“Thar’s Natchez, an’ Norleans,” a man was saying. “But the king of ’em all has to be St. Lou.”
Another asked, “How come you figure it’s the king?”
“’Cause it ain’t got a lick of nothing to do with the Spanish, that’s why,” the first answered, pounding his clay mug against his chest hard enough that he sprayed himself with cherry flip.
A third man in a scraggly beard nodded knowingly. “We all know the French can damn well show a man a better time than any else, don’t we, fellers?”
The whole lot of them gushed and laughed, guffawed and poked one another in the ribs.
“Why the French better?” Titus inquired.
One of them turned and eyed the young man, then explained, “Them Spanish is mean li’l bastards, nasty and fighters.”
When another agreed, “But them French, they allays been lovers.”
“Never was good at fighting and such,” a third piped in. “That’s why the English throwed ’em out more’n fifty year ago.”
“Yep, the French sure know how to show a man the time of his life.”
“Why—there’s so much shameful delight up that way—”
“Sh-sh! Here comes your woman, Henry,” one warned, and they all went silent.
After supper, when the fiddle and squeeze-box were brought out, Titus again clung to that group regaling themselves with tales of the houses of pleasure and the great French homes built behind the tall limestone walls, stories of the stinking, brawling watering holes where a man’s life might well be worth little or nothing, depending on how a man might look at another. It sounded no different from life down the Mississippi—but St. Louis was all the closer right then.
Soon she had come to Titus and asked him to dance. When he begged off, embarrassed, Marissa asked if he knew how.
“Course I know how to dance,” he growled.
“Then dance with me,” she begged.
“You likely dance different here in this country than I learn’t back in Kentucky.”
“Dancing is dancing,” she pleaded. “Just come here and hold my hand, like this. Good. And put your other hand here on my hip, like that, Titus. Oh, dear—you’re blushing, ain’cha?” she whispered. “Now, you’ve had your hand on my hip lots before.”
“But these here folks never knowed it!” he rasped.
With the perfume of those hillsides matted with ivy and laurel’s aromatic green leaves and greenish-yellow flowers brought on that evening breeze, she led him away across the cropped grass in a simple pattern, slowly describing a large circle as Marissa guided him across the yard, closer and closer to meld with the other dancers. Soon enough he was whirling her in great, dizzying spins, her head flung back as she gasped and giggled, the whole world blurring around them. At times they even fell, sitting there in a heap, laughter gushing from them until they caught their breath and rose to spin again.
“I can’t wait until next year,” she confessed that next morning when all the celebrants had shared breakfast and families were parting for home, saying their farewells beneath the trees draped with hop vine.
“Next year?”
“Yes,” Marissa replied. “Everyone’s decided we need at least one good celebration a year.”
“End of summer,” Lottie added as she pulled her shawl over her head. “We’ve decided to get back together come the end of harvest next year. All that wheat and barley, corn and potatoes. Good cause to dance and laugh, don’t you say?”
“I can’t wait, dear,” Able said, grinning, rubbing a hand across his belly.
Neither could Titus. On that long, long ride back to the Guthrie place, he thought and thought on it. One celebration a year was just not enough. To wait four whole seasons without busting loose and forgetting one’s cares? Simply unreasonable. Why, it was just like the Longhunters Fair back to Boone County. Even the boatmen with their hard and dangerous life grabbed for more excitement and celebration than that! Such men reveled and made merry whenever and wherever!
Now, up to that St. Louie—that was the place, he had brooded. From the sounds of it there was a celebration going on there every night. Winter, summer, fall, or spring. The folks up there didn’t wait for harvest to come around once a year. They made themselves happy just for the sprig of it!
That was the life for a young man.
But then his gaze was drawn over to Marissa, seated opposite him in the back of that big dray wagon the oxen were pulling home to the Guthrie place. And just looking at her, he doubted. Confused. Torn. Was he meant to stay? Or was he meant to go? Just to look into her eyes made him want to stay.
Oh, how he had wanted her last night after the spruce beer and the dancing and the way the aroma of her heated body rose to his nostrils as they whirled and laughed. She looked at him in that way of hers on the way home, and he knew she was coming to him that night. Titus decided he would stay.
Yet over the next eight days he changed his mind twice as many times. Lunging back and forth on the horns of his own private dilemma. Like an unbearable torture.
Until at last that morning came and he arose to the first real hard frost of the season. Knowing if he did not go then, he never would. What might hold him there was something much, much stronger than what would ever hold him to Rabbit Hash in Boone County. If he were to be free, he would have to be free of her.
Trembling even more with his fear of leaving—with his fear that he wouldn’t—he had found a slip of paper. Looked to be a bill of sale as he smoothed it out across his thigh. On the back he rubbed the letters with a stub of a lead pencil, not sure of all of them as he formed the few words in making his good-bye to Marissa and her parents. Then he stood and tore a small hole in the corner of the paper, slipping it over the peg where he always hung his shirt of an evening before sinking into the blankets and the hay to await her coming to him all those hot summer nights.
That big barn smelled of oiled leather and new wood and animal sweat. His throat seized as he descended the ladder and stepped around Lottie’s keeler—that shallow tub the women used for cooling milk and to catch drippings from the cheese press. From a peg he seized the hackamore he looped over the old horse Able Guthrie had given him many weeks ago: “Too old to work a plow, too weak to pull a wagon, son. It ain’t much use to me nowdays, but maybe you can get the animal to ride under you.”
Titus had done just that since last summer, many times taking Marissa for a ride through the cool timber, the two of them bareback atop that old, plodding plowhorse.
He led it through the low door into the cows’ paddock, where he pulled out the corral rails, leading the horse through the opening, then refit the rails in their posts before he slipped into the forest just as he had that morning more than four years before. The frosty blades of dying grass crunched, the thick mat of big orange and red leaves crackled beneath his moccasins and those four old hooves.
Titus stopped back in the still-dark shadows, looking at the cabin where he had first seen her at the hearth, the fire’s glow igniting the red in her chestnut curls. Bringing a blush to her cheeks, the same blush painted there when she became aroused in the hayloft with him. The merest hint of smoke rose from the chimney in a ghostly wisp above the leafy canopy turning gold and orange and sienna-brown with autumn’s first cold kiss.
Maybe if he crept to the window for one last look inside … to see her, a last lingering look at what he was leaving behind.
Closing his eyes instead, he sought to remember that cabin where he had his first look at her. In his mind once again seeing the gleam of a hair ribbon poking from Marissa’s sewing basket. The glossy spray of feathers in a turkey wing hung by the fireplace, used to stir the fire or shoo away pesky flies. The dull sheen of the black walnut highboy in a corner, atop it resting the Irish Book of Kells—that Latin manuscript of the New Testament. The white and satiny shine of a pair of slat-backed, split-bottomed chairs made from gouged buckeye where Lottie and Marissa sat as they carded and spun. Those Cumber
land baskets filled with weaver’s spools, warping frame, wool and cotton cards, flax and hemp hackles. The old family safe, its doors lined with hammered tin, where Mrs. Guthrie stored her flour and herbs away from the ever-present mice and spiders, its poplar wood softly yellow in the firelight from so many scrubbings.
Yes, Titus thought, forcing himself to turn quickly before he gave in. Yes, there would surely be pain in his leaving.
She loved him.
But perhaps every bit as great was the pain he felt right then at leaving without ever telling Marissa to her face that he loved her too. He hoped the few words in that note would say it for him.
He was more afraid than he had ever been. Not strong enough nor brave enough to tell Marissa to her face. To say that he loved her, but he still had to go. He wasn’t man enough to do that, so he stole away before he caused her even greater pain: marrying; beginning a family; her believing they were putting down roots. Then he would up and leave her.
No. The pain he felt at that moment was nowhere near as great as her pain would be if he failed to leave right then. So he would let the note tell her, and decided to leave in silence.
Heading southwest through the timber, he kept himself deep among the trees before he circled back to the west, then pointed his feet due north. Those first moments in turning away had been so hard. All through the first hour. And that first day—the pull still so strong. Her smell clung to his shirt every time he opened his blanket coat and brought the homespun tow cloth to his nose—forced to remember what he was leaving behind, to remind himself of why he had forced himself to go.
Titus had struck the river the following day near Grand Tower Rock as the Mississippi angled lazily toward the northwest, his mind still coming back again and again to Marissa.
Now he had nothing more difficult to do but follow the river to St. Louie.
And pray that glittering old French city was enough balm to ease the sharp pain he still carried even after all these days and distance put between them.
With his heels now, he set the old horse into motion, his eyes still straining to find in all the aching autumn blue overhead that solitary osprey.
“Whereaway you bound, my son?”
With a start Titus peered up at the old man leading a fine horse up to his evening fire. Night came early, and with it the cold as he drew near the city of his dreams.
“St. Louie.”
“Ah.” The older man halted, staring down in study at the fire a moment, then regarded the youth and the rifle across his lap. “I am but a poor wayfarer. Do you mind if I share your fire and a bit of conversation this night?”
He tossed another limb onto the flames and shrugged. “I was just getting used to the lonesome.”
Turning toward a tow sack he had tied behind his old, worn saddle, the stranger said, “I have food to offer, young man. You decide to share your fire and your talk, I’ll share supper.”
Looking more closely now at the dance of the firelight across the man’s deeply seamed face, Titus decided he liked the gap-toothed grin. The eyes were kind, yet possessed of great, great sadness. “What you got to eat?”
“Capons. A farmyard cock—castrated to improve the flavor of his meat for the table. Fresh as can be, I suppose. Butchered this morning just before I took my leave of a farmer’s place north of here—a family where I spent the night as their guest.” The old man squatted, began tugging at the huge knot in the tow sack. “The truth to it, we stayed up most of the night talking on ships and kings and sealing wax.”
Bass watched the bony, veiny old hands struggle over that knot, thinking how strange this stranger was—to talk in such an outlandish, confusing manner.
“I mean to say we spoke of all sorts of critical matters.” The stranger tugged the tow sack open.
“Didn’t know what the hell you meant.”
“Aye, easy to see that on your face, young man.” He pulled forth a dead bird, handing it over to Titus. “This one be yours.” Then stuffed his hand into the sack again and pulled forth another, smiling with those gapped teeth. “God’s rich bounty.” Laying the bird aside, he next retrieved four potatoes and a half-dozen ears of corn from the sack. “I must tell you the corn might be past its prime—long gone is the sweet milk in the ear, I say. But they truly will do for a man hungry for the manna of the fields.”
Titus put his hand over his mouth, catching himself about to laugh. After all these past days of loneliness and dark brooding, it brought merriment to him just listening to the way this old man talked.
So he asked of his guest, “Where are you off to?”
Raising an arm that looked more like a winter branch inside the huge, ill-fitting coat he wore, the stranger pointed off here, there, and over there. “No place special. Off to where the spirit moves me. God tells me where I am to go—as He told the wandering Israelites of Moses and Joshua of old. Yet, truth be it, I—like you—am alone. Alas, that is God’s condition yoked upon the shoulders of some, is it not, son? As many as we might have around us, family and acquaintances, we are still alone in this life, and God makes the only sure friend we will ever truly have.”
With a snort Titus said, “I had me lots of friends.”
From beneath the bushy eyebrows that stood out like a pair of hairy caterpillars on the pronounced and bony brow, the stranger sneered, “Yes—I can see by all these companions you have brought along with you on this journey.”
“They are here!” he snapped at the sudden, harsh judgment, and tapped a finger against his chest. Then added, more quietly, “Right in here.”
For a long moment the stranger regarded that, then smiled warmly as he tossed Bass three ears of the corn. “Yes. I believe you might just be the sort who would hold a friend dear in your heart. But be busy now: find us something to boil our corn and potatoes in.”
“I ain’t got nothing near big enough—”
“Tied on the far side of my saddle,” the stranger interrupted. “A wandering wayfarer like myself must always have himself an all-purpose kettle in which to boil anything and everything that God provides for the table. For a prayerful man of the Lord, nothing he finds is ill-gotten gain.”
“You lost me on your track again.”
“God has taken care of me for more years than you have been breathing, young man. And I trust in Him for when there are not folks to take me in and spread their board before me. At such times God will provide me the opportunity to feed myself.”
Titus looked down at the capon, a castrated rooster grown plump for the table. “You … you didn’t steal all of this, did—”
“By the heavens, no!” he roared, laughing. “The farmer I spent last night with—but I already told you, didn’t I? Get that kettle of mine from the horse and see that it’s filled with water from yonder creek. Once you’ve removed his saddle for me, you best be plucking feathers from that bird, unless you want to mud him.”
Titus stopped on his knees. “M-mud him?”
“Ahh, yes,” he said, regarding the fire pit. “You seem to have a good bed of coals going already. Let’s mud these gamecocks tonight, my young friend. You go on about your chores and get to boiling those fruits of God’s fields while you and I find a spot of dirt where we can mix in a little water to make a good, stiff mud.”
“You ain’t told me what the hell for.”
The old man laughed easily, that gap-toothed mouth working with a throb. “Not what the hell for! For a heavenly repast! We’re going to coat these fat little roosters with mud, a thick shell it must be. Then stuff them down in the coals to cook themselves inside that shell of temporal earth.”
“They’ll cook up like that?”
“And when we drag them out of the fire, prepare to dine on the outskirts of paradise, my young friend,” the old man explained. “All we have to do is crack the hardened mud shell, and in pulling it off, we tear away the feathers. Sacré bleu! as the French in St. Louie would say. We are ready to eat!”
When it came time f
or everything to come off the fire and out of the coals, Titus discovered he was much hungrier than he had ever imagined. He hadn’t eaten like that in days. Ever since that last of Lottie’s meals … Lottie and Marissa’s.
Something about the chill, frosty air and the crackle of the campfire gave muscle to his appetite. All of his hungers. So he tried desperately to force her into the recesses of his mind as he pushed himself back from the pile of bones and gristle and three corncobs.
“You damn near made that bird disappear,” the stranger said. “Along with those potatoes, skin and all.”
“I like the skin,” Titus replied. “And them birds—mudded an’ all.”
“It was a fine feast, wasn’t it?”
“A good change from pig meat.”
With a visible shudder the old man wagged his head. “How I have come to hate Ned.”
“Ned? Why you hate him? Who’s he, anyhow?”
“Not who—what. Ned is pork. Ned is pig meat. Ned is the sustenance of the devil himself! No, I haven’t partaken of Ned in so long, I cannot remember.” He pointed a bony finger at Titus. “And you would do well to swear off it as well. Cloven-hooved, unclean, filthy beasts that they are.”
“But if a man’s hungry—”
“He’s better off going hungry than biting into any Ned! God will provide for His redeemed souls … without any of us having to descend into the fiery depths and dine on the devil’s fodder.” He raised his face and arms to the sky, closed his eyes, to say, “Praise God I no longer eat such a beast.” Then he quickly opened his eyes and looked directly at Titus. “Don’t you hunt, son?”
“Y-yes, sir. I hunt.”
“That’s a fine piece of workmanship there.”
Titus rubbed it, looking at what he took to be wanton envy and desire for the weapon on the stranger’s face. “It was my grandpap’s.”
“I see.” And the stranger peered into Bass’s eyes again. “With such a beautiful piece, a man would never again have an excuse for eating Ned.”
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