Lying there, Bass winced on the seriousness of that, this custom of declaring before all that he intended to marry, as his mother had often said, to heartily cleave unto one person and only one person for the rest of his natural life. On the early frontier the parents of young couples announced their “banns”: publicly posting one’s intention to marry on three successive Sundays, allowing anyone who might object for whatever reason the courtesy of so doing.
Now she was running her fingertips down from his chest across his solar plexus, causing his manhood to squirm slightly as she drew nearer and nearer to it with every brush of her hot fingers.
Then she raised herself on an elbow, bit at his earlobe, and whispered to him, hot and moist, “I’ll be a good mother to your children, Titus. Ain’t no one gonna ever be a better woman for you than me.”
“I ain’t ready to have children.” He fought to get the words out. They sounded low and raspy, rumbling in his throat as his own passion rose.
In moments Marissa was biting him across the shoulder, down one side of his chest, and licking across his nipples. As much as he didn’t like that because it tickled, he had never once said anything to her, not daring to have her stop once she got herself worked up enough to start biting and licking his flesh. Instead, he lay there as riverbank clay in her palms, letting her shape him and move him, listening to her breathing become more and more rapid and ragged until she finally climbed over him, taking his rigid flesh in her hand and gently guiding him into her readiness as she settled her buttocks atop his hips.
As much as anything else in what they shared, he liked that part of it—when she first took hold of him and made his flesh a part of her. What fevered grappling he and Amy Whistler had shared, it had never been like this. Maybe it had been what Abigail Thresher had taught him about a woman’s body, taught him about his own, showing him how to satisfy both need as well as hunger.
But maybe, just maybe—it had to do with Marissa Guthrie too.
God, how he didn’t want to fall in love with her, a part of him afraid that he already had.
He looked up at her in the summer light, nothing but starshine, the crescent shadows beneath both small breasts, the rounded shadow beneath her chin as she leaned over him and let her chestnut curls tumble across his face before she met his lips with hers, opening her mouth, moist and hot and flavorful.
He was certain this was how a woman got hold of a man and would never let go. A woman’s power over a man just like this. For a moment he wondered if his mother had been like this with his father—getting Thaddeus so wrought up that he couldn’t leave if he had wanted to. Maybe that’s why his pap stayed on the land, settled in and never again gave thought to seeing what was out there. Maybe it was this mystical power of a woman.
Titus struggled against the rising crescendo orchestrated throughout his body, coursing into his loins—vowing he would not fall in love with Marissa Guthrie because she was too much like his mother: the sort of woman who had the strength to hold a man in one place.
Slowly, slowly she rocked back, back farther still, putting her hands down near his knees as she arched her back and braced herself while she throbbed atop him, round and round in an ever-faster cadence that seemed to join itself with the rhythm of his own heart. How she did that, he didn’t know. Part of the mystery that was woman.
He must not fall in love with her, for if he did, he would forever be there. Never to push on to St. Louis. Never to see what lay up the river where Levi Gamble said furs and Indians and the shaggy buffalo reigned. If he fell in love, Titus was scared down to the marrow of him that he would end up like Able Guthrie. Never to taste the caliber of the wind, never to dance on it a free man.
Like poor Able Guthrie: loving a woman who held him to her so tightly he couldn’t breathe, didn’t have room to roam. A good woman like Lottie, who wanted her daughter to give her the children she had been robbed of having for herself.
A good, but sad, woman.
His mother, a tired and worn woman after four children, three stillbirths, and two other babes who had died within their first year of life. A hard toll, even on a tough woman.
Now he looked at Marissa as she ground herself down onto him, as if she desired to swallow him, engulf him completely—groaning as the beast welled up within her. Did he have it in him to watch what toll childbirth took on her year after year?
He had run from the Chickasaw and fought them up so close, he could smell their sweat and their paint and even what they ate for supper. He had stood against the might of those rapids on the Ohio and held his own against the very worst the great Mississippi threw against a boatman. Titus had even dared free a slave within earshot of his masters, then shoot a slave hunter in the back when that man stood between his friends and freedom. No, let no man be so bold as to say that Titus Bass was one to shrink from fear. Instead, he had learned that fear often emboldened him—made him all the more ready to pit himself against a challenge.
But this … this thing of a woman and love … it was something that nonetheless made him shrink as never before. Afraid to his core. Frightened of Marissa? Yes, he admitted. For he had come to believe that she held the power to make him stay. For some men it might be a woman who kept them prisoner, for those like Able Guthrie. For others, like his father, it might well be the land that held Thaddeus Bass captive. The warm, steaming, fertile earth, that soil rich and black with humus. For a certain breed of man the land was no different from a heated, moist, fertile woman.
At long last he was beginning to understand his pap, and why Thaddeus stayed on and on in one place … almost to the point of growing enraged when his own flesh and blood did not lust after the soil every bit as much as he. Now Titus was coming to understand.
To know why he would be expected to stay here in this place with the Guthries. Not so much because of the seductive lure and hold of the land, but because of the love a man held for his woman. And all that woman needed from him.
She began thrashing her head side to side as she whimpered, raking her fingers down his chest as she reached a crescendo atop him. With great, heaving thrusts of his hips he spent himself violently within her, listening to her muted shriek in response to every last one of his explosions.
Then Marissa collapsed, murmuring in his ear to promise that she would awaken in a while and have him again before she crept off across the starshine splayed on the yard below them, slipping away to her bed in that cabin. The words were no sooner out of her mouth than he felt her breathing deepen, become rhythmic, and he knew she was sleeping.
He lay there for a long time that night, the chestnut curls spilling across his chin, her hair smelling of the musty hay where they always coupled there above the cow pens. Titus lay there knowing that if he ever did fall in love with Marissa, he vowed never to tell her.
For if he told her of his love, he would thereby be trapped in this place. He simply could not be trapped there. Not held in one place, whether held by the land or imprisoned by a woman. Never to lay eyes on the wilderness at the horizon’s edge. Never to taste the bite of the wind as it roared out of those faraway places.
There and then he vowed that should he ever fall in love with Marissa Guthrie, he would have no choice but to simply convince himself that it wasn’t true. Then force himself to leave.
If not for his own good, for hers.
20
A great covey of passenger pigeons beat the autumn air overhead, enough of them to blot a great shadow upon the land and he walking within it, flew right over Titus, darkening the sky so that he turned with a start and looked up, frightened. The birds passed so close above the thick and fiery orange and red canopy that he could make out the pinkish breasts until they had flapped out of sight.
He sat there on the old broken-down horse’s back, watching them go, beating their way off to the south. In their wake suddenly opened in all that great expanse of blue sky sailed a lone osprey. Wide of wing it was, possessing that singular luxury of taking
its time while the pigeons hurried on in flock. The osprey careened down from on high to inspect more closely this strange four-legged, two-headed creature below it, then beat its angular wings to climb back into the sparkling fall sky, circled once more over the man and horse, then disappeared beyond the horizon.
It had all taken less than a half-dozen heartbeats, his chest hammering like the devil as he watched the bird go. Wishing. Wishing …
He had simply stayed too long. Titus cursed himself for hanging on as long with the Guthries as he had. Was a time four years back when he had vowed to the heavens that he would never again raise blisters on his hands with farmwork. But for the sake of that warm and willing body, for the sake of that sweet ecstasy of having a woman wrapped around his manhood, for the sake of knowing he meant the world to at least one person—he had forgotten that vow.
Denied it because he had made the mistake of falling in love with Marissa Guthrie.
For sure, his young, curious, eager body may have hungered for Amy Whistler in the worst way as she’d escorted him to the brink of manhood … but his heart had been captured by Able Guthrie’s daughter. He hadn’t counted on it, no more than he had counted on running into Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat and crew and floating with them on down to New Orleans. No more than he had counted on staying on all those seasons with the skinny whore who held him tightly until it was she who was ready to leave. No, he hadn’t counted on a lot of things that had happened in these years since slipping away from Rabbit Hash and Boone County.
Still, he never would have dreamed things would turn out like this with Marissa. Him running again, that is.
Twice now in his young life Titus had been forced to make his choice. Both times fleeing what he feared most. First off his pap and that land Thaddeus kept clearing, more land for more crops every season. And now he’d fled the girl and the land. Running from family and children and sinking down roots—all that Marissa Guthrie represented.
Time and again he had convinced himself he wasn’t really in love with her. It was only the way she felt lying next to him. That and the smell of her hair, the taste of her skin. No, it couldn’t really be love that he felt for her.
Yet it was his fear that he already had fallen in love with her that drove him to leave in the first gray of a frosty dawn like some sham thief.
Five days ago he had awakened with the seeping of first light into that new barn’s loft, where he lay beneath that new cedar-shake roof, awakening to the damp chill at that coldest time of day before the sun even prepared to make its rise over the earth. He had rolled over, shivering, at first attempting to go back to sleep, to secure some warmth beneath those two thick blankets he owned. Then he’d suddenly snapped awake, poking his head out to peer into the dim, ashen light. Blinking, Titus had rubbed the grit from them, then looked again—until he’d realized the fog surrounding him was his own breath. Frost borne of the chill of that early-autumn morn as the crystalline air defined the edges of all things, sharp and crisp.
Making clear what he had to do.
Already there too long. Spring had tumbled into summer. Summer had drained into fall. That ancient toll of seasons within him had once more sounded its warning knell—announcing the time for leave-taking had come. To be on the march once more, moving north to the city that had lured Levi Gamble west. The very city Able Guthrie had warned him against.
“Maybe I can take you with me to St. Louie one time of the coming winter, Titus,” the settler had grunted as they had shouldered one of the roof beams across the wright pole. “Hap that you can see for yourself the devilment that lures a man away from his rightful place making the land fruitful.”
Day after day that spring into summer they had harnessed Abie’s oxen to the long logs they’d felled and trimmed, then snaked them through the forest toward the site where they were raising Guthrie’s barn. Using their hand axes, they had notched every corner before hoisting each log into position, using ropes and oak pulleys and the backs of those snorting oxen heaving the timbers ever higher.
Then the farmer had carefully shimmed and trimmed the corners as he’d needed to square them with the world. Not owning a carpenter’s level, Able—like most men on the frontier—had improvised with a small bottle so filled with water that one good-sized bubble remained when it was turned on its side.
“We make every log right, Titus,” Guthrie had seemed to repeat each day they’d devoted time to raising that barn. “Make every one square and level. And just like a man chooses the right tools for his job, he must choose the right wood.”
Able had gone on to explain much of what Titus’s grandpap had taught him years before concerning the building of a proper structure to keep out the cold and the beasts and the red man too. From generation down to generation such wisdom was passed on: that first tree cut should be hardwood, like maple, providing pegs for the job at hand; next came oak or cedar, some wood easily split for roof boards and doors, anything requiring rived planks—things made of seasoned wood carefully stacked and allowed to dry properly.
“But a man with a family to feed and protect might not always have him the time to wait on seasoned wood,” Able had added. “He has to get his family behind some walls.”
Each generation was taught those walls should not be of oak, for it was far too heavy when green, and even dry, tending to split with age. Beech and hickory must be avoided as well because they tended to rot beneath the onslaught of rains and snows, damps and dews. Pine too should not be used, as it decayed far too easily, fried and smelled to the eternal heavens, besides being highly flammable after seasoning.
Instead, the most solid homes on the far frontier were built of hewed cedar—when a man could have it—even the more abundant poplar, soft as it was and therefore easily worked with an adze, hewn into a rectangular instead of a square shape, which allowed a man two wall timbers from one log instead of one. Stacked on their short ends, most cabins therefore rarely required more than six timbers from doorsill to doortop.
One by one, hour by hour, a few logs a day inched the long barn walls ever higher until the final bearers of the roof timbers were in place, then wright poles notched in, secured with long iron spikes as a bed for the successive support beams. That shell of the roof was ready for the broad clapboards they eventually laid over with huge cedar shakes. Down below them in those waning days of summer Lottie and Marissa mixed water and clay, then stomped in just the right proportion of hay and daubed their recipe between every wall log to chink the barn against the coming winter.
Many were the times he had gazed down at her pigtails tied up with ribbon to pull her chestnut curls back from her mud-smeared face, finding her glancing up at him to smile before she went back to stomping more chink in that clay pit.
That dark morning of escape he had glanced below at the barn furniture they were beginning to hew out now that the roof was finished, ready to hold back the autumn rains: things like those feed boxes and water troughs, wooden latches for the stable doors, and a new shovel for mucking out manure. … He knew Able could finish the last details with his own hands. Alone.
From the dark timber came the howl of a wolf on the heels of an owl hoot.
Shuddering as much with anticipation as with the cold, Titus had pulled on his canvas britches and tucked in that shirt Marissa had sewn him out of mixed cloth. All that he possessed: few folks on the frontier had more than one change of clothing. After lashing his freshly tallowed moccasins around his ankles, he bent to collect what little else he owned, rolling an extra shirt, a small kettle and skillet, along with a handful of iron utensils and blacksmith tools Able Guthrie had helped him make at the hot and sooty work of the forge.
Maybe it had been all the talk over that last week or so that had rekindled the same old restlessness. What farmers there were clearing homes for their families out of that Missouri wilderness north of the old French settlement at Cape Girardeau had determined they should have themselves an autumn jubilee—to come together and c
elebrate the arrival of another harvest season come and gone with the bounty of the land spread across their tables, as well as an excuse to bring out a little spruce beer or cherry flip or homemade brandy. Autumn was, after all, cause for celebration.
The women had fluttered around the long line of tables strung end to end through the center of the neighbor’s yard, setting every dish and pot and kettle just so while the young children needed no formal introductions and got right down to playing blindman’s buff and hide-and-seek. Titus had come there with the Guthries, finding how contented it made him to watch Marissa among the women-folk, seeing her eyes find his from time to time while he stayed with the men, old and young alike. They loaded their pipes, drank from their great clay mugs, and told their bawdy stories when there were no women about nor children playing among their legs. Stories of St. Louie. Unbelievable tales of the rouged and willing women that beckoned all passersby to come use their manhood on them, promising wild and devilish delights. Titus knew such places were not the stuff of myth and fable. He had seen Natchez-Under-the-Hill and the Swamp with his own eyes.
So he had watched Abie’s impassive face as the talk went on and on as the men poured down more and more of their own home brew. Then Guthrie wagged his head, knocked the black dollop from the bottom of his pipe bowl, and strode off muttering that he would be with Lottie. Titus started to move off as well at the settler’s elbow.
“No, you stay with those others, son,” Able said with some resignation. “Might just learn all for yourself about the sinful delights waiting to lure a man to St. Louie. Time that you listen, and pay heed.”
Bass needed no further coaxing. He had seen enough down the Mississippi to whet his appetite for more. So he sipped at his spruce beer, listening wide-eyed to the farmers who had made that journey north to the mouth of the Missouri for supplies and equipment.
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