Titus he might soon be breathing a bit easier.
“Way I figure it,” the settler said as he leaned back, dragging that big muzzle away from Bass’s most responsive part, pointing at the floor as he continued, “you owe me a little of your time and muscle.”
“T-time … and muscle?”
The farmer quickly gazed around him at the small shed and sighed. “This ain’t gonna do me much longer, son. Already I’ve gone an’ laid the corner posts for a new barn. Staked and stringed everything else. I figure you can help me today afore you push on tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You’re likely to be real tired after I work you hard as I’m gonna today. You’ll wanna sleep another night right there in that hay.”
Bass had to grin with relief. And that had made the settler smile, finally raising his fowler away from its delicate target.
“My name’s Able Guthrie.”
He held his hand up to the man. “Titus Bass.”
“You come down from Owensboro of recent, yes—I remember,” Guthrie replied. “Well, c’mon, young Mr. Titus Bass. The woman’s waiting breakfast for us.”
“B-breakfast?”
“Damn right, er—pardon me,” Guthrie apologized sheepishly. “I don’t but rarely curse. The woman don’t like it—not a hoot—and I promised the Good Lord I wouldn’t do no cursing around my girl.”
Bass threw back the blankets and stood, dusting hay from his clothes. “Girl? Your family?”
“Only the one. Marissa. After her my woman couldn’t have no others. Had hoped for at least one boy to have my name. Carry on the family, like any man would hope for.” He flashed a courageous smile, his eyes crinkling with such brave, good humor in that way Titus would come to appreciate in those months still ahead of them. “But I got me a fine, fine girl. A strong woman she’ll be real soon. Gonna raise her mama and me some handsome grandbabies. You come now and have your breakfast afore we start the day.”
“Don’t believe it,” and he wagged his head. “You’re gonna feed me.”
“Sure as hell am…. Dear Lord, there I go again!” He whispered this last, his eyes flicking at the cabin, where the door opened and a full-framed woman waved him in from the cow shed. “Sure I’m gonna feed you. I can’t expect a man to work his all for me without first putting some fodder down into his belly.”
They had crossed the muddy yard, dodging greasy rain puddles and fresh cow dab close by the paddock to reach the cabin, where they climbed onto the low porch and pushed through the open doorway that faced south like most settlers’ places erected foursquare with the world. It made perfect sense for the main entrance to look out on the southern side, which stayed sunny in the winter, cool in the summer, where the hard-driving rains and sleet and snows that mostly came out of the north and west of those hard months of the year could not beat in upon those taking shelter there.
Guthrie led him into the main room, thick with the heady perfume he had long ago forgotten. Like a warm flood the seasoned memories washed over him. Titus drank in the aromas of sizzling sausage, fragrant biscuits just scraped free from the Dutch oven, pungent smoked bacon piled high on a big platter at the center of the table where Guthrie went to settle. The seductive allure of boiled coffee made his mouth water almost as much as the sight of that pitcher of creamy milk and an apple-tree knot that served as a bowl for freshly churned butter just waiting to be lathered on those biscuits.
Looking around the room in amazement, Bass took in the hutch table covered with wooden bowls and pewter trenchers and utensils, several three-legged stools and a handful of half-log benches, on the shelves near the fireplace a hominy block, deerskins laid out for rugs across the uneven floor, brass tinder boxes with their dull sheen near the hearth, lug poles for the tea kettles and cast-iron cookware handy by the mantel, pepper grinders squatting on the table before him, a well-used cherry seeder atop a small table stuffed back in the corner, joined there by a coffee mill and a butter paddle, yellowed by use and age, lying among it all.
“This here’s the woman, my missus,” the settler said, steering Titus’s attention away from the table to the woman rising from the fireplace with the bail of her Dutch oven at the end of her arm, still scraping loose the pull- apart biscuits that had baked themselves together in a mounded loaf beneath a golden-brown hue. “Lottie, the young fella’s name is Titus Bass.”
“Ma’am,” Titus replied, glancing once at the woman’s flushed face as she dragged the entire biscuit loaf onto a platter with her wooden spatula. In wet-mouthed wonder he went back to gaping at that table. He hadn’t eaten like this in … in longer than he could remember. A real sit-down family meal, complete with all the fixings he could ever hope to have for breakfast.
“How would you like your eggs?”
He turned dumbly at the new voice, startled to discover the other female at the fireplace had turned to him, a great iron spatula in one hand, a coarse linen towel in the other, hand and towel both wrapped around the handle of a large cast-iron skillet. She squatted beside it so she could swing the trivet it sat upon over the flames in the fireplace made of stones daubed with a proper plaster of lime and gypsum, the chimney of fine-grained sandstone.
“Eggs?” Titus answered her with his voice rising, stunned by the surprising beauty of the girl, finding her cheeks flushed by the heat at the fire, sensing a thrill at the way her chestnut hair spilled down each side of her neck in curls she kept pushing out of her way … then suddenly he felt guilty as a pig snatcher, remembering last night how he had planned on gathering up a few of those very same eggs for himself, then stealing off into the dawn before anyone in the cabin was the wiser.
“Maybe you don’t like eggs?” she asked him.
Able Guthrie nudged into the discussion, saying, “Mayhaps he don’t, Marissa.”
“Eggs?” Bass repeated, and swallowed hard again, locked into looking at her deep, round eyes. So much like a doe’s. Heavy-lidded, long-lashed, and damned near as big around as that skillet she sat beside. “I I-like eggs a whole lot. Yes, ma’am. I mean miss. Sorry. Yes. Eggs. I’ll take me some.”
“How many?”
“A couple maybe.”
Atop his crude cane chair Guthrie snorted, turning to his daughter and waving a hand in her direction as he said, “Just g’won and fix him a half dozen for starters, daughter. I’m planning on having you women stuff this here young fella so I won’t feel the least bit guilty ’bout working the bedevil out’n him till dinnertime.”
Titus grew wide-eyed, asking, “Dinner too?”
“I figure by midday I’ll work your breakfast off you,” Able explained, planting his elbows on the rough table. “So these two here gonna fill you back up come dinnertime. Then later on—by supper—it’ll be getting dark, so it’s only fair I feed you again at the end of the day. So tell me: that sound like fair pay for using your muscle and ’flowing you a place to sleep out to my cow shed?”
“I’m making syllabub for dessert this evenin’,” the girl at the fireplace said.
He looked from Able Guthrie to the girl. “S-sylla …”
“Syllabub,” Lottie instructed, coming to his shoulder. “It’s a fine and heady drink we make by mixing fresh cream with our own apple cider and whipping it up to a fine froth.”
It made his mouth water just thinking about how sweet it might rest upon his tongue. The girl at the fireplace smiled softly as she turned back to her chore of cracking eggs over the skillet. For the moment he wasn’t sure if it was the flush of the fire’s heat, or the crimson of her own embarrassment that had brought such a lovely blush to Marissa Guthrie’s face.
“Yes, sir,” Titus eventually said, turning on his stool to look at the settler. “That’ll do … I mean them meals —they’ll do just fine for my pay, Mr. Guthrie.”
“Then sit yourself and dig in,” the woman said, moving past the table in a swirl, a tangy cloud of sourdough clinging to her. “I’m Lottie—seeing how Able forgot to introduce us proper. You eat, and make yourself to home, son. We don’t get much folk out here. Not much folk at all.”
“What folks there is seem to be on the hurry north to St. Lou,” Guthrie explained as he speared some fat sausages onto his pewter fork and freed them into his shallow wooden bowl. “While other folks is scampering south—getting as far away from that place as a person can get.”
Lottie Guthrie turned to Titus, asking, “You want to see St. Louis yourself?”
“Yes’m. Figured I would see it for some time now.”
