bread off the fire for me when it’s my job, Titus.”
He trapped her hands in his. “No. Listen. Just for a short bit. Let’s go swimming.”
“I can’t,” she repeated more emphatically, tugging to free her hands from his grip. “Not time now to do nothing but go back afore my baking’s burned.”
He pleaded, “Then promise me when.”
“Promise you what?”
“We’ll go swimming.”
“I don’t know—”
“Promise me.”
She stopped wiggling, studying his eyes, cocking her head slightly to the side. “This something you really, really wanna do—like we done as children?”
His head bobbed up and down. “More’n anything I could think of doing with you, Amy.”
Finally, after long moments of what seemed like tortured consideration, she answered. “All right. We’ll go swim—”
“When?” he interrupted in a gush.
“Soon.”
“Tell me when.”
Her eyes darted about, as if searching the darkening woods for her answer. “Come Saturday. When your school be out for the rest of summer now that planting’s done. I can get things done back to home so that we got us enough time to have alone, Titus.”
“Saturday,” he said, his mouth gone dry just to think of it, faced with the waiting.
She gazed into his eyes, as if trying to measure something there that even she could not sort out. “Yes. Saturday. You come fetch me up after supper. We head down here and be alone to go swimming like kids.”
“But we ain’t really young’uns no more,” he wanted her to know as he let her hands go.
Amy placed them on either side of his smooth, hairless cheeks. “No. We ain’t children no more.” Then she pulled him to her and kissed him on the forehead. And turned to slide down the gentle slope of the swimming-hole boulder.
At the bottom she looked up at him. “You coming? Fella’s always gotta walk his girl home when they’re courting.”
He glanced at the quiet surface of the pool they had made years before when they were young. Then he looked at Amy in the starlight.
“Yeah. I’ll walk my girl home.”
And realized he could never look back again.
Everything lay before him. Only memories of childhood rested behind him.
And as he walked out of the trees toward the Whistler cabin, Titus wondered if this was how a boy like himself became a man like his pap. Or like Cleve Whistler, who sat on the porch, idly stripping thin slivers of bark from a hickory limb with his folding knife.
“Evenin’, Titus,” he called out, his teeth clenched around the cob pipe. “Amy said you’d be dropping by.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You going for a walk?”
“Yes,” he answered as steadily as he could, hoping his face would not give him away. Titus was afraid a man was sure to see a certain look on a boy’s face when he was about to become a man. “Going for a … walk.”
“Nice evening for it, son.”
Whistler reached over and snatched up a small bundle of long hickory sticks, each more than four feet long. Every one he had peeled and carefully knotted with his knife. He untied the four long leather straps lashed around the narrow bundle, slipped in the limb he had just finished, then retied them all together as tightly as he could before knotting the straps.
In the near distance came the reassuring clang of an ox’s bell, floating in from the fenced paddock.
“You ’scuse me a minute, Titus—I gotta go put these back to soaking an’ bring that ol’ beast in from his feed.”
“Yes, sir. You go right ahead.”
He swallowed as he watched the man’s back disappear around the side of the cabin. Every man Titus knew of had a special trough somewhere close where a fella would keep peeled hickory shafts soaking and straightening, all bound one to the other in a tight bundle.
He sensed something behind him. When he turned, the four of them were there again. Each one of the children stared up at him from those expressionless faces that regarded Titus as if he were of no real particular interest, yet the only thing of any interest at all for that particular moment in their world nonetheless.
“I’m ready.”
He whirled about, finding her on the porch above him. Behind Amy stood Mrs. Whistler framed by the open doorway, tucking a wisp of her hair behind an oversize ear. From the cabin came the strong lure of salat greens simmering in a pepper-pot soup over a fire. Daughter tossed mother her apron, then pulled at the loose end of a ribbon that had held her own hair back from her face.
“Here, Mama,” she said, laying the ribbon in her mother’s palm, then planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek.
No different from the kisses she gives me, he thought.
But when Amy turned back to Titus, she wiggled her head, shaking out her hair, combing her fingers through the long, wavy tresses that caught the sunset with a hint of coppery shimmer. Oh, how he loved her for the way she tossed that mane from side to side. He was positive she had to know what a trembling pan of mush it made of his insides to watch her do something so seductive as flip that hair around, suddenly loosened from its ribbon.
“You young’uns have fun now,” Mrs. Whistler cheered them, waving to them both as Amy leaped barefoot from the porch to his side.
Swallowing hard, Titus waved back and nodded lamely, not taking his eyes off Amy—for the moment he could dwell on nothing more than seeing her get loose of her clothing. He wondered how a woman looked skinned. Shet of her garments—almost like skinning an animal to get down past all the layers of concealment.
He thought he wouldn’t be able to take another breath when she slid her hand into his and tugged him away, stumbling and ungainly as a newborn calf at her side.
“You been looking forward to tonight, Titus?” she finally asked when they had pierced the shadows beneath the timber at the far side of the yard.
He glanced back at the Whistler cabin, her brothers playing mumblety-peg in the yard and her sisters fluttering around that rope swing, not sure what to feel now that he found himself truly alone with her and on their way to the swimming hole. Anticipating to the point that he found it hard to speak.
“M-more’n anything … ever,” he stumbled getting the words out.
Amy didn’t say anything more on that walk through the woods until they reached the creek and turned south, using the game trail that ran close to the bank, a path likely every bit as familiar to their bare feet as it was to the four-legged creatures who shared this hardwood forest. An owl flapped low over their heads as they reached the pool, hooting once in the shrinking light that seemed to compress the world in around them. As far as he was concerned, there really was nothing beyond the ring of trees and tangle of brush that covered either bank, immediately surrounding them with a sense of privacy, intimacy. Despite the coming twilight, the yellow of tansy and whitish-blue of periwinkle were still evident among the fragrant wild clover.
For several minutes they stood at the side of the boulder, staring at the black water stretching to the far bank, not uttering a word. Then Amy finally turned and spoke.
“You still wanna swim with me way we done when we was children?”
“I ain’t really thought of nothing else for days, Amy,” he confessed. “Working that field for my pa, yanking stumps outta the ground—everything I done it made, no matter: I ain’t thought of nothing else.”
Slipping her hand from his, she stepped away to the side of the boulder. “I’ll shinny out of my clothes over here. You stay there and … I’ll meet you in the water.”
“Aw-awright,” he answered, of a sudden dry-mouthed.
He felt that left hand she had been holding grow cool in a gentle nudge of breeze rattling the heavy green
