against others, such as those thieves and pirates the loose talk claimed were working the shadows up and down the Ohio along with honest riverfolk.
In the dim, cold light Titus took a step at a time, staying as close to the hearth as he could. At least where the stones lay, there was little chance of the floor puncheons creaking their warning. It was warm there beneath his bare feet too. With one hand gripping the top of the mantel, he leaned forward, slowly reaching out with the other arm. Just past the end of the fireplace his fingers touched it, confirmed what it was by touching the brass thimbles that held the wiping stick beneath the long forestock. Afraid to drag it across the floor, he raised it carefully, bringing the weapon slowly around the corner of the stone fireplace. Into both his hands with an anxious sigh. And a leap of his heart.
He had his rifle.
Now he could leave. Moving off the stone hearth, Titus shifted his weight carefully, one foot at a time—testing the boards that no one gave any notice to other times. But at this moment, when all was quiet and the rest were asleep …
Of a sudden he thought on old Tink outside, dozing the way hounds would on the porch, or beneath it. Likely he might set up a clamor—a howl or a yelp of happiness, some declaration that he too wanted to come along on what the old redbone would believe was to be a hunt, off for a romp through the woods.
Maybe if he found something to give Tink to eat, something to chew on as soon as he got out the door. Keep the old hound’s mouth too busy to yowl or bay. Titus inched foot by foot toward his mother’s table.
Not until he got right to it did he see that on the table lay the new shirt his mother had been working on for Thaddeus. She must have finished it last night after pap had sent him up to the loft, he thought. And beside the shirt sat a pewter bowl of the biscuits left over from last night’s supper, piled within the folds of a clean square of muslin. Gathering up its four corners, smelling the yeasty dusting of flour that made him think not only of his mother but of Amy as well, Titus rolled the biscuits into the center of the shirt and knotted the sleeves. All the biscuits but one, that is—he clutched one in his hand, then stuffed the shirt beneath his arm.
Step by step he moved off from the table, then suddenly came to a halt when his sister’s snoring stopped. Balancing on one foot, he waited those long, breathless moments, his thundering heart climbing out of his chest and into his throat until she began snoring once more.
At the doorway he halted again. From a peg where they hung their coats he took down a small pouch, fingeringing it a moment to be certain. Inside he felt the scrape and rattle of a handful of rich amber French flints. His father’s prized flints for his own rifle. Titus dropped the pouch inside the neck of the shirt he wore. Patted them against his belly. His father wasn’t much of a hunter, nohow. Thaddeus would never use all them flints anyway.
As he raised the iron latch within the door’s slot ever so slowly, some of the metal growled faintly. He stopped, his ears pounding as the rope bed creaked a few feet away behind the blankets divider. Breathlessly he waited, the latch half-raised, watching the wall of blankets, his eyes straining, ears working so he might have first jump when his father emerged to catch him. He would yank up the latch all the way and be out on the porch before Thaddeus truly realized what was going on. Off the porch and into the shadows of dawn, off to the cover of woods. Once there—no one would ever catch him.
His father snorted, coughed, and the rope bed creaked again. Then came an audible sigh, and all fell quiet once again. His eyes rose to the edge of the loft above him, and he nodded one time in farewell. Turning back to the door, Titus released the latch, pulling the heavy oaken planks toward him an inch at a time so the door would not drag across the puncheon floor. Open … open just wide enough, he told himself. Only that much. There.
And he was out, into the shocking cold of that autumn dawn. Dragging the door carefully toward him, latch raised—quietly pulling it closed and lowering the iron back into place.
He turned at the sound of the padding feet to find Tink had pulled himself out from under the porch and stood there stretching in a great flexing of his back, followed by a shake of his head with those long ears that slapped his muzzle. The dog was at the steps, ready to leap up in greeting, his mouth just opening when Titus reached out and stuffed half the biscuit into Tink’s jaws.
Sweeping past the hound as fast as he could, in hopes of getting the dog far enough away from the cabin before either of them made the sort of noise that would awaken his family, Titus held the other half of the biscuit out for Tink to see, for him to smell. The hound followed obediently, quietly. Jowls flapping like this was turning out to be some game to go on.
Titus did not stop to feed the dog nor to look back until he had slipped around the side of the cabin, snatched up his blanket roll, and
finally stood at the far edge of the trees. The gray of dawn was oozing out of the sky. Beneath the autumn canopy he had come to a halt, turning to kneel as the dog loped up to his side. With the biscuit held out in one palm, Titus scratched the hound’s ears for what he knew was to be the last time.
“You got to go back, Tink,” he whispered, sensing the sour clutch of sentiment burn at the base of his throat.
A good, old friend. Many, many hours had they roamed the timber and hills together, looked down on the boats plying the Ohio from the same rocky prominence.
“I don’t wanna tie you up, you gotta understand that.” He cupped his hand beneath the moist lower jaw and raised Tink’s head so he could look into the dog’s sad, watery eyes. “But you can’t go with me this time. This is something I gotta do on my own, and you’re better off here. Don’t know what’s out there, so it’s safer for you here.”
Then he finally stood, gazing back at the cabin where a thin streamer of smoke from last night’s fire lifted itself from the stone chimney.
“G’won, Tink. Get.”
The hound looked up at the youth with a bewildered expression, cocking his head to the side.
“I said, get. We ain’t hunting today.” He pushed the dog toward the cabin. “Get.”
More gray was seeping into dawn’s coming. He felt anxious to be gone before his father arose and stoked the fire as he always did before moving out to the barn to begin his day.
He shoved the old dog again, and Tink finally loped off twenty feet, then stopped and looked back at Titus—as if hopeful this was just one of the games they had played when the boy was younger. Many, many years gone now.
“Get! I can’t take you with me.”
Then Titus realized his eyes stung, and that made him mad, mostly at himself. “You gotta stay and look after them others now. G’won—get! Shoo!”
His head hanging morosely, the hound turned away from Titus and plodded one slow step at a time toward the cabin, as if being punished. Halfway there Tink halted one more time and looked back over his shoulder at Titus.
Dance on the Wind tb-1 Page 13
